Dangerous Donald.

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11843550/hillary-clinton-trump-risk?yptr=yahoo

Essentially most everything that Hillary Clinton said today about Donald Trump was right on the money. He is an oaf who shouldn't be anywhere near the presidency. For her to win in November she is going to have to hammer away at that message from now until election day. It was more than less an attack speech though that focused very little on her less than appealing track record. It was a lesser of two evils argument to choose her instead of him because--as bad as you think she may be Dangerous Donald promises to be so much worse.

....and....

......anyway George W. Bush was also incompetent and dangerous. In her speech she worried about the Donald getting us into armed conflicts. She didn't worry her head all that much however when George W./Dick asked her for her okay for the preemptive attack of Iraq. She was fine with that........although the Bush's and the Clinton's are also buddies.....so. I don't know---anyway the drift of her argument though doesn't appeal to me though it may appeal to others. A main appeal of Bernie Sanders is he speaks to myriads of issues most all of which he has some kind of prescription for. Whether you like his prescriptions or not you can't objectively say that he's short of issues, content or ideas. Hillary Clinton--as in her speech today doesn't offer much more than 'if you think I'm bad---just look at the guy I'm going to be running against'. To me there is very much a shortage of issues, content and ideas coming out of her camp.

I'll finish with the email thing. It's a black eye---whether it's decided as criminal or not notwithstanding. She more than obviously and deliberately subverted the rules she applied to others and was meant to abide by. Personally I'm for transparency in government and not a fan of spy agencies like the CIA and NSA and would like to see them brought under thumb. I had no problem with the activities of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. What Hillary did pretty much was the same as those three---the main difference being that what she did was for her own personal benefit and what the others did was more in the spirit of altruism. She--a teflon coated powerful political figure looks immune from prosecution---meanwhile they chase the other three all over the globe with the aim of throwing them into a dark dungeon for decades. Well---that's pretty much what's going on with Manning.

It's not who you vote for. It's who you vote against. Hillary seems to be driving a lot of Americans toward Trump, too. To some HE appears the lesser of two evils. Which shows just how much many people despise Hillary.

So just how bad on a scale of 1 to Hitler do you think President Trump will be?

#2--could he be as bad or worse than George W. Bush? It's possible. There is this caveat when comparing him to Bush though---who by the way said a whole lot of stupid shit. I had a friend who had one of those 365 day tear off calendars of idiocies that came out of George W.'s mouth and that calendar came out well before Bush's presidency ended. But anyway the caveat is that Bush was loved by his party--from the large donors to the small office holders and most certainly by the elected establishment. The same affection for Trump?--not even close. IMO a Trump presidency would unify the democratic opposition--and if he's screwing up like we can almost expect that should lead to the Democrats making major inroads in the Senate and House two years from now. And he's not loved by his own party anywhere near like George W.--so I also suspect whatever agenda he has to be continually sabotaged by members of his own party.

Imagine Richard Nixon without a law degree or any experience in Congress. Or imagine Nixon's businessman friend, Charles "Bebe" Rebozo, Florida banking and real estate tycoon who raised money for Nixon, imagine Rebozo running for office himself instead of staying in the "background."

There are some similarities in personality characteristics between Trump and Hitler but I think the most important--and dangerous--aspects of Hitler's personality are not important features of Trump's personality.

"a scale of 1 to Hitler" --

"1 to Hitler" is not a scale, it's a piece of ambiguous mental short-hand. If "Hitler"--which, for many people, is just short hand for 'ultimate in mad, bellicose dictator with world imperial ambitions' but little in detailed acquaintance with his motivating beliefs--is the extreme of one end of the scale, who or what is supposed to be represented by the "1" ?-- since there's really no such metric as "the opposite of 'Hitler'."

The New York Review of Books : "Why Trump Was Inevitable" by Ronald B. Rapoport, Alan I. Abramowitz, and Walter J. Stone

The New York Times : "Where Hillary Clinton’s Heavy Attack Was Light on Specifics" by Mark Landler, (03/06 /2016)

Trump wanting to be a dictator? I have no idea. It's not going to happen. If he wins I don't think it will be very long until he's a very frustrated individual. Congress is going to be a problem for him and the courts are going to be a problem for him. It's not going to be like he just tells someone to get something done and it gets done. I've had this idea for a while that Trump really doesn't understand the process of governing or legislating or working within the parameters of established law. If that intuition is true---and it's true about a lot of people (not just Trump) he's going find himself stymied all the time. It's one of the reasons I think if he does win--he's a 4 year and that's it POTUS.

He's not really an adult and if he's elected he won't be the first non-adult and we don't have to look back any further than George W.

