Brian Kilmeade interviews Donald Trump. You can stop right there, you say. That is just too much stupid to be borne. You would be right to stop reading now. Don’t click to go on to the next page. Do not click that link.
You’ll regret it if you do.
Last chance! Turn back now! You’ll be happier if you just go read some webcomics instead.
No, really. I like The Non-Adventures of Wonderella. Questionable Content is always good. Maki Naro? Trust me. Anything. Well, not Dilbert. Almost anything.
You’re still reading? What the fuck is wrong with you?
OK, as long as you understand the principle of informed consent, you may continue. The safeword is any kind of gurgled, choking scream.
“I like to do one thing at a time,” Trump told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade. “I would knock the hell out of ISIS.”
“What about civilian casualties?” Kilmeade wondered.
“One of the problems that we have and one of the reasons we’re so ineffective, they’re using them as shields,” Trump explained.
According to the GOP hopeful, President Barack Obama was waging “a very politically correct war.”
“With the terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump said. “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.”
“They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. But they say they don’t care about them. You have to take out their families.”
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
One of our presidential candidates is now saying that it is “politically correct” to try to avoid butchering small children (not that Obama has been particularly good at avoiding that). He has just announced his intent to slaughter whole families in the Middle East if elected president.
David Neiwert has a good analysis of this fascist trend in the Republican party, and he actually comes down on the side of saying that Trump is not actually a fascist, but not for the reasons you might think.
Trump is not fascist primarily because he lacks any kind of coherent, or even semi-coherent, ideology. What he represents instead is the kind of id-driven feral politics common to the radical right, a sort of gut-level reactionarism that lacks the rigor and absolutism, the demand for ideological purity, that are characteristic of full-bore fascism.
He’s not literally a fascist, despite the fact that his policies will have fascist outcomes. He’s too stupid to be a fascist.
But if you’re wondering where this came from, or where it may lead…
It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn’t get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.
The main recruitment tool for ISIL is footage of innocent Muslims being killed.
Trump wants to kill innocent Muslims.
Obviously, they both want the same thing. But it raises the question — could Trump be an ISIL plant?
I presume the same logic applies to domestic terrorists. Robert Dear’s family must be living in fear right now.
You said it was going to be stupid, not evil.
@Reginald #2
Of course it doesn’t apply, they’re not terrorists. They’re white, christian, and doing gods work of killing the godless athiest baby killers
“A meeting of the minds”
That doesn’t strike me as a terribly accurate hed for the article…
Are you sure there were minds involved?
His plan could work, it’s the same tactics that the terrorists use to ensure obedience in the local population. So by becoming more brutal than our opponents we could get control over the area quite effectively.
maybe he is “strawmanning”. Postulating that the only way to fight a war is to go ‘all out’, and slaughter everyone on the ‘other side’, irregardless [sic] of their physical involvement. So to stop them, one must kill their families also. ISIL being family-guys, who will totes feelz badz if their family is killed.
This was a strategy used in WW2, where entire cities of civilians were firebombed, as well as factories, etc.
yet the WW2 strategy depended on survivors, to lobby their gov. to end it through surrender.
Trumpster just wants to kill. Kill. KILL !!!!!
Republican candidates also want to torture people. Here’s what Chris Christie said when he was asked if waterboarding was torture:
Donald Trump supports torture. He was asked if he would support waterboarding:
@6
I really hope you’re being facetious, because that’s some disgusting rhetoric there.
It sounds like Trump and Sam Harris would get along like a house on fire (i.e. the house of a muslim civilian they bombed).
As appalling as Trump’s stupidity is, this wouldn’t be new foreign policy for the US, vis-a-vis Madeleine Albright’s attitude toward the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.
Vivec @ 6:
Given their history here, don’t get your hopes up.
Gosh, what could possibly go wrong? It’s not like many ISIS members were radicalized in the first place because we already killed their families, or anything like that, amirite?
Hey, hey Trump. You’re trying to become commander in chief of this nation in order to fight a war against the enemy. So, if ISIS were to attack and destroy your family, would you back down? Would you think “they’re too strong, we can’t win, I’ll give up?”
