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Donald Trump 2018

TheFlyingBoat

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Ghost of LL

Ghost of LL 15539

Posted
Posted
18 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

Millions of lives. Billions of dollars. All wasted.

Pulling out of Syria is a good thing. Fewer of our tax dollars will now go to killing innocent people.

Even more innocent people will die.  And we'll end up spending even more in blood and treasure dealing with the consequences.

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SInce y'all seem to be my clearinghouse for all things political, let me tell a story.  A couple of them, actually.  Three, if you want to be specific. When I was 14 I went with a family frien

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105298

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, bad_teammate said:

But guys guys guys were <<<THIS CLOSE>>> to installing peaceful liberal democracies with bullets and bombs. You know, like it always works!

Your point is a powerful one when it comes to the lesson of "think about it long and hard before you step into that shit."  It's not nearly as powerful once we already decided to step into it.  Now we're committed -- even Colin Powell noted that if you break it, you buy it.  

We absolutely fucked up and helped create the perfect growing conditions for ISIS.  We made the mess.  We had an obligation to clean it up.  The point of "we shouldn't have made the mess in the first place" may be a good one, but it's academic now.  And now....we're going to repeat the same stupid fucking mistake, and to top it off, it's not even a strategic or tactical decision, it's just a transitory brainfart traveling through the colon that Trump calls a head.

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High Plains Drifter

High Plains Drifter 11051

Posted
Posted
19 minutes ago, Lagunamadre said:

We just better hope we never need any favors in that region ever again because what we are doing to the Kurds is fucking cold-blooded and will be remembered. Also, be ready to accept Iran expanding their influence in the region. 

The Kurds will be bombing our embassies now. Thanks Obama!

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Hugo Stiglitz

Hugo Stiglitz 23367

Posted
Posted

We currently have more troops deployed to the Mexican border fighting a fictitious caravan than in Syria.

However, the guys in Syria were actually doing good work, like killing Russian mercenaries trying to capture territory we were protecting. 

We have troop buildups all over the globe for a reason... so shit doesn’t get out of hand.  

But those fleeing women and children at the southern border...they’re the real threat.

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bad_teammate

bad_teammate 13224

Posted
Posted
5 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

Even more innocent people will die.  And we'll end up spending even more in blood and treasure dealing with the consequences.

I have no idea on which you base this certainty. I have 15+ years of evidence backing up my completely obvious observation that our unilateral military adventurism doesn't lead to the results we claim to desire.

You have nothing. You have no articulated rationale for why we will have to spend "more" in either blood or treasure. And what "consequences" would you even be talking about?

1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:

Your point is a powerful one when it comes to the lesson of "think about it long and hard before you step into that shit."  It's not nearly as powerful once we already decided to step into it.  Now we're committed -- even Colin Powell noted that if you break it, you buy it.  

ok let's make sure to base the wasting of billions more and the killing of millions more on this guy

colin_powell_at_the_un_feb_5_2003.jpg

Quote

We absolutely fucked up and helped create the perfect growing conditions for ISIS.  We made the mess.  We had an obligation to clean it up.  The point of "we shouldn't have made the mess in the first place" may be a good one, but it's academic now.  And now....we're going to repeat the same stupid fucking mistake, and to top it off, it's not even a strategic or tactical decision, it's just a transitory brainfart traveling through the colon that Trump calls a head.

How? Beyond being happy with the simplicity of the metaphor of making a mess and cleaning it up, what on earth are you even talking about? What would it look like and how would we help facilitate that end goal?

All you are advocating is managing our ego and pride by convincing ourselves we can make it right. We can't.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105298

Posted
Posted
6 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

All you are advocating is managing our ego and pride by convincing ourselves we can make it right. We can't.

We can't make it right.  You are absolutely correct on that point.

Of course, that unreachable goal isn't the point.

We can't make it right.  But we can help manage how "wrong" it gets.  

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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28797

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, softlynow said:

I don’t watch “unscripted” tv. Can one of y’all Survivor, Pawn Stars or Big Brother fans tell me what usually happens now at this point in the plot? 

