Oops. I have to apologize to Floridians. I just accused them of being a collection of stupid, purblind fools who are following assholes into a watery oblivion. It’s not that that isn’t true, but that it’s also true of every state in the Union.
The truth about Trump has become a little bit too obvious. It’s always been obvious, but now it’s accompanied by a marching band with banners flying and megaphones howling it out.
- He sold out the Kurds to protect his Turkish hotel interests, turning a good chunk of the Middle East policy into chaotic shambles and causing the deaths of thousands.
- He has awarded himself a lucrative contract to host an international meeting, a transparent act of corruption.
- He is so tone deaf that he tried to stage a reality-show style confrontation between grieving parents and their son’s killer. He has no humanity left in him.
All that, and Congress hasn’t dispatched a police detail to arrest him for gross incompetence and greed, to get him out of office before he does even more harm. And people still go to his rallies and cheer for him.
Fuck, we are so fucking fucked.
“This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.” – Hunter S. Thompson (in 1972)
I like Hunter S. Thompson but retreating into a comforting cynicism about things is escapism. Might as well jump in a Cadillac with a trunk full of recreational substances and head for Las Vegas then.
aspleen @ 2
I’ll bring the ether!
Trump brayed, “tough love.”
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/10/syria-damning-evidence-of-war-crimes-and-other-violations-by-turkish-forces-and-their-allies/
It is very easy to sit back and condemn all of the US for the extremely bad behavior of self interested, straight, cis-, White people. There are those of us working damn hard to try to save this country (and save ourselves in the process) and we are being hampered and hindered at every turn, and I don’t think its right for the rest of women, children, and the marginalized, who are working hard to save this country, to be just lumped in (and then thrown out) with the f*ckups who caused these problems.
PZ: One point of correction, based on trump’s past history, he never had humanity!
They don’t care, and unless something he does DIRECTLY affects them, and he let’s them keep their money, guns, and racial/religious privileges, they’ll keep cheering.
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blockquote>Fuck, we are so fucking fucked.
We’re fucked only if you keep insisting to play by the rules that our opponents ignore. It’s time to make our own rules.
Damn ADD!
We’re fucked only if you keep insisting on playing by the rules that our opponents ignore. It’s time to make our own rules.
Furthermore, sadly, the Trumpians know this as Mick Mulvaney went before the press yesterday, in the White House briefing room, no less, as an official spokesman and said, essentially, “Yeah, we did it. So what? Get over it!”
To state that quid pro quo and injecting politics into foreign policy is standard procedure and “we do it all the time” is nonsense to the highest degree. And to compound the idiocy by stating that the methods of foreign policy change with every president is ludicrous. Sure, there are deviations, but the broad brush of the direction of foreign policy has to have some consistent structure.
Mulvaney’s new line of “defense” seems to be that by announcing crimes loudly and clearly it somehow makes everything OK. Unfortunately this comes at a time where we have an entire political party, the Republicans, that is so corrupt, immoral and feckless that they are willing to watch the entire country go down the tubes in an attempt to save their own hides.
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blockquote>To state that quid pro quo and injecting politics into foreign policy is standard procedure and “we do it all the time” is nonsense to the highest degree.
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blockquote>
Yes, but it plays nicely into the MAGA-hat’s belief that government (especially when it’s run by Democrats) is inherently corrupt. If their political opponents can benefit from real or imagined graft, then why shouldn’t they?
PZ, the previous two administrations used lies to start a pair of wars. The first one killed a million people, the second one “only” killed people by the tens of thousands but it destroyed the governance of the region, handed things over to the terrorists created by the first of those two wars, and ended up letting slavery reappear for the first time in ages in north Africa.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: of the three things you’re pointing out, the only one with massive repercussions still isn’t necessarily as bad as stuff we’ve been doing all along (and which both parties have implicitly approved). The same is true of how the Trump administration is dealing with immigrants — most of the policy is stuff started by Bush with Democratic consent (go look up who voted for the Homeland Security Act of 2002), or else stuff which Obama either started or tried to do and got slapped down. (Indefinite detention of asylum-seekers was something Obama ordered, for instance, but which the courts stopped.) The graft and inhumanity of the latter two actions in your list are small potatoes.
“Fuck, we are so fucking fucked.”
I am amazed by your ability to accurately assess situations and express them is simple English.
“Fuck, we are so fucking fucked.”
The rest of the world possibly less so, now it has become obvious that the USA are a superpower in decline. Like Vicar already hinted at, it’s probably a good thing that the EU has to develop an international strategy for itself.
To me it boils down to the notion that I rather see an incompetent clown in the White House than a war criminal like Barack Obama.
Trump is like a pernicious disease, spreading and doggedly eating away and aggravating everything it touches the world over; American society and democracy, the environment, peaceful alliances, you name it.
Look at him any way you want, a prolonged acid bath, or simply the last nail in our coffin, to my mind, there’s no room for soft pedaling what’s going on; even if it doesn’t have the drama of all out war– though given the opportunity and another 5 years in which to burn it all down…
mnb0 @12: I agree with you that the international decline of the US is a good and necessary thing, but your last sentence exposes that you clearly enjoy a ridiculous amount of privilege. I don’t know where in the world you live, and I don’t defend Obama’s military actions, but the “incompetent clown” has caused death and misery amounting to torture to a very large number of human beings. On net, far worse than his predecessor.
Sometimes it’s not what you do but how you do it that makes a difference in the outcome. Personally I’d prefer our leaders act like professional and responsible adults. But hey, go ahead, leave it all to Russia and whomever to sort out. Everything will always be fine for the lazy because magic!
