monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

He's in trouble. The latest is that a Former campaign official tells the Times that they did know about meetings, and Sessions specifically told people in the campaign to deny it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/us/politics/trump-jeff-sessions-russia.html

It's very hard to see how Sessions didn't commit perjury in front of Congress, and Trump has been constantly lying about this as well.

Cycloptichorn

America’s love affair with uniformed men is problematic
The Economist, Oct 28th 2017

A POIGNANT feature of American bases in Iraq were their walls of Thank You cards sent by American schoolchildren. Often displayed outside the chow-hall, where the troops gathered to eat, they typically thanked them for “being over there to keep us safe”. Hardly any of the soldiers Lexington spoke to, during several trips to Iraq, believed that to be the case. Their Iraqi enemies were fighting a defensive war, not trying to launch one against America. Yet the soldiers accepted the sentiment unblushingly. No soldier expects the beloved chumps back home to understand what he gets up to. He just needs to feel appreciated.

This paradoxical tendency among soldiers, to hunger for the approval of civilians whose views they otherwise set little store by, came to mind during chief of staff John Kelly’s recent presentation in the White House briefing room. The retired marine general’s boss, President Donald Trump, had got himself into hot water after it emerged that he had not written to the grieving relatives of four soldiers killed in Niger, an oversight he made worse, characteristically, by falsely suggesting his predecessors hadn’t contacted Gold Star families much either. Worse still, in a call to the grieving widow of Sergeant La David Johnson, which was overheard and described by a family friend, Frederica Wilson, who is a Democratic congresswoman, the president crudely suggested her dead husband “knew what he signed up for”.

In response, Mr Kelly sought to delegitimise the president’s critics, by implying that, as they had little direct experience of military affairs, including the “selfless devotion that brings a man or woman to die on the battlefield”, they should not pass comment on them. Indeed, Mr Kelly went further, suggesting, to a group of awestruck journalists, that they were not merely incompetent to pass judgment on military affairs, but unworthy of doing so. “We don’t look down upon those of you who haven’t served,” he said as he left the podium. “We’re a little bit sorry because you’ll have never experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kind of things our servicemen and women do—not for any other reason than they love this country.”

Setting aside, for the moment, that this was a spurious defence of the president’s slander of his predecessors and his carelessness towards Mrs Johnson, Mr Kelly pointed to an important truth. The gulf between America’s armed forces and its civilians has never been greater. In 1990, 40% of young Americans had a military veteran for a parent; in 2014 only 16% did. But this dissonance has not, as the general implied, caused Americans to underappreciate the forces. To the contrary, it has encouraged, as his remarks also indicated, a highly romanticised view of military service, which is inaccurate and counter-productive at best.

Members of the armed forces are often patriotic. But many see their service primarily as a way to make a living, as the soaring cost of recruiting and retaining them indicates. Personnel costs have risen by over 50% in real terms since 2001. Acknowledging this truth takes nothing from their professionalism and valour, which your columnist has witnessed at close quarters. Nor is it disrespectful to fallen heroes such as Mr Johnson to dig a little deeper into their motivations. When the bullets fly, it is true, most soldiers really are motivated more by a great, self-denying sense of love than by money. Yet that momentous and inspiring emotion is primarily aimed at the comrades fighting either side of them, not the flag.

Meanwhile there are costs to America’s uncritical soldier worship. Most obviously, it gives the Department of Defence an outsize advantage in the battle for resources with civilian agencies. Today’s cuts to the State Department, whose officers are not noticeably less patriotic or public-spirited than America’s soldiers, are a dismal case in point.

The phenomenon also provides an easy opening for political opportunists, such as Mr Trump. His eagerness to hire former top brass—including James Mattis, H.R. McMaster and Mark Inch, a retired army general who was recently appointed to run the Bureau of Prisons, as well as Mr Kelly—was on one level a cynical bid to appropriate their hallowed reputation. And it is working. Where earlier soldier-politicians, including George Marshall and Colin Powell, were viewed as political figures, Mr Trump’s generals are widely considered to be above the political fray, including by the president’s critics, who look to them to moderate an errant commander-in-chief. Perhaps they do. But it is unwise to subject such powerful men to so little criticism, as Mr Kelly’s ill-judged intervention illustrates. On the one hand, the former marine implied that he, too, through the awfulness of his experience, as a commander who had sent men to their deaths, and as the father of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, was unimpeachable by journalists. On the other, his remarks, including a harsh, erroneous attack on Mrs Wilson, were highly partisan and contestable.

