A little trip down dove and hawk lane
by digby
It's only a year ago that this was published. And I heard it over and over and over again during the campaign, mostly from liberals:
In case you haven't heard, Trump just dropped the biggest bomb the US has dropped in combat since Fatman and Littleboy on an alleged ISIS stronghold in Afghanistan. It's called the MOAB --- colloquially known "Mother Of All Bombs."
I have to assume that people did not actually listen to Trump or use their instincts to understand what kind of leader he would be. It was never hard to imagine that the US military in the tiny hands of such a man would prove to be a terrible temptation to violence and domination. It was clear who he was.
Recall that he said this just a couple of weeks before Maureen Dowd wrote that stupid column:
Donald Trump thinks that tactical nuclear weapons may be worth using in the war against the Islamic State.
In an interview with Mark Halperin and John Heilemann of Bloomberg, the Republican presidential frontrunner refused to rule out using tactical nuclear weapons in the war against ISIS.
“I'm never going to rule anything out—I wouldn't want to say. Even if I wasn't, I wouldn't want to tell you that because at a minimum, I want them to think maybe we would use them,” he said.
Trump also said he's open to tactics like waterboarding and monitoring American mosques in the fight. He also talked about respect, which he sees as one of the biggest problems facing the US right now.
A request for comment from the Trump campaign was not immediately returned.
“They have to respect us,” Trump said in the interview. “They do not respect us at all and frankly they don't respect a lot of things that are happening—not only our country, but they don't respect other things.”
As he often does, Trump specifically said that people don't have respect for President Obama.“The first thing you have to do is get them to respect the West and respect us. And if they're not going to respect us it's never going to work. This has been going on for a long time,” he said. “I don't think you can do anything and I don't think you're going to be successful unless they respect you. They have no respect for our president and they have no respect for our country right now.”
I'm going to guess that this kind of "respect" isn't going to have much on an impression on ISIS or that loon in North Korea. But people who aren't crazy or fanatical may just think they need to arm up and quickly since the US is in the hands of an unstable moron. "Respect" has nothing to do with it.
*And yes, ICYWW, I would have been against dropping this bomb no matter who ordered it.
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