As a comparable to Hitler--the world we live in is a much different world. The Mexicans as the new Jews doesn't really work the same. There's really not that much animosity from the electorate towards racial groups. There are fringe lunatics. There will always be fringe lunatics.

Trump to some respect is the creation of 24-7 news who could not give him enough free television time for the last year and a half. And it's not just Fox News---MSNBC, CNN--the whole shebang. They didn't care whether he came with any substance or not---their main concern was he was great for ratings. Somewhere along the line they clued into the fact that their establishment buddies in the republican party and the corporate world didn't really want him but by then Trump had too much momentum--it was too late.

>6 lriley: It's pretty sad when the very best that can be hoped from a Trump presidency is that he will be ineffective.

Because God help us if he IS effective....

#7--you're a Canadian are you not? If so--I'm not sure you should be all that worried about it.

True, as a Canadian I'm not as directly affected. I can watch the American election as a rather entertaining form of reality show. But on the other hand... you are our neighbours, largest trading partner and NATO and NORAD ally.

And of course Trump will have control of nuclear weapons. So there's that.

Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.

Pierre Trudeau
(Cdn PM, father of current PM, referring to the US)

I might add that Trump is anything but an even-tempered beast!

As long as the president is popular and favored by at least 35% of the Congress, he can do and get away with almost anything which Congress will go along with--war, torture, extra-legal assassination, the overthrow of foreign governments, etc.

But, in Trump's case, since Congress doesn't particularly like or agree with his anti-establishment rhetoric, he can be kept on a very short leash. Congress controls the federal budget; it has Constitutional authority for deciding if and when the U.S. goes to war. As soon as it chose, it could reassert that exclusive prerogative and prevent Trump from exercising any war command which Congress opposed.

If elected, just as any otherwise untutored apprentice president-elect should be, Trump shall be given a crash-course in presidential powers and responsibilities. He'll be tutored on what he can legally do as president and on what Congress can do if he commits what Congress regards as "high crimes and misdemeanors."

The president of the United States is not the same as a company's C.E.O. Trump may be greatly disappointed in how constrained his power can be if the Congress chooses to block him.

For him to counter that, he'd need immense popular support of the kind that would intimidate Congress.

All of this is exactly why it is Hillary Clinton who really poses the greatest danger to good Consitutional government rather than Donald Trump.

As a favored insider, Clinton would find the scope to commit dangerous acts which Congress would forbid if Trump were to attempt them.

#9--As a Canadian I suspect you're a lot more interested in American foreign policy and I'm pretty sure you've brought up American foreign policy numerous times relative to the Israel/Palestine problem.

As an American citizen I'm a hell of a lot more interested in domestic policy and I have to say I don't think my government for a very long time has worried itself all that much about its own citizens and their standards of living/survival. To me this is a big issue and has informed itself particularly in the campaigns of Trump and Sanders this time around but could be seen in the past several years with the emergence of the tea party movement on the right and the Occupy movement on the left.

Personally I don't think the United States should be the world's policeman. I don't think it should be the world's favorite arms dealer either. We have 900+ overseas military bases. We don't have a health care system that works for us. Our system is not controlled by the government---it's controlled by for profit insurance companies, pharmaceutical multinationals and health care providers. How do you think that works for the people living here? Our infrastructure is falling apart while we're investing in other countries. Our politicians allow corporations to move jobs overseas at the same time giving them huge tax breaks. That's been going on for decades. The two new industries this country seems most intent on building into behemoths---are prisons (particularly private prison systems) and natural gas exploration/exploitation through fracking.

Speaking of them. We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated. We have been fighting this colossally stupid war against drugs that has sent literally hundreds of thousands of non violent illegal drug users away---sometimes for decades. The tendency is to criminalize--not treatment. Land of the free?---police love it and want to keep their own status quo. Raiding, arresting and confiscating property and federal and military subsidies is in their overall picture a good deal for them. The pollution caused by fracking--well there's globing warming from methane going into the atmosphere--the melting of the polar caps and the rising of sea levels. Not good news for Victoria BC or Halifax NS--but Canada's coastal cities pale in comparison to size to some of the United States coastal cities. That's still just a potential. More real right now is the pollution and poisoning of ground water sources--the disposal of trillions of gallons of water used in the process--the structure damage to the ecology. For instance Oklahoma's history of earthquakes averaged about two per year of 3.0 or better just several years and now Oklahoma is average one and a half a day.

Personally I think we need something of a time out or some quiet time to get our act together. The foreign policy shit should take a back seat. We should start closing overseas military bases and stop overfeeding our military/industrial complex. End altogether this stupid war on drugs--stop feeding military equipment to Turkey and Israel. Start investing in our own people--giving them universal health care--kill the health insurance industry and start controlling the pharmaceuticals. Start controlling the banks as well. We need newer and cleaner and renewable energies. Need to make some real progress on climate change.

