Made a comment, thought better of it, took it out, then found I couldn't get rid of it without leaving something in its place, so I left a ..

Anybody know how to do this?

I wish those of us who post on various other subjects would make the attempt to focus as admirably as those who post on, say, football. Right, maybe some subjects are a bit more amorphous, but that's no excuse for free-for-all backbiting, etc. The syndrome seems to pop up most frequently when the subject matter requires an effort to reason.

@vicar: I'm always worried when I hear the phrase 'putting America first', but to be honest I'm never quite sure what is meant - I guess that's why I'm worried. What do you mean by it? I take it you don't think that US generals 'put America first'?
One problem I think we all tend to have is that we use a vocabulary that sounds like we're all talking about the same thing when in fact the terms either mean different things to different people or are not really clear to anybody. I think this phrase is an example.

I'm not sure everybody involved with the military-industrial complex and its generals are pro-Trump - the MIC has always done pretty well under previous administrations, and I think some of them aren't into Trump's wackier ideas and attempted leadership.

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Exactly. And in the US a lot of people don't seem to be able to distinguish liberal from radical from socialist from Communist from doper or Gay. Or, for that matter, even to see either the similarities or differences between libertarian and conservative. Leads to rather low level, but useful up to a point, consensus called Trump and the Resistance. Easily fed on by politicians of various stripes.
A certain lack of even a very simple level of sophisticated thinking, and a lot of it coming either from gut-level imbibed prejudice, media simplification and selectivity, and/or just plain laziness. And the 2-party system doesn't help much.