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Is Trump a peace president and therefore, hated by the war mongers?
Have the Democrats and progressive liberals turned into war activists simply because Trump is on the other side?
Have we actually won the war against ISIS or will they re-form and be at it again when and if we leave Syria and elsewhere in The Middle East?
Is economics and politics driving Trump rather than a desire for peace?
Is the matter of the Syrian withdrawal a mixture of so many competing and conflicted issues it is hard to discern the truth of what is motivating Trump and his detractors? (See 1 below.)
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I am going way off track so follow me into the woods and cut me some slack.
I have a lot of friends who read my memos, hate Trump, think he is everything in the book and send me nothing but negative articles/e mails about him. They are mostly liberals.
But then, I also have a lot of friends who read my memos, are conservative and are beginning to become disaffected. They too think Trump's wheels are coming off.
This got me to thinking that we know Hillary and her friends in the various intelligence agencies did everything they could to stop Trump and failed. Meanwhile, post his election, they have done everything they can to wreck his administration, to stop him at every turn, to frustrate him and to goad him into reacting because they know he is a combative type and, in their opinion, totally unsuited to be president etc.
Just as many thought Obama was the Manchurian Candidate, is it not possible the Democrats are preparing to drive this president out of The White by undertaking a variety of orchestrated events that will break his spirit, play off his own quirkiness and get him to announce he is unwilling to run for a second term? Even a fighter can take only so much and Trump does not need the salary.
Frankly, nothing surprises me when it comes to Democrats and what they are/have been willing to do to re-capture power. The incessant drum beat against this president does not stop with Democrats, it continues relentlessly with the mass media. Only yesterday I received the same New York Times' article from two friends suggesting Trump was acting as if he is already a candidate for the "funny farm" because of the Syrian withdrawal and the manner in which he handled the matter.
Obama was ill prepared to be president but the mass media circled the wagon for eight years. His charm, his "breezy" style earned him a pass notwithstanding the fact that most of his decisions either were beyond his constitutional authority or proved poor and/or were based on lies, ie "you can keep your doctor" for starters etc.
We also know nothing in Trump's political background prepared him for being president other than his success as a real estate mogul and TV showmanship. We also have learned he too is not always forthcoming in the truth department and has a sordid personal past. For those who can separate the person from the policies we also have a list of actually remarkable accomplishments under the most difficult circumstances. The problem is, nothing Trump does is seen in a positive light because the Trump Haters want him to fail. They have done everything in their power to orchestrate his failure and, in many ways, he has supplied them with rope.
How this all plays out is beyond me but the next two years could prove a hellish ride and could have a tragic end for a nation that once was united, accepted the rule of law and was always willing to bury the hatchet.
The market is a barometer not a thermometer. Is it telling us something?
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Will the government shutdown prove what most already know? Less government is more betterment? We can live just fine without a lot of bureaucratic government. Maybe better.
We also know Congresspersons have abdicated much of their authority to the office of the president because they have become masters at kicking the ball down the field. Why? Most Congresspersons covet being re-elected and that means avoiding controversy. Also, if Congress solved issues it might impact funding of their campaigns by those who were gored. Finally, the more issues left unresolved the more reasons Congresspersons can cite they are needed and relevant.
It is all a big con job, a game. It has very little to do with what is best for our nation. If that were the case the illegal immigration issue would have been settled eons ago. Sanctuary cities would not even be a fact and the mess we were in and the disgust, which helped elect Trump, would not have existed.
The enemy is us and we have only ourselves to blame for constantly electing these "yahoos" and then re-electing them. Running for office no longer appeals to vast numbers of those who are competent and seek results. Who could possibly want to make a living at engaging in and/or want to be part of an endless charade?
We also know Congresspersons have abdicated much of their authority to the office of the president because they have become masters at kicking the ball down the field. Why? Most Congresspersons covet being re-elected and that means avoiding controversy. Also, if Congress solved issues it might impact funding of their campaigns by those who were gored. Finally, the more issues left unresolved the more reasons Congresspersons can cite they are needed and relevant.
It is all a big con job, a game. It has very little to do with what is best for our nation. If that were the case the illegal immigration issue would have been settled eons ago. Sanctuary cities would not even be a fact and the mess we were in and the disgust, which helped elect Trump, would not have existed.
The enemy is us and we have only ourselves to blame for constantly electing these "yahoos" and then re-electing them. Running for office no longer appeals to vast numbers of those who are competent and seek results. Who could possibly want to make a living at engaging in and/or want to be part of an endless charade?
