It’s not that I think there are any easy answers to the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear program, but don’t you think it’s a reckless blunder for our government (meaning Congress) to allow a complete dunderhead to remain in the Oval Office when he doesn’t listen to his own intelligence community?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Yes. But he’s not going anywhere before January 20, 2021.
>>don’t you think it’s a reckless blunder
yes,that’s what i think.
but there’s only one person whose opinion matters. Until Mitch McConnell thinks Trump is unacceptable, Trump stays.
Yep
They are all, meaning the Republican Party too to bottom, are perfectly happy being Putin’s puppets.
When they wear clothing that says `Rather be a Russian than a Democrat’ and the NRA has become a fully owned Putin subsidiary, Trump is just a symptom not a cause.
The entire Republican establishment is the metastasization of the malignant cancer of white supremacy at any cost. Just like the Civil War was treason to defend slavery as the most salient point of white supremacy at that time, the current anti-democratic, anti-minority, sexist, religious bigotry is the most salient point of white supremacy now.
These people feel like the desperate, cornered rats they are.
Yes.
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
I suppose he figures he can listen to his master in the Kremlin rather than Dan Coates and friends. So the question just might be has Putin pulled a fast one on our leader? Sort of a little something like a humiliation by Kim to bring him back into line. What could it be Putin wants now? Let’s watch closely.
If we are ever going to get this guy out of there it has to be now. And the only people on earth who have a chance other than Putin are the Dems through impeachment or election. I increasingly am thinking Mueller doesn’t have him but we will soon see. If Mueller comes up with nothing then the Dems should still talk up impeachment perhaps to win over the electorate if nothing else. We have to win or we face another four years of this utter garbage.
“If Mueller comes up with nothing…”.
We’re swimming in Trump’s propagandistic rhetoric, but we shouldn’t use it ourselves. Mueller has already come up with tons and tons of somethings, and his many cooperating witnesses have surely offered some meaningful evidence. Otherwise they’d have been sentenced already.
Nothing with Trump, at least nothing revealed.
That’s not correct. Trump is “Individual-1” in Cohen’s indictment.
Do you really believe they will go after him on that?
I would be furious if that criminal conspiracy is not part of the impeachment charges. It was a crime which was meant to give Trump an opportunity to win the election, and it worked. The charge is not what you would want to solely rely upon for impeachment of this serial criminal, but it’s absolutely important.
Well you can always charge him after he is president. In fact then we won’t need twenty jurors who think it was all a private matter. If they decide to impeach there is no doubt they will include this.
Yes much evidence and Cohen just provided a good deal more. But here’s the thing. Is there any direct evidence against him? I would have thought his little speech that began with “Russia if you’re listening…” was direct evidence but he now says that was just a joke. And will 20 republicans convict him on that ? I have my doubts. Same could be said about the checks he signed to reimburse Cohen or was that just payments for legal advice in a private matter?
Cohen told us the way he operates. He seems to stay away from direct orders and operates by inference like,. “we never had this meeting” and such. So what will Mueller say?
I think he has a serious narcistic personality disorder and can be dangerous. Mueller will have to nail him to get those 20 votes which I have my doubts. So, failing that, we have to be sure we knock him off in the general or we will have four more years of never ending lies and arguments about border walls.
And just to show us he never gives up he included the border wall in his budget at $8.6 bn. More shut downs down the road. But I am hoping Mueller’s got the goods on him or Adam Schiff and the dems.
Here is something new. He was just humiliated in NK. What happened? Is Putin unhappy with him?
The President has already been named in Cohen’s charging documents as an unindicted co-conspirator (“Individual-1”) who ordered Cohen to commit a crime.
It is extremely difficult for me to believe that the information which Mueller’s team has gotten from Flynn and Gates will not be enough to bring more indictments. It’s difficult to gauge what it will take for enough Republican Senators to vote for impeachment, but if Kushner, Don Jr., Ivanka and others are indicted and more is revealed about Trump’s actions, the President may become so severely damaged that even if DOJ decides that Orange Mussolini should not be indicted while in office he’ll become too toxic for the voters and Congress to continue to abide.
As far as whether he was “joking” when he asked Russia to steal information in order to help his campaign, well, come on! Is that claim plausible? After he made the request at his press conference, reporters immediately pushed him very hard, asking if he really thought it was acceptable to do such a thing. He defended his request very seriously and belligerently. He then went years without saying he was “joking”.
It’s preposterous to believe that horseshit will hold up to any public, political or legal scrutiny. It’s ludicrous. Any Senator who wants to run for re-election and claim he believed the President on that is welcome to try, particularly since there is almost certainly more major evidence to be revealed.
We know that any democrat would have long since been convicted. I think Cohen might be the one who takes him down. He seems to have a lot of material about his financial dealings. That could be his Achilles heel — greed. Here’s hoping. I also wonder when Putin gives up on him.
