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Hey, wait, isn’t “dark” a trigger word for the politically correct crowd? Every time President Donald Trump gets up and speaks what most people interpret as common sense, the left calls it “dark.”
What’s funny is that if Barack Obama gave essentially the same speech, minus the “Rocket Man” reference, they’d want to give him a second Nobel Peace Prize, or add one for Literature to it.
Even David Ignatius, writing in the Washington Post, called the speech “conventional,” and “a well-cooked pudding.”
So what worries me about Trump’s speech? Oddly, it’s precisely that it was so conventional. If Trump is going to deal successfully with North Korea, he’ll truly have to think outside the box. If he wants a better, longer-lasting deal with Iran, he needs in some way to engage that nation and its people.
But HuffPo chimed in with Hillary Clinton (please will she just shut up?) on how “dark” the speech was.
TONIGHT on #LSSC: Before getting into the 2016 election, @HillaryClinton reviews #WhatHappened in @realDonaldTrump's #UNGA speech today… pic.twitter.com/AguyWYMnH8
— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) September 19, 2017
Slate went apocalyptic.
It began—as all Trump speeches must begin, it seems—with a boast of how much better life in America has been since his election: stock market up, unemployment down, military stronger. This was a clue that the speech, though sometimes couched in the language of international principles (and dotted with thanks to the U.N. for helping out here and there), was really going to be about Trump—and Trump’s dark vision of what the world should look like.
Sigh.
When Trump said, “We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even systems of government,” they criticize him for not calling out corrupt despots or dealing with genocidal maniacs.
And in the next sentence, “But we do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties: to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation,” they say it smacks of nationalism. “Nationalism” is a trigger-word conjuring up Nazis and death camps.
Which sentence do they really have a problem with? Because “both” is an absurd answer.
Yet he said nothing about the similarly dreadful records of Russia, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey. In fact, he praised Saudi Arabia—where, he noted, he was “greatly honored” to speak earlier this year—for its agreement to stop “radical Islamic terrorism,” ignoring the Saudis’ longtime support for certain terrorist movements and the country’s cruel bombing of civilians in Yemen, with our own shameful abetting.
The left truly doesn’t get it.
Saudi Arabia and Turkey pose no threat to America or to western civilization. They may repress their own people, and in Turkey’s case, beat up their own nationals in our capital city, but that’s not a reason to march in and impose our morality on them.
Trump said “In America, we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to watch.” That sentence makes liberals go into “tilt” mode for a couple of reasons.
First, it presumes that America is worthy of being an example for anyone. The salient difference between Barack Obama’s worldview and Donald Trump’s (or Ronald Reagan’s for that matter) is that Obama thought America unworthy of emulation or as an example of what’s right. He thought quite the opposite, and therefore the primary motivator to be involved in foreign problems was the desire to make amends for our wrongs.
Second, it removes America from a global moral calculus of “universal human rights.” Obama and his predecessor George W. Bush spoke of these as a touchstone of our moral obligation to other countries. It’s what drove Bush’s “nation building” approach. If only we could get Iraqis, who have lived as a tribal society for a millennium, and only coalesced as a nation since western powers declared it so after World War I, to embrace a pluralistic democracy, they’d learn to love it.
But they never did.
Getting Russians to embrace a federal republic has about the same chance of happening. Their culture can’t embrace concepts that are so unnatural and alien to them.
Fred Kaplan at Slate had particular disdain for Trump’s threats to North Korea and Venezuela. Again, he doesn’t get it. States that cause problems for America and western civilization, through their own despotic or criminal enterprise, are targets for America to impose our will and might that they might fall in line.
It’s not some overarching global watermark for morality that drives Trump’s policy. As much as we’d like the comfort of that consistency, the world is a messy place. The measure of America’s involvement in another nation is their ability to mess us or our allies up. Period.
And Trump’s main purpose in this speech was to tout the doctrine of America First. “As president of the United States, I will always put America first,” he said, “just like you, as the leaders of your countries, will always—and should always—put your countries first.” Unless, of course, your country is North Korea, Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela—in which case Trump insists that your country’s real interests lies in aligning those interests with our interests: with his interests.
Well, yes. North Korea, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela cause problems for America and our allies. Saudi Arabia doesn’t. These countries have some of the same fleas but only the dogs with fleas carrying the “anti-American interests” virus interest us. We know that many of the 9/11 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia. But as long as the Saudis cooperate with us in rooting out al Queda and ISIS (and they do), we have no interest in ending their brutal and repressive practices. That’s their issue.
Liberals don’t like that. They either want to solve everyone’s problems for them or apologize that America doesn’t have some of the same problems as other countries and endeavor to give us those problems to make things more “equal.” That’s plain stupid.
The world isn’t going to get together in a “brighter or more orderly” brotherhood and love-fest. It’s messy, filled with self-interests, petty thugs, criminals, and haters. Trump was correct in applying common sense to deal with those who threaten us or our friends, and saying “live and let live” to everyone else.
If that’s too “dark” then liberals are living in rainbow unicorn land.
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