This country and every country in the international realm needs a President whose word means something. Nations need to be able point to treaties honored and promises kept and their President’s word has to be looked up to as something that other countries can rely on. With Trump in the White House none of this is possible. He goes to the UN and attacks Kim Jung Un but not in a way that he should. He has to know that this is a tyrant who is fighting for his life. Trump and all of us want Kim to come to a negotiating table and somehow work out a treaty that will stop all the saber rattling. Yet in the same speech in which he attacks Kim and North Korea, Trump talks about trashing a treaty with Iran. If Trump understood diplomacy or if he had read the treaty, he would realize we have gotten what we wanted from Iran. Their nuclear program is frozen for at least a decade. If this isn’t good enough for Trump what could Kim possibly offer that would make Trump happy?
Yes, it’s Kim who has caused this problem but we have to be smart enough to know that we must overcome Kim’s fear that we will do the same thing to him as we did to Saddam and Qaddafi. Kim has good reason not to trust us. We aren’t very trustworthy. It’s way past time for Trump to get off the Iran treaty and to figure out a way to swallow his ego just long enough to convince Kim that he will be safe if he puts his nuclear weapons in mothballs and tries to live like one of the functioning nations in the world. It’s a real long shot but it must be taken.
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“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag. Get that son of a bitch off the field right now.”
That’s our white supremacist President talking in Alabama last week. There were many cheers, the bigot leading the racists. The real problem is Trump is too ignorant to understand the difference between respectful dissention and disrespect. So far, neither Kaepernick nor Bennett or any of the others have shown any disrespect to the flag or to any of those who fought or died for it. What they are saying is that America must pay attention to all the disrespect being shown its minority peoples by those who have neither respect for those minorities nor to the thoughts and values our flag is supposed to stand for.
The argument that the sports field is not the place for protest is just false. These are huge gatherings of Americans. Where better to protest against the destruction of those values that make us Americans? Even as I am writing this, I am watching, Steve Mnuchin, the petty crook who masquerades as our Secretary of the Treasury, lecturing the public about what is an appropriate venue to protest and what is not. He babbles about respect for the military and the first responders. When was the last time he served as either? He’s just another of Trump’s draft dodging morons. This clown sits in front of the public and speaks with locked jaw and a stick up his ass and talks about how the protestors are more divisive than Trump with his foul remarks. If there was ever a reason why the French invented the guillotine, Steve Mnuchin is it.
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And the battle over healthcare goes on, and on, and on. The Republicans admit that their only ax to grind is that they promised to repeal and replace Obamacare. They can’t defend with a straight face any of the post Trump plans they have come up with, but to try to pass one of these abortions they have created, they are willing to lie to the nations face until their tongues fall out.
Lindsey Graham is one of the more puzzling problems. I have disagreed over many areas with Graham but still recognize that he is a Republican with whom one can intelligently discuss a problem. What has made him give this up for an obviously catastrophic excuse for a bill? Yes we all recognize that you’re desperate to fulfill your campaign promise Lindsey, but do you have to sell your soul to do it? Reach across the aisle and try to make something happen with the Democrats, something that will benefit the people. Obamacare needs to be fixed. Fix it, don’t try to replace it with something worse just because your GOP hacks lack the intelligence to come up with a better plan.
Then there’s Bill (I was a doctor but am now trashing the Hippocratic oath) Cassidy who has already proven that he has no scruples, no morals and very little intelligence. It seems that all Cassidy is accomplished at is lying, which he does almost as duplicitously as Trump.
The biggest complaint against his plan is that it does not really protect those with existing conditions. He swears that it does and points to a very cleverly written con man description of that subject which if read loosely looks like the protection we all know the bill needs but when reread carefully becomes just one more big lie. Cassidy is a disgusting creature, a disgrace to his job and to the people he falsely claims to represent.