Those lovely men in uniform

A less-noted problem is that America’s unthinking reverence for its fighters is forestalling a badly needed reappraisal of how it organises its forces, and to what end. The fact is, America’s foreign-policy doctrines envisage a degree of global dominance, based on military might, which its volunteer force is now too small to enforce. And to increase the force sufficiently, on current trends, appears unaffordable or impossible. “This force cannot carry out that foreign policy,” concludes Andrew Bacevich, a historian and former army officer, who happens also to be a Gold Star father.

This constitutes a looming crisis, which could logically end in one of two ways. Either America will have to reintroduce conscription. Or it must curtail its military ambitions. Neither outcome is palatable to American policymakers, however, so the problem is seldom discussed. Maintaining the happy delusion that America’s forces are ideal and irreproachable makes that easier. But reality cannot be deferred indefinitely.

Quote izzy:

To paraphrase Hobbes, history will remember Trump's presidency as being nasty, brutish, and short.

Everybody knows that, and Blatham has posted about it extensively here. For the record, I agree the Repubs are far more corrupted than the Dems.


Brazile's book is contemporary, and relevant to this thread.


I don't really care what you believe.

But if Sessions does bail out, what will Trump put there to replace him? Chances are someone even more loyal and willing to subvert justice.

It's only going to be short if the Dems win the next election, and to do that, they need to reflect about what they did wrong in the past election.

Which we are trying to discuss here:

https://able2know.org/topic/404158-14#post-6532649


Join us and let's discuss it in the relevant thread.

The midterms are the focus, not the next presidential election. If Dems get a majority in congress and the senate, they can impeach and convict. A big if, sure, but still the midterms - not 2020.

Could Joe McCarthy have happened in a healthy political system? Barry Goldwater? Nixon? Ed Meese? Jack Abramoff? Rush Limbaugh? Fox?
Sarah Palin? Could the political power now wielded by the sprawling Koch operation have happened in a healthy system?

Factors which degraded the US political system have been a common subject of posts by many posters contribution on this thread (I've written hundreds myself). Further, this is an utterly common subject in current political analyses, for obvious reasons, and I have many books on exactly this subject on the shelf behind me.

But when you speak of a broken system, your tact is to suggest that blame rests with the DNC and the Clintons. That's remarkably block-headed. Trump arose within the right wing universe. He was the chosen GOP candidate. And now, a year after his victory and after many months of him being in the WH behaving as he has and speaking as he has, most of the right wing world including his party remains, for the most part, in support of what he's done. They're still behind him. And if it needs pointing out, every name listed in my first graph is a Republican or a GOP supporter. Further, if Trump for some reason disappears and Pence takes his place, do you imagine that the changes will be much deeper than a coat of fresh varnish?

It is not just valuable to discuss what has/is ******* up US politics and civil discourse, it is profoundly necessary. But the failure to honestly grasp the asymmetry between the two parties (and certainly, your personal failure to ever even write about this) is the key reason why so many of us here conclude that you are trolling and insincere.

They'd have to be confirmed by the Senate, which seems far-fetched in this environment.

Cycloptichorn

As I've said before, this sociopath believes he was elected to the position of Pharaoh.
TPM

From Josh Marshall

Quote Blickers:


Quote Olivier5:
When I said "short", I didn't mean one-term. I meant short, as in out of office well before his first four years.

In Trump's case, by 2020 he will be out of office, out of the country and living in Russia with his own Russian TV show about how the evil New World Order wouldn't let him work together with Putin to Make America Great Again.

I found this encouraging:


Much, much more:
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-clinton-reflect-20171103-story.html

What difference does it make, to post here or there?

I don't know...why aren't we talking about English translations or playing word games on this thread?

I moved your last post to the relevant place for you. I'd love to respond over there, but not here.

https://able2know.org/topic/404158-14#post-6532674

I presume that no one is surprised by this.
TP

So this thread is exclusively dedicated to "hordes of progressives who scream helplessly at the sky to protest Donald Trump’s election", to paraphrase the LA Times. Got it.

Thanks for pointing me to the other thread though.

No. And you know it.

__

What do you have to add, positive or negative about #45, his government and relevant contemporary (aka current) events?

The Veep is worse, so impeachment brings little hope.