POTUS Donald Trump

[Badsmerf]

I really hope for a number of things. I'm shocked we carried out an attack. Our foreign policy with Syria was a failure for allowing Assad to keep murdering people, but I'm not sure this is the right decision. I'd much rather have directly eliminated Assad.

 

My hopes:

1. No civilians died.

2. We collaborated with our NATO allies.

3. These strikes were precise and controlled.

4. There is no retaliation.

5. Russia gets kicked out of the United Nations (far fetched).

[ashbury]

 

I really hope for a number of things. I'm shocked we carried out an attack. Our foreign policy with Syria was a failure for allowing Assad to keep murdering people, but I'm not sure this is the right decision. I'd much rather have directly eliminated Assad.

My hopes:
1. No civilians died.
2. We collaborated with our NATO allies.
3. These strikes were precise and controlled.
4. There is no retaliation.
5. Russia gets kicked out of the United Nations (far fetched).

To my surprise, the Russian news agency states that there were no casualties, civilian or military, in the strikes. If anyone was going to exaggerate, I figured it would be them. There is a statement that there will be consequences, but who knows what that means. They're convening an emergency session of the UN to discuss the aggression - business as usual, in that regard.

[D. Hocking]

Military actions like this to help stop atrocities are complicated issues, but it seems like in the end we don't end up helping people and often make things worse.  I also don't trust Trump's motives of why he is really doing this.

 

I am sure my anti-Trump bias colored my viewing of his statement last night, but it seemed to me that instead of being burdened with the grave responsibility of this sort of action, he seemed excited and has been wanting to play war all along. 

 

Right now he is tweeting about how great we are and how no one will be anywhere as good as us.  He is taking the moment to brag.  Everything is about being the best and a winner to him.  We have someone with the emotional maturity of a 5th grader making these decisions.

[Mr. Brooks]

To my surprise, the Russian news agency states that there were no casualties, civilian or military, in the strikes. If anyone was going to exaggerate, I figured it would be them. There is a statement that there will be consequences, but who knows what that means. They're convening an emergency session of the UN to discuss the aggression - business as usual, in that regard.

That's because we told Russia our targets, who in turn warned Syria.

Supposedly they evacuated all the targets in time.

[TheLeviathan]

Sean Hannity is also a Cohen client they tried to hide.

[PseudoSABR]

 

Sean Hannity is also a Cohen client they tried to hide.

I wonder what actual legal services Cohen provided Hannity. I doubt it was estate planning.

 

Is the reason they wanted to hide this is to keep up the myth of Hannity's disinterestedness?

[D. Hocking]

I was just going to post about Hannity.  I know you should not wish ill on anyone, but I would not be overly upset if Hannity somehow went down in all of this.

 

At a "journalist", should not he have revealed his connection when reporting stories involving him?  It might raise questions of whether he is impartial and non-biased.

 

[gunnarthor]

If Fox had any standards, Hannity would be suspended for that stunt but they'll just say he's not a journalist and therefore doesn't have to obey any journalistic standards. They'll stick with him until the profits go away and then they'll cut bait with him just like they did with O'Reilly. 

[gunnarthor]

Speaking of Trump, I thought this was funny.

 

[Badsmerf]

I really hope Hannity gets his. He is a stain on our society. Paid to twist an agenda to people, and is the very epitome of problems we face in this country.

[Badsmerf]

Also, not a single mention of this in the fox website. I'm really not sure what they have to do in order to get blown up. Scandal after scandal, conflict of interest after conflict of interest. I wish their viewers would take a step back and realize this is what they are endorsing and voting for in the polls.

[ashbury]

Also, not a single mention of this in the fox website. I'm really not sure what they have to do in order to get blown up. Scandal after scandal, conflict of interest after conflict of interest. I wish their viewers would take a step back and realize this is what they are endorsing and voting for in the polls.

They did have a 2+ minute clip of him "setting the record straight", on their front page this morning. He wasted just about a full minute of that time, feeding resentment by playing rapid-fire soundbites from other news sources mentioning his name. Boo hoo.

[D. Hocking]

I am not a huge Barbara Bush fan, but how classy of Trump to finally acknowledging her health problems by just retweeting the RNC tweet - no words of his own.  Although when you keep tweeting about your poll numbers, it is hard to spend time on other less important, less narcissistic issues.

 

Speaking of the RNC, the fact that they set up a web-page calling "Lyin Comey and have adopted Trump's name-calling tactics will make it a bit harder for them to distance the party from Trump if his Presidency collapses.  He really is the party and whether they pretend otherwise or not, they have adopted right down to his dog-whistles and his questionable endorsements.

[Brock Beauchamp]

 

Military actions like this to help stop atrocities are complicated issues, but it seems like in the end we don't end up helping people and often make things worse.  I also don't trust Trump's motives of why he is really doing this.

 

I am sure my anti-Trump bias colored my viewing of his statement last night, but it seemed to me that instead of being burdened with the grave responsibility of this sort of action, he seemed excited and has been wanting to play war all along. 

 

Right now he is tweeting about how great we are and how no one will be anywhere as good as us.  He is taking the moment to brag.  Everything is about being the best and a winner to him.  We have someone with the emotional maturity of a 5th grader making these decisions.

Honestly, I don't really disagree with showing force against al-Assad. He's an awful person backed by some pretty awful countries.

