Televangelist Pat Robertson was on the air this week blaming everything about the shootings in Las Vegas and just about everything else that’s wrong with this country on the wrong sources. This is a con man who praises God for the acquisition of gold and who over a long career, has been able to scam the marks for millions while selling them a very Republican God and ignoring what is really going on in the world.
He did a huge number on “disrespect,” whining about how it is the cause of much of man’s evils. He may be right about that but over and over; he ascribes blame to the wrong sinner. He babbles about those disrespecting the President while failing to see that this President has renounced all respect by acting like a junk-yard-dog, expressing no morals, little intelligence and no respect for anyone else. Robertson talks about our nation losing respect for our court system while failing to see that it was the President who first engendered that loss of respect when he attacked our judicial system on racial grounds over a Federal judge who correctly, did not give him what he wanted.
Even as he preaches his phony and convenient moral outrage, Robertson doesn’t seem to care that prior to his term in office Trump led a life of moral decay and ethical dysfunction.
He goes on to attack the very restrained protests of black athletes during theplaying of the National Anthem at ballgames. It’s indicative of his lack of connection to reality that Robertson doesn’t understand how respectful the taking of a knee during the anthem really was. It’s fascinating that this man who puts himself forth as a man of God, sees nothing wrong with the racist face of much of this nation. Robertrson is and always was a fraud, conning the suckers out of their money and doing it in the name of a God he invented purely for the sake of the scam.
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And then there’s our foreign policy led by a President who has no vision, no policies and seemingly no intelligence. He threatens the leader of North Korea who is fighting for his life. He undercuts his own Secretary of State and his few functional cabinet members on every front. He makes ignorant little theatrical quips to the press like “we’ll see,” which he obviously thinks are cute but only underline a lack of understanding of his job and how to do it.
Some things have to be understood if we are to solve the Korea problem. First is that Kim Jung Un is fighting to keep his regime alive and we are not. The second is that when Trump blabbers on about rescinding the Iran Treaty he is only proving to Kim that our word is worth nothing and that if he, Kim, doesn’t forge ahead with his nuclear program he is a dead man.
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Then there’s this week, one in which Donald Trump really went off the deep end. In his desperate and brain dead attempts to unravel the work of his predecessors, especially Barak Obama, he took the first step to destroy our healthcare system. It would appear this is simply because it’s named Obamacare and in his miniscule brain a little devil is saying, “Why should he have a healthcare plan named after him when I don’t have mine.” But that’s what we’re dealing with, a madman who brooks no logic, understands nothing except that he wants to be right… all the time!
But domestic chaos wasn’t enough. Trump had to dive into our foreign policy too. He took a working piece of our foreign policy, the Iran Nuclear Treaty and put it in jeopardy. As stated above, by doing this he also closed the only door to any negotiation with North Korea.
All being viewed as thinking people have been infuriated by Trump’s attack on the Iran Nuclear Treaty both because Iran has been living up to the letter of the law on their end of the treaty and because it puts us in the position of being viewed as not honoring our treaties when we approach North Korea in an attempt to get them to the negotiating able.
Republican Senator Susan Collins weighed in with a couple of salient points about why Trump may be taking this stand when she pointed out that the treaty contains no limitations on Iran’s ability to develop ballistic missals with which to deliver nuclear weapons and secondly that under the agreement Iran has what is called a patient pathway to develop a nuclear weapon. This simply means that all they have to do is wait until the treaty expires and get right back up on the horse. Sure, but the world will have gained ten or fifteen years in which it can work on other solutions to the Iran problem, not the least of which is the replacement of the religious fanatics in Iran’s current regime.
Collins is right in her criticism of the deal but as is usually the case when politics enters foreign policy this is only partly right. The deal was never meant to last into infinity. It’s absolutely a short-term stopgap to nuclear development in a country that we don’t want to have nuclear weapons. The fact is, Trump with his inability to understand anything above fourth grade level, can’t fathom this, just as he doesn’t understand that we didn’t pay Iran one cent to get the treaty. All we did was release money that was already theirs. The fact that we have elected to the Presidency, a man who is serially unqualified to run anything more complicated than a laundry wringer, is a huge detriment to all of our foreign policy. Those that surround him must keep him from putting this country into a hole that will keep us buried for decades.
Unfortunately Collins exemplifies most of the Republicans when she makes statements about hoping that the President will consult with our allies on this treaty because it involves more than just us. When did this moron ever show any inclination t consult with any of our allies? He only wants to cozy up to our enemies, even as he insults our allies. The best thing that can be said about Trump is that he is the Manchurian Candidate.
UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has seemed to be trying to be an intelligent voice in her job, came out his week defending Trump’s idiotic actions by saying that Iran has not been a good citizen in the Middle East. No, they have not, but that has nothing to do with the treaty. Nothing in the treaty says that Iran has to say; ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Mary’s every time they do something nasty in their region. Every inspection team and there are an inordinate number of them, say that Iran has absolutely kept to the letter of the treaty. So if Trump is just trying to get them to be better citizens by rattling the treaty he is as usual, out of line.
Iran is what it is. The treaty is what it is. If we had a better or smarter or just a functional administration in place, maybe we could work on these more subtle problems. but considering who’s in the White House we’re very lucky we’re not looking up, this morning, at a serious mushroom cloud. Trump can’t do the subtle stuff. He can’t even understand it. We should be thankful at this moment that he just stays out of the way.
Haley should forget about defending the indefensible. Her job just like that of everyone else in this administration, has, unfortunately melted down to keeping the idiot in the White House from displaying his stupidity to the entire world. Like their boss, they are failing miserably.
Even those who did not back the treaty think this is a bad move. Iran has kept to the letter of the treaty. Seven other signatory’s acknowledged this. All are involved in tough inspections of Iran’s facilities. Attacking the treaty is the ultimate stupid move. Again this is a move by the dumb one, to unravel Obama’s legacy. It’s amazing how deep the barbs went that night at the Washington’s Press Association dinner.
Of course even those jokes aimed at him by President Obama were born of his own actions, his ridiculous and racist birther accusations, a program, like most of Trump’s programs, based on nothing but lies.
Republican’s with some guts are already speaking out. Men and women like Corker, McCain, Flake and Sass are trying to lead the way but those who need to stand up for their constituency, like Ryan and McConnell just tuck their skirts between their legs and hide their heads in them. It is now common knowledge that Rex Tillerson who after a meeting with Trump and others in which Trump wanted a tenfold increase of our nuclear arsenal, called him a “Fucking moron.” It is just as common knowledge that Tillerson would already be gone if he hadn’t been collared by Mathis, Kelly and McMasters who requested in the strongest terms that he stay. They need all the help they can get to corral a nut case with the nuclear codes.
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The inability of our President to even fake empathy along with his ignorance of sentence structure and the English language have led to a huge brouhaha over the soldiers killed in Niger. The noise about whether or not Trump called the widows and parents and the bigger noise about what he said when he did call are all about politics not Presidential duty. I say that because anyone who has been paying attention since this clown was elected knows that there is no longer any standard of Presidential behavior. We elected a junk-yard-dog and he is acting like what he is.
This could easily become the Benghazi of the Trump administration. The parallels are all there. Grieving families, an administration that misspeaks and a rival party frothing at the mouth. Yes, all the elements are certainly there. But before the dumb congressmen on both sides start a war over nothing; we have to look at the big picture and try to understand what is really going on.
First, from the POV of being the President, Trump awkwardly misspoke when he told a widow that her dead husband “Knew what he was getting into.” That was dumb, unfeeling and completely lacking in empathy. But it was true. We have special forces troops all over the globe doing what this patrol was doing and they are all volunteers who have worked hard, trained hard and fought hard to do what they are doing for their country. No one goes into these fights with their eyes shut. They want to be out on the point. They have trained for that and it’s where they want to be.
The nature of what they do always puts them in danger. These missions are not for the faint of heart. They are often fighting without the support that is required by our regular troops. That’s what makes them special. The news today, especially that on the morning talk shows made a big deal about medevac and support. The nature of what these men do puts them ahead of medevac and support. That’s why they are special. The nature of war always puts certain individuals in deadly danger and these brave men had chosen to be the ones who put heir heads in the lion’s mouth.
There has been a lot of loose talk on these morning shows about the fact that it took two days to recover he body of the soldier in question. Why is this so surprising? A patrol of 12 men was devastated by an ambush. They were extended far into enemy territory. The available rescue services were few and far between. It took two days because someone with some intelligence saw that right move was not the to risk another life to recover a dead body and held off until it was at least a little safer before instituting search and recovery operations.
What we are seeing is the nature of the kind of war we are fighting all over the world. This is what today’s war better be about because our destructive abilities are so far advanced that any other kind of war is unthinkable.
This kind of war is going on all over the planet right now and if you don’t see that, you better open your eyes. It’s not new. We have been fighting like this since the Sixties. And we have been doing it everyplace in the world where there are American interests. And those interests don’t have to be national. Often they have to do with nothing but American imperialism, with business as usual. For the last 60 years the United States has been engaged in this kind of war on every continent on the planet with the possible exception of Australia. That should not be considered a big deal because it is in the DNA of mankind to be a beast of war. Man has been this monster since the beginning and it was because of this that mankind developed the concept of religion to hold the savage beast in abeyance. Even that, of course, eventually became subservient to power and now we are left with only our damaged humanity and our intelligence, with which to combat our natural greed and the desire to make everything subservient to us.