Then why the fuck do you think that tactic would work on them?
What if ISIS were attacking the families of your fellow candidates and killing them? Would that cow you into ceasing your activities through fear that your family might be next?
Oh, you’d double down, eh? How fucking interesting.
Erlend Meyer
Well, nuking the whole planet would also work, it wouldn’t solve just this situation but all our problems.
And yet…
Seriously, that idea possibly working or not working isn’t even remotely they issue. They complete lack of morality is.
My current favourite webcomics are Kill Six Billion Demons and Dumbing of Age, the latter of which I got turned onto with the recent To Those Who’d Ground Me storyline (though today’s strip promises great things, too).
That’s besides Order of the Stick and Dresden Codak, of course.
Next Trump will reveal his plan to eliminate gang problems by killing the members’ parents.
@Vivec #9: More or less. But I think it would work, at least short term. In the long run it would probably be a pressure cooker waiting to go off, but if you are brutal enough you could quench IS fairly quickly. All you have to do is to abandon all morals and basic human decency and become something worse than your enemy. So it’s not that he’s wrong, he’s evil.
This should be familiar to anyone who has read about Hitler’s rise to power.
Let us hope that Trump is simply talking out his ass (again). Because if he were to become president and did attempt to put his “take out the families” strategy into effect, then he would need the acquiescence of the Pentagon to see it through. And this would mean that American soldiers would be on the ground doing the dirty work. The thought of young GIs and marines slaughtering women and children because their menfolk are ISIS is — well, you get the picture. We saw that in Vietnam. And, yes, putting Godwin’s Law aside for the moment, we saw that on the eastern front in WW2. I don’t see how any person of conscience could sign off on this barbarous idea.
A colleague passed this New York Times piece along to me: Wary of Donal Trump, G.O.P. Leaders Are Caught in a Standoff. The poor dears are scared that a Trump nomination will driver voters away in droves and they’ll loose seats in the House, Senate, and state houses.
A couple of key quotes from the article:
“With his knack for offending the very constituencies Republicans have struggled with in recent elections, women and minorities, Mr. Trump could be a millstone on his party if he won the nomination. He is viewed unfavorably by 64 percent of women and 74 percent of nonwhite voters, according to a November ABC News/Washington Post poll. ”
“Another Republican strategist in Ohio replied to an email asking about Mr. Trump’s effect in the state by sending a link to a Wikipedia page on the 1964 congressional elections, when Barry Goldwater’s presence atop the Republican ticket led the party to lose 36 House seats.”
The reference to the 1964 campaign is particularly interesting because there is evidence that’s when the Republican party began to go off the rails, although the period of Republican red baiters (McCarthy, Nixon) was a decade before that. According to Ian Haney López in Dog Whistle Politics, Goldwater’s campaign was the first to use the Southern strategy, in other words appealing to white, socially conservative voters in racist and xenophobic terms, tacit if not openly expressed. It’s also when Robert Novak dubbed the GOP as the “White man party.”
One of my favorite blog authors has a very good article about the current crop of Republican candidates and fascism. You don’t need a coherent political philosophy to be fascist, because fascism doesn’t depend on having such. Fascism arises from the combination of any of several different behaviours and movements and is a result of that combination. http://weeklysift.com/2015/11/30/the-political-f-word/
The same people who are currently quaking in their boots over the possibility of an Obama dictatorship would be the first in line if President Trump issued a call to arms for all “patriotic” gun owners to rally and support his mass illegal immigrant deportation program — the most likely path to fascism in America.
Gun nuts believe they are the bulwark against fascism when, in reality, they would be the enablers.
Larry Wilmore did a great job of taking Trump to task. Wilmore covered the meeting with black pastors, Trump making fun of a disabled journalist, and Trump’s general tendency to lie.
Salon link. Scroll down for video.
