monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Oh, really? While I don't agree with Bannon's political views I find him a somewhat fascinating figure, much more interesting than Trump, Pence, or the collection of swamp creatures and billionaires found in the inner circle and the Cabinet. I have no reason to doubt that he's a shrewd operator, adept at sizing up the intellectual capacities of the people around him. He wouldn't have gotten as far as he has if he were an unobservant chump.

Oh, I don't think so. If I asked Steve Bannon what time it was, I'd probably believe his answer. Granted, I'd probably check my phone, just to make sure, but probably. Even a total jackass can be right once in a while.

So that is good enough for you? Have you heard her speak? Do you have any idea what she has accomplished? I think she is very intelligent and I think she would leave anyone with that impression.

He was right when he backed Trump, right?

Well if the right is spinning a counter-narrative it's not getting much airplay, and Trump's performance hasn't really illustrated his imagination, subtlety, diplomatic instincts, political acumen or any of the other traits one would hope for in such an unlikely and unprecedented one-on-one encounter.

I expect that he'll be the one "played like a fiddle". Especially if the meeting is in Pyongyang and Kim throws him a party and a parade.

Seven Big Things to Understand About Trump's Talks with North Korea

From the point of view of his domestic propaganda, Kim has already won a big coup. It is supposed that the most powerful leader in the world will come to him; if Plump demurs, Kim can blame the failure of the putative "denuclearization" on him. What an inept clown Plump is. He shoots his mouth off all the time, without considering the consequences.

That was not one of the times;.

Of course, he didn't. Blatham just can't resist his reflexive urges to defend the man. Obama should have politely declined the award, but at least he had enough grace not to preen about it.



More pedantic pomposity from Prof. Mountie.

However, he's actually correct here... though, of course, not for the reason he's provided. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee is a cohort of Scandinavian socialists, and as such, they were required to despise Bush. They didn't have a Nobel War-Monger Prize to give him so they felt that by giving the Peace Prize to his successor, for no reason other than his being someone who objected to the Iraqi invasion, it would be seen to somehow serve as a rebuke to Bush.

They also, obviously, fell under the spell of the Magic Negro Messiah, who was possessed of the powers of enlightenment because his father happened to be an African and he decided to self-identify as a black. It was very common for liberals, moderates, and even some conservatives (all of whom self-identified as white) to support Obama for the redemption they were convinced would be their reward. Voting for the "black" candidate served much the same purpose as baptism: It washed away America's original sin, racist slavery, from the heart of the voter. It was also felt to be, by many, 1) A means to heal the racial wounds of the nation that have persisted since its founding and 2) An immunization of the voter from any future allegation of racism. I feel certain that a great many of his voters (and particularly those who were not staunch Democrats) believed that "I voted for Obama...twice" would, as a response, immediately put an end to assertions that they were racist because of such transgressions as not supporting Affirmative Action, or supporting Workfare How could someone continue to accuse them of racism when confronted with the fact that they voted for our first black president not once, but twice?!

Of course they soon found out that during Obama's eight years, racial tensions not only didn't dissipate, they intensified, and that the people who were fond of using race as a rhetorical club when they found it impossible to counter arguments rationally, were sure as hell not about to give it up just because some cracker voted for Obama. They were also not about to let white supremacists off the hook for two lousy votes. They weren't finished and they weren't going to discard such a powerful tool.

We saw this very clearly on the night of the 2016 Presidential Election when Van Jones on CNN, speaking for a great many of his fellow left-wingers, pronounced the Trump victory a whitelash.

Nevermind that Trump could not have won without the votes of people who had previously voted for Obama, or that the alternative to the white Republican candidate was a white Democrat candidate (apparently for Jones and his confreres, a woman, white though she may be, who had been a member of Obama's Cabinet and had his endorsement was close enough). It couldn't possibly be that after eight years, the shine was off the apple, and since the Messiah had failed to deliver, a great many people didn't want four more years of his policies, and especially not if it meant that the unlikeable and corrupt HRC would be the one carrying them forward. Nope, it had to be the return of that old friend of Democrats and lefties alike (redundant?)...Mr. Racism!

