Democrat Eric Swalwell (D) CA spoke on Deadline White House about the lack of evidence to support the Trump administration’s claim that they had information that indicated the Iranians under Soleimani were going to attack US embassies. This is what the administration claims led to the decision to kill Soleimani. So we now have a second Republican administration in a row that has lied to the American public leading directly to one illegal war and edging up on a second.
What the hell is it about the GOP that makes it love President’s lying to the nation in order to start wars. You know this isn’t the first one.
It got so bad that even Mike Lee ® Utah felt he had to speak up about the lack of honesty evidenced by the Secretary’s of State and Defense plus other administration officials who obviously lied to the Senators and Representatives. Lee isn’t a Democrat doing a political thing. He’s a very Right Wing Republican and even he is fed up.
It is very obvious that everyone in the administration is willing to lie to cover up Trump’s blunders.
The fact of the matter is that we can’t get into a war with Iran or anyone else because we just don’t have the brain trust available to fight one. These guys are one dumber than the next. We’ve known all along that Trump was stupid and a liar but now we’re finding out that the whole lying crowd are imbeciles.
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We all know Lindsay Graham has traded his honor, his mind and what little respect he had managed to retain, for a pat on the head from the Fat Liar in the White House. But this weekend he finally lost any standing he might have managed to retain as a human being. I’m speaking, of course, of his equating Trump’s mumbling, inane speech with Ronald Reagan’s “Tear Down this wall,” speech to Nikita Khrushchev. I’ve never been much of a fan of Reagan but I have to admit that speech was a pretty good example of what Trump should be trying to emulate if he had the intelligence or the ability. In getting his nose out of Trump’s ass long enough to grovel in a new way, Graham has shown us the exact opposite of everything Reagan stood for.
There was a time when Graham seemed to stand for something other than keeping his job, but his latest actions have fully revealed him to be a simpering toady bent on getting Trump’s help in retaining his seat in congress, at any cost.
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The discussion broke out on This Week about Russian interference in the past elections and the potential for even more in the coming one. Chris Christie felt obligated to pitch the FBI as our complete defense against that happening, but that’s ludicrous. Without some kind of recognition from the White House this is a problem even the FBI will have a tough time solving.
Of course the White House in the personages of Trump, Pompeo, Mulvaney and Barr has been anything but cooperative in trying desperately to sell the rotting carcass of Putin’s promises that Russia had nothing to do with any of this.
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Robert O’Brien, National Security Advisor seems to be the only man in the administration who has the intelligence and cleverness to slide around in these dangerous waters. He manages to uphold the administration stance without looking like a complete liar or a fool. This can’t be said for Trump, Pompeo, Mulvaney or Barr. That doesn’t mean that anything O’Brien says is true, it just means he is able to say it in a way that seems it might possibly, in some alien universe, have some truth attached to it. He has developed the ability to say stuff that has almost no truth in it, while making it sound almost plausible, some thing that has totally eluded Pompeo.
Even Republicans like Mike Lee have trashed the administration for the way they are handling this blundered opportunity.
O’Brien gets stuck in a corner when he quotes Trump saying that, “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”
Really? So why did he dump the treaty we had with them and open up this whole mess, allowing them to start building one right away?
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Mike Bennett (D) CO was a guest on Meet the Press this week. I don’t understand Bennett. This is a guy I have always thought of as pretty bright but it’s also a guy who refuses to realize that he has no place on the Democratic ticket. Yes, he’s still running! What you didn’t know that? Guess what. You’re in the majority. He hasn’t even been on the debate stage for months and he hasn’t got a recognizable poll number since forever but still, he’s out there running his little heart out, wasting time and money when it’s clear he has no chance of being elected.
One wonders why he’s still out here. Is it possible that a guy, who appears to be so smart, is actually so dumb that he doesn’t accept reality? Bennett always seems a little stoned. Maybe he’s just a little too bombed to see the reality of the race. What a waste!
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So we had the last Democratic debate the other night and I for one am sad to see them go. It’s not that I thought they were earth moving, but each one gave a hint of a little more knowledge about each candidate than we will ever get from the pundits who report on them each day. We certainly didn’t get much help from the three moderators from CNN. Only Abby Phillips seemed to have any idea of what an intelligent question might be, though she was guilty of being the one who took a cheap shot at Sanders over whether he had told Warren that a woman couldn’t win the presidency. Wolf Blitzer was too busy being a star to ask anything cogent and we would have been better off if the piercing tones of the third member of the panel had never been heard at all.
