Tag Archives: U.S. Politics

The Challenge of Looking Beyond The Islamic State: Trump’s Foreign Policy Inheritance

21 Dec

jihadists

Is the Islamic State Worth Destroying?  From a moral standpoint, one can’t help but answer the question in the affirmative.  How can one sit idly by, as the world did when Fascism spread throughout Europe and Southeast Asia?  Then again, none of the major powers really became heavily involved until either a surprise attack befell them, and/or their treaty obligations with another major power required them to act.  Even then, the British merely sent an Expeditionary Force and the U.S. steered clear of major combat operations in Europe, until the enemy’s weaknesses could be favorably exploited.  Nonetheless, acting against modern-day fascists is a worthy cause.  And fascism is precisely the term to describe the so-called Islamic State and their ilk.

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Deep red state split over latest Trump allegations

19 Oct

Deep red state split over latest Trump allegations

Donald Trump continues to be barraged by ghosts and skeletons from his past. Happy Halloween, Mr. Trump. The truth of the allegations appears to be in the eye of the beholder. Dems love it. Reps think it’s nonsense … and so the wheel continues to spin along a fairly normal axis, even in this unusual year. Continue reading

Public Opinion Analysis: Being a Committed Leftist is Linked to Disdain for Israel

3 Jun Wide gap between Clinton & Sanders supporters in their views of Israel chart

Over the past couple of years, I have been quietly building on a theory that what really causes the American Left, and perhaps their foreign ideological brethren, to favor the Palestinians over Israel is actually rather simple to understand.  The Left thrives on, and is obsessed with creating new categories of underdogs[1] (the poor, minorities, or anyone whose reduced power position is assumed to render them ‘oppressed’).  This usually requires a narrative fallacy, such as unarmed black males are unjustifiably killed by armed white police officers (“Black Lives Matter”), or that the Palestinians are the perpetual victims of the State of Israel (the BDS crowd).  The thing about narrative fallacies is that they can be rather attractive, particularly for people with a penchant for intellectual laziness.  Populist rhetoric seems to pay dividends for politicians, but there seems to be some limit to its policy effects. Continue reading

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