Monday, May 08, 2017

Worse than refighting the last war...

..is fighting the war you ran away from last time, regardless of whether this one is worth fighting.



A really annoying Times editorial, in a gravity-defying feat of bothsiderism, denounces both Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton for their failure to move beyond the divisions of the November election and into the healing our nation so desperately needs, as in

Six months on, both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton are still waging last year’s campaign, undermining their promises to help America heal.
To be fair, The Times puts more blame on the Trumpster, "who after all has a nation to run", which he isn't in fact running, which I'm tempted to say is probably something of a good thing, except I don't want to imply that he could run it if he were so minded, or could ever play a role other than to hire and fire advisors according to whether he had a feeling for whether they were making him look pretty or not, which is a pretty terrible management technique—

Yet Mrs. Clinton, a person of greater substance, also seems unable to shake free.
This week, in a conversation with Christiane Amanpour, the television journalist, Mrs. Clinton was asked about Mr. Trump’s approach to North Korea and Syria, and about women’s rights around the world. Her insights were strained by insinuations against the president, whom she still refers to as “my opponent.”
Or, as the next few paragraphs explain, faced with questions from Amanpour on her views about Trump's conduct in office so far, she perversely insisted on talking about Trump's conduct in office so far. How rude, and divisive, is that?

Trump is a terrible, incompetent president! Those who have made sincere efforts to help him, starting with Barack Obama in the immediate aftermath of the election, have found that he does respond to flattery but the response is fleeting, and that he always descends, in the long run, to the stupidest position.

I'm annoyed with Clinton myself, to tell the truth, for proclaiming her support for the pointless Syria cruise missile mission of April 7, but that's not the point. I just want to report my suspicion, which has been growing over the past several years, that the Times and a few organs like it, that these guys feel guilty, for their failure in particular in the George W. Bush administration, and are constantly trying to make up for it.

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