 

24 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

You say that like you think fans of those shows are watching unscripted tv. They're not.  

 

17 minutes ago, softlynow said:

“Did I?”

Obviously yes. 

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RPM

RPM 26343

Posted
Posted
6 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

We're like a coke-addled gambler in Vegas convinced that we can make it right with just one more bet.

Like HBO thinking Vinyl would be a hit if they just aired more episodes while everyone is wondering wtf are you thinking.

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32425

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Until Nancy Pelosi can claim credit for reopening the government 

But let's think about this.

Nancy & Company come up with something. Send it to the Senate.  Hey, Mitch and the boys agree, so yeah!

But no funding for a fucking wall, so he decides to veto it again.  Sure, 2/3rds can override, but in the House?  

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Hugo Stiglitz

Hugo Stiglitz 23367

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11 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

We're like a coke-addled gambler in Vegas convinced that we can make it right with just one more bet.

I’m not a fan of how we use the military as the primary instrument to conduct foreign policy, we could do a lot better with fewer resources invested.

However, it would take a massive ideological, structural, and logistical paradigm shift that seems unattainable in the short term.  

Nevertheless, our military hegemony is better than the alternative of isolationism. 

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lemonlime

lemonlime 5503

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Posted

Putin's gotta be laughing his ass off at this level of dysfunction.  His chosen party still controls the government, and it's going to shut down because the toddler in chief didn't get funding for a useless prop.  And the options are either (1) Putin's chosen king gives in showing his weakness, (2) the government shuts down/stays shut, or (3) we waste a shit ton of money we don't have on something we don't need that's going to tick off our allies.

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Biff Tannen

Biff Tannen 45717

Posted
Posted
4 minutes ago, lemonlime said:

Putin's gotta be laughing his ass off at this level of dysfunction.  His chosen party still controls the government, and it's going to shut down because the toddler in chief didn't get funding for a useless prop.  And the options are either (1) Putin's chosen king gives in showing his weakness, (2) the government shuts down/stays shut, or (3) we waste a shit ton of money we don't have on something we don't need that's going to tick off our allies.

What is stopping him from going with option 2?  Does he get 25th amendment'd if he just continually refuses to sign the CR?

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SuingToGetAMessageBoard?

SuingToGetAMessageBoard? 3861

Posted
Posted

 

 

12 minutes ago, lemonlime said:

Putin's gotta be laughing his ass off at this level of dysfunction.  His chosen party still controls the government, and it's going to shut down because the toddler in chief didn't get funding for a useless prop.  And the options are either (1) Putin's chosen king gives in showing his weakness, (2) the government shuts down/stays shut, or (3) we waste a shit ton of money we don't have on something we don't need that's going to tick off our allies.

My guess is they are trying to figure out how to give him something to save face that isn't just going to disappear into the wind.  If they approve $600,000,000 for advance study and feasibility for wall structures and eminent domain across the deserts of blah blah blah, that's fine.  But Ds are about to take over and will tell him to shove it next time he asks.  So we are out $600 million.

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32425

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Posted

How can a family that can’t run a charity run a country?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/opinion/trump-russia-michael-cohen-charity.html?fallback=0&amp;recId=1EdSCDhTeSCrvqDqv9YQW7lRxqy&amp;locked=0&amp;geoContinent=NA&amp;geoRegion=OK&amp;recAlloc=top_conversion&amp;geoCountry=US&amp;blockId=most-popular&amp;imp_id=818862013

 

Quote

I will be going on book leave soon — today is my last column for a while because of the holiday schedule — to write what I believe to be the most important thing that I’ve ever written.

No, it’s not about Donald Trump, just in case you were wondering.

But since I have written almost exclusively about Trump for more than two years, please allow me this parting assessment: It is so much worse than I thought.

 

Quote

My original objections to Trump, the things that pushed me into the Resistance, were his immorality, dishonesty, fraudulence and grift.

I freely admit now that I was seeing only the pointy edge of an enormous machine. I had no idea how immoral Trump actually is.

