Trump And The Dictators

He likes 'em!
   The GOP in general seems to have largely gotten over this...I'd hate to see them revert to form. Man, they sure loved them some Pinochet, for example. If pressed, they'd say that he was just a bulwark against communism, supporting him was a necessary evil, and blah blah blah... But they liked him. They had a kind of boner for the tin-pot dictators they supported in South America. Eventually I came to realize that they admired the crushing of dissent...left-wing dissent, anyway. Perhaps they even longed for the power to do so here. I came to suspect that they may have been living vicariously through their pet dictators. Of course not all Republicans were like this. They weren't all Jesse Helms...
   I guess I never got the feeling that the GOP really liked Saddam, but I didn't pay much attention to that, so I don't really know. But a fair number of vocal conservatives have fairly serious man-crushes on Putin... Now that's freaking weird. There's no way to explain that away with enemy-of-my-enemy excuses. That, IMO, clearly tells us something about the spirit of those conservatives. The only plausible explanation is admiration for political strongmen. Or for shirtless men riding bears. Ok, there are only two plausible explanations...