I’ll get right to the point, right to what has been bothering me for weeks now, watching, wondering, and even just being Putin’s puppet doesn’t entirely explain, but my question is why is this president behaving in such an obvious way?
Obvious in that he seems to almost go out of his way to support the policies that are pro-Russia, or at least pro-Putin. Why? Policies that, like pulling out of NATO, that undoubtedly has Putin dancing, lifting sanctions on that Oligarch, and so forth, but why?
I mean, if you were being accused of colluding with a foreign power, would you not go somewhat out of your way to appear otherwise? You would at least make some kind of conscious effort.
Yet he doesn’t. Why doesn’t he?
“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.” A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better. Democracy”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
How bout this, he does that because he WANTs the majority of American’s to distrust their institutions.
The objective is to create a fog of distrust in these pillars, of Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Treasury, the Attorney General, not the least of which is the media. With every chaotic judgement, action, word, lie, tweet, appointment, all of it, the chaos, the circus, the corruption that oozes from every one of his appointments and characters he surrounds himself with, all is one more measured step towards American’s losing faith in their institutions, less faith in government, and in effect weakening these foundational institutions.
So, by installing an Attorney General who is distrusted by most Americans, in effect it has the advantage of taking the teeth out of the Justice Department, and the majority of American’s loose faith in Justice being served, and thus it has less power.
Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
ibid
Go back to Kavanaughs appointment to SCOTUS, exactly the same thing, American’s now have less faith in the Supreme Court and it’s judgements become suspect to the majority of Amercians.
Weakening these institutions STRENGTHens the Presidents role and allows him to lord over those departments at will, empowering him to get his way, to become even more of an authoritarian than he already is, making it the presidents way or the highway.
All of those, like McConnell, refusing to reign in this wannabe despot are colluding, and with a greedy eye towards the power that they too will gain, beyond just praise but as well gain more power in government for themselves, and, maybe some bags of cash, enrichment to their already bulging piggy banks.
“Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.”
― Timothy Snyder
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
by PaulaB 