Trumps Approach: A Fresh Start or Crazy Reckless? (Thomas Freidman)

[still_one]

"Maybe it will all turn out O.K. If it does, put me down as promising to applaud.

But my fellow Americans, whatever mix of motives led us to create an Electoral College majority for Donald Trump to become president — and overlook his lack of preparation, his record of indecent personal behavior, his madcap midnight tweeting, his casual lying about issues like “millions” of people casting illegal votes in this election, the purveying of fake news by his national security adviser, his readiness to appoint climate change deniers without even getting a single briefing from the world’s greatest climate scientists in the government he’ll soon lead and his cavalier dismissal of the C.I.A.’s conclusions about Russian hacking of our election — have no doubt about one thing: We as a country have just done something incredibly reckless."

........

Don’t misunderstand me: It is excusable to raise questions about climate change. But it is inexcusable not to sit down with our own government experts at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a briefing before you appoint flagrant climate deniers with no scientific background to every senior environmental position.

It is excusable to question if Russia really hacked our election. But it is inexcusable to dismiss the possibility without first getting a briefing from the C.I.A., some of whose agents risked their lives for that intelligence.

That is reckless behavior — totally unbecoming a president, a professional or just a serious adult.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/opinion/trumps-approach-a-fresh-start-or-crazy-reckless.html

[triron]

1. What bugs me about this is

that Friedman is doing the same thing as most of the commentators on MSM. Let's move along and forget about the cyber attack committed by Putin et al resulting in Putin in effect installing Trump. This is total bullshit!

[still_one]

2. Not entirely triton. The last three paragraph slightly touches on it

"Let’s imagine that in six months the C.I.A. concludes that North Korea is about to perfect a nuclear missile that can reach our West Coast and President Trump orders a pre-emptive strike, one that unleashes a lot of instability in Asia. And then the next day Trump and his national security adviser, Mike Flynn, the purveyor of fake news about Hillary Clinton, defend themselves by saying, “We acted on the ‘high confidence’ assessment of the C.I.A.” Who’s going to believe them after they just trashed the C.I.A.?

Finally, Trump has demonstrated a breathtaking naïveté toward Putin. Putin wanted Trump to win because he thinks that he’ll be a chaos president who will weaken America’s influence in the world by weakening its commitment to liberal values and will weaken America’s ability to lead a Western coalition to confront Putin’s aggression in Europe. Putin is out to erode democracy wherever he can. Trump needs to send Putin a blunt message today: “I am not your chump.”

As Stanford University democracy expert Larry Diamond noted in an essay in The Atlantic last week: “The most urgent foreign-policy question now is how America will respond to the mounting threat that Putin’s Russia poses to freedom and its most important anchor, the Western alliance. Nothing will more profoundly shape the kind of world we live in than how the Trump administration responds to that challenge.”

[triron]

3. yes not entirely

[still_one]

4. your point about the MSM unfortunately rings true, and most disgusting is their movement toward

trump normalization