 

Spoiler

The same month that Trump pulled the outrageous stunt of inviting women who had accused Bill Clinton of inappropriate sexual behavior to his debate with Hillary Clinton, his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, apparently under his instructions, facilitated a $130,000 payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels to prevent her from telling America that she had a sexual encounter with Trump, who was married with a small child. This payment was a few months after Cohen had helped arrange a $150,000 deal between American Media Inc., the parent company of The National Enquirer, to buy the story of the Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also claimed a sexual relationship with Trump.

According to prosecutors, both were campaign finance violations — federal crimes — and now a judge has sentenced Cohen to three years in prison for that and other crimes.

The fact that Trump would be directly implicated in a federal crime that took place on the verge of the election and may have helped hand that election to him is mind-blowing to me.

Trump, for his part, lied about these payments and denied them — while also having those around him lie about them on his behalf — until he could simply no longer lie about them anymore. Then came the roulette wheel of revolving explanations that makes one dizzy because of their silliness.

Just this week, the Trump Foundation agreed to dissolve under pressure from the New York attorney general, who found that the foundation functioned “as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests” and engaged in “a shocking pattern of illegality,” including coordinating with Trump’s presidential campaign.

How can a family that can’t run a charity run a country?

But of course, that is not all. Nearly every aspect of Trump’s life is now under investigation for wrongdoing, something I could not have foreseen.

I could not have predicted the extraordinary lengths to which the president would go to obstruct justice and undermine the rule of law, nor that he would do these things in full view, for everyone to see.

I could not have predicted, when I first wrote that Trump was a pathological liar, that his rate of lying would increase with his time in office, rather than decrease. As The Washington Post Fact Checker put it in September:

“Trump’s tsunami of untruths helped push the count in The Fact Checker’s database past 5,000 on the 601st day of his presidency. That’s an average of 8.3 Trumpian claims a day, but in the past nine days — since our last update — the president has averaged 32 claims a day. When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. He passed the 2,000 mark on Jan. 10 — eight months ago.”

Just this month, the newspaper’s Fact Checker was forced to create a new category of lying just for the Trump era: the “Bottomless Pinocchio” for “when a politician refuses to drop a claim that has been fact checked as three or four Pinocchios, keeps saying it over and over and over again, so that it basically becomes disinformation, propaganda.”

I could not have predicted the overwhelming number of contacts that would have existed between people in Trump’s orbit and the Russians during the campaign, or the number of people who would take plea deals and ultimately be charged, indicted or convicted of lying about those contacts.

I couldn’t have predicted any of it, but here we are, and the president, his congressional backers and his citizen supporters are continuing to tell us that this doesn’t matter as much as we think, that this is a politically driven prosecution, that everyone does what Trump has done.

They are all wrong. This is huge, and the longer we pretend that it isn’t, the more damage we do to the health and stability of our own country.

While I am away, I will enjoy not having to follow the hourly insanities too closely, but every day I will worry about the republic in which we live. Trump has the capacity to damage or even destroy it. That’s not hyperbole. That’s an observation informed by a close reading of history.

 

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bad_teammate

bad_teammate 13224

Posted
Posted
35 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

We can't make it right.  But we can help manage how "wrong" it gets.  

At some point, there has to be an idea beyond platitudes that motivates our continued military adventurism. Right? I mean, it can't just be metaphor and aphorism all the way down, can it?

What is our end-game in Syria? What's the specific outcome that (1) we would like and that (2) our current military action is bringing to bear?

19 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

I’m not a fan of how we use the military as the primary instrument to conduct foreign policy, we could do a lot better with fewer resources invested.

However, it would take a massive ideological, structural, and logistical paradigm shift that seems unattainable in the short term.  

Nevertheless, our military hegemony is better than the alternative of isolationism. 

Great false choice.

We could be a normal participant in the UN Security Council and not, in solo missions, murder millions of brown people in order to gratify our inflated sense of self. How about that?

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RomaVicta

RomaVicta 30002

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Lagunamadre said:

We just better hope we never need any favors in that region ever again because what we are doing to the Kurds is fucking cold-blooded and will be remembered. Also, be ready to accept Iran expanding their influence in the region. 

