Monday, June 13, 2016

Orlando and Trump's America


Suggests its now Trump/Brexit/LePen as a result of this terrorist attack on US gays.


Omar Mateen, the Florida shooter who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, just ushered Donald Trump to the White House, Britain out of the European Union, Marine Le Pen to the French presidency, and the world into a downward spiral of escalating violence. 
Aged 29, Mateen is the Gavrilo Princip of the early 21st century, the young man who ripped up an old, decaying political order. Like the 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist whose bullets ignited World War I, Mateen has set a spark to a time of inflammable anger.





16 comments:

Malmo's Ghost said...

The moonbats on the left, especially in the MSM (basically state run media) along with moronic SJW's in social media are attempting to spin Orlando as Trump's fault. That dog don't bite, try as they will. Just remember, the left can HATE with the best of them. Their sanctimony wears thin under circumstance as suck. The so called tolerant loving left's hate of Trump and those who support him shows their hypocrisy by the second. World class haters they be.

At any rate, Trump was going to eviscerate Hillary anyway, even without the radical Islamic Orlando nut's killing spree.

Dan Lynch said...

Agree that Orlando will help Trump.

Hillary will try to use Orlando to drum up support for her anti-gun platform, but Americans have already made up their minds about guns and are set in their thinking. Have you ever tried debating the gun issue with your friends? Did you change anyone's mind?

On the other hand, opinions on immigration are more nuanced, and Orlando will nudge public opinion against Muslim immigration.

A said...

malmo, what makes you think Trump will eviscerate Hillary?

lastgreek said...

Trump bragged on twitter, right after the shooting, that he "called it." What did he call exactly? I don't recall he calling for the banning of American citizens in the US, nor the banning of homophobes. (The killer was an American and obviously a homophobe.)

Btw, it takes a special kind of douche bag to brag right after a human tragedy that he "called it" -- not to mention his douche bags followers who tweeted "congrats" to said special kind of douche bag.




John said...

It'll probably help Trump for a few weeks and then the memories will start to fade, just as they did with San Bernardino or Fort Hood or wherever else. Most Americans now think that the far worse attacks of 9/11 did not justify invading Afghanistan and Iraq, which may help Trump's disingenuous anti-war rhetoric. The dying days of ISIS will probably see more and more attacks. If there are more attacks, it'll help Trump, not that I think it will be enough to see him to the Oval Office.

Hillary can't wait to create more terrorists and give ISIS a new lease of life. Hillary's neoconservative foreign policy will be a factory that will churn out jihadis at a rate faster than all previous administrations other than perhaps Dubya's. Hillary can then lead a delusional country in a demented cry that "They hate our values". The massacre at Orlando is a result of Obama and Hillary's support for the jihadis against Assad, not that it will ever be seen that way. Hillary's proposed neoconservative foreign policy may well mean total carnage around the world but it'll also lead to bloody corpses on the streets of America. What Trump really thinks is, as ever, a complete mystery.

Lastgreek, excellent points.

Peter Pan said...

Like the 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist whose bullets ignited World War I, Mateen has set a spark to a time of inflammable anger.

Whoa there, cowboy. You're riding a horse called Hope.

Malmo's Ghost said...

"malmo, what makes you think Trump will eviscerate Hillary?"

1-Sanders supporters will not support Clinton en masse. Many will still vote for her but many will sit out the election.

2-Trump will resurrect all the past Clinton shit for those ignorant of her given the media's down the memory hole past--especially during the debates.

3-Trump will dominate the white vote like no Republican has in decades.

4-No matter how hard the left tries to deflect the Orlando massacre, the tactic won't work, and Trump will benefit (like it or not) because sensible folks relate to Trump, not Clinton, when it comes to Islamic nutters.

5-Clinton is too wooden a personality. Relative to Trump she is sleep inducing.

6-Americans are tired of Obama. Another potentially worse Democrat simply isn't in the cards.

Trump will blow her to smithereens in November. 1980 Reagan style.

John said...

Malmo,

A lot of those points are either true or can be true.

Point 1. Never underestimate the gutlessness of Democrats. I wouldn't be all that surprised if every single Sanders supporter goes over to Hillary. In any case, Trump will need a huge swing from Hillary to anybody but Hillary.

Point 2. Absolutely right, although the Clinton machine will fight fire with fire. Hillary isn't Kerry or Gore. The bitch is a bitch.

Point 3. Debatable. Women of all colours don't like Trump. The white male vote will be overwhelmingly Trump, but enough white working class males will nevertheless vote Hillary.

Point 4. The anti-Islamic nutter vote isn't a big one, and Trump will have to explain why it is he supported the invasion of Iraq, destined to become a cauldron of anti-American jihadis. Those who put Orlando down to the alleged nefarious nature of Islam won't change their minds. Those who put Orlando down to the lack of gun control won't change their minds. There aren't many who don't hold either of those wrongheaded options.

Point 5. True, but it may work both ways: it can be spun so that people will want an allegedly sober and thoughtful POTUS, not a reckless big mouth.

Point 6. Americans are tired of Obama. If he could run again, he'd probably lose. Hillary's been smart enough to have distanced herself from Obama for many years and has been voicing her displeasure through various media.

