The thing about Trump

What a lot of folks don't seem to get their heads around is the fact that Donny J is just a symptom. He is not the disease.

Those folks tend to believe that if we had a suave operator in the Oval Office everything would be hunky-dory. It's only due to the short-fingered vulgarian that America has become a laughing stock.

Suave like Hillsy.

Suave like Barry O. Barry was even better than Hillary; he allowed a lot of liberal white folks to congratulate themselves about how racially inclusive America has become.

Oh lookee! We have a black president! Everything is beyond cool!!!

Sure it is.

Don't look now, but countries like Croatia and Iran are giving America a good run on prosperity metrics like infant mortality and percentage of population working in poverty.

America continues its inexorable slide into decrepitude in all aspects of society save one; the illustrious military-industrial millstone around her neck.

Don't know if you caught Trump's speech in Poland the other day. Yup, America and her allies will prevail in the clash of civilizations. Pure PNAC boilerplate from end to end. I have no idea why PNAC stalwarts like Robert Kagan have such a hate on for Trump. After all, that Poland speech could have been written by some pro-empire twit like "axis-of-evil" maestro David Frum.

Maybe it's because they know that when Trump spews PNAC boilerplate he's just talking shit. His heart is not in it. He'd just as soon build condo towers in Tehran as nuke the place. That's not the kind of self-dealing opportunist that the PNAC crowd wants to see in the Oval Office.

They want a true believer in manifest destiny and American exceptionalism.

Donald J. Trump is not their man.

Does the road to Damascus lead to Tehran?

The so-called Syrian uprising gives the think tank here at Falling Downs a bit of pause.

Let me be clear. Falling Downs is a friend of freedom everywhere and at all times. This is Freedom Central. In fact, I've been thinking about changing the name of the blog to The View From Freedom Central. 

Wouldn't really work on the side of the barn. "Freedom Central". At least "Falling Downs" references, however obliquely, those Kentucky horse farms that populated the imagination of my youth.

But I digress. Syria has top billing in the mainstream news these days. That in itself is enough to make me suspicious. Why Syria?

Every day a new tally of the martyrs massacred by that monster Assad. The daily total tends to be less than the daily total of Americans murdered by other Americans on any given day. Ya, I know that's sort of an apple to oranges thing, but violence is violence and dead is dead.

The R2P arguments have been suspiciously absent thus far. If the virtuous west had to intervene in Libya before any civilians were killed, why has the virtuous west not intervened in Syria after seven thousand have been killed?

But I think it's coming. You're hearing it before it's news. It'll be R2P all over the place, and Assad's weapons of mass destruction, and OMG, look, that road goes straight to Tehran!