President Trump’s unbelievable decision to stab our Kurdish allies in the back is certainly as despicable an act as was ever perpetrated by any American president. It instantly becomes one of the great international betrayals of all time.
As Kurdish civilians are being massacred by Turkish troops and as ISIS prisoners are flooding out of their detention, Steve Mnuchin, our Secretary of the Treasury, appears on TV and blabbers uselessly about sanctions against Turkey if they continue their invasion of the Kurds.
What the hell is this fool babbling about? Trump gave the Turks the go ahead to invade when he pulled our Troops out, thereby removing the only obstacle to a bloody massacre. Turkish intentions were no secret. Erdogan had announced his intentions when he asked Trump to pull the trigger on the abandonment of the only Middle East group that had supported our fight against ISIS.
Mnuchin was asked when he was going to trigger these sanctions and all he could do was stumble and stutter about it being a complicated situation. No it’s not. It’s only complicated for a brain dead moron trying desperately to shield the hideous behavior of a degenerate President. We abandoned our allies knowing what Turkey would do and now Turkey has done it. So we can either let Erdogan massacre Kurds or we can go back on Trump’s word to him.
Mnuchin is dumb enough to try to equate Turkey’s support for us with the Kurds support for us by saying that Turkey is a NATO ally and so we should support them just as we do the Kurds. Really? When the Kurds were fighting ISIS at our side, Erdogan was allowing massive numbers of ISIS supporters to flow through Turkey to reach the battlefield to fight us. Mnuchin may think that’s equal support from both but that’s only because he’s an idiot.
Even Lindsay Graham who hasn’t been able to get his nose out of Trump’s ass for the better part of a year has finally seen the light over this egregious situation and has announced that Trump is wrong and that we have to support the Kurds. But still, Trump and his “Igor” Mnuchin sit on their fat asses and do nothing as Erdogan’s murderers slaughter Kurds.
No group in the Middle East had been as steadfast in supporting us as the Kurds. The Saudi’s kill our reporters, the Israeli’s attack us when we don’t support their totalitarian approach to the Palestinians, the Iranians, after we abandoned our treaty with them… oh wait! That’s another example of Trump stupidity and ingenuousness. We had a treaty the Iranians had lived up to and still Trump stabbed them in the back. It seems to be a genetic trait of Trump’s, who avoided his duty to his country by being a draft dodger.
But still Mnuchin continues to rave about sanctions and what we can do with them if we ever get off our butts and impose them. Forget sanctions. Tell Erdogan that we are moving our troops back in and that if there should, by any chance, be an accident in which an American soldier is hurt by a Turk, he can kiss Istanbul goodbye. That’s what has to be done if we are to live up to our duty to support our ally the Kurds. They laid their lives on the line for us and now our phony President is floundering around the White House trying to figure out how to get his ass out of the mess he’s made.
Rand Paul, with whom I rarely agree, made some, for him, intelligent statements on Sunday even as he was espousing the wrong position on this whole mess. Basically Paul’s position is that we should abandon those who fought with us because we have nothing to gain by supporting them. In and of itself, a very Trumpian position! But he did suggest a sensible position for us to take if we first stop the Turks from their goal of genocide.
Paul thinks we should take the responsibility of bringing all parties together and forcing a negotiated peace with the goal to create a Kurdish homeland. Unfortunately that’s the end of his reasonable considerations. He immediately goes off on a spiel about us not having enough troops to fight the Turkish army. That’s ridiculous. We would never have had to face the Turkish army if Trump had stood up on his cowardly hind legs and told Erdogan that if any American troops came under fire we would definitely be at war and if that’s what he wanted that’s what the United States would provide. There is no way Erdogan would ever make that move, but Trump, the self-proclaimed great negotiator didn’t have the balls to do his job.
The fact is, the US should have gotten involved in the Kurdish problem across Turkey, Syria and Iraq long ago. We need to fix the mess that the British Empire created when they drew national lines based on rivers and quadrants rather than on who was living where.
And one other big point! How come if Trump is so hot to get our troops out of harms way, he is basically renting American troops to Saudi Arabia to fight in Yemen? Is he that stupid or just too corrupt to see what is going on?
Mark Esper, our “Acting” Secretary of Defense, spoke to Chris Wallace this Sunday and what a crock of shit he tried to make us swallow. Esper wants us to believe that same crap about the United States of America being helpless to stop Turkey from attacking our Kurdish allies because we only had a handful of soldiers protecting the border across which Erdogan sent his troops. One of the great truths about war is that it takes strength to create peace. We have that strength. For Christ’s sake we spend more money to create that strength than the next ten nations in the world combined. If we haven’t got that strength we should shut down the Pentagon and throw all those incompetent bastards out in the street. We have already established that Trump had the ability to stop Erdogan. He had no trouble threatening North Korea or Iran, how come he finds Erdogan so intimidating? Or does Erdogan have something on him?
