For starters, this version of the Republican Party has to die. I don’t say that as a partisan. I say that as a citizen who believes that America needs a healthy center-right party that offers more market-based solutions to problems; keeps the pressure on for deregulation, freer trade and smaller government; and is willing to compromise. But today’s version of the G.O.P. is not such a problem-solving party.
We have known that ever since the G.O.P. speaker of the House John Boehner quit, not because he couldn’t work with President Obama but because roughly a quarter of House Republicans, the so-called Freedom Caucus, were simply not interested in governing and had made his job impossible.
Vladimir Putin is bringing back the 1930s
Undermining the West’s confident sense of itself is important to Putin’s implementation of his ideology of Eurasianism. It holds that Russia’s security and greatness depend on what Ben Judah calls a “geographically ordained empire” that “looks east to Tashkent, not west to Paris.”
.. Writing in the British journal Standpoint, Judah reports that Russian television relentlessly presents “a dangerous, angry wonderland”: “Russia is special, Russia is under attack, Russia swarms with traitors, Russia was betrayed in 1991, Russia was glorious under Stalin’s steady hand.” This justifies gigantic military, intelligence and police establishments steeped in Eurasianist tracts published by the Russian General Staff.
.. Lilia Shevtsova says Putin is simultaneously imposing a domestic revolution of cultural conservatism, converting Russia into a revanchist power and “forging an anti-Western International
.. “the underlying goal” of Putin’s domestic disinformation is less to persuade than “to engender cynicism”: “When people stop trusting any institutions or having any firmly held values, they can easily accept a conspiratorial vision of the world.”
.. In inward-turning, distracted America, the role of Charles Lindbergh is played by a presidential candidate smitten by Putin and too ignorant to know the pedigree of his slogan “America First.”
U.S. diplomats fear Trump will unleash cronies as ambassadors
Will he just appoint a buddy to schmooze with the Kremlin?
America’s diplomats are shuddering at the notion that Donald Trump, if elected president, will send unqualified cronies around the world as ambassadors, exporting his bombastic style to sensitive jobs that represent the face of the United States.
.. Like some of his predecessors, President Barack Obama has been criticized for handing out plum diplomatic posts to prominent campaign donors. According to one analysis, Obama has named at least 29 campaign bundlers to ambassadorships, many of them in posh Western European nations.
.. Around 30 percent of Obama’s ambassador appointments have been “political,” according to statistics kept by AFSA. That’s in line with most of Obama’s predecessors dating to the Gerald Ford era.
.. Some countries may even prefer having a political appointee as the U.S. ambassador because of the belief that person is a heavy-hitter who is more likely to have the president’s ear than a traditional State Department employee. Generally speaking, the tougher, less-glamorous assignments — such as Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Yemen — tend to go to career diplomats,
.. Already, there is speculation that Trump may name former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as his ambassador to Mexico
.. no matter who wins November’s election, the American penchant for political appointments is undercutting U.S. anti-corruption initiatives around the world. It’s hard to warn other nations against the dangers of cronyism or selling political office when so many of your ambassadors were campaign bundlers.
Jill Stein: Trump may have ‘memory problem’
The physician turned Green Party candidate sees signs of health, mental, cognitive issues in the man atop the GOP ticket.
“You know, I don’t pretend to be able to do TV diagnosis, but I think the guy has a problem,” said the 66-year-old candidate, who is averaging somewhere between 2 percent and 5 percent in most national and state polls, enough (Clinton people say) to put a scare into the Democrat in too-close-to-call states. “The guy has a lot of problems — physical, mental, emotional, cognitive,” Stein said of Trump.
As proof of his (alleged) pathology, she pointed to his position-hopping on a range of issues, which she cast as erratic rather than calculating — from his fuzzy Iraq positions over the years, to his brief “softening” on immigration last month, to his decision (on the day we spoke) to suddenly renounce birtherism after five years of banging a drumbeat of lies.
.. “It’s hard to, you know, to think too hard about anything Donald Trump says because he will change his mind in the next hour, if not the next day, or whatever,” she added. “Today, suddenly, after five years, he became convinced that it’s not an issue. Yesterday it was an issue. It will probably become an issue again for him. You know, the guy may have a memory problem. Who knows what it is? But he’s incapable of having a consistent thought or policy.”
.. she describes the choice between him and Hillary Clinton as an abominable binary offering “death by gunshot or death by strangulation.”
.. Stein thinks he’s, at heart, a bumbler who would be neutered by his own party after being elected. But it’s Clinton who poses the greater threat, in Stein’s estimation, because she knows how to move the levers of Washington.
.. This is a boutique opinion among mainstream liberals
.. some polls showing a quarter to a third of under-30 voters opting for Stein, Johnson or none of the above.
.. Like Sanders, Stein has an affection for Russia and a soft spot for Botox strongman Vladimir Putin. Critics like Clinton ally Neera Tanden have noted just how often Stein appears on the Putin-controlled cable network RT.
.. When I asked her whether Putin is a despot, I got a yes-and-no answer, with traces of Trumpian ambivalence. “To some extent, yes, but there could be a whole lot worse,” Stein said when I asked about the reportedly rigged Russian elections this year.