People, Personas, and Politics 6 – Decency and Honest Politics
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): People, Personas, and Politics
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/03/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So do you think it’s a removal of two principles? One, decency; two, pursuit of honest politics, an orientation towards those.
Rick Rosner: There’s just too much at risk. He and his people seem so dangerous and dumb that we don’t know what they’re going to do and how much damage it’s going to do. Where North Korea is being super noisy about the nukes they’re developing, the rockets they’re developing, and the rocket engines they’re developing, that would be scary under a normal president, and it is super scary under Trump.
Trump, I mean, with regard to the North Korean situation, that’s uncertainty. If North Korea were doing it under any president, it would be scary. That’s not related to Trump for the most part. It’s just that Trump might do anything in terms of—he might provoke some kind of war to boost his approval, which is kind of what Bush did at various points. He manipulated military action from foreign enemies to good his approval ratings enough to get re-elected.
With regard to trump and North Korea, you have to wonder whether crazy person versus crazy person is the best thing. I had a conversation with a conservative buddy recently.
SDJ: Lance Richlin?
RR: Yea, Lance Richlin, Lance and I had North Korea come up in conversation. He likes the idea of a military buildup president, which is what Trump is trying to be. He will cut all sorts of social program funding for military. So that, according to Lance, we can ring North Korea with ships on the water and along the border of South Korea a bunch of missile stations.
So that if North Korea does anything super aggressive, we can just rain fire down on them, which also requires threatening China because China has a weird alliance with North Korea. They share a border. China doesn’t want a bunch of refugees flowing into its borders if North Korea completely falls apart. So China feels obligated to keep North Korea stable, which it isn’t because it is run by a crazy person.
Of all the arguments you can make for Trump, the crazy person versus crazy person is one of the least non-persuasive argument. It is one where I could almost say, “Alright, maybe.”
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012–2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 