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According to Zito, small businesses are coming back? (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) Donald Trump is a man of peace – his enemies are a war machineWar brings our elite together
Donald Trump is the only peace president the United States has had since the end of the Cold War, and his enemies hate him for it. ‘Peace president’ is a relative term, of course, but as yet there is no Trump war comparable to George H.W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War, Bill Clinton’s war against Yugoslavia, George W. Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Barack Obama’s gruesome regime-change bungle in Libya. Instead, the most conspicuous foreign-policy achievement of the Trump administration to date is de-escalation on the Korean Peninsula, along with the stamping out of ISIS. And with ISIS broken, Trump is bringing America’s soldiers home from Syria in victory – a startling contrast to the interminable, slow-motion defeats that are characteristic of most other presidential wars of the last 25 years. Afghanistan, to name one – a war-zone that everyone fully expects the enemy to reconquer the minute US forces leave.
Peace, after all, means two things: either not fighting in the first place or else fighting and winning, so that the conflict ends. Curiously, America’s political establishment, in what purports to be Trump’s party as well as in the party opposed to him, finds peace of either kind unacceptable. So the president’s announcement of a withdrawal of US forces from Syria has been met with predictable outrage from Democratic House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi and from Republican Senators like Cory Gardner and Marco Rubio. The elite pundit class reflects exactly the same range of opinion – or rather, lack of range, with formerly antiwar left-wing commentators joining NeverTrump Republican writers in condemning the president for winding up a military intervention.
The contrast between the alarm felt by elites over this move by Trump (and over his efforts at peace with North Korea as well) and their gushing enthusiasm for Trump’s missile strikes against Syria last year is revealing. As personally reviled as Trump is, he won instant accolades when he seemed to be on the verge of committing himself to the same interventionist path his recent predecessors have followed. The one thing powerful enough to annul the political and opinion elite’s hatred for Trump is that same elite’s love of military intervention. Peace is antithetical to the anti-Trump elements in Washington, whether they are Republican or Democratic, liberal, progressive, or supposedly conservative.
Why should that be the case? And why is Trump himself an exception to the rule that America’s leaders prefer war to peace – ongoing war to concluding war? Nobody, of course, thinks of himself as a warmonger, and America’s anti-Trump leadership class certainly does not believe itself to be militaristic. But again, look at the reactions, and look at the actual policies. What most of Trump’s critics in the political and opinion establishment appear to believe, as shown by their actions and reactions, is that America must be in a condition of ceaseless low-level conflict almost everywhere in the world, and when conditions are in flux, it’s better to increase the use of force than to reduce it, always
The mythology that accompanies this interventionist disposition claims the ‘Surge’ in Iraq during George W. Bush’s second term as a success and points to Obama’s drawdown of US forces in that country as a failure that facilitated the rise of ISIS. But the mythology begs the very question: if the Surge worked, why couldn’t the troops come home? Why has it never worked when it’s been tried in Afghanistan? And what brought about the rise of ISIS in the first place if not the influx of Islamists and Hussein Ba’athists into Syria as refugees from the Iraq War? By the logic of Trump’s interventionist critics, nothing less than a permanent ‘Surge’ to occupy the planet would suffice to establish peace – a peace would require continuous police duty on the part of non-elite Americans serving in the armed forces. This is not an attractive image to most Americans – this is not the purpose they envision for their country, and it’s not a condition to which the only alternative is anarchy and terror at home. Most wars in most places have nothing to do with us, and securing our own borders and policing our own communities against extremist violence makes more sense than trying to do it everywhere else.
There is nothing natural, inevitable, or commonsensical about the interventionist worldview that the American elite holds. It’s a conditioned reflex of the mind, and it’s a freakish one. So where does it come from?
It comes from the same administrative and technocratic spirit that virtually defines the self-understanding of America’s political and opinion elite at home. This elite views other people’s lives in terms of problems, for which the elite’s calling is to provide knowledgeable solutions. But knowledge only comes from the top, and it can never be absorbed by those further down or on the outside: in theory, the technocratic ideology may be egalitarian, but the failure of egalitarianism is what serves to keep the technocrats in existence as a class. They are needed. They will save you from eating the wrong food or smoking the wrong plants (tobacco bad, marijuana good, or vice versa), or having the wrong attitudes toward people of different colors or habits from yourself. Just as society must become ever more regulated at home – if not always regulated by government, then regulated by enlightened authority in the private sphere, even the enlightened Twitter mob – so the world must benefit from our enlightened regulation as well. Within a nation, civil society and government can act with a minimum of violence to secure compliance, because most compliance is based on habit and the desire for social acceptance (or the fear of ostracism, at any rate).
