In a written report and congressional testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, the senior members of the United States intelligence community had some interesting things to say. The most important arguments they made directly contradicted their boss, the president.
They assess, for example, that North Korea is unlikely to give up their nuclear program and that Iran is not currently pursuing their nuclear program. They assess that Russia is currently and will continue to interfere in our politics and our elections. They assess that ISIS is nowhere near defeated. They reiterated a report released to Congress last week by the Pentagon that insists climate change is a national security threat.
We’re supposed to have a chief executive and commander in chief who is a customer for this kind of intelligence. Our president is supposed to be the primary customer for these types of assessments. But that’s not the situation we have in this country right now. At the moment, our president has taken public positions contrary to every one of the assessments I highlighted above, and he’s simply not interested in contrary evidence. He is certainly not interested in being contradicted.
Fortunately, our intelligence community leaders seem to have enough stature and self-confidence to provide an honest threat assessment and to testify about it truthfully before Congress, but there are other people with less stature and security who will shy away from giving candid information to our elected representatives if they know the president’s stated position is different.
It’s a problem that Congress can’t get reliable information from our various agencies, but it’s an even bigger problem that our president, who is the final decider on many issues, is living in an alternative universe where up is down and left is right.
I knew all that. I must have ingested it somehow. How come our commander in chief didn’t or pretends not to? it wouldn’t have anything to do with that fella Putin would it?
i’m trying to imagine a reality-based article about the current head of state that could not begin with these words.
I also saw that NOAA responded on their main Twitter acct to his claim comment that Vortex was moving in and asking global waming (yes he misspelled it) to come back.
Their reply was simple and sweet. ‘No”. Then they went on to explain.
Trump and his rabid fans live in a Fox/Rush world, where apparently Ann Coulter and/or Sean Hannity are the Deciders in Chief.
Guess Trump needs to hear from them about what to do, if anything, about any of these threats.
I’m guessing: probably do nothing, except kiss Korea’s butt, rail against Iran, and say climate change is a LIEbrul hoax… or something.
As long as Trump appears to be owning the Libruls, all is well in Trumpland.
Garbage in, garbage out. What could he possibly be “right” about? And how could it happen? A stopped watch is right twice a day? Even a blind pig finds a nut occasionally?
I’d say “no” even to those instances of pure chance. The poisoned shit-brain of Der Trumper perversely can be relied upon to home in on “Wrong!” for literally every evaluation of fact. Add in professional “conservative” crackpots like von Bolton and Pompous-eo to “advise” him and the chances of correctness obviously center precisely on zero.
So Der Trumper seems the Col. Klink of presidents—but I’d have to scrutinize the record of another “Always Wrong” prez, Dubya, to see who really takes the palm.
Next to Trump, “W” is Eisenhower and Einstein, wrapped up in one.
I really do think a post on this subject by Booman would be interesting. So far, in terms of actual destruction, economic meltdown and global killing, Bushco is in the lead, IMO. But the National Trumpalists have likely done more to actually poison American society and wreck democracy, both here and abroad. Was Prez Cheney really that much “better” a person than Trumper? Dickey C. had his own severe personality disorders.
Too big an OT subject for this thread.
. . . then Trump’s still got a way to go to surpass dubya. (With the caveat that much of Trump’s damage that’s already inflicted — e.g., ecological and to societal and democratic norms and just basic decency — is yet to be fully, overtly expressed.)
Just ask the million (+/- several 100K) prematurely dead Iraqis.
But then, he’s only had 2 years!
Give him time!May that ability to inflict harm end real, real soon!Well, overt harm inflicted is gonna be an important metric on historic awfulness. Trumper is without question the most unqualified, unfit and unprepared person ever “elected” to the position (so far), and the worst statesman and leader we have ever seen, by far. Trumper surpasses Bushco there, and that’s saying something! But National Trumpalism simply hasn’t killed as many people worldwide in its (shorter) term in office. Obviously, Bushco loved illegal wars of aggression, perhaps because Cheney and von Rumsfeld saw themselves as such wonderful field-marshals, who could dupe the (previous) “conservative” popular-vote-losing Prez-Imbecile into seeing himself as a glorious heroic “wartime” prez.