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I’ve now heard three different apologists for the President talk about the football players disrespecting the flag, our veterans, and our first responders. This included Mark Short a very well spoken lackey from the White House. My friends, this is the execution of the big lie. This is trying to make a President who is constantly wrong about just about everything look good, if only in the eyes of his ignorant and bigoted base. Just so the more ignorant among them understand, kneeling has never been seen as a mark of disrespect. We kneel before those we honor. It has always been understood to be a mark of respect, which indicates that those players who have knelt to make a serious point have been doing it with the utmost respect but with a point to make. It’s too bad our pathetic President isn’t intelligent enough to understand this basic fact before he starts bellowing for these young men to be fired. This fat clown has never worked for anyone but his indulgent old man and himself and now that he has been elected to work for the American people he thinks he is a dictator. He’s wrong and it is up to all those who understand how wrong he is to prove that to him.
Short talks about the generations of Americans who have fought and died for the freedoms we enjoy and in the next sentence wants to deny the players who knelt for the National Anthem, the right to those same freedoms. Is he too in thrall to Trump for him to realize that these young men are exercising those specific freedoms to which he refers? We know that Trump doesn’t understand this. It’s obvious that he understands little, but someone like Short who appears to have some successful education and some knowledge of how to act, should realize that he couldn’t possibly overcome the bad stench left behind by Trump’s fowl behavior.
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This morning the President of the United States, quoting a piece of incorrect information that described an event that never happened, attacked Iran and our nuclear treaty with them. This is just one more case of monumental irresponsible behavior by our egomaniacal sociopath of a leader. This ignoramus doesn’t have enough problems brewing because of his irresponsible behavior and his administrations incompetence; he has to go looking for fights on issues that don’t even exist.
It is long past time for the Republican Party to act responsibly with regard to the disaster they have perpetrated on the United States. They must reign in this idiot before he causes a nuclear war. It’s obvious that Trump has no recognition of the enormity of the consequences he is dealing with and no filer by which he can modulate his behavior to deal with them.
So someone must do that for him and since the GOP has managed to control all other aspects of government in this country at least until 2018, it behooves them to do something to mediate their error. Robert Muller is working on his end but he is probably still months away from anything like a substantial result. So, unfortunately, it falls to Republican leadership, which is McConnell and Ryan to finally stand up and muscle their petulant and incompetent followers into line to stand up to this bombastic bully and force him into a corner.
There are people in the House and Senate who know the difference between right and wrong but up to now they have been in a tiny minority. It’s time for them to band together and save the nation from destruction by ignorance and ego.
The other night Trump led a band of genetic miscreants from one of our most backward states in booing a man before whom they should all be in their knees in thanks and supplication. Trump was attacking John McCain because McCain refused to do the wrong thing and vote for a healthcare bill that Trump doesn’t even understand, most certainly has not read, and only wants because in his small mind it will give him what he sees as a win. So Trump demagogues his brain dead followers into attacking a man whose fee Trump should be kissing. This man fought bravely and spent five years in a prison camp while Trump was using his old man’s money to avoid the draft. Why is it that all the assholes that are too cowardly to fight want to put on a uniform and cover themselves with unearned medals? (Check out the North Korean general staff!) This is what we now have leading our country and leading it into the abyss.
The Democrats don’t have the power to stop Trump, only the Republicans with their majority in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court can even slow this race to oblivion but they have to have the intestinal fortitude to do something and so far they have shown neither inclination nor ability to do anything to even slow him down. The GOP leadership combined with the business community has to approach Trump and tell him that it’s over, that his childish behavior is putting the entire nation in jeopardy.
There will be no convincing Trump about anything he doesn’t want to do himself. He only believes in what he has conceived in his own mind. There must be force. There must be a situation developed whereby those approaching him can say if you don’t do this, we will do that and be clearly able to deliver on their threat because that’s all Trump understands. Maybe faced with diminution of power and at least in his mind, disgrace, he can be convinced to act presidential or to at best cede some powers to those who know how to use them. At least, maybe this could buy time until Mueller organizes a case against him.
It doesn’t appear that Mueller will ever get him on collusion with the Russians but like all these political messes, he may be able to get him on what he has done to elude that charge. They didn’t get Nixon on breaking and entering but on his unlawful efforts to cover that crime up. They didn’t get Clinton on his sexual activity with a young woman; they got him on lying about it. They same will probably be true with Trump and all that he has done to cover up his associates activities with the Russians.