* Please watch the entirety of Chris Christie’s presidential announcement below. It’s a hoot. It shows a guy with the capacity to talk extemporaneously, with good sense, and without the juvenile rhetoric of the man from Mar-a-Lago.
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Today’s pundits frequently refer to America’s political scene as one composed of tribes. Actually, “cults” is more accurate. We have the woke cult (neo-Marxism), a gender fluidity cult, climate cult, the Gaia cult, etc. Well, for some on the right, let’s add the Trump and nonsense cults. Frequently, those two overlap.
So, what is a cult? Words such as “excessive admiration”, “a fashionable person or thing among a particular group”, “veneration or devotion for a particular figure or object” stand out in the dictionaries. Putting it together, it’s a siloed group of people who are transfixed by a person or idea and revel in confirmation bias (seek only information that supports their biases).
Regarding Chris Christie, he has stepped forward to call out the cult in the midst of the Republican base – the cult of the orange man. Prior to him, all Republicans in the Republican presidential derby, and before, pranced around like they were walking on egg shells, afraid to upset the delicate sensibilities of Trump’s rabid followers. Quite frankly, it’s about time the cult was challenged. Thanks to his fortitude, Christie jumped to near the top of my score card.
And Vivek Ramaswamy leaped to the bottom. There is a crazy element in the right’s “populist” base – another aspect of the orange man’s cult – that believes our fiscal problems are driven by excessive spending on . . . foreign aid. Not only that, they think that appeasing aggressors leads to peace. Hmmmm, where have we heard that before? No “Si vis pacem, para bellum” of the Roman general Vegetius for this panderer to the mob – er, cult. If you’re interested, it means, “If you want peace, prepare for war”.
No sure path to appeasement can be imagined than knee-capping the victim by ending their access to U.S. foreign aid. Foreign aid, though, represents less than 1% of our federal budget ($39 billion). That’s 1.7% of our two biggest drivers of the federal budget – Social Security and Medicare – at $2.2 trillion annually. We are not even talking about peanuts. More accurately, we are talking about a particle of a peanut that unhappily fell under the track of an Abrams tank. So, Vivek will lead the charge against the smallest budgetary particle of a particle going to Ukraine on his way to bootlicking a thug, Putin. He’ll have to share the other boot with Trump.
As Christie says of Trump, the man of Mar-a-Largo would quickly end the Ukraine War by giving Ukraine to Russia. And Vivek would be cheerleading the entire way. This duopoly of demagoguery is an insult to rationality. Get this: show your spine to the CCP by showing how quickly you cave to a thug, an ally of the Beijing thug. And this on the heels of the Afghanistan bugout. Abandonment and surrender are a show of strength? How does that work? Chairman Xi must be shaking in his boots, the same boots that Xi shares with Putin, the same ones dripping in Vivek/Trump spittle.
Hooray for Christie bringing all this lunacy to light. I hope that he keeps it up. He’ll steal the stage from a man whose sole theatrical tact is to bully. As for Vivek, fresh from the taste of leather in his mouth, Christie in comparison shows himself to be the adult in the room.
RogerG
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* Vivek Ramaswamy’s appeasement policy: “Vivek Ramaswamy willing to give ‘major concessions to Russia’ to end Ukraine war”, Ryan King, Washington Examiner, 6/4/23, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/vivek-ramaswamy-give-concessions-russia-ukraine