Its now more than clear that Russia interfered with our election. What’s also clear is that they wanted to get caught because they wanted this because they wanted us to know that they could do whatever they wanted and we wouldn’t be able to stop them. They have admitted this on Russian TV. They make fun of us, stating that Trump will do nothing. Why? Why are they so sure that Trump won’t order us to knock them out? Don’t forget that Trump is the one they wanted in office. They accomplished this and now they are taking advantage of it. Trump has never moved to implement the sanctions voted by congress against Russia. Right now he is doing nothing to act against the Russian attack on our elections, even though it’s now common knowledge. Why? What do they have on him? It’s pretty clear that we have a President that is either indebted to, or being blackmailed by, the Russians. Trump is the Manchurian Candidate! As such, he has installed in the government, people like Jared Kushner who couldn’t get a security clearance for over a year because of his associations with the Russians. In any normal American government Kushner would already be gone but this is no normal American government. This is a compromised government, a government that floundered about attacking everyone else as being security risks before it got in office. Now we have over one hundred thirty members of the White House staff that can’t get a clearance but are still working there and we have a government that’s completely compromised. It would be like having Goebbels serving as vice-president during WWII.
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So all the noise about Jared Kushner is really just a symptom of everything that’s wrong with the Trump administration. Okay, maybe not everything. There is so much wrong that it boggles the mind, but there are a couple of crippling problems that Donald Trump brought with him on the trip from Trump Tower to his new home in Washington, DC.
Trump came to DC with the conviction that he was the smartest person in any room and that was all he needed to be the President. He had run a small family business where his word was law, where he brooked no opposition and where his natural criminal tendencies played to success on the job. Certain realities seem to have never occurred to Trump. The millions that his old man gave him to get started in his business would not be of help in the White House. The money he made by stiffing those who worked for him was going to be a detriment as President. He would not simply be able to file for some kind of bankruptcy when he screwed up a deal with one of our allies. Trump was used to always being right because he held the power of good paying jobs over everyone who worked for him. Before the White House, there was no one out there to call bullshit on his lies. Now there was the media. They didn’t seem to care that he was President so all, save Fox News, Sinclair and Right Wing Talk Radio, quickly became the enemy. Trump thought, and he’s said as much many times and in many ways, that being clever was enough to run a successful country. During he elections he constantly ran his mouth about how he was a better dealmaker and how he would fix everything the first day.
To anyone with any understanding of government he looked like a fool. Within days of his election he was proved to be a fool. Trump entered the White House intent n proving to everyone that he was the smartest guy on the planet when he was just the luckiest. A perfect storm of a bad candidate, naively ignorant voters and a large segment of the population, who were completely disgusted with business as usual in the capital, coalesced with serious Russian interference to put the worst possible candidate in office. Trump took it to be a mandate.
Trump’s background has shown clearly as a cheap crook and con man he had learned to trust no one and he brought that aspect of his background to the White House with him. So instead of looking for the most suitable actor for each position he had to fill, and there were thousands of positions, Trump always chose someone he felt he could trust rather than someone who knew how to do the job. This created a billowing cloud of ignorance and incompetence to surround and smother the administration.
In one important respect, governing a country is pretty much like any other job. Experience counts. It counts big, but Trump ignored that, preferring to fill the White House with cronies rather than functioning, experienced, people who knew how to run a government. After carrying on about how Hillary had compromised our national security and leading the cheers by his swamp rat mob of “Lock her up,” Trump proceeded to ignore anything even approaching functional national security by hiring a bunch of sleazy self promoters who were involved in grubby deals with everyone from Saudi Arabia to Russia, putting all of them, it turns out, in a position to undermine the security of the country. This rogues gallery of fiscal pimps included but is not limited to, Paul Manafort, Robert Gates, Mike Flynn and even his son-in-law Jared Kushner. As if to attempt to make matters worse, most of these characters couldn’t pass through the FBI process that allows government workers to get a security clearance. There are currently over 130 such miscreants working in the White House, Jared Kushner, who has, after a year and much arm twisting, finally gotten some kind of clearance, being the most notable.