@20:
if he is offending all the Rethugs who will be repulsed if he is nominated, then how did that nomination come about? (it ain’t a random winning of some lottery for nomination)
Being so offensive, it seems the Rethugs would nominate ANYbody other than Trumpster. Of course that assumes the common Rethugs are rational people and not the emotionally driven goons the RNC has been grooming them to be.
It’s nice to; think that with Trumpster as the nominee, all the Rethugs will vote for the opponent rather than the horrific, yet that disregards how he got there in the first place.
—
ack [reread] seems i missed it the first time reading: minorities and women are who the Rethugs struggle with. (not the hardcore white-male-Rethugs). I guess, even if the W-M-Rethugs are a majority, probly not a plurality, so without the minorities and womenz, the Rethugs could lose this election, by turning all the RINO’s to the D ticket out of revulsion at the Trumpster(R). /hypothetical
I agree with Ryan Cunningham@18 and The Other Lance@21: fascism never had a coherent ideology beyond focus on a “great leader”, extreme nationalism, scapegoating, and violence as the general solution to problems. Trump ticks all those boxes.
Forgot one: misogyny. Another big tick for Trump.
Cracked on October 1: 5 Ways Donald Trump Perfectly Mirrors Hitler’s Rise To Power
I hadn’t read about how Hitler’s rise and the odious Final Solution came about, until a few weeks ago. (US schooling!) Basically it started with reasonable-sounding restrictions – ghettos, ID badges – and over just a few years metastasized into a broad and often locally driven system of pogroms, “work” camps, and mass slaughter as more cost-effective than keeping them alive. To paraphrase a commenter at Daily Kos… even Hitler wasn’t “as bad as Hitler” when he started out.
Much reading including original source documents and testimony from war crimes trials at jewishvirtuallibrary.org and holocaustresearchproject.org.
Content warnings for all of the above, definitely. An excerpt from the above page on ghettos:
Background of the “Final Solution” from the Jewish Virtual Library page: Background and Overview
They basically made it up as they went along.
I wonder if Trump actually has a secret agenda to make the Republican party so repulsive and unelectable that the Kochs & Adelsons & other conservative money bags will pool their resources and make him an offer to fuck off.
Today, Trump continued to defend his claim that thousands of Muslims celebrated when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11:
Link.
In a way, this is one of the scarier aspects of Trump’s presidential campaign, the proof that facts do not dissuade him from taking the wrong path. He depends on Twitter users and audiences at this rallies to tell him “the truth.”
Trump is making most of the others down to his level of rhetoric. He is getting the response he is because that is where the hard core numbers seem to be. The core of the republican party the ones that they have depended on for so long are just as has be characterized here, the candidates are just a reflection of them. Whether it is by artifice or sincere belief on the candidates side the response is a true thing. There is a very size-able part of The U.S. that is at heart violent, fearful and bigoted , they ignorant (by design?) of what democracy is and have a very distorted understanding of our history.
They seem to be willing to hand over our freedom for the security of the tyranny of the great leader!
the question comes down to what percent of the VOTERS are they?
uncle frogy
Which is, of course, what the Nazis did: extermination. They locked whole villages into the church and set it on fire, shot 100 civillians if one soldier was killed, etc.
Sounds quite like Trumps plan.
And once the slaughter is over people will look at the horrors and say “but how could we have known he’d do that???”
More importantly, the “Maki Naro” link http://www.popsci.com/blog-network/boxplot does not work! :-(
@12: “Gosh, what could possibly go wrong?”
What you rhetorically describe (IS radicalizing) is in the mind of Trump and co actually going right. What they’re heading for is fulfilling Samuel Huntington’s prophecy of 1993: the Clash of CIvilizations. People like Trump are in this respect actually the allies of IS; they have the same goal and that’s not living peacefully together.
Though I’m not sure if “civilization” is still the appropriate term.
That must be the fucking best description of Trump’s character there is!
“They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.”
And some people think conservativces can’t learn from history.
No, no, you don’t understand. They use other civilians as human shields, not their families.
@brucegee1962, #1
Wasn’t Donald Trump already a Democrat plant? Is he perhaps a plant for everyone, then, except the GOP?