We've always played Lucy to their Charlie Brown. It's a national disgrace.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105298

Posted
Posted
Just now, bad_teammate said:

What is our end-game in Syria? What's the specific outcome that (1) we would like and that (2) our current military action is bringing to bear?

THERE IS NO END GAME.  Thus, the strength of your point about starting a dance that you can't just walk away from.

What is the GOAL?  To keep the circumstances that allow a violent jihadist movement, proven to inflict horrendous suffering both locally and globally, below a boil.  That's it.

Diseases, fires, floods, ISIS: if your argument is "you can't totally eliminate them, so don't do anything," that's bad logic.  PARTICULARLY when we helped create the "disease" at issue.  You don't stop them from happening.  You manage them.

It's a messy fucking business.  Again, a big reason why we shouldn't have entered into it so cavalierly.  But we're in this business now.

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

Posted
Posted
3 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

THERE IS NO END GAME.  Thus, the strength of your point about starting a dance that you can't just walk away from.

What is the GOAL?  To keep the circumstances that allow a violent jihadist movement, proven to inflict horrendous suffering both locally and globally, below a boil.  That's it.

Diseases, fires, floods, ISIS: if your argument is "you can't totally eliminate them, so don't do anything," that's bad logic.  PARTICULARLY when we helped create the "disease" at issue.  You don't stop them from happening.  You manage them.

It's a messy fucking business.  Again, a big reason why we shouldn't have entered into it so cavalierly.  But we're in this business now.

Does the state in which this is taking place have a say in any of this?

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bad_teammate

bad_teammate 13224

Posted
Posted
4 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

THERE IS NO END GAME.  Thus, the strength of your point about starting a dance that you can't just walk away from.

What is the GOAL?  To keep the circumstances that allow a violent jihadist movement, proven to inflict horrendous suffering both locally and globally, below a boil.  That's it.

Diseases, fires, floods, ISIS: if your argument is "you can't totally eliminate them, so don't do anything," that's bad logic.  PARTICULARLY when we helped create the "disease" at issue.  You don't stop them from happening.  You manage them.

It's a messy fucking business.  Again, a big reason why we shouldn't have entered into it so cavalierly.  But we're in this business now.

Pulling out of unilateral military action is "don't do anything"? Either you're not thinking rationally or you're just operating in pure bad faith.

We have international bodies intended to deal with international problems. We have powerful non-military tools to use in diplomacy. We are squandering both of those with our unilateral military adventurism.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105298

Posted
Posted
Just now, Fozzz said:

Does the state in which this is taking place have a say in any of this?

It did.

But that ship sailed.

All of these arguments are based on "we shouldn't have fucked shit up in the first place."  Nifty.  BUT....irrelevant.  Because we did.  You don't get to go back in time and rearrange the chess board.  You play the board as the pieces lie.  The fact that we helped put those pieces in their current position emphasizes that point.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105298

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, bad_teammate said:

We have international bodies intended to deal with international problems. We have powerful non-military tools to use in diplomacy. We are squandering both of those with our unilateral military adventurism.

Well, my starting point is my acknowledgment of the fact that we don't live in a fantasyland where 1) we didn't fuck shit up in the first place, and 2) even if we did, the UN will come in and clean up our mess so it won't come back and kill a shitload of people.  Neither of those things are real.  So, no, I didn't include them in my calculus.

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

It did.

But that ship sailed.

All of these arguments are based on "we shouldn't have fucked shit up in the first place."  Nifty.  BUT....irrelevant.  Because we did.  You don't get to go back in time and rearrange the chess board.  You play the board as the pieces lie.  The fact that we helped put those pieces in their current position emphasizes that point.

So because we did something bad in the past we need to keep doing that bad thing because...?  Maybe if we were willing to work with Syria and Russia they wouldn't mind us providing assistance in some capacity.  I don't see how illegally maintaining an occupation force in a country on the other side of the planet really helps anyone.  How is Afghanistan doing these days?  

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