I have yelled at John Bolton on numerous occasions before (well, at the TV anyway). I am not a big supporter. He’s a Republican, after all. So please understand this perspective from the get-go as I post this.
That being said, I was tracing certain political contributions this morning and wound up on this site: John Bolton PAC. I read the article. Here, in a few brief words, he has for the first time (to my thinking) made some bit of sense out of restricting travel to the U.S. from certain specific countries.
In the opening paragraph: “Either they [the countries included in the ban] don’t function as governments like Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, in which case they can’t possibly supply credible information about people claiming to come from their country, or they’re places like Syria and Iran where I wouldn’t trust what they say anyway.”
I agree with this. I also agree with his closing statement, that “[The ban] shows a structural defect in the transition because much of this was done in the White House without cabinet secretaries and key departments…”
If Trump would listen to intelligent people from outside his enclave, people who actually have experience in the areas he’s focusing on, he could begin to play a credible role in setting the direction for the country over the next four years. Further, if he would take his presumed role as everyone’s president seriously, and not just the president to his cronies, and actually tried to engage with people outside of his immediate sphere of influence, people who may not at all be on the same page as him, it would go a long way toward healing some of the divides that he himself has instead fomented.
His refusal to take these steps or to proceed in a disciplined manner is at the core of my personal resentment and resistance toward everything he has done so far. In international politics as well as domestic affairs, our culture has advanced so far beyond “throwing it against the wall to see if it sticks,” we simply can’t tolerate the President of the United States utilizing this caveman-like “method.” It’s at best an ineffective waste of time, and at worst a total disaster, bringing key systems, relationships, functioning processes and operations grinding to a halt while he figures out that what he thought would work wouldn’t work, didn’t work, and can’t work.
Imprtnt Ephemera 