But outside of a nation, legal and cultural controls fail, which leaves only the control that can be established by force. And the work is never-ending – just as the administrative state and social conscience must be present everywhere and always wakeful, in foreign lands it is military force that must always be at hand and whenever possible expand. There is a profound truth in the recollection that the Vietnam War was the Great Society pursued in the paddies of Vietnam. Each of the post-Cold War presidents before Trump has likewise had a domestic vision of benevolent technocracy that runs parallel with an interventionist foreign policy. Not coincidentally, Trump is a peace president just as he is a disruptor and contemner of bureaucratic rationality and rules – as well as of the ‘norms’ of polite and politically correct society. As far as the elite is concerned, Trump is pure irrationality, and that is bane to a class that exists for the very purpose of making life rational (as the best credentialed authorities define rationality).
Bureaucratic regulation is not exactly the same thing as socially enforced conformism, and neither is identical with military occupation and the suppression (or protraction – but never resolution) of foreign conflicts. But the spirit of benevolent expert control that is ubiquitous among America’s ruling class, but for renegades like Trump, is common to all three endeavors. And the same emotional matrix is engaged by offenses against the sacred rationality of all three: to stop a war, to end a war, is as bad as rolling back a social revolution or a decade or regulatory growth. Indeed it’s worse, because whereas Republicans and Democrats have different technocratic recipes for law and social attitudes at home, they converge when it comes to the benighted state of the rest of the world, which is neither capitalist enough nor humanitarian enough – nor simply stable and efficient enough – to satisfy elite Americans. So war brings our elite together. Unfortunately for them, it does not unite their hearts with those of the American people. The people want peace, and they want freedom – they want Donald Trump to succeed
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2) America's Love Affair With Small Business Rekindled
By Salena Zito
WEST NEWTON, Pa. — Bloom Brewery is the kind of Main Street business that shut its doors a generation ago when shopping malls lured customers to their mega-buildings with well-lit parking lots, extended hours and everything imaginable under one roof.
The brewery, which offers 24 artisanal beers on tap, sits near the Great Allegheny Passage, a 335-mile bike trail that has connected Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh since 2013. And with it, a new kind of customer is being drawn through its doors, seeking comfort and community instead of big-box discount deals.
"When I first started, we were only open Saturday afternoons," said owner Jeffrey Bloom, 52. "Now we are open Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, and we are growing all of the time. It's a real sense of community when you are here, where conversation and good beer are a given."
When Bloom was scouting different towns to house his brewery, no local officials offered him tax subsidies to entice him here — a sharp contrast to the estimated $4 billion in subsidies that local and state officials offered Amazon in nearby Pittsburgh to lure its second headquarters there. The new HQ was expected to deliver 50,000 high-paying jobs and an economic reboot.
Despite practically being handed the keys to the farm, Amazon ultimately chose to divide its second headquarters between New York and suburban Washington — two of the wealthiest cities in the country — instead.
"There was never a chance they were going to come here," said Joe Mistick, a former Pittsburgh Zoning Board chairman. "But I'd take a bunch of small businesses any day over Amazon. Their contribution to the fabric of the community is more valuable."
WEST NEWTON, Pa. — Bloom Brewery is the kind of Main Street business that shut its doors a generation ago when shopping malls lured customers to their mega-buildings with well-lit parking lots, extended hours and everything imaginable under one roof.
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A growing number of small-business owners are seeing an opportunity to make a comeback. This summer, a National Federation of Independent Businesses report showed that small businesses are growing and adding the most workers per firm since July 2006. At the same time, the Wells Fargo Small Business Index shows optimism among small business owners growing at a historic clip.
And their commitment to the community goes well beyond their business hours. Bloom sits on his downtown revitalization board, attends city planning meetings and creates events to draw people not just to his brewery but to the town itself. And for now, he does all of it while working a full-time day job as a lineman for Verizon.
A new Amazon headquarters would undoubtedly have brought jobs to the Pittsburgh region, but it also would have brought real-estate speculators, gentrification and soaring housing prices. In addition, Amazon's convenience-through-technology model has caused many of the malls that shuttered Main Street businesses, too. And the bigger companies become, the less they care about the communities they serve.
The 2017 book "Glass House" told the story of Anchor Hocking, a century-old glass tableware company in Lancaster, Ohio, that was originally locally owned. Its corporate leaders served on local community boards. The wives of the leaders were local volunteers. But Anchor Hocking became detached from the city after a hostile takeover in the late 1980s, leading to several bankruptcies and mergers and acquisitions. Eventually, the ownership vanished, and the social capital of the city shrank.
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