Bradley Burston, Haaretz: Trump Needs a Holy War

[highplainsdem]

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.769002

He needs a war to reconcile the contradictions of a populist and extravagantly self-contradictory election campaign, in which he vowed to rebuild the military to historic levels while also slashing government spending. He needs the kind of war that could make good his vows to revive heavy industrial manufacturing and the mining of "beautiful coal."

A war would free him to green-light mammoth corporate monopolies, and to provide the ultimate pretext, the emergency imperative, for abrogating on a massive scale the most basic of constitutional guarantees to individual freedoms - gun ownership excepted.

A war would underscore his contentions that his critics are weak, his rivals myopic, liberals perverse, immigrants suspect, leftists metastases, journalists -Fox News and Breitbart excepted - subversive, anti-American, knowingly and treasonously and shrewdly deceitful.

A war would make it clear that it's not mass casualty shootings by loner white males that makes Americans unsafe. It is, rather, the specter of the swarthy Muslim we have never met, which should keep us up at night - even if that Muslim is in actual life a saint among physicians or a decorated former brother-in-arms of U.S. troops overseas.

Donald Trump needs a war. But not just any war. He needs just the right global non-Christian, all-powerful, all-frightening, non-white, non-negotiable enemy.

He needs a Holy War.

And he needs a doomsday weapon he can rely on. As it happens, he already has one. It's called Steve Bannon. And Steve Bannon, ideologue, impresario, scorcher of Republican earth, has been talking Holy War for years.

-snip-

The war may not be underway just yet, but the Crusade certainly is. The Muslim Ban was just the staging area. The first target of conquest is already in sight: the Supreme Court.

And what about real war? Trump may well consider it a positive option precisely because he has no clue in world what it's like. What the horror of war means to the people whose lives are destroyed by it, whether they physically survive or not.

-snip-

His only experience with military service is evading it.

His only experience with the innocent victims of war, is sending them back to Syria, then going to bed with that satisfied smile on his face.

God help us all

[madokie]

1. We need to keep our eyes, so to speak

on this whole cabal of treasonous bastards. Trust any one of them at our own peril

[highplainsdem]

2. Agree completely

[Baitball Blogger]

3. I def feel like we are fighting against the clock.

If we don't get down to the truth of Trump's agenda before we suffer a policy-altering event, I fear he will be able to set in like an aggressive cancer.