Having Trump anywhere near a Nuclear Trigger has a serious Steven King “Dead Zone” feeling about it. We could easily envision Trump played by Martin Sheen as the lunatic President who orders a nuclear strike.
But in this case, we got lucky. He “fell in love” with Rocket Man, perhaps the most idiotic but generally harmless thing we could have expected out of this volatile situation.
What we want is peace and no Nuclear Destruction. North Korea has nukes and is not going to give them up. That is a given. Attempting to pressure them to give up their Nukes is insanely dangerous. It is literally a matter of life and death to the regime. Kim knows perfectly well that he and his clique would be ruthlessly murdered and overthrown should he bargain away North Korea’s only shield – their nuclear deterrence.
You take a look at Trump’s threats to invade Venezuela and our actual invasion of Iraq or Syria, with how gently we have to deal with North Korea. Because they have nukes. You cannot threaten to invade a country with nuclear weapons. They will use them. And there is no defense.
An intelligent President would know this because he would be briefed carefully by the State Department, CIA, DIA and other agencies with intelligence capability before they ever dreamed of issuing a policy position, let alone a major summit with North Korea. Trump “went with his gut.”
His gut told him that “Little Rocket Man” was a guy like him – just needed to be told about the possibilities of doing “a wonderful real estate deal, because this is just a great location for a resort. I mean it’s great, got great facilities. And a Golf Resort. Trump Resort International Pyongyang. We’ll do a deal once we get this nuclear negotiation wrapped up. It’ll be great. We’ll make money, you’ll make money. We’ll both make a lot of money and it will be just great!”
You know some version of that conversation had to have happened at some point in the secret negotiations. Trump never goes anywhere he’s not thinking about whether it would be a good spot to open a club or resort or whatever.
We have the best, completely unparalleled intelligence capability. Best in the world. And we have a President who is too stupid to even listen to it. He goes with his “gut.” And his gut always tells him to do something stupid, because your intestines just aren’t very smart.
So in this volatile situation, Trump could randomly go in any direction, like the famous random “Drunk’s Walk”.
But, instead of going into a rage when his idiot initiative failed, he just shrugged and returned to the US. He didn’t go into an insane rage like usual and order retaliation. He’s always into retaliation against anybody who crosses him. But, not Kim so far. He’s judged Rocket Man, and the Rocket Man is his kind of guy, and they’re still in love!
So, he’s not going to do much to punish his guy. We dodged a bullet there. Because belligerent stupidity and Nuclear Weapons do not mix. Like Napalm and matches in the hands of your 5 year old child. And somehow he doesn’t set the house on fire.
Sometimes the parents come home and find the babysitters are all asleep and that the child has piled up a small pyramid of Napalm canisters in the basement and tried to strike a match. But, he was too clumsy and only scratched the matches not being able to light them. Then he got bored and left the whole big mess there for Mom to find when she turns on the basement light.
Disaster averted by accident.
Of course it is, but it is more important for the GOP to fix the Federal judiciary to its liking than it is to care for the res publica.
I would like to believe that there are enough patriots left in our government that would be willing to stop Trump from doing something truly insane, like starting a war that might result in massive causalities. Unfortunately, there is probably a non-zero chance that we might actually find out if this is true or not in the coming years considering how immature and unstable the guy seems to be.
Still, I would say that the “good” news is that guy appears to be motivated mostly by greed and ego, and those forces so far haven’t yet combined to produce a foreign entanglement with massive casualties- perhaps because Hannity and his ilk view the Democrats (AOC!) as the greatest threat to the world and probably haven’t talked up the president about how he could improve his poll numbers by starting a major conflict. However, I wouldn’t put that past them if Trumps numbers go down significantly. Would the MAGA idiots come out and cheer for him if Trump irradiated the Korean peninsula? I don’t know. What about if he nuked California? definitely.
Maybe it hasn’t yet resulted in a massive death toll, but anyway you look at it, what he and his Republican allies are doing domestically, without actually starting a war, is in itself a monumental catastrophe that will probably take America generations to recover from. And of course, with global climate change, we won’t have that kind of time.
On January 25, 2017, CNBC reported that Mar-A-Lago membership fees were doubling from $100,000 to $200,000. This appears to violate the emolument clause of the Constitution; an impeachment drive should have started on January 26th.
I hope you’re right that Senate Republicans really will vote to impeach Donald when it comes time for them to take a moral stand.
to believe our intelligence community
gawd knows I hate Trump,
but you are supposedly smart, in contrast.
you never learned nuthin’from
our wars abroad. Nuthin’.
Not even a pencil-sketch of the male organ.
Unfortunately, Trump is the voice of reason compared to members of Congress like this guy.
America’s problem is that the Republican party is led by con men and lunatics. Trump is more of the former than the latter. God forbid Lindsay ever convinces him that we could win a war with North Korea, painlessly.