He also attacks Trump as “cavalier about the use of nuclear weapons,” with “a record of insults to servicemen, their families and the military.” He criticizes the GOP standard-bearer as “willfully ignorant about the rest of the world, about our military and its capabilities, and about government itself.”
.. “He has no clue about the difference between negotiating a business deal and negotiating with sovereign nations,” Gates writes. “A thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief is too great a risk for America.”
.. But he rules out Trump as “stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.”
An open letter to the Republican establishment leadership
The Koch sons would later revive the spirit of the John Birch society under a new more respectable name: the “Tea Party.”
Given that the Tea Party-dominated Republican Party became the party of the “You Lie!” Obama-obstruction era, the Koch brothers had succeeded in reintroducing the very note of hysterical paranoid racism into American politics. This was what Bill did had worked so hard to repudiate.
Bill would have never said Obama wasn’t a real American, let alone have gone along with the “birther” or “he’s a Muslim” nonsense.
.. Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere. He is the creation of the Birch/Koch brothers designs on our democracy. Now the Koch brothers and the Republican establishment are affraid of what they made.
.. First, Neil Postman’s prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death has been vindicated. It’s not coincidental that Donald Trump is a reality TV star. He is the face of an illiterate America that gets its “facts” from TV news and talk radio hosts. He is the result of a celebrity “culture” gone wild.
.. Second, Donald Trump is the creation of white angry lower and middle-class Americans who have come through our educational system that failed to educate them.
.. These are fact-free functional illiterates, creatures of TV news and celebrity culture, Postman’s walking dead. The are not moved by facts but their energy is fueled by overt racism, hate, xenophobia, isolationism and ignorance.
.. It turns out that what Bill Buckley misunderstood about America was the actual character of white America. Bill thought he could civilize conservatism. But the American right has never dealt honestly with the issue of race.