As csm points out, surely a big difference is that one has to grant some sort of institutional “competence” to the dramatis personae of Bushco—monsters like Cheney and Rumsfeld had at least been “in the room” during past admins, even if the lessons they learned were perverted. Our absurd National Trumpalists make Hitler’s collection of unqualified chicken farmers, thugs and rubes look like Churchill’s cabinet. But the manifest lack of fitness of most of Trumper’s Team of Crackpots (compared to Bushco’s) is certainly crucial.
Bushco of course did not deviate from the debated and accepted tenets of the “conservative” intellectuals of the day, the interventionist Neo-cons and rightwing American Century blatherers like Krystal, et al. Whereas (at least on foreign policy), the demented Russian asset Trumper surely is following his own (i.e. Putin’s) compromised path, without support from the recognized rightwing policy intellectuals. (The professional goof Bolton has taken the WH job as a capstone to his illustrious “career” and to see if he can militarize Trumper to a greater degree).
On domestic and tax policy, Bushco and National Trumpalism are pretty much on the same page, with National Trumpalism being more inclined to overtly wreck the hated federal government. Both were delighted to ruin the fiscal position of the government and eschew regulation of our Noble CEOs. Both admins operated to undo everything the previous (successful) Dem prez had done. Both men put multiple 48 year old white male conservative activists masquerading as “justices” onto the Court, with Trumper having completed the process by creating our current democratically illegitimate “conservative” majority, who will successfully complete the destruction of the democracy started by “conservatism” so many decades ago.
But ultimately, the big difference will be the callous and open sadism and racism of National Trumpalism (baseless travel bans, The WALL, Kiddie Koncentration Kamps, etc, etc) and the fact that it has divided the nation into a democracy-supporting pluralist majority and an irreconcilable (white) authoritarian minority, as well as setting one racial element of the society against another(s).
And that was most certainly by design, not incompetence. And that is most certainly the feature that most pleases the incompetent white electorate, howevermuch they may bleat the contrary…
One difference between Trump and Cheney/Bush, is that Cheney/Bush calculated and planned ahead, and the outcomes they got were what they expected. And they had competent people to carry out evil deeds. In e.g., everything wrought by them, including the bad stuff, was a feature, not a bug.
Trump’s actions on the other hand are narrow in scope — make money; feed ego, and do not consider dependencies or outcomes. He has incompetent people trying to cover up his own incompetence. The result is a lot of bugs — Mueller, big loser on the wall, viewed as Putin’s puppet, exposed as a buffoon, getting mocked from the far right, having his ass handed to him politically, etc.
This is not to say Trump’s outcomes are benign; they’re not.
You can sum up the difference this way: Bush/Cheney worked at the behest of the same 1% (which they were members of) that drives US and global politics, whereas Trump does what he does, and damn the consequences, for his own personal benefit only to find himself ensnared by and thus beholden to a foreign adversary.
They went into Iraq based on PNAC assumptions while making no effort at all to understand what they were getting into. In fact, they rejected what the Joint Chiefs of Staff told them, and the outcome was not at all what they expected.
Yep. Agreed. If anything the region was badly destabilized as a consequence. Heck the region continues to become less stable. Competence is a prerequisite for good policy but not a guarantee. In this case, people who should have known better managed to really screw things up, and harmed countless human beings in the process. History will not look kindly at the US role in creating what was a total clusterf*ck.
. . . it seems important to keep front and center.
It cost way more than predicted $50 billion), and Iraq’s oil did not pay for reconstruction.
Rumsfeld predicted it would be over in a short period of time.
“Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that,” he said. “It won’t be a World War III.”
We’re still there.
This situation with Trump reminds me of a song, “If Loving You is Wrong, I don’t Want To Do Right”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYLVJqkErcI
Doing right by Putin means being wrong on not just threat assessments but foreign policy and Russian meddling in our elections.
I could see if there were one or two cases, but Trump is consistently wrong on damn near everything with respect to our own foreign policy and intelligence assessments.
Clearly, Trump is a president working against US interests.
Funny how his “errors” always seem to align with Putin’s interests, and never against them.
Discussions of who was worse, W. Bush or Trump, are simultaneously both highly infuriating and deeply boring.
They’re both among the very, very worst Presidents our Nation has ever suffered through. Those are the only comparisons which are worthwhile to make.