i think my fellow posters can guess my opinion of trump's first term. his election is going to bring down america, but not to the simple, melodramatic end his critics think - no childish tantrum leading to a first strike and then atomic rockets whistling overhead, a brief period of still and then a mushroom cloud reaching towards heaven. would we ever be so lucky! no, we're doomed to a worse fate than that - impulsivity was never our hamartia. we're going to all die from stupidity, greed, cruelty, and hick equanimity. that sounds like too many fatal flaws, but they're one at once, our national beating heart. it's our cowardly war impulse. we never fight wars we might lose, besides two, and, credit where it's due, they're beauties. but we never fight wars we could win either. we fight wars to extract maximum value. that's it. that's what iraq was - is. Afghanistan is the same, a whole lot of poor kids denied lives and unhaunted dreams as we edged our way to the big Osama Bin Laden cumshot and didnt, couldnt, clean up after, here or there. Vietnam. it goes back. We're stupid enough to be convinced of their necessity, greedy enough to breed people who want to do them, cruel enough to stomach the images, and even enough to tolerate the most heinous of imperial crimes, particularly on tv - wouldn't we just give George W. Bush a chance? and after trump what will happen. he'll go, but the democrats will beat him with the most feckless, stupid plunderer who knows the vocabulary, the world's first pirate pirate doll who says "intersectionality" and "vocational training" and "fair capitalism that works for main street, not wall street" instead of "ahoy, matey" when you pull the string, who will just fuck around getting blasted for four years, waiting to lose. the idiot vulgarity of trump will make the only requirement of a GOP nom a basic notion of civility, and they'll exploit that to promote Tom Cotton, a man who really, really, is the worst person alive. He will win in 2024 and promptly start a war with iran, which he aches to do even now. Everyone is going to believe they have a secret nuke, and Halliburton will make billions on billions, and so many people will die, and the media will hem and haw and both-sides until Tehran looks like the insides of a furnace and there's terror on u.s soil every day, which will be used to retroactively justify the war, and we'll have earned - stupid, greedy, cruel, and balanced. it's a war we - the nation and the world, because it will nearly be over - will lose. Think about an iranian speedboat torpedoing a u.s destroyer and turning it into a pressure cooker. thousands of poor kids in it will heat up, boil alive almost, cook in oily water, surrounded by guns of a failed state. those are the lucky ones. the unfortunate ones will survive only to be blown to absolute fucking pieces when the ship explodes, torn by shrapnel, not even afforded the dignity of going whole. it's the worst death in the world. the nuke is beautiful and dignified, the most clean end we can hope for, and brave - it's by our own hand, the invention and the execution. Drop the bomb! exterminate us all.