Another perspective of the Trump-Cheney blowup

I won't repeat Trump's latest in relation to the post below. You've already read it. What's below is important to read or reread as a kind of shotgun blast to the memory: Jesus! I had forgotten just how consistently this man treasures concepts of violence. This update is only in response to a top link I saw, then read, on the most recent display of the usual, the Trump-Cheney affair.

Fox News' media and culture reporter Brian Flood protested that Trump's words were "framed as a call for violence" by, you guessed it, "irresponsible" journalists. Flood first glided by Trump's gratuitous introduction of Liz Cheney as "a very dumb individual ... very dumb." I believe her old neoconservatism was, but she sure as hell isn't. Her intellectual abilities could be intimidating to a debate foe; just recall her performance as a member of the J6 committee.

This leads us to ask: Why would anyone with such a megaphone, let alone a presidential nominee's, publicly defame another person as "a very dumb individual" — especially a very dumb individual. That sort is defenseless, no rational person would go there. This leaves us with the question: Why would he defame a woman who is highly intelligent as "very dumb"? Ah, but therein is a loaded question. No rational person would.

Flood then proceeded to his thesis: the reframing of Trump's words as an anti-war remark. I concede Flood's initial complaint, that what followed the widely reported quote was truncated. Continued Trump: "They're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let's send 10,000 troops into the mouths of the enemies,’ but she’s a stupid person and I used to have meetings with a lot of people and she always wanted to go to war with people."

First I'd like to see a timeline of Trump's meetings "with a lot of people" who included Liz Cheney. The subject matter of foreign affairs doesn't strike me as his kind of meeting. As is his wont, he topped that off with "always," an unconditional assessment of a rather peculiar consistency; hobgoblins of little minds, that sort of thing, but we've already established that Liz's mind is not "little."

Flood's major argument: Trump was merely reconfirming that "he’s against sending Americans to war." His war room, excuse the pun, issued a statement: "[He] is 100% correct that warmongers like Liz Cheney are very quick to start wars and send other Americans to fight them, rather than go into combat themselves." In the 2000s, I wrote that very thing dozens of times; the comfy neocons were known then as "chickenhawks."

Yet what Trump, Flood and their likeminded never engage is an exceptionally more complex world. Fewer statements are as self-evident as that of being "against sending Americans to war." The words are so generic as to be meaningless.

Let us recall instead that Trump's "ism" or whatever he calls the inconsistent hobgoblins of his little mind is touted as "America First." Whether he knew it or not, the term harks back to the America Firsters of the 1930s. They too were against sending Americans into war. Their movement was backed by many in Congress, which for years frustrated President Roosevelt's efforts to prepare for what he knew was inevitable.

FDR understood the world was a complex place that needed confronting, and no slogan or averting our eyes from evil would protect the United States — and for sure none of our valuable, critical allies in Europe. But Trump's brain is not a complex place. He thrives on such slogans and ignorance of what surrounds us globally.

In short, America Firsters' thinking was ill-thought out, and now a presidential nominee proposes to guide the U.S. along its grossly mistaken lines. Yes, theirs was an anti-war message, as was Trump's when defaming Liz Cheney. I'll grant his objection to sending Americans to war, even though such an objection cuts across what so clearly is his sociopathic personality.

Taken to extremes, as it was in the 1930s, and in certain situations that reflect the very complexities I have noted, an anti-war message carried out can and would lead to a far more violent, human-consuming war. We know that. We went through one. Only a psychopath or one of the ill-ideology that unfolded in the early 200os would desire an unprovoked war. For that, Ms. Cheney is responsible, and that I shall not defend.

But Ms. Cheney is not the Republican presidential nominee. Her views or past views are irrelevant when it comes to weighing what an elected nominee might do when pure evil once again this way comes. Does he possess the mental capacity to comprehend just how integrated America's national security is with other nations of the world? Does he have anything upstairs beyond a slogan and the most simplistic of yearnings to keep Americans out of a war?

Above I used the word rational twice. It's a seemingly straightforward word, yet it too is integrated with other characteristics: a capacity for higher reasoning, empirical beliefs, a conscious avoidance of extremism — even the ability to resist the temptation to call an intelligent woman a "very dumb individual."

So, taken together, Mr. Flood, would you still say that Donald J. Trump is a rational human being who has a desirable place in the commander in chief's chair? I won't even go into his acute episodes of a pro-war mentality that he had to be talked out of when he occupied that chair.

Truth be told, I don't care what Mr. Flood might say. I'm interested only in what the American electorate says next Tuesday.