Kushner, Trump’s boyish sidekick, like most of the others in his position in the administration, seems to have inherited his post through a personal association with Trump rather than by any qualifications he may have had. Regardless, Trump put Kushner in charge of just about anything he didn’t want to run himself. With absolutely no experience, no background, Kushner was suddenly in charge of our foreign policy, the mid-east peace process, our infrastructure and just about everything else that fell off Trump’s desk.
So how is that working out so far? Well, after a little more than a year and a half in office, our crumbling infrastructure shows nothing in the works that would indicate it will ever be fixed At Kushner’s bidding, Trump has announced we recognize Jerusalem as henceforth being the capital of Israel, just about solidifying the fact that there will be no Mid-East peace, at least for the foreseeable future. And how is our other foreign policy going?
Well, Trump did actually pick Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. Tillerson, former CEO of Exon, like Trump a businessman but one with far more experience in international deal making but also like the rest of his appointments, one with no government experience and worse with a history of deal making with Russia. But after he was appointed, Tillerson didn’t bother to staff his department so what used to be a huge government agency employing well over a thousand workers, had him running around refilling his own toilet paper containers. That left a lot of work for Jared, who didn’t know how to do any of it. It has recently been revealed by our intelligence services that four nations, who are ostensibly our allies, have conspired on how to manipulate Kushner in their dealings with him. They are Saudi Arabia, Israel, China and Mexico.
That these nations even think that this is possible only goes back to the fact that neither Kushner nor anyone in the administration understands the protocols that must be maintained in international dealings if we are to have any success at all. Trump doesn’t take briefings seriously. Kushner couldn’t even be briefed for a long time, because of his failure to get a security clearance. It seems, almost no one, in this administration is in a position to know “what the hell is going on” or to be able to tell anyone else. So our future will have us stumbling blindly about in shark infested international waters as long as Trump rules.
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Trump went nuts a while back, suddenly calling for all kinds of gun restrictions, even going so far as to demand that guns be illegally taken from their owners before due process was executed. Of course he turned that around the next day, but that’s SOP. It’s really time the fat one read the constitution. He has been operating out of ignorance far too long, but that’s only part of the problem. The real problem is that no matter what he says, no one can take it seriously. Trump has lied and changed his position so often in the last two years that his statements carry no weight whatsoever. Heidi Przybyla pointed this out on Morning Joe and it caused Noah Rothman, a conservative hack that writes for Commentary to get all his feathers ruffled and to attack her, saying that if we don’t believe the President it leaves us vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. It’s really time for Rothman to get his head out of his ass. We don’t believe the President!We can’t because he has proven over and over to be nothing but a serial liar. Not only doesn’t Trump understand the truth, he doesn’t even have a concept of what it is. The idea of truth as most intelligent people understand it has no place in Trump’s twisted mind. Rothman is a fool. If Scarborough needs another conservative on his morning panel he would be better served to have someone with some intelligence and a broader worldview.
The Democrats, in fact all logical thinking people not motivated by greed, would have loved to have been able to believe Trump’s stance on gun control was serious, but history tells us it was just another of his insane rants and in fact his further babbling about ignoring gun owners constitutional rights just proves that. Trump doesn’t really know what he wants. He has no morals or values to direct him, so he just flounders around depending on flawed instincts to guide his non-functional blunders. Does he really want tighter gun restrictions? No. He may have for the few seconds it made to make those statements but that means nothing. He took over thirty million from the NRA. He speaks of them as great guys and his friends. Does he really want to slap them in the face now? Maybe. There is really no way to tell. We are not dealing with a rational man and thirty percent of the population just doesn’t care. This country isn’t in trouble by accident. We earned it when we elected a man we already knew was a crook and a con man, to the Presidency.
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I was registering on the antics of Trump in the White House yesterday and I started thinking back to the last five or six administrations and how they had advanced or detracted from the American dream. It was pretty scary.