 

But any time a bomb is dropped, I have to ask:

 

How many homes and communities could we build around the world for each one of these things dropped on brown people?

 

As you said, it's complicated. al-Assad is a monster propped up by the countries that truly stand in the way of progress (and it shouldn't be lost on us that Trump is drawing a line in the sand against Russia here when he has no interest in doing so about the election interference and general chaos they're causing around the world via the internet).

 

Personally, I'm so fed up with Russia that I'd like to see the President take a back-breaking stance of intolerance against them and force a potential cold war again. We'd have all the same allies and they'd lose again, just as they did last time. The game they're playing only exists when no one stands up to them and forces better behavior.

 

Russia can't stand on its own and we're allowing them to drive a wedge small enough that nations like China still tepidly back them. Force that wedge deeper and make China stay out of it (along with nations like France that receive cheap natural resources), leaving Russia on its own.

 

No one worth mentioning is truly married to Russia. Put the screws to them.

[Mike Sixel]

Maybe instead of bombing people, we should kill the actual source of the problem....

[gunnarthor]

Trump surrogates are talking like Trump might have committed a crime.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/trumps-lawyer-cohen-forgets-to-pretend-trump-is-innocent.html?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-t

[D. Hocking]

This summarizes it better than I would:

 

Morgan J. Freeman
‏Verified account @mjfree
6m6 minutes ago

So I’m clear, @realDonaldTrump gaslighted a reputable reporter while en route to his golf course while past presidents paid respects at Barbara Bush’s funeral?

 

 

 

[kydoty]

So...Trump had himself quite a morning today.

[gunnarthor]

 

So...Trump had himself quite a morning today.

Yeah, I saw a lot of funny tweets about it this morning but the funniest was someone saying "For Trump's lawyers, this must be like watching a toddler play in traffic."

[LaBombo]

 

I am not a huge Barbara Bush fan,

 

It would be interesting to hear you elaborate on this if you wouldn't mind.

[Badsmerf]

It would be interesting to hear you elaborate on this if you wouldn't mind.

She wasn't exactly a shining star for conservative women to look up to.... She was commonly referred to as a bigot, racist, and elitist. She wasn't horrible, but I wouldn't put her on a pedestal.

[LaBombo]

 

She wasn't exactly a shining star for conservative women to look up to.... She was commonly referred to as a bigot, racist, and elitist. She wasn't horrible, but I wouldn't put her on a pedestal.

 

Bigoted, racist, and elitist? That's really just cut-and-paste liberal dismissal of virtually every conservative in America, isn't it? What specifically racist and bigoted things did she do or say?

 

As for elitism, even the New York Times, for heaven's sake, went out of its way to acknowledge repeatedly that whatever else Mrs. Bush was, she was emphatically not an elitist in the eyes of anyone but the most brazenly partisan Dem character assassins.

[gunnarthor]

She said some dumb (racist) things about the Hurricane Katrina refugees - I'm fairly sure there were other dumb things like that over the years but I think most of the cringe-worthy quotes came across as a mom trying to protect her son (who happened to be the President) from criticism.

 

I never much cared for her. I think the press treated her as a nice old grandmotherly type when she was really much more political. I don't think she was a great role model for young girls but that's also probably part of the generational gap.

[Mr. Brooks]

Yeah, I don't know how someone can read the Katrina comments and think they are not either racist or elitist. Or both.

[USAFChief]

Jeebus, some of you make it hard to be a Democrat.  It's no wonder we can't win elections.

 

Classy lady, let her rest in peace.

[TheLeviathan]

Does that one sentence offset her contributions to promote literacy? Or any other positive contributions?

 

Why are we so willing to cast aside people entirely for any affront? Go ahead and criticize the remark, but good lord have perspective.

[Mr. Brooks]

In my post, I'm commenting on the remark about Katrina only.

Like everyone else, I'm sure she was some combination of good and bad. Hopefully (and probably), she was more good than bad.

But, I reject the opinion that the good things she did give her some kind of free pass for the comments posted above regarding Katrina.

[TheLeviathan]

I don't want to give her a pass on criticism, but some of what has been leveled nationally and echoed here seems to go past that.

 

A liberal, Joy Reid, is going through a similar thing.

 

I guess I wish we'd stop at criticism rather than the lengths to which we go Instead.

[gunnarthor]

 

Jeebus, some of you make it hard to be a Democrat.  It's no wonder we can't win elections.

 

Classy lady, let her rest in peace.

Someone asked what, if any, racist things she's done. I answered that question with one example. In other threads I've also pointed out some of the ugly racist things Hilary Clinton had done.

 

You think she was classy. Fine. Others don't. 

[LaBombo]

The consensus that the Katrina comment constitutes the bulk of the evidence that Barbara Bush was a racist and bigot is pretty much what I expected. It makes me sad rather than mad.

 

But I'm not going to defend her comment or her life. The former doesn't warrant a defense, and the latter doesn't need one.

 

Instead, I'm just going to say that I respected Michelle Obama a great deal as a First Lady and role model, and then I'm going to invite your kind attention to your left foot. Is there a shoe on it that matches the one on the right?

 

There should be (especially if you're at work), and if you listen very carefully, you can hear that shoe saying "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country".

 

What your left shoe is trying to tell you is that although words matter, a single quote from a person constantly in the public eye is a vastly inferior way to take stock of that person's life compared to their actions.

 

And gunnar, your left shoe is also saying it's time for new Odor Eaters.