Monday, January 4, 2016
Distilled Essence of Trump
The title here is a bit harsh, but not inaccurate. The Trump campaign's first ad says pretty much all the things Donald Trump has already been saying, even if they are kind of absurd. I think that's probably the point. Things like "cut the head off of ISIS and take their oil" sound great until you realize the this isn't ISIS' oil--they seized it from Iraq and Syria and it should go back to whoever it belonged to. A wall is nice, but won't stop people coming by boat or plane. Banning Muslims from immigrating is just...un-American.
But other than that...it should be very effective for people who like that sort of thing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
It's utterly stupid. There is no 'head' of ISIS to 'cut off'. If we've learned anything from fighting al Quaeda and the Taliban, there's no shortage of leadership willing to fill the void. These are not rigid organizations in any classic sense, but rather a core group (in the case of ISIS it's mostly former Iraqi army officers) and a bunch of religiously indoctrinated eleven bravo infantry. Look at Ramadi - go in hard and they fade away. Now, if you're Iraq you've got to commit a huge amount of military resources to HOLD Ramadi. Move those resources on Mosul, you'll get Mosul and lose Ramadi again.
And exactly how would you 'take' their oil. The oil fields are in terrible shape after years of war. There are no pipelines. You'd need ten or twenty thousand trucks to move it to the port at Latakia (Oooppss, still held by Assad and the SAA) or Basra (Ooopppss, I suspect the Iranians might have something to say about that).
Every simplistic slogan that falls out of Trump's face is an impractical and unrealistic idiocy, and yet he still never has to go any deeper, or explain any methodology...
His appeal is for the angry and the low-info voter--I don't believe they ever think about what he's saying in a practical sense, only the emotional one.
Post a Comment