Going back to Ronald Reagan there has only been one president that has left this country in good financial shape. Bill Clinton left the country with a financial surplus, no other president has. Every other President has left us with a deficit, sometimes a staggering one.
That realization led me looking at the significant achievement of each of the Presidents from Reagan on. For Ronnie it was undoubtedly the Iran-Contra affair. Sure, I know that dyed in the wool Republicans will consider the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union his best, but conservative pundits belief’s to the contrary, Reagan had about as much to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union as did my then ten-year-old son. Communism collapsed because it is an unworkable economic and social system; that and television. The people of the communist world were starving to death. But because of TV, for the first time in the history of man they were able to see that the rest of the world was not in the same fix as they were. It was as simple as that. The Soviet system, lacking in motivation, bereft of any kind of entrepreneurship, was killing itself while the rest of the world was flourishing. Reagan had nothing to do with that, he just benefited from the timing.
Ian-Contra, on the other hand, was a direct result of a presidential decision, carried out by loyal military aides. This was basically a criminal operation that led to the booming of the drug traffic in this country. It was one of the most damaging things ever instituted by an administration in this country.
George HW Bush, who spent an uneventful four years, with some insignificant tax legislation as his only accomplishment followed Reagan.
Bush was followed by Bill Clinton, possibly the most functional president of the group. He is the only one who has left e country better off fiscally than he found it. He would have been hailed to the skies if he’d found a way to keep his dick in his pants but he was an inveterate womanizer and that led to his dismal ratings as president.
George W. Bush, who despite strong attempts by Trump to best him as the worst president in United States history, followed Clinton. Trump is floundering around trying to do everything wrong while Bush was able to achieve the goal of actually doing everything wrong. He wasn’t a sociopathic liar like Trump but he did just about everything else wrong. He started out by lying about WMD’s in order to get us into a needless war with Iraq. Then he let his unholy trio of Cheney,Rumsfeld and Libby attack Valerie Plame, the hero CIA agent and wife of Ambassador Joe Wilson who wrote a magazine piece exposing the truth about the fact that there were no WMDs in Iraq. This led to the government forcing Plame into retirement and the abandoning of agents and resources in eight countries that had been connected to her. Many were killed as a result of this.
Libby was later convicted of revealing Palme’s classified status and sentenced to two and a half years in the can but Trump pardoned him. Libby should have been drawn and quartered. But Bush wasn’t finished. He began cutting regulations on business and banking and this quickly led to the second biggest crash in the history of the nation. He final left office a complete disgrace.
Bush was followed by Barak Obama who, after years of talk, passed a viable health care law. He preceded that with legislation that bailed out the failing auto industry saving hundreds of thousands of jobs. He followed that with more legislation that helped save mid-western manufacturing. Then he lost congress and for the last six years of his administration nothing much happened. He never really learned to play the politics role in Washington so in the end he was a disappointment. Especially when he passed on making a recess appointment of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court. He was, however, like George HW Bush a laudable role model as a President.
Now we have Trump, a blundering, psychotic, serial liar who is a disgrace to any job he would ever hold, let alone President of the United States. He’s a racist, a misogynist, a bigot and easily the greatest embarrassment this country has eve ever had in the White House. If he is allowed to continue in office, he will easily outstrip Bush as the worst in history. All he is lacking now is a major catastrophe like Bush’s war or his financial crash.
So of our last six presidents, four Republican and two Democrat we have one ineffectual gentleman, George HW Bush, one semi-senile ex-actor with the wrong moral values, Reagan, one functional politician with no self control, Clinton, one absolutely dumb clown with a great personality and no idea what he was doing, George W. Bush, one absolute gentleman with good ideas but no concept of how to execute them in a political game, Obama, and one egomaniacal sociopath one is step from an institution, Trump. If I’m an Independent and I am, I have to look for a Democrat as our next president but only if a lazy, indolent Democratic Party manages to come up with some functional plan by which to run this country. So far I haven’t seen even a hint of one.