Deeply moving essay from wife of a Trump supporter.

[Moksha]

Except that in this case, the tiger jumped out of its cage and is now busy eating the zoo patrons. Should we just ignore it and hope that it feels full at some point?

If the zoo patrons had stayed home they would not have become tiger fodder or forced the Japanese to consider them a threat!!! The tiger could have joined the Axis powers. I wish to emphatically state that I am not talking about Tony the Tiger or Cosmo from BYU. I trust this will be clear to Morley that I am simply stating my opinion on paper tigers.

[Kishkumen]

Sometimes, if others aren't understanding, the fault might not be that every one of them is either careless or stupid. It might be that you're not doing a very good job in crafting your sentences to be as clear as you obviously think they are.

When I wrote “the Axis powers wouldn’t have forced,” I was referring to the Axis powers. I don’t know how to indicate the Axis powers any more clearly than by typing “the Axis powers.”

If you do, then by all means, please share.

I think the problem here, in my mind, is the idea that the responsible thing to do is to leave Hawaii unprotected. Once the bridge of creating a territory has been crossed, the US has a responsibility to it. The US is not obliged to leave Hawaii unprotected for the comfort of aggressive, militaristic powers. In fact, the opposite is the case. It is necessary to show a robust defense is in place.

[Dr. Shades]

If the zoo patrons had stayed home they would not have become tiger fodder or forced the Japanese to consider them a threat!!! The tiger could have joined the Axis powers. I wish to emphatically state that I am not talking about Tony the Tiger or Cosmo from BYU.

Cosmo from BYU isn’t a tiger.

[Physics Guy]

Getting an American fleet from San Francisco, say, to Pearl Harbor would have taken maybe five days. So it makes no sense to me that the extra time cushion of five days would have made such a big difference in how threatened imperial Japan felt. The US fleet in San Francisco would have been the same "dagger" only five days further away. Conversely, for Japan to have struck San Francisco rather than Pearl Harbor would only have taken five days of sailing time more for the Japanese fleet.

There were no satellites then. Japan wouldn't be able to count on knowing that an American fleet was coming until it was already in Japanese waters, anyway, no matter where in the world the fleet had started. So it was the mere existence of the US Navy, not its peacetime location, that was the threat to Japan.

Conversely, if the American fleet had been on the west coast instead of in Hawaii, Japan could have hoped to get its attack fleet all the way to the US west coast undetected. There were no satellites. 1940s radar couldn't see over the horizon, the horizon from a shipborne radar tower is only about thirty miles away, and a thirty-mile-radius circle is a pinprick on the map of the Pacific. In the Pacific naval war that did happen, fleets that actually knew there were large enemy fleets quite nearby still spent days trying to find them, by sending out aircraft to spot them visually. And in the Pearl Harbor attack that did happen, the Japanese did get to Hawaii undetected. If they had had to stretch that stealth run the rest of the way across the ocean to hit San Francisco instead of Pearl Harbor, they probably could have.

Keeping the US warships on the US west coast instead of in Hawaii might still have made the Japanese a bit less anxious, and made the US fleet a bit less vulnerable to a surprise attack. The difference would only have been those five days, though, so the risk and anxiety reductions could not have been all that great. They certainly would not have been great enough to make it worth leaving Hawaii undefended against an aggressively expanding naval power. Nations risk their warships to protect their citizens, not their citizens to protect their warships.

[Morley]

Sometimes, if others aren't understanding, the fault might not be that every one of them is either careless or stupid. It might be that you're not doing a very good job in crafting your sentences to be as clear as you obviously think they are.

When I wrote “the Axis powers wouldn’t have forced,” I was referring to the Axis powers. I don’t know how to indicate the Axis powers any more clearly than by typing “the Axis powers.”

If you do, then by all means, please share.

You're right. As I acknowledged earlier, I certainly could have seen that. If nothing else, I should have noticed that what you wrote was response to Chap.

Rereading, I can see why you would see my replies to two different posts as the continuation of one thought--however, I was making two different points. Obviously, I should have split my post into two separate responses. My critique of your complaint that nobody reads you correctly didn't have anything to do with my 'thank you' for your clarification about your Axis Powers post.

[Moksha]

What if the US had surrendered to Japan and Germany before WWII? There would not have been a need for NATO, Fox TV, or Trump.