You have to be MYOPIC to be a Trump supporter, follower of the GOP party line, or a
pundit/journalist on TV trying to seriously discuss a Trump policy,
MYOPIC is a kind word for it.
It's amazing that Trump can issue a proclamation, pull something out of his a*s in front of a microphone, or tweet a one-sentence statement...and people take to their media of choice to analyze it, discuss the merits or lack thereof, compare it to history, etc.. I'm talking about not only pundits, journalists, and analysts but also bloggers and message boards. And I'm talking about not only his statement today about strengthening laws to allow torture but almost ANY of his positions.
I'm for exposing the shallowness of his ideas...but not from the standpoint that they are ideas worth discussing with a straight face. The place where Trump comes from is a couple of decades in the making...that one party has emphasized that governing means a lack of deep analysis, a defiance of history and logic, a reliance on lies, disassociation from reality, and denial of practicality. And these decades have waited for a guy like Trump to come along and play the game they created.
So it's ironic that the media spends so much time giving thought, history, and analysis to something forged from a DENIAL of thought, history, and analysis. Before talking about Trumps proclamations, there should be a disclaimer at the beginning of every show or article that says the author is going to go through the motions of analysis but is aware that Trump ideas aren't meant for analysis. We should stop pretending. His policy positions, and many of the GOP's, aren't supported and reinforced with a structure of analyze-able science and facts and history and studies and projections....they are hatched fully formed from either ideology or, more so in the case of Trump, from the low-tactic, lowest common denominator thinking that the base conservative electorate is now attracted to based on decades of GOP training and literal brainwashing.
I found this article interesting...not as much for the article but for the amazing reader comments that took the author to task and offered their own ideas re the Trump phenomenon. NYT articles are often surpassed by their reader comments, IMO. One reader:
"It's just a hop, skip, and a jump from the Republican Party's imposing their myopic views -- including religious and "moral" views* -- on the American public to Donald Trump, who thinks he can impose his views on everything on everyone.
Break it down all you want, into 4 or 40 supposed building blocks, but the fact is that the Republican Party created this monster. Its bones and sinews are the Party's dog-whistling racism, the election of unqualified ignoramuses for Congress, a refusal to compromise because undermining a sitting president is more important than working on behalf of the American people. Also, the decades of "trickle-down" where nothing trickled down; startling increases in the ratio between CEO to employee salaries; the dereliction of public education; the neglect of infrastructure. These last two are because Republicans don't want to pay taxes (after all, government is the problem) and now there is no one in their party brave enough to explain why they need to.
Republicans who bought the party line for decades are coming to see that it is not working. They've heard for so long that they need to take their country "back." They've believed it, and they are trying to take it back now -- if not exactly in the way the party elites would like."
Key word is "myopic". That's what has been required to be a republican and what is now required to be a Trump supporter or pundit who seriously thinks Trumps expositions should be carefully analyzed for feasibility.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/opinion/sunday/the-elements-of-trumpism.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
Let me say that I hope Trump gets the nomination because I think he's nearing his expiration date and will be easy to defeat in the general by someone willing to ridicule his ideas, not debate them.
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