I don't know if any of the folks who saw their visit to their local polling place as a pilgrimage to the Jordan River learned any lesson from Mr. Jones' pronouncement (or the myriad of other such displays) but to the extent that anyone voted for Obama because of his racial identity rather than his policies, they deserved to be hoodwinked. You either believe blacks to be, somehow, inferior to whites or you do not. Voting for a black candidate for president, or any office, isn’t going to immunize you from charges of racism if your words and deeds reveal you to be one, and, as it turns out, even words and deeds that clearly demonstrate you are not one won’t do the trick.

Racism remains a problem in this country, but it has also spawned a cottage industry in which a great deal of money is made and fame and power accrued by those, like Van Jones, who are willing to shine a light on the scourge whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head! Of course if it’s not present in the hearts of those under observation or behind the outcomes of events like presidential elections, it’s not going to be allowed to go to waste. After all, Mr. Jones and his friends have bills to pay and kids to send to college.

His friends and comrades like Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, and Keith Ellison have elections to win and pork to bring back to their districts. Since we know racism is endemic in America, what’s the real harm of every now and again misidentifying it as the cause of some outcome or damage? For every problem mistakenly blamed on racism, there must be at least five others that are clearly caused by this blight on our society and are not even being talked about! And if large numbers of people are unfairly accused of racism, is that really a reason for crusaders like Jones, Waters, Pelosi, Ellison, Jim Clyburn, Rahm Emmanuel, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Dick Durbin, Shaun King, DeRay Mckesson, E.J. Dionne, Chris Hayes, Don Lemon, Joy Reid, Melissa Harris-Perry and Rachel Maddow (to name a few) to take pause in their mission, be a bit more circumspect, and restrain what appears to be a knee-jerk reaction?

Hell no! Blindly toss a stick into a crowd of white people and you are certain to hit someone who thinks their race should reign supreme in Amerika. If the stick somehow misses all the white supremacists and manages to hit the one or two people who are not racists, that’s unfortunate but it doesn’t mean that the majority of the crowd weren’t proper targets who should have been hit.

It’s like that fictional account of sexual harassment and abuse at the University of Maryland which was penned by the writer for Rolling Stone. We all know that sort of **** goes on all the time on campuses and it needs to be exposed. The reporter didn’t have the time and resources to track down an actual case, so she made one up. Hypocritical right-wingers got into a self-righteous rage about “fake news” in an effort to kill an important story about the crisis we all know exists!

So even if there were a bunch of Trump voters who had previously voted for Obama twice before, that there was no black candidate on the ballot, and a lot of Americans were not happy with the Obama legacy, it doesn’t mean that Jones was wrong! A white racist voting for a black candidate for cover is still a racist. If you won’t vote for a woman because of her gender, you won’t vote for a black candidate because of his or her skin color, and the country is filled with people who benefited greatly from Obama’s policies but were too stupid to recognize it or so filled with bitterness and hate that they allowed racists like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to lead them to the polling places by the nose!

Barrack Obama was able to win the presidency without having any leadership experience and little to no accomplishments to his name, and so it’s only fitting that he won a Nobel Peace Prize despite having a record devoid of any major initiatives or accomplishments in terms of advancing peace in the world.

His failure to live up to the faith of the Norwegian socialists is in keeping with his failure to live up to the role of Messiah. Over his two terms the peace-loving Anti-Bush:
1) Began and continued significant drone wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen
2) Overthrew the Libyan regime of Moammar Ghadafi
3) Initiated military campaigns, including aerial bombardments, (against ISIS) in Iraq and Syria
4) Gave the green light on two “advise & assist” missions against Boko Haram in Cameroon
5) Greenlighted a similar mission against the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda
6) Allocated war-relatedto war related initiatives ($866 billion) than did Bush ($811 billion)
7) Ordered a troop surge in Afghanistan
8) Got a real kick out of Special Forces warriors and expanded SOCOM by 25%
9) The Defense budget increased by billions of dollars under Obama
10) Increased the number of countries in which the U.S. Military was actively engaged.

Now, with the exception of the Libyan disaster (for which Hillary Clinton is primarily to blame), I didn’t and don’t have a problem with the above list. In fact, the times and areas in which I found myself in agreement with and supporting the Obama Administration overwhelmingly involved national security and military involvement in the world. He may have been awarded two gold stars by the Norwegian socialists, for ending Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, but in both cases I believe he was wrong to do so (especially in Iraq where US troop withdrawals directly resulted in the rise of ISIS and the establishment of its Caliphate), and in both cases, peace, very definitely, didn’t break out once the operations were ended.