(And anybody who thinks Obama is worse than Trump, while conveniently ignoring Bush, a real war criminal… wow.)
If it’s any consolation, the UK is about to join you in being equally fucking fucked.
Tomorrow is when MPs vote whether to approve a deal that is going to have a worse effect on the economy than the previous deal, with only a few hours to read and take in the whole thing. The likelihood is that they will narrowly vote for it, probably without a confirmatory referendum, and our mini-me Trump will go on to win an election on the back of it. And so Putin wins another battle, the rich fucks in Parliament and their yet richer backers make some more money, we get the likes of Farage and various idiot MPs strutting around like this is something to be proud of, and the Labour Party has shamefully failed to put any kind of brake on the process. We’ll have cast aside the best deal available in a union designed to promote peace and cooperation, because of a mirage of petty, insular and backward looking nationalism whipped up by populists and demagogues and right wing media.
We are living in dark times.
While I suspect there is truth to this claim, the linked article doesn’t address the question of whether Trump’s properties played a part in any of this deal. I found a couple of articles that do make a similar claim but unfortunately without any evidence. So at this point it’s speculation based on other self-serving behavior he’s exhibited.
While I don’t think it’s necessary to find such evidence to condemn the administration’s actions, it sure would be nice to nail the claim with hard evidence. I suspect that’s going to be difficult to find…although Dumbo’s admin seems incompetent enough to publish the evidence (e.g. a transcript of the phone calls) thinking it adequately justified his decision.
Of course, the Kurds have not agreed to withdraw so the whole exercise is grand standing on Trump’s part…with Pence as the middle man. In a few days…or perhaps already…when Turkey’s army has more clashes with the Kurds, Erdogan and Trump will claim justification for hitting back hard because the Kurds violated the terms of an agreement they were not a party to.
Sadly, this sounds similar to the double-dealing justification the US government used extensively in the 19th century to attack and isolate indigenous people in the US who didn’t agree to treaties they weren’t a party to.
In my home town of Tulsa…
https://ktul.com/news/local/tulsa-trump-rally-escalates-to-pushing-and-shoving-as-opinions-clash
Tulsa Trump rally escalates to pushing and shoving as opinions clash — KTUL
One Trump supporter said…
Literally not true just from the fact people were counter-protesting their little rally. And it completely ignores the fact that something like 52% of Americans now support impeachment and removal from office.
“Shit is fucked up and bullshit.” – Occupy Wall Street slogan (e.g. this)
“Let us assume that we are fucked.” – Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk
quousque tandem, Donalde, abutere patientia nostra?
I’ve said before I keep wishing for him to have his “Lonesome Rhodes” live mic moment, but after his and Mulvaney’s public confessions, among all the other things, it’s now undeniable that it wouldn’t dent his popularity among his cult one bit. They’d probably start wearing t-shirts emblazoned with “Idiot,” “Moran,” and “Guinea Pigs for Trump.”
This is an undeveloped thought and maybe someone else can make more of it but…have we done this to ourselves? The mention of Hunter S. Thompson (the poster boy for the Baby Boomer Man-child) brings this thought to mind here. Did “I’m ok, you’re ok” lead to this? Certainly, we’ve been conditioned to avoid judgement and controversy, a fact which is routinely cynically exploited by the right. There are things, such as universal human rights (rights which apply regardless who you are) that have only two sides and one side is very, very wrong but too many people are desperate to find a middle ground (“BOTH SIDES”) rather than to be seen as prudes or scolds.
Does a bright yellow Smiley Face lurk in the abyss?
Gotta ask, what the hell did decent American folks do to “deserve” this Abuser in Chief?
@WMDKitty:
PZ is being misanthropic and saying we all deserve him (PZ included) because of all teh stupid shit we’ve done and all that. I’m sure, once he sees grandchild pictures he’ll change his tune. But I feel the same way at times, so I can commiserate.
It doesn’t make what PZ said right, but I understand it.
Selling out the Kurds was bad, but it was also inevitable. The idea that any electable US leadership at this point in time would support the rise of a free state built on anarchist principles on already sovereign soil over the objections of Israel and Turkey (a NATO ally, for all that they are about as Democratic as Russia,) is pretty naive in the light of past US foreign policy. As a rule, the US can be counted on to overthrow any remotely Democratic government in a region where they have economic interests on the grounds that such governments might care about their own people. To the US ruling class, ISIS is far less of a threat than Rojava. Trump is just providing an opportunity for everyone else to pretend that this is an aberration, as opposed to business as usual.
I do not know any more than the next guy but it is just as likely that chump agreed to move US forces out of the way because The Turkish president said he was getting very impatient with the situation on his border he has been getting a huge input of refugees from the civil war with scant help from the rest of NATO or any where else the Kurds were going to have to go some place pretty soon. He does not want them coming his way to join up with Turkish Kurds. So the phone call was to inform Chump that was likely to happen Chump makes a grant gesture to look like the great leader and act like it was his idea because he could not stand up to a real “strong man”. As far as I can see he has not stood up to any off them but he talks in public like he has but the results say some thing else.
uncle frogy
Yeah, funny thing about the Turkish thing. I’m from a SEA country where a majority here are both hardline anti-Kemalists & total Erdogan fanboys, to the point local politicians here deport Turkish dissidents who seek refuge here. The Erdogan fanboys also hate Trump, but are more than happy that Erdogan is doing anything ‘positive’, such as killing Kurds or imprisoning dissidents, that they’re willing to feign ignorance about Trump.