monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

One of the rejoinders here, one of the most sophisticated arguments, about these leaks is that Trump is shaking up the government's old ways. And right or wrong you'd expect the bureaucracies in place to resist that. Indeed, one of the mysteries of that Eli Lake piece I mentioned above is this. Lake is generally associated with the people who back in the aughts we called "neo-conservatives." Today though most of those people are either Trump skeptics or vociferously anti-Trump. So why is Lake portraying Flynn as an intelligence "reformer" who "threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals."

What's that about? Here's my take. On its face it seems like a strange place for Lake to be. But look at the book Flynn published last year: The Field of Fight. He coauthored it with Michael Ledeen. Ledeen has always rightly been associated with the neoconservative movement. But he's actually a variant strain of that world on the farthest right, with the most conspiratorial, renegade mindset. Ledeen also has a longstanding devotion to and focus on the philosophical movements around and underpinnings of Italian fascism. Ledeen and his collaborators are at the far fringe of the people who literally got the country into the Iran/Contra scandal and pushed hardest to manufacture and imagine tales of ties between Iraq and al Qaida, imminent threats from Iraqi nuclear weapons and all manner of other catastrophe-inducing folly.

Lets remember, Flynn among many, many other things, seriously entertained the idea that Hillary Clinton and her top aides was running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop in Washington, DC. He is not a reformer. He is someone prone to conspiracy theories and craziness. There's been a lot of discussion of what happened to Flynn. Many people who worked with him as recently as half a dozen years ago talk about him as being a different person than the one they've spoken to or seen speak in the last year or two.

Americans are big cheese eaters.

But what’s especially interesting about this week’s rally is that it’s apparently not a presidential event. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, asked about the Florida gathering yesterday, told reporters, “It’s being run by the campaign.”

I realize Spicer says a lot of things that shouldn’t be taken seriously, but in this case, I think he was serious. Less than a month into his first term, the president is holding a campaign rally in a swing state.

And I mean “campaign” in a literal sense. Donald Trump already has a campaign office, campaign staff, money in the campaign coffers, and even an official campaign slogan, all in advance of an election that’s 44 months away.

In other words, as profoundly silly as this may sound, the first campaign event of the 2020 election cycle will be … this Saturday.

In December, Kellyanne Conway denounced what she called the “permanent campaign.” That seems kind of hilarious now.

It's not yet been disclosed which cheese-eaters will serve as the "targets," though.

"oralloy" is a self-proclaimed Einstein and assumes that his brilliance excuses him from meeting normal standards of rational discourse. We're lucky to have him here.

We both know why I bolded that phrase used by Thomas.

Citing three unnamed people

The US ambassador to the United Nations has insisted that Washington “absolutely” supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict, 24 hours after Donald Trump dropped US commitment to the policy.
[...]
In Bonn, the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, emerged from his first meeting with the new US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, to describe the Trump administration’s Middle East policy as “confused and worrying”.

Ayrault pointed to Trump’s remarks in a joint appearance with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he explicitly abandoned the two decades-long US commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as part of a final peace deal.

“I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like,” Trump said. “I can live with either one.” ... ...

After his meeting with Tillerson at the sidelines of a G20 meeting, Ayrault said: “I wanted to remind him after the meeting between Donald Trump and Netanyahu that in France’s view, there are no other options other than the perspective of a two-state solution and that the other option which Tillerson brought up was not realistic, fair or balanced.”

He did not give details about the option that Tillerson raised and the secretary of state did not take press questions, but he appears to have echoed Trump’s remarks suggesting other outcomes would be acceptable to the US.

“I found that there was a bit more precision even if I found that on the Israeli-Palestinian dossier it was very confused and worrying,” Ayrault told reporters. He also noted differences over the 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran, with the Trump administration wanting to review it “from scratch”.

... ... ...

Why does it get tiring? You are under the impression, badly mistaken, that Trump is going to lead you all from this darkness.

The swamp Trump described wasn't simply one occupied by Dem alligators.

Quote:

Is it too early for our English speaking friends to learn the term "Gleichschaltung?"

I had to look it up. It's a dilly of a term in the present American context.

Quote:

In Nazi terminology, Gleichschaltung (German pronunciation: [ˈɡlaɪçʃaltʊŋ]), was the process of Nazification by which Nazi Germany successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of society, "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education".

Obviously, there isn't an on/off switch for these things. They take time and the necessary conditions to come into being. But interim steps in that direction are not at all difficult to identify in the present.

Maybe you can answer a question for me that most leftist here on A2k either can't or won't. How does voting for a right of center candidate go against my best interests?

Sounds like you're a little threatened by his intelligence.

Mr. Friedman came under fire last year for an op-ed he wrote for the website of Arutz Sheva, an Israeli media organization, in which he said supporters of the liberal Jewish lobbying organization J Street were “far worse than kapos,” referring to the Jews who cooperated with the Nazis.

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1"

You continue with your usual arrant nonsense because you have only made false accusations,