The two likely political candidates Trump and Clinton are going to do none of the above--not unless they're forced to. The Trump candidacy does signal that a huge number on the right are as disgusted with the status quo of the establishment as the people on the left and the people in the center. However ineffective Trump will be and as much as I think him as certain to be a failure I welcome the disgust. Both parties at this point in time deserve to be burned and buried and then pissed on.

Economics, environment, social, foreign policy- almost everything the US does affects Canada/Canadians--at least some--directly or indirectly.

#13--sure it does--but at the end of the day you don't have a government that goes out of its way to help corporations outsource manufacturing and industrial jobs. At the end of the day you have a health care system that actually works for the benefit of all instead of emptying their wallets/pocketbooks and limiting their options. There may be some Canadians in Afghanistan but you're not paying a shitload in taxes for them and Canadians certainly aren't paying for the 900+ overseas military bases that American citizens are. Canadians aren't fighting this moronic war on drugs either. You're not incarcerating a full 1% of your population at any given point in time. Your country invests in its own citizens to a much larger degree than ours does and the military/industrial complex together with our foreign policy and need to push economic global initiatives--to get into the business of other countries internal affairs--to play policeman is a major reason why the US government is not investing in the welfare of its own people.

So what I would suggest to our own political leaders is that they take a step back---to shitcan all the empirical bullshit---which isn't much more than a pack of lies to begin with--and to start taking care of their own. I'd rather us be like you guys up in Canada or the people of Sweden---looking after our own interests first and not necessarily getting in the middle of tragedies going on somewhere else.

>14 lriley: I agree with you, Iriley. The U.S. should step back from its overseas commitments. In fact, that is what Trump has been promising. Unfortunately, because of his ego he'll probably do the exact opposite, making enemies and getting the U.S. involved in more messes.

On the other hand, what about ISIS, and the Taliban? Now is not an opportune moment for the U.S. to withdraw from the Middle East, or Afghanistan, but there probably never will be a perfect time.

>14 lriley: Still, The Donald can take the whole world down if he acts as he proposes on climate change and not honoring national debt--never mind his cozying up to dictators and his non-conventional approach to nuclear weapons. Enough shivers for all of us, and reason for other nationals to hope US voters don't impose him on the world next November.

>16 margd:

The U.S. president cannot refuse to honor the national debts unless at least one-third + one member of a chamber of Congress goes along with him. It's much more likely that if he refused to sign Congressional authorizing and spending acts, the Congress would pass them over his veto.

Then, even assuming that he could personally block their execution--which he can't--he would then run the risk of being impeached, tried, convicted and removed from office for failing to honor his oath of office.

That's never happened before but we may be in for things which have never happened before.

Basically, he faces similar if not even harsher possible restraints in the other matters you mentioned--though, loosely speaking, he could "cozy up to dictators" --as though this would be a novel development in presidential practice!

#16---until very very recently Hillary Clinton was all for natural gas exploration. She's taken a lot of money from the oil and gas people over the years and it hasn't stopped despite whatever rhetoric she's come up with recently. I fall amongst those who don't really believe a whole lot of what comes out of her mouth and I certainly don't trust her. She's a status quo third way centrist anyway--at best she'll compromise all the parties to a degree and the thing is climate change is not a thing that can be compromised on anymore. It's too late for that.

Once Sanders is out--of those left in the race who are right on target with climate change there's only one---Jill Stein. And to be honest with you I think what Stein says and what the Green platform is is a bit more progressive than Sanders. I'm very comfortable supporting them.

>17 proximity1: The U.S. president cannot refuse to honor the national debts unless at least one-third + one member of a chamber of Congress goes along with him. It's much more likely that if he refused to sign Congressional authorizing and spending acts, the Congress would pass them over his veto.

Meanwhile the global economy would go nuts (?) Even now, markets are said to be anticipating The Donald with dread.

>18 lriley: But natural gas is part of the solution, at least in short term, as supplement to renewable energy. And coal miners certainly don't think of HRC as ally! I agree, though, that she will need to grow on this issue, and quickly. More chance of that than with The Donald!

>19 margd:

"Meanwhile the global economy would go nuts (?) Even now, markets are said to be anticipating The Donald with dread."

"are said to"? Where?

"Billionaire real-estate mogul to wreak havoc upon global markets" ? People that simple-minded who are invested in the securities markets are bound to lose their shirts, Trump or no Trump; and the others shall be only too glad to keep their heads and their profits while fools panic prematurely.

So we're all to regulate and concede our political lives and liberties in order to pander to investors' fears?