The feeble moderators should never have let the debate wander back into healthcare. At this point we already know far more than we need to about the fact that Trump doesn’t want it and all the Democrats do.
The problem was, none of the debate questioners asked, “What would you say to Trump about X”? The fact of the matter is, most Democratic voters don’t care who wins the primary as long as it is someone who can smash Trump.
To that end it appears that there are four of the six remaining candidates that would easily best Trump in a debate and all six who could win.
I find it curious that Tom Steyer who I don’t think will win the primary, has emerged from the debates as a very smart guy with great instincts who could batter Trump simply because he’s so much smarter and even richer.
Joe Biden, who is currently the front-runner because many people think he is the only one who can beat Trump, is to my mind one of the least qualified to debate with him. Joe has great experience and the right mindset but he is just not a great public speaker and he seems to get too upset over things that rub him the wrong way. I think that’s also true for Elizabeth Warren who though a better speaker than Joe, is also able to be thrown off her game.
Amy Klobachar looks like she could be a killer in a hostile debate but the question remains, does she have enough backing to get to the post first?
I would love to see a debate between Bernie and Trump, two grizzled old veterans. Bernie would win but neither of them would end up making much sense.
It’s Mayor Pete, the baby faced killer that I think would really leave Trump a bloody mess on any stage they shared. Pete is smart as a whip and way too fast on the comeback for Trump to handle. Even more important I feel that there is no way Trump will be able to shake him and he, in turn, will be able to infuriate Trump and lead him into myriad mistakes and obvious lies. Pete will goad him, embarrass him and drive him into a trashing frenzy from which he will have nowhere to go but down. This would be one worth paying to see and I believe that he would turn Trump into the blabbering bumbling, blustering idiot that he has always been. Buttigeig will have had a battle of wits with an unarmed man and he will send Trump staggering from the stage like a whipped dog.
But the question remains will he get the chance? One of the big worries coming from the Democratic leadership is that if Pete wins the nomination, black and other minority voters will not come out to vote. If that’s true, it represents the greatest failure of black and minority leadership in the history of our political system. Do minorities really have to love the candidate in order to get out and vote for anyone running against Trump? I don’t believe that, but if it’s true then they will get what they deserve and they will screw everyone but the racists.
It’s difficult to believe, considering Trump’s behavior during the last three years, that anyone in his or her right mind would vote for Trump for anything, yet we all know they are out there. His character has been that of a boorish thug, lying over 15,000 times, and that’s just in public. But that’s not all of it. He has made fun of the disabled, relished racist positions, supported the most racist and xenophobic among us, attacked the parents of dead war heroes, ordered the separation of parents from infants on our southern border, insulted our allies and then betrayed them and befriended our enemies. This was done while he was trying to rip apart NATO, while actually destroying the TCCP and the Iran nuclear Treaty and instituting economy destroying tariffs on goods entering the country from our former trading partners. All this was done without consultation with experts, in fact completely without any kind of research or investigation.
Trump brooks no intelligence. He acts out of ego or whim and the results are obvious to all. Still a segment of the population loves him. Why? What is wrong with those people? Why don’t they see what is obvious to any even semi-intelligent person. The actions of the GOP politicians are understandable if insufferable. They are looking to save their cushy, well-paying jobs. In the current circumstances the only way those members of congress with limited insight and even lower morals can accomplish that is to mindlessly follow Trump. But why his base? They owe him nothing. He has done nothing for them. None of his promises have been kept. He didn’t build a wall. He didn’t get rid of Obamacare. He hasn’t installed any infrastructure. Our educational system is falling apart under his direction. He hasn’t gotten us out of any of the wars he promised and in fact he now has more troops overseas then we did when he entered office. His unemployment numbers are only low because it now takes three jobs to pay the bills that one once did. His policies have led to the pollution of our water and our air, along with the diminution of wild life species, even as the planet burns and the very life on earth is threatened with extinction.
The only thing he has achieved in office ha s been the passing of a tax plan that has lowered taxes on the already too rich while eliminating most corporate taxes on the richest companies in the world while they are laying off American workers so they can move their factories to Third World countries where they can pay their workers starvation wages.
And now to finalize his legacy, Trump has been impeached, a true accolade for a cheap crook and con man whose every action has been for his own benefit, even as a large segment of the population falls into poverty.
Is there really anyone in this country, not driven by racism, who is so ignorant that they really think Trump has been a good President? If there is, that person has truly put the lie to everything this country stands for.