A happy new year to you as well - that goes for Potemkin and all of you folks. May it be filled with good health and fortune and renewed strength to realize even your silliest errant fleeting wishes as well as your deepest convictions. May we all go forward. The best gift I could have asked for on here, what with my visiting more infrequently and seeing all the changes to the forum display, is to see some old familiar faces to know you are all still around. I'm talking about those of us who go back to the mid 2000's.
Tewodros III wrote:You alive, what think of trump so far?
It won't surprise many that after having distinctly stated in 2012 that I would not participate and it was the first U.S. presidential election in my own life in which I did not do so, that I did indeed vote this time and cast a vote for Trump. He isn't even in office yet, but I can say that aside from all the non-issues given tv air time and the wrangling over cabinet appointments that before all this my hopes were still very modest. I had hoped and still hope that the mere act of his election and his presence will upset the apple-cart even 5% where it counts - on trade, foreign policy, and immigration. The surge of even a superficial flavor of populism did throw a spanner into the works of the business-as-usual attitude and the mores, values and policy preferences of the entrenched "Washington consensus" and its orthodoxy to the extent that Americans are at least having discussions about real substantive change for the first time in a long time rather than existing in an echo chamber of their own creation and a feedback loop of circular logic.
Americans of a new generation now know it's possible to influence a participatory system largely in place to provide an outlet for frustrations without endangering the status quo; to influence either from the right or left, and that idea is dangerous currency to some. I supported Trump's candidacy, as others on the far-right did, as well as surprisingly even some on the left and all over the spectrum, as the political equivalent of a stick of dynamite hurled against fossilized sheet rock which would be immovable otherwise.
This was vastly superior to the alternative - had the predicted outcome and the preferred outcome by those who have a vested interest in this country and the world remaining exactly in the direction it currently is come to pass, many a rich discussion in the aftermath would not have taken place. That in and of itself is worth something.
So I have a wish list of sorts, but I'm a bit giddy as it's been a while since I compiled one of these so I'll keep it short:
1) Deport several million of the 11-14 million illegal Mexican nationals on U.S. soil
2) Actually enforce existing U.S. federal immigration law and commit to a 180 degree policy reversal on pursuing rather than rewarding states like Arizona in the past who implemented their own proactive statutes largely mirroring federal policy
3) Severely penalize large corporations for either hiring of illegal migrant labor or outsourcing to South Asia, South America and elsewhere abroad. Stack a loyalist assortment of characters in the FBI and AG's office directly reporting to the office of the presidency to threaten the non-compliant with asset seizure and wholesale liquidation
4) Drive a wooden stake through the TPP and submit all formerly signed trade treaties designed to facilitate free flow of goods and capital at the expense of national sovereignty and workers' livelihoods, societal position and autonomy up for stringent review starting with NAFTA on down to the bilateral FTAs
5) Immediately cease all diplomatic, financial, military and intelligence support in training and acquisition of arms to the Islamist insurgency in the Syrian war and restore full ties with Syria and complete normalization
6) Normalize ties with Russia and terminate the sanctions regime against all private and public entities in that country
Of course there are far more I could add but those are just a combo of some of the most vital and those which I think have an actual chance at coming to fruition.
RightUnite wrote:Because his actions are symbolic. America did nothing wrong in those days. It was a necessary thing to preserve further loss of American soldier life, but the Left just won't accept that the Japanese would have slaughtered every American there. The Japanese have a fierce warrior code. They would have butchered every American there. The bombing was necessary. Obama's reception at PH was a denigration of the lives of those Americans who lost their lives.
This is a criticism you could more appropriately direct toward Obama's visit to Hiroshima though; not Pearl Harbor. If anything it is Abe's Pearl Harbor visit which would have aroused the anger of some Japanese nationalists.
"I am never guided by a possible assessment of my work" - President Vladimir Putin
"Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin." - Muammar Qaddafi