Over at Politico, Adam Walinsky gives good head with the following: “I was RFK’s Speechwriter. Now I’m Voting for Donald Trump. Here’s Why.”
What follows is a depressingly accurate account of Hillary Clinton’s Putin-phobia, her school-girl earnest conviction that Mr. Putin “needs to be taught a lesson.” Mrs. Clinton, with all her vaunted knowledge of foreign affairs—and she surely knows literally a hundred times as much as Donald Trump does—is entirely incapable of looking in the mirror and realizing that Mr. Putin is equally convinced that she needs to be taught a lesson. Hillary, like the rest of the foreign policy establishment in DC, clings to what can be labeled “bourgeois rationalism”—the notion that if you credibly threaten someone with death they will give in, because life itself is the greatest good. But dictators like power more than they like life, as both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi recently demonstrated, not that Mrs. Clinton bothered to notice. And I suspect that Mr. Putin feels the same way. If they can’t be feared, they’d rather be dead.
So all that’s true. Is that enough reason to vote for Trump? Fuck no! to coin a phrase. Hillary Clinton has an irrational hatred of Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin. Electing Donald Trump president would be the worst event in American history. People like Mr. Walinsky want us to forget everything “bad”—that is to say, everything disgustingly racist, vicious, and immoral—that Trump has said—want us to forget that he has absolutely no respect for the law, to forget that the one thing he would most certainly do is build a disgusting wall between the United States and Mexico, which itself would be enough to disgrace not only Donald Trump but the entire nation.
Afterwords
Mr. Walinsky1—or his headline writer—has a sappy subhead—“The Democratic Party has become something both JFK and RFK would deplore—the party of war.” Anyone who knows the true story of the sixties knows that both brothers were considerably less noble than flame-keepers like Adam want to believe. According to David Brinkley, JFK was hot to “win” in Vietnam mere weeks before his assassination, while RFK’s enthusiasm for “Operation Mongoose”, a bizarre grab-bag of grossly irresponsible terrorist plots intended to drive Fidel Castro from power, was acknowledged even by fellow flame-keeper Arthur Schlesinger.
- Why do I feel the need to call people “Mr.” and “Mrs.”? Am I turning into the New York Times? ↩︎
