Up to a point, because even though he is proposing that we should do more or less exactly what President Obama is doing, he blasts the President for his weak rhetoric.
But leaving that aside, Krauthammer, a former fairly moderate writer for The New Republic, who went over to the deeply conservative side and became a partisan mouthpiece for hardcore conservatism, such as it is today, does slam Donald Trump's worst instincts.
Krauthammer points out that the Kurds are Muslims, and the ban all foreign Muslims would not only capture Syrians, who just might lie when ask if they were Muslim, but also the Kurds, and our "allies" in the Gulf and other Arab countries. People we need if we are to offset the siren call of ISIS.
Link to Krauthammer column
Which got me thinking about two things.
1. Alienation is hard thing for society to combat but seems to be a common thread in what motivates terrorism, both domestic and jihadist. While we need to combat armed terrorists in some manner to keep them contained and the Shiite government in Baghdad did not care to co-opt Sunnis and is now reaping what they sowed. But so did the Dick Cheney wing of the GOP when then disbanded the Baathist Party, and now those former well trained soldiers/technicians are the core of ISIS's military effort and economic machine.
Technology has changed global society in many ways, and I don't have the answer, but I think we need to think about alienation and what we as a global society can do to reduce it.
It is a very complex process by which one can become alienated, and I doubt there is a 100% foolproof way to prevent it. I don't own a gun so I cannot act upon this, nor do I want to, but the crazy irresponsible GOP positions alienate me so much that sometimes I fantasize about taking on a bunch of GOP crazies in the hope that they see the error of their ways. And I am a rational human being with something to lose by doing that. I can understand how someone who is less rational, with nothing to lose, would actually act out on such a fantasy.
How does society prevent that? I wonder if there any psychologists out there who are thinking about that and could the political establishment which is failing so miserably at even thinking in this manner, actually listen to them and develop a set of policies that would reduce alienation.
2. Sometimes I think Donald Trump is on a one man mission to destroy the Republican Party. But then I remember he has been a birther since Day 1 of President Obama's administration, even though the Fiscal and Monetary stimulus implemented by both the Bush and Obama administrations saved not only the economy, but Donal Trump's wealth. With the debt he employs in his real estate, he would have been bankrupted by a bankrupt credit allocation system, along with the rest of us.
So why has Donald Trump been so vocal on President Obama's birthplace, promoting the idea that somehow Hawaii doesn't keep records in the same reliable manner that the rest of the country does. And why is he feeding all these other anti-American, anti-immigrant thoughts. I cannot think of a better way to destroy the GOP on a national level and I wonder what Donald Trump's motivation is. I mean Arab's and Chinese and Latino's are prime buyers of his real estate developments all across the U.S.
I am less baffled by Donald Trump's appeal to alienated white lower middle class voters, than I am completely baffled by Donald Trump's motivation. He is reducing the value of his brand by insulting his buyers. Perhaps he is has a strange loose screw in his brain, but you can't talk like he does and have dementia, so it is not that. And why would he want to destroy the GOP, he is not a modern Democrat.
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