The month before the 2016 election, when Trump said this?
On Syria’s civil war, Trump said Clinton could drag the United States into a world war with a more aggressive posture toward resolving the conflict.
Those were the days, when people would seriously argue that we couldn’t vote for Hillary because she was a warmonger.
Today, of course…U.S. launches missile strikes in Syria.
Someone is psychic, I don’t know who.
The operation capped nearly a week of debate in which Pentagon leaders voiced concerns that an attack could pull the United States into Syria’s civil war and trigger a dangerous conflict with Assad ally Russia — without necessarily halting chemical attacks.
We will all go together when we go!
While it is perfectly fair to call trump full of shit, I don’t think electing hillary would have avoided this particular fiasco. She has always been extremely hawkish and even the Europeans are calling for blood, I would argue more than trump in THIS specific instance. He’s still a deranged maniac who belongs in a prison though. This isn’t me saying I like him.
This is what happens when the Overton window spends thirty years drifting to the right and we have no anti war movement to speak of.
I admit that I laughed a lot when people were trying to pretend that any Republican candidate was going to be anti-war.
Robert Westbrook #1
yes.
Right on, number 1. Hillary Clinton was calling for bombing Syria a year ago. They’re all war crazy, the lot of them. That’s the ‘bipartisan consensus’. Also, the Dems have inadvertently (?) spent the last year recklessly goading the deranged Trump into sparking a war with Russia to prove he is not Putin’s lapdog or lover-boy or whatever. We should all be ashamed of ourselves for not heeding MLK’s message: our love of violence is rotting our national soul.
My comment was actually referring to cooment Number 2, but Number 1 is appropriate as well. We are pretty much all doomed to die in a nuclear conflagration unless we can back an actual anti-war candidate instead ‘Extra Strength War Plus’ vs ‘Smiley Face War Lite.’ People should read Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine to understand the insanity of this system we have built and which is fully supported by both political parties.
If we make it we can all sit back and laugh, but I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying.
This amazing comic book, Addicted to War, should be read by every American … and everyone else too. It is available for free to read here: http://www.addictedtowar.com/atw1a.html
vucodlak@8 —
Excellent choice. I’d also go for verse 3 of “21st Century Schizoid Man.”
clevehicks@9
I’m always amazed at the the criticism of useless weapons systems AKA can’t hit anything.
Every time the Congress fires another $billion$ into the Pentacorp bank account it looks like a bullseye to me.
The only benefit of Clinton over Trump in this case is a more consistent foreign policy. Bombs alone solve nothing and without diplomatic and economic efforts coordinated with the bombs, they actually are worse than nothing. I believe that with Clinton we just might have a more coherent foreign policy.
As much as I despise the man, the current situation in Syria is so serious that we can’t really just claim that this war is Trump’s doing alone, and I don’t imagine a Hillary Clinton Presidency would have been likely to avoid conflict when available intelligence indicates the repeated use of chemical weapons against civilian targets, if only because of the desire to attempt to maintain the international imperative against the use of such weapons. With the stated position of the NATO powers on the use of such weapons being as it is, the rhetoric of recent months have backed most of the NATO powers into something of a corner when it comes to options that won’t cause them to feel like they are losing face on the global stage (it perennially horrifies me how much blood humanity has spilled, and continues to spill, just to avoid ‘loss of face’).
After all, President Macron of France has if anything been even more outspoken about the need for action than the Americans, and it is not as though Trump had to twist Prime Minister May’s arm to get her to commit British forces. Concern about what is going on in the ground in Syria reaches far beyond Capital Hill. This war has been brewing in the corridors of power of many nations for years, and the failures that have brought us to conflict are broader than just those of the US.
