Compare and contrast two Twits:Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will forever remain in our hearts as pattern of impeccable public service and devotion to duty. We bow our heads in sorrow together with the subjects of the British Crown around the world.
Like so many of you, Michelle and I are grateful to have witnessed Her Majesty’s dedicated leadership, and we are awed by her legacy of tireless, dignified public service. Our thoughts are with her family and the people of the United Kingdom at this difficult time.
The first is simple, dignified, moving. The second is focussed on the audience of the Twit, then on the Obamas, and only thirdly on her Maj. Despite his brutal barrage of complete sentences, this seems all too typical.
As to what I think: when young I was a good republican, of course; now it hardly seems to matter in comparison to other matters; having someone vaguely sane as a non-political figurehead seems like a good idea.
Trump would pose an unsurmountable protocol problem as the only American President without a dog since the reign of Queen Victoria.
ReplyDeleteWhether or not B invites T is performance art so I'll leave that one to the artistes; more interesting is the Ukraine.
ReplyDeleteThe Bidens were invited. No one else. So the Royal Family removed this question.
ReplyDeleteI've heard that the King isn't amused by DT.
As for Ukraine:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/ukraine-victory-russia-putin/671405/
What's after Putin? Unlikely to survive this, at least as ruler of Russia.
We can be hopeful. I hope they don't waste their time with reparations or tribunals. The Fall of Putin would be a nice bonus but depends on unpredictable internal Russkie dynamics. It becomes ever clearer what a disaster for the world the original Russian revolution was.
ReplyDeleteWhich Russian revolution(s)?
ReplyDelete1905 or February 1917 or October 1917 or the revolutions of 1989 or perhaps December 1991, so many choices?
(typo correction)
Russia revolution, civil war and the Whites.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/11/russian-historian-books-civil-war-ukraine-invasion/671533/
Well, I read it, though I started skimming after a while. It was rather long and not I think rather relevant. There's no need to invoke vast swathes of history to explain Putin and his war; a more parsimonious explanation as "just another tinpot dictator of another banana republic" makes more sense to me (yes, I know, regrettably he does have nooks). The std dictator playbook, when you've fouled up your country and have no idea how to fix it, is to invade someone else: it will distract your folks, and at the least delay things; and at the best it might have worked. In this case it looks like a disastrous failure, of course.
ReplyDeleteIf so, the death of Putin would end the war.
ReplyDeleteNot clear that would happen, to say the least.
If people are completely independent of the society and history of that society, you would be correct.
ReplyDeleteCheck your assumption.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/liz-truss-economic-tax-plan-disaster/671774/
ReplyDeleteI hope you're not expecting me to defend Truss. FWIW (though I think I've said this somewhere else) I'm unimpressed by that aricle (arch), which misses the key point that Truss / Kwarteng failed on the hard choices: they just did the tax cuts, not the spending cuts.
ReplyDelete