my take on the man<\/a> from two years ago, because nothing I have learned since then has changed my mind on his character: he thinks everyone is either a grifter or a sucker. I\u2019ll say it in more positive terms, if you like: his particular political<\/i> genius lies in his ability to utterly reject conventional wisdom, expert analysis or even settled fact, and that derives (imao) from that fundamental character trait of believing that everyone is either a chump or on the make\u2014that whatever somebody is telling him that he doesn\u2019t like, he can reject. Either it\u2019s wrong because the guy\u2019s an idiot or it\u2019s a lie because the guy\u2019s a grifter.\r\nNow, let me be clear: I personally don\u2019t believe that. I think that\u2019s a terrible way to live, and I think he\u2019s squandered a lot of the potential effectiveness of his job by rejecting stuff that was actually correct. But it\u2019s also true that a lot of the crap that he decided not to believe was actually not true. He did not, in fact, have to release his tax returns. He can, in fact, use the Presidency to promote his business. The Republican leadership will, in fact, back up his obstruction of justice (at least for a while). He has been wrong a bunch of times, but he has been right a bunch of times, too.\r\n
So, here we are: everybody told him it would be very, very difficult to have a summit and come to an agreement with Kim Jong Un. They were grifters or suckers, because it turns out that it wasn\u2019t that hard at all. Right?\r\n
The US has given up a bunch of stuff to get it, but, and this is the analysis that I haven\u2019t seen elsewhere, the stuff that we gave up is considered to be important only by grifters and suckers. We\u2019ve strengthened a dictator\u2019s grip on his country\u2014so what? We\u2019ve agreed to stop the military exercises with South Korea\u2014who cares? We\u2019ve agreed to some security guarantee of some unspecified kind\u2014that doesn\u2019t mean we actually have to do anything, does it? We\u2019ve given up the leverage that not<\/i> agreeing to a summit gives us\u2014what\u2019s the use of that leverage if we don\u2019t have a summit?\r\n
Is he wrong? How the hell would I know? But it seems to me that what we\u2019ve given up in this deal is almost all intangible, in one way or another, and the value of that those intangibles is inherently speculative, as all leverage is. I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve gained<\/i> anything of value, mind you, but if we haven\u2019t given up anything of value, then maybe it isn\u2019t a bad deal, after all. And I do try to keep in mind that a lot (not all, but a lot) of the intangibles that Our Only President rejected as worthless or at least way overvalued turned out to be in fact way overvalued.\r\n
I mean, to be fair, my expectation, as occasional Gentle Reader David Bernstein put it back in May<\/a>, was that Kim Jong Un would literally walk out of the summit meeting with Donald Trump\u2019s pants, so perhaps my expectations were low.\r\nTolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger recognizes the particular nature of Our Only President's genius, and its possible utility in the field of oh my lord we're all doomed just please don't start firing missiles","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19698"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19700,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19698\/revisions\/19700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}