That said,Trump certainly made a bad situation far worse, most notably with his wilfully inflammatory tweets and general idiotic posturing which has only served to increase tensions, especially with the Russians. Quiet diplomacy with Putin may be very challenging, and often doesn’t achieve much, but even Putin may be prepared to accept that the propagation of chemical weapons of mass destruction, and the normalisation of their use, is potentially highly deleterious to the interest of all countries in the medium to long term, including the interests of Russia. I honestly wonder if such diplomacy was even attempted. And without America under Trump lending its full weight to such diplomacy, were any other such overtures ever likely to be successful? The orange-hued buffoon doesn’t grasp that his responsibilities as leader of the world’s richest and most powerful nation go beyond electioneering, failing to understand economics, and posturing about world affairs. Like it or loath it, America is a superpower, and as such it influences the global balance of power in many ways, both subtle and gross. If America isn’t at the table, or by any direct or oblique indication suggests that it isn’t invested in a particular set of talks even if its representatives are there, then diplomacy is weakened.
This isn’t just about the stupid things Trump has done, but also about his stupidity with regard to what he has failed to do to pursue avenues other than war.
a couple of thoughts.
First, why is no news organization (or Fox News) screaming about “Wag the Dog”? This last week, for the Trump administration and for Trump personally, has been just about the worst week a President has ever had that didn’t involve an assassination. If ’twere a Democratic President in exactly the same situation, I double-damn gauranfuckingtee you that conservative media would be screaming that the chemical weapons attack and the response were an attempt to divert people from, say, Bill Clinton’s blowjob. And then, using the old ‘it is being talked about’ excuse, all the other news media would start discussing it.
Second, what little good the strikes could have done (which is (at best) interrupting production for a couple of months (tops)) has pretty much been nullified by Donny Five-Thumbs, the Amazing Twittidiot. As soon as he texted, late last week, that we (the US) were going to hit the storage and production areas, I doubledamgauranfuckingtee you that all the difficult to replace equipment was loaded onto trucks and moved a couple of miles away. Production of chemical weapons does not require chemical plant analogous to an oil refinery. Rather, it is more in the range of small distillery. And all the expensive stuff left as soon as Assad’s people read Trump’s tweet,
Third, will this be the last straw? Will Putin decide to, through a semi-deniable third party, decide to drop docs on Trump? Will the Pee-Pee tape suddenly appear everywhere? Is the Trump Putin romance on its last legs, or will they be able to patch things up (when Trump apologizes and says that he had to do something, please forgive me, Vlad)?
(And I just realized, as I wrote that last paragraph, that I seem to have lapsed into soap opera-ese.) (and I am cross posting this comment on the
Political Madness thread.)
a couple of thoughts.
First, why is no news organization (or Fox News) screaming about “Wag the Dog”? This last week, for the Trump administration and for Trump personally, has been just about the worst week a President has ever had that didn’t involve an assassination. If ’twere a Democratic President in exactly the same situation, I double-damn gauranfuckingtee you that conservative media would be screaming that the chemical weapons attack and the response were an attempt to divert people from, say, Bill Clinton’s blowjob. And then, using the old ‘it is being talked about’ excuse, all the other news media would start discussing it.
Second, what little good the strikes could have done (which is (at best) interrupting production for a couple of months (tops)) has pretty much been nullified by Donny Five-Thumbs, the Amazing Twittidiot. As soon as he texted, late last week, that we (the US) were going to hit the storage and production areas, I doubledamgauranfuckingtee you that all the difficult to replace equipment was loaded onto trucks and moved a couple of miles away. Production of chemical weapons does not require chemical plant analogous to an oil refinery. Rather, it is more in the range of small distillery. And all the expensive stuff left as soon as Assad’s people read Trump’s tweet,
Third, will this be the last straw? Will Putin decide to, through a semi-deniable third party, decide to drop docs on Trump? Will the Pee-Pee tape suddenly appear everywhere? Is the Trump Putin romance on its last legs, or will they be able to patch things up (when Trump apologizes and says that he had to do something, please forgive me, Vlad)?
(And I just realized, as I wrote that last paragraph, that I seem to have lapsed into soap opera-ese.) (and I am cross posting this comment on the
Political Madness thread.)
That is odd. The same comment was accepted on the Political Madness thread but rejected here. If a double-post of mine shows up, blame it on it being Friday morning.
Something must be done!
This is something.