So regardless of whatever silly symbolic reasons the Norwegian socialists had for awarding President Obama the Peace Prize, it clearly had nothing to do, at the time, with his advancement of the cause of international peace, and if the Norwegians are capable of restraining themselves from indulging in fatuous symbolic gestures, they never would have awarded him the prize based on his record over eight years in office.

Still, Obama's Nobel just has to be understood in relation to who had come before. Simply no other way to look at it.

(Note: I appreciate that I tool a little detour into the area of racism here, but it’s so darn important that I just had to! I know Van Jones would approve)

Certainly looks that way, so sorry.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/us/politics/trump-mueller-flood.html

Is tRump seeing the writing on the wall?

The NYT is now tabloid journalism when it comes to Trump, as in 0 credibility.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/steve-bannon-call-racist-wear-badge-honor/story?id=53656814

The truth emerges!

What a screed frpm Finn. May I remind you, Finn, the country voted for Hillary and Obama's policies, not Trump's. WE did not reject them, we affirmed them. Trump's lies came up short. It was only the Founding Fathers' poison pill they left for us, the Electoral Collae, that railroaded him in against the peoples' will. If you get those basic facts wrong, as you do, your whole argument collapses.

Illegal votes is what gave them the edge in the popular vote. And the EC railroads no one, it has served the country very well.
So your popular vote crap is crap.

That was probably your morning **** emerging. You would not know the truth if it bit you.

I read your post, finn. But seriously, what value is there in a sentence such as, "If by some miracle, Sarah Palin solves the cold fusion problem, then a Nobel will definitely be deserved".

Good looking women are extremely capable.




https://patentlawcenter.pli.edu/2011/12/05/the-truth-about-hedy-lamarr/

There's another thing going on in the post you were responding to and its a rather common "argument".

The argument goes, "You are being hypocritical if you accept something said by a person you normally do not trust". The implication being that the listener suddenly and unusually finds that the speaker's words are worthwhile - only because the listener agrees with what the speaker has just said".

Isn't that the way it's supposed to work? It's the idea communicated which ought to gain our approval or disapproval, not the speaker's membership in a party or some ideological brotherhood.

I see no reason not to believe this but I also see no reason why it is required of any negotiation and certainly not when it comes to North Korea. Presumably, all of the prior "high-level talks" that have been conducted with North Korea involved this "telegraphing" process and none of those negotiations can be considered much of a success.

The process reduces the risk of one or the other side being embarrassed by a surprise, but it also reduces the possibility of dynamic face-to-face negotiations where a surprise just might be favorable. I know, I know, Trump is a phony dolt that shouldn't be given credit for any of the skills or talent of which he frequently boasts, however I also know he has conducted a hell of a lot more negotiations than the vast majority of his critics, and that before he became president he was a very successful businessman. Now, you, like so many of his critics, can toss out nonsense about prior bankruptcies and how there is a ton of evidence that Trump was never a successful real-estate tycoon, but 1) The critics who love to remind us of his casino bankruptcies know very little about business or they would realize that bankruptcy can be a tactic, and used to make lemonade out of lemons 2) The critics are, for the most part, all risk adverse tit-mice. It makes perfect sense to them that the best way to achieve everything is through obsessive planning that attempts to take into account every possible contingency, and never to leave anything to chance or the moment 3) Very, very few of his critics are billionaires. There may be some question as to how many billions he has, but even if he has one or none and is only worth between $500 and $800 million that is an indication of considerable success and vastly more money than they will ever see.

A critic who is a journalist can point to a Peabody or Pulitzer as their success and their gesture would be valid since such awards, in journalism, are as much or more of a sign of success and achievement than money. In business, however, the sign of success is money. There are probably thousands of rinky-dink awards that are given to businessmen as tribute, but a businessman worth a billion dollars is at least the equivalent of a journalist with a Pulitzer or an actor with an Oscar. Every year there are lists published that rank companies on the basis of such things as employee satisfaction and innovation. They are interesting and clearly, such values are important to success, but the prime time lists are all about money: revenue, sales, profit...

It was just reported that Jeff Bezos is the world's richest man having supplanted Bill Gates who is now in the second spot. Warren Buffet is in the third spot. Strangely enough, everyone (and in particular liberals) credits these three with business genius. They're the three richest men in the world, they must be incredibly talented! But not billionaire Trump. Anyone, including him, who has the audacity to credit him