Gandalf wrote: ↑2017-10-03 09:47pmIf the president is an elected position, and people vote for a president because of his boorish mannerisms, doesn't that effectively redefine presidential as a word?
No, it means they elected a president who sucks, at least in that particular way.
If two of the qualifications for being a jockey are liking horses and light weight, and my boss hires a fat jockey who hates horses, does that mean "jockey" has been redefined to mean "people who can ride a horse, even if they can't ride the horse very fast or well?" No, it means my boss probably hired a bad jockey.
More generally, "presidential" serves as a proxy for "how capable is this president of, in a crisis, extracting head from colon long enough to look around and correctly assess the situation?" A person who is so narcissistic and obnoxious in normal times that they can't abstain from getting into Twitter wars over protesting football players and celebrities who stop using their favorite products... Well, it turns out that person is
also so narcissistic and obnoxious that if one of their country's big islands gets wrecked by a hurricane, they'll be so busy getting into Twitter wars with the mayors of cities in that island who beg for help, and making excuses for why somehow a superpower with the world's largest navy can't get assistance to an island
that is its own territory. Because the island is surrounded by water! Ocean water!
This is a basic, largely nonpartisan, test of presidential ability. The Republicans and Democrats agree, at least in public, that saving Puerto Ricans from dying of drinking muddy crapwater or having their houses fall down is a good thing. Both parties know that they're supposed to not fuck up disaster relief,
especially after Katrina back in 2005. And yet... this thing, Trump cannot do it. At all.
And what it comes down to, when we see such a grotesque failure of a president's responsibility to act sanely in a crisis... Is that Donald Trump does not have that critical ability to extract head from colon. He cannot do that to save his life, and he certainly cannot do it to save anyone else's.
And how do we measure this ability of a president's in times of non-crisis? How could we see this coming? By, among other things,
how presidential they behave. That's not the only indicator, but it's one of the indicators.
And given a big enough crisis, Trump's inability to extract head from colon could very easily result in massive, genocide-sized death tolls. Imagine how well he'd do with something like the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It is possible to counterargue against this by saying "well, you can be "presidential" and still do terrible things to foreigners or to some small minority group." But this argument entirely misses the point. There is more to being a good president than "looking presidential." Criticizing Trump (or anyone else) for being insufficiently "presidential" is totally independent of any other criticisms that may or may not apply. No one here is trying to present Trump as bad ONLY because he is insufficiently "presidential." No one here is trying to present all non-Trump presidents as good because supposedly they were sufficiently "presidential."
Of course they're independent of one another. That's what makes the idea of "presidential" so fucking funny, especially when people link it to ideas of dignity. I'm sure some of the genocidal US presidents were very dignified. Genocide is presidential, while lighting farts at an official function is not?
Yes.
Being unpresidential is, like, -100 points and a yellow card. Being genocidal is like -100000000000000 points and deserve to get taken apart slowly by the demons with the dullest pitchforks in the hottest circle of hell for the next several eons. They are unrelated offenses. The fact that I continue to criticize the set of all unpresidential presidents, and the set of all genocidal presidents,
separately, is in fact entirely reasonable.
Because otherwise, I have no way to even describe or compare presidents except "were they genocidal, Y/N." Because all other possible flaws look trivial compared to "personally responsible for the death of a hundred thousand people." Nothing else I can say about them matters except "how much genocide did they cause or prevent?"
That is not a normal human way to look at the world- to measure people in such a one-dimensional way, even if it is a
really good dimension.
...