Therefore, this must be done.
At best, the bombing is a pointless gesture, done to show that “We’re taking action!”, and in the case of the UK, to show that May, unlike her predecessor Cameron, is willing to launch military action without consulting Parliament*. The UK planes reportedly attacked a site believed to be used for “chemical weapons storage”. Now, given Trump’s tweeting that missiles were on the way, it’s likely that any chemical weapons that had been stored there would have been moved. But if they haven’t, bombing a chemical weapons store surely risks the escape of highly toxic gases.
I’ve just returned from an anti-war demo in Edinburgh city centre. People were queueing up to sign a petition against the bombing. Polls last week showed a strong plurality against military action, although that will likely shift now it has actually been undertaken – Brits are quite as stupid as Americans in that regard.
*There’s no doubt May had the legal right to do that, but it makes clear once again how hollow the Brexiteers’ slogan of Parliamentary sovereignty is. The pretence that the bombing had to be done now for military reasons is absurd – she went ahead either at American orders, or because she could not count on winning a vote in the Commons.
Trump actually tweeted “Mission Accomplished”.
Someone needs to ask Ms. Daniels if he likes getting bit in the ass.
@6
I’ll third that. It’s a bigger problem that Trump – much of the foreign policy-making community in both parties has an obsession with “credibility”, where credibility is defined as “willingness to use military force at a moment’s notice to back up unwise commitments and ‘red lines'”. They should not be making that commitment in the first place.
I held my nose and voted for Clinton.
There was a subtle problem: we knew Clinton was already a war criminal and willing to see people killed for her policies. We hypothesized Trump would, also. So, I experienced a bit of distress at voting for someone with a track-record of murder because I thought she’d be better than someone we (at that time) were not sure was as vicious. Well, now that Trump has shown he’s as bad as Clinton in that regard, I’m willing to return to choosing lesser evils instead of unknown evils.
Oggie.@14, commenting (from I don’t know where) at 14 April 2018 at 9:50 am (presumably Minnesota time?): “If a double-post of mine shows up, blame it on it being Friday morning.” Omigod, this time Friday the 13th has been so unlucky that’s it’s had a go at converting the following morning to Friday too!
Ozzy said it best.
https://youtu.be/LWRnT3FLW3Q
Odd, Oggie, Ozzy? :D
Australia has also stepped into line, both the government and the opposition. Always holding onto mummy’s apron strings.
…that’s “mommy’s apron strings” for those living in “wrong English” land. ;)
She is.
Let me be absolutely clear, there is no silver lining to be found in this. That being said, if Clinton were elected we would still be in the same boat with Syria, except for one thing. There would be a swath of the left defending her aggressive foreign policy. But since Trump is committing this crime some on the left are going to knee jerk and oppose that decision simply because the Human Cheeto is the one who made it. I’ll take it.
“Aeproun,” “wroung,” and “Aenglshi,” surely.
Assad’s government is atrocious, committing atrocity after atrocity. It could be that military action is part of the solution (but only part). But with Russia in the equation it makes it a situation fraught with danger. And I don’t trust Trump one bit to handle things in any way close to correct. This situation requires nuance and Trump doesn’t do nuance.
Because this kind of action worked so well in Libya.
Azkyroth,
I was going to do that but decided against it.
I don’t actually care if people insist on being wrong. :D
Blog post positing that Hillary was less X than Donald. Check. Commenters riding meme horse “Hillary and Donald are the same, but Hillary is more X!” posting? Oh yeah, double-check!
@18; You’ve only noticed Donald’s war-mongery now? This way past his ‘I can shoot people in new York City and still be elected’ and condoning supporter violence against the press before the election. PS. your statement of voting for HRC despite your opinion of her being more hawkish does you no favors.
@23, “Swath of the left defending her” in the event she did anything like President Obama or Trump. Claimed by Prof. Otto Butte. Men getting aggressive get defenders, women get called ball-busters.
That your imaginary President HRC would be worse that President Trump says a lot. Especially given https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/united-states-became-irrelevant-rest-world/