Now Trump says he is pulling all our troops out of Northern Syria essentially giving that country to the Russians. What the hell is going on? Is our President in league with the Russians to throw the battle for civilization? Is this one more example of the fat liar kissing Putin’s ass? Is he really the Manchurian Candidate or do the Russians actually have something big on him? Either way he is not acting in our interests and that, more than his extortion of the Ukrainian President should get him kicked out of office immediately.
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With the Democratic debates coming up on Tuesday the question arises: who will bring up Joe Biden’s poor choice in allowing his son to do business with the Ukrainians while he was VP. Joe has been exonerated by believable sources but he is certainly guilty of poor judgment for allowing is son to put him in this position.
Hunter has exposed his father to the perception of questionable involvement when he was VP. Yes, he’s now agreed to cut any association with any foreign companies if his father is elected but it’s a case of too little too late. I really believe that Joe didn’t do anything wrong and that’s enough for most citizens in that position but not for the VP. The VP, unlike many members of this administration, must be far above suspicion and in this case he’s just not. Joe should have told his son, “NO,” just like Trump should have told his brats and his crooked son-in-law to stay home and get jobs instead of pulling them into the government even when they are so sleazy that they can’t get security clearances.
It would appear that this isn’t finished. It would appear that Biden will be damaged enough by this, even if he didn’t actually do anything wrong, that he will fall far enough from grace that he will eventually pull out.
Things are not looking up for Bernie either. His heart problem along with his advanced age will probably leave Warren as the sole, older candidate. She may be 72 but she acts like she’s 50, which is just about right.
If Bernie’s heart doesn’t do him in, his comments that Elizabeth Warren is a capitalist and he isn’t, surely will. This is a capitalist country not a socialist one, even if we do enjoy many of the fruits of socialism. Yes, capitalism must be fixed, the power that is represented by successful capitalists must be controlled a hell of a lot better than it is now and the fruits of capitalism must be redistributed to better benefit the public but it’s still far and away the best economic system available. I think Bernie just cut his own throat.
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One of the big talking points in the House impeachment investigation is about why Nancy Pelosi hasn’t let the membership vote on impeachment, especially when it is a foregone conclusion that the vote would be overwhelmingly positive. It has, in fact, become a big GOP rallying cry, with every Republican asked about it ranting on for far too long.
The Democratic view is that Pelosi doesn’t want to give in to any GOP power point but the reality is that she should have had a vote before all this went this far. It ws a mistake not to, but now it’s too late. Now it’s a point of contention, which has gotten so loud she can’t back down.
The reality is that it’s much ado about nothing, but that nothing has given the GOP a little bit of something they can cling to among all the lies that they and their leader perpetrate.
It appears that Bernie Sanders has the right take when he says that very little of this really matters because regardless of vote or no vote, the House will eventually go for impeachment and when it gets to the Senate, Moscow Mitch will kill the whole thing.
There are two very different points of view on how this should all turn out. One is that Trump should be impeached and removed from office as soon as possible, mainly because every day he remains President he hurts the nation. All you have to do is look at the situation of him abandoning the Kurds to understand this. The damage he has done to our standing in the world by this unimaginably stupid move is almost insurmountable. And he must go,
The other POV is that he was elected, no matter how flawed that election, and our minority president should be free of removal by any political process other than the next scheduled election.
These would both be valid arguments if there was an alternative available, but the justice department in their gross ignorance has seemed to take the alternative off the table by declaring that the President can’t be held accountable for any crimes he commits while he is in office.
This seems to undermine the whole concept of equal justice under the law, which is the basis of our whole judicial system. So now all those upstanding Americans who like to brag, incorrectly, that justice is blind and that the same standards apply to all have to eat their words. We all knew that this was bullshit but we were able to maintain the illusion until Trump the asshole spit it into our faces. In Trump’s America, when the people demand justice, the Justice Department just tells them to go fuck themselves.
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I may never have been more disappointed in an interview than the one Chuck Todd did on Meet the Press this Sunday with Jim Mattis. I understand that Todd thinks Mattis is an American icon but Mattis sure didn’t act like one this week. I agree with Mattis that the military should stay out of politics but he ignored that concept when he became Secretary of Defense. Once he did that he became a political figure and now it is just too easy for him to try to slide out of not stating an opinion on Trump’s despicable behavior. It’s his responsibility as a citizen, with a great deal of behind the scenes knowledge, to say how he feels and explain how much harm Trump has done to this country.