This piece was genuinely shocking to me: I’d never thought about it this way, but I completely agree with the conclusions.
In a sense, the arrival of a new leader is the distilled result of the previous one’s missteps. In that sense, Trump is the flip side of Obama’s elitism — the gap between the Ivy League and the Rust Belt, the part that didn’t fall asleep to the lullaby of “the war is far away, the villains have been punished.”
You could say Obama himself handed Trump an enormous amount of executive power. Which, more than anything, speaks to the flawed nature of power itself.
"In Obama’s time, the massive expansion of drone warfare (with more strikes in his first year than George W. Bush conducted during his eight) ..."
This is the second time I've seen this claim in two days. But I have to wonder: Were drones so heavily adopted by the U.S. armed forces during 2001-09 that Bush could have launched a lot of them?
All I'm seeing here is a rather irrelevant sidebar discussion about the ever-changing nature of war weapons; about a century or so ago Max Beerbohm quipped something to the effect "Thank the Lord that we have got...
the Maxim Gun and they have not!"
No matter who comes out with a new thing for good or I'll, it gets standardized pretty quickly-the Russians were first to field low-recoil rapid fire assault weapons and methamphetamine was concocted by German scientists to help keep Hitler on his feet during the last days of WWII. Sure, we pretty much invented drone strikes for a variety of reasons both good and questionable, but microanalylizing the subject now in the midst of all the stuff currently happening seems like an exercise in pointless navel-gazing from where I'm sitting...
It turns out the Maxim Gun quote originated with Hillaire Belloc in 1893-the Beerbohm version (in an old book I can't find to save my life) may be apocryphal,,,
This piece was genuinely shocking to me: I’d never thought about it this way, but I completely agree with the conclusions.
In a sense, the arrival of a new leader is the distilled result of the previous one’s missteps. In that sense, Trump is the flip side of Obama’s elitism — the gap between the Ivy League and the Rust Belt, the part that didn’t fall asleep to the lullaby of “the war is far away, the villains have been punished.”
You could say Obama himself handed Trump an enormous amount of executive power. Which, more than anything, speaks to the flawed nature of power itself.
"In Obama’s time, the massive expansion of drone warfare (with more strikes in his first year than George W. Bush conducted during his eight) ..."
This is the second time I've seen this claim in two days. But I have to wonder: Were drones so heavily adopted by the U.S. armed forces during 2001-09 that Bush could have launched a lot of them?
All I'm seeing here is a rather irrelevant sidebar discussion about the ever-changing nature of war weapons; about a century or so ago Max Beerbohm quipped something to the effect "Thank the Lord that we have got...
the Maxim Gun and they have not!"
No matter who comes out with a new thing for good or I'll, it gets standardized pretty quickly-the Russians were first to field low-recoil rapid fire assault weapons and methamphetamine was concocted by German scientists to help keep Hitler on his feet during the last days of WWII. Sure, we pretty much invented drone strikes for a variety of reasons both good and questionable, but microanalylizing the subject now in the midst of all the stuff currently happening seems like an exercise in pointless navel-gazing from where I'm sitting...
It turns out the Maxim Gun quote originated with Hillaire Belloc in 1893-the Beerbohm version (in an old book I can't find to save my life) may be apocryphal,,,