Trump will not blow her to smithereens. She'll win by a good distance. It's a long way to November and many things can happen, but every poll I've seen puts Hillary way out in front. Far too many people have already made their minds up about Trump. I can't see how he can make up the ground. As I've said before, he has nobody to blame but himself. He could have taken the White House at a canter but he blew it by lashing out at indescribably petty nonsense. If many Republicans are going to hold their noses when voting for him, he's got no chance with rightwing Democrats and floating voters. In many ways, I hope I'm wrong. Trump is not a particularly endearing figure, but Hillary is truly horrible.

Tom Hickey said...

Some "choice."

I can't in good conscience vote for either.

Tom Hickey said...

I've already told the story of a friend of mine who is a human relations consultant to tech firms. He only consults to CEOs. He says the story is always the same. He does his study then schedules an appointment with the CEO and announces that he has completed his work. The CEO asks what he has found. He says, "The problem with the company is that everyone thinks you are an asshole." The CEO reacts in surprise, "They do?" Then he proceeds to tell them how people are not computers.

This is real life, not Dilbert.

John said...

Tom,

It's the worst choice American voters have had in heaven knows how many years. Conservatives should vote Libertarian, and Progressives for the Green Party and refuse to have anything to do with either of the sclerotic establishment parties.

Or better still, something completely radical, like a Libertarian-Progressive coalition. I remember Ron Paul saying in 2012 that if he were ever elected President he would make a grand bargain with the Left: safeguarding social security and medicaid if they would support his efforts to close down the war economy and the military-industrial complex. Now that is something the Libertarians and the Progressives should have thought about for the next election, that is 2016. Gary Johnson as the Libertarian-Green nominee with Jill Stein as the VP. The Libertarians would give way on social security and medicare. The Greens would give way on, say, a flat tax and a whole host of other taxes, which usually hit the poorest anyway. It sounds farfetched but right now America needs really radical coalitions to defeat the Democrats and the Republicans.

Peter Pan said...

Denis Leary for VP.

Ryan Harris said...

I don't understand how a guy involved in severe domestic violence - beating his wife to pulp, a guy who works for a government security contractor, was investigated by the FBI for terrorism links, made threats against gays and others serious enough to cause co-workers to report it to authorities, and was known by all to suffer from psychological disease something that appears to be bi-polar disorder was able to buy an assault rifle and pass a back-ground check. Is the purpose of a background check not to ensure people with any one of these issues does not get a gun much less an assault rifle?

In the aftermath of a human tragedy, it may not be time to evaluate the effectiveness of government regulators, health care workers, gun dealers and reporting systems and other technical issues, but how many times does the system have to fail before it is fixed? It's only a year ago we had a white supremacist man shooting at people in a black church.

I understand the way the two-partiers try to divide the electorate on the issue and keep those neat clean lines without actually solving the problem but it has to chip away at the legitimacy of their regime when they refuse to do anything so they can maintain these divisions without making any progress.

Dan Lynch said...

@Ryan, Mateen was never even charged with battering his wife, let alone convicted.

The FBI investigations on Mateen found no connections to terrorism and no illegal activity. They probably thought Mateen was a crackpot (like his dad), but there is no law against being a crackpot.

A background check looks for certain criminal convictions, for a current restraining order, or for being legally adjudicated as mentally impaired.

Just because someone says you battered them does not prove that you battered them. Just because someone says that you are a terrorist does not mean that you are a terrorist. Just because someone says you are mentally unstable does not mean that you are mentally unstable. Even the worst criminal deserves a fair trial where he can confront his accusers and be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Finally, I'll answer your question with a question: if we know for sure that someone is a danger to society, then why don't we institutionalize that person? Why would we want to knowingly allow dangerous people to walk the streets?

There are many things the U.S. government could do to reduce violence. For one thing, stop practicing it!

Another is to reduce poverty and inequality. Homicide rates correlate to inequality.

Another is to decriminalize drugs, because about half the violent crime in this country is related to the black market for drugs. The homicide rate spiked when prohibition was implemented, then dropped sharply when prohibition was repealed. Then homicides climbed back up after Nixon declared the war on drugs. Black markets breed crime.

Ryan Harris said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
John said...

Dan, all superb points. You can now add to this weird mix, the apparent fact that Mateen himself was gay. So it looks more and more like a very disturbed man (his bi-polar disorder and whatever else will explain his claim to have been in Hezbollah while some of his family members were in Al Qaeda, hence the terrorist investigations by the FBI) who couldn't come to terms with his sexuality (he frequented gay clubs often and tried it on with many there and used a number of gay apps) and in some desperate, bizarre bid for heaven knows what claimed allegiance to ISIS when he wasn't known to have been religious.

Disturbed people can do highly disturbing things, like Sandy Hook, The question is how to do something about it. As Dan says, better mental health care is obviously required. The prevalence of drugs doesn't help: drugs are known to send people on the edge or close to the edge well over it. And of course the ease in which almost anyone can buy military hardware over the counter is a problem. Other than the gun situation, we have exactly the same problems here in the UK. When people go totally nuts, they attack you with a knife or a meat cleaver, not a machine gun.

Terrorists are another matter, and that's down to a lack of good intelligence gathering or incompetence. The intelligence services should be beefed up. It'll also help if we stop destroying whole countries and creating the perfect conditions for jihadis to flourish and murder innocent people and pass on their know how to others who want to blow up buses and trains and the like. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be killed by a jihadi.