A Truly Dangerous Candidate in Trump

WaPo says Trump is unprecedented threat to American democracy. An unprecedented editorial.

Donald Trump’s nomination is the first time American politics has left me truly afraid

Donald Trump’s NATO comments are the scariest thing he’s said

Wednesday night, Donald Trump said something that made a nuclear war between the United States and Russia more likely. With a few thoughtless words, he made World War III — the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in nuclear holocaust — plausible.

This probably scans like hyperbole, the kind of thing you hear a lot in politics. I assure you, it’s not. Not this time.

What Trump said, in an interview published by the New York Times, is that he wouldn’t necessarily defend the United States’ allies in NATO if they were attacked by a foreign power. This extended, Trump said, to the Baltic countries right on Russia’s border — countries Russia might conceivably invade.

The NATO alliance is the key deterrent against this: It is founded on a promise that an attack on one NATO country is an attack on all. Trump is directly undermining this promise.

The consequences are hard to overstate. He is trashing one of the foundations of the postwar European order, which has helped guaranteed peace on the continent for 70 years. And by equivocating on whether he would defend the Baltics, he creates a dangerous amount of uncertainty among Russians as to how seriously the US takes its NATO treaty commitments — the kind of uncertainty that, yes, could spark an actual conflict between the US and Russia.

This is what happens when you let a flamboyant reality star get this close to the highest office in the land: You get someone who doesn’t understand the machinery of state, and plays with literal nuclear fire as a result.

 

 (short answer is "no")

GOP Platform Proposes to Get Rid of National Parks and National Forests

Just flat-out barking insanity.

And there's even an anti-national park GOP caucus.

The GOP is a fucking death cult.

GOP Convention Platform Is a Haven for Religious Zealots, Bigots and Cranks

GOP Platform Committee Embraces A Purely Puritanical Agenda

So far this week Republicans have worked religiously to adopt a staunchly neo-conservative theocratic platform that embraces a strict, Puritanical view of the family and children, bans military women from serving in combat, defines coal as America’s preferred clean energy source, replaces the Constitution with the Christian bible, and in keeping with the Puritanical agenda, declares pornography a “public health crisis.” 

First, declaring “porn” as a public health crisis is really cover for the reality that porn is “a serious problem and health crisis” among the Christian community, particularly the Christian male, porn addicted, community. The evangelicals running the platform writing committee claim “Pornography, with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the life of millions. We encourage states to continue to fight this public menace and pledge our commitment to children’s safety and well-being.” 

It sounds as if Republicans and evangelicals have a serious “traditional Christian family” parenting problem if they can’t keep their young religious perverts off of porn sites they’re not allowed to legally visit. Their horrid, traditional family parenting, or devastating porn addiction epidemic, doesn’t mean they can start down a path to abolish free speech, or free Internet porn, for the rest of the population because they have porn-addiction issues. And, it belies their contention that they hate government intruding into Americans’ private lives, unless it comports with the Puritanical leanings of the religious right: then government tyranny and intrusions for religion’s sake is admirably godly. 

Despite a year-old SCOTUS ruling that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right, and the party’s first openly-gay platform committee member participating in the debate, the RNC rejected an amendment to have a “thoughtful conversation” on same-sex marriage. The amendment didn’t demand a full embrace of marriage equality, that would be too much to ask; just that the Party “have a thoughtful conversation” on marriage equality. The openly gay delegate from Washington D.C., Rachel Hoff, said during the debate and while fighting back tears, “We are your daughters, we are your friends. All I ask today is that you include me and people like me.” About 30 delegates agreed with Ms. Hoff, but these were religious Republicans and most of the committee agreed with religious malcontent Tony Perkins not to remove traditional marriage language from the platform; social conservatives will not embrace, much less talk about marriage equality. 

It really leads one to wonder why an openly gay person would be a Republican delegate, much less ever vote for one of the hate-mongers. Never straying too far afield from the conversation on the imagined threats of same-sex marriage, religious Republicans inserted language claiming that children raised by “traditional” families are superior to those raised by same-sex couples. 

The official wording reads, “Children raised in a traditional two-parent household tend to be physically and emotionally healthier, less likely to use drugs and alcohol, engage in crime, or become pregnant outside of marriage.” Except that is patently false and yet another typical religious Republican lie. According to myriad studies, and specifically a very recent UCLA study: “There is no difference in the outcomes for same-sex couple’s children, including their general health, emotional difficulties, coping behavior, or learning behavior.”