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Fake News, Failed States and "America First"
 One would have thought that a 90-day suspension of immigration from seven countries with minimal economic ties to the United States would be minor news. It has to be the best thing an American president has done since Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, because [of] it all the people I dislike have gone bat-guano crazy.The mainstream press is blaming Trump for everything including a down day on the stock market. ...Then we have Starbucks, Lyft, and the whole Silicon Valley circus denouncing Trump for cutting off their labor supply--as if they employed Somalis or Yemenis. It's just fake news, folks. Fake news has metastasized from the gossip columns (vicious personal attacks against Trump family members) to the political columns (scurrilous slanders against Trump team members like Gen. Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon, to the financial page. ...The biggest piece of fake news is that Trump is isolationist. It's true that the catchphrase "America First" originated with isolationists. In the 1930s, Charles Lindbergh's "America First" movement opposed intervention against the Nazis. De facto it was an instrument of German foreign policy. By sharp contrast, President Trump has promised to "eradicate" the contemporary equivalent of Nazism, namely radical Islam terrorism. That means to eradicate it anywhere in the world. It's the polar opposite of Lindbergh's isolationism: It means that America is going use all of its power all over the world to stamp out the present-day version of Nazism. Radical Islam is a lineal descendant of Nazism. See Paul Berman's book The Flight of the Intellectuals for documentation of the common history of Nazism and modern Islamism. That isn't isolationism. It's an activist foreign policy. It happens to be the kind of activism that the Democratic Party and the McCain wing of the Republican Party don't like. What Trump means by America First is that America will not sacrifice the blood of its soldiers and the security of its citizens in a Utopian quest to save other countries and cultures who, sadly, insist on destroying themselves. Instead, we will insulate ourselves from their failure and take measures to protect ourselves from their hatred and rage against us. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-01-31 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=480058 |