President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

My father hated it when I watched Hogan's Heroes. He'd walk by, stand and look at the TV for a minute, and then say "Son, the damn Germans were a long way from stupid. Don't you believe that bullcrap."

He was an infantry company commander in the hedgerow country in Normandy a couple of weeks after D-Day, and that show really pushed his buttons.

 

Because of the Magic R.

 

Gorka seems like the perfect Trump advisor as he doesn't seem to know much about the subject on which he claims to be an expert.

For a Trump adviser, an odyssey from the fringes of Washington to the center of power

 

My high school football coach was shot down over Germany and spent 18 months as a wounded POW. The show sent him into ballistic rage, justifiable rage.

 

Pretty interesting (i.e., harrowing) piece in Commentary ... Some "highlights" ...

1) "[Nearly] half of all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts — an army now totaling roughly 7 million men — currently take pain medication on a daily basis."
2) One out of five men in the prime working years is a Medicaid beneficiary. Among those in the "not-working" category, more than half (53%) are Medicaid enrollees. For white men in that category, the Medicaid share is 48%.
3) Perhaps 9 out of 10 convicted (living) felons are not incarcerated.

Our Miserable 21st Century - Commentary Magazine

 

Not an expert. Ok. Based on what? That he's not an Islamic scholar?

How many of his critics are Islamic scholars, speak Arabic, or have lived in a Muslim majority nation?

This is indisputable:

For him, the terror threat is rooted in Islam and “martial” parts of the Koran that he says predispose some Muslims to acts of terror.

“Anybody who downplays the role of religious ideology . . . they are deleting reality to fit their own world,” he said.
...
“Yes, it was jihadi terrorism . . . but, more importantly, that event was linked to communism. It was linked to fascism,” he said. “Why? Because al-Qaeda, ISIS, all of these groups are totalitarians — either you surrender to them or they will kill you.”

And this is silly.

In other instances, his fellow professors would challenge his contention that the Koran’s violent passages are the primary driver of terrorism.

“There’s crazy stuff in the Bible, too,” said David Ucko, who taught alongside Gorka for three years at CISA.

 

You're responding to an imaginary thinker.

 

What's his training in counterterrorism and/or Islam?

He's no more of an Islamic expert than you or I.

 

One summer in college, one of the residents in the building was gone but didn't stop his WSJ subscription so we took it. I remember a middle column about how Hogan Heroes repeats were popular in Germany. I wish I could remember why because then there would be a point to this post.

 

That isn't a denial. I really am surprised that you would lump all conservatives together like that in saying that they aren't offended by Nazis.

 

Here's the deal about the Nazi analogy:

The Nazis convinced most of the country to participate in or ignore killing every Jew (and others) they could round up. I truly don't know what would seem scary, threatening or even undesirable about the Jews.

So Hitler and friends had to work pretty hard to blow in the little flame of ant-Semitism and stoke it.

Trump has it easy with the Muslims. There are real concerns about a small minority of them, a willing group of brainwashed supporters and lots more ways to get his lies out.

So I don't think the Nazi comparisons are outrageous or out of bounds at all.

 

European anti-Semitism got a lot of traction on their cultural institutions of money-lending. When things went bad economically, you could blame them the same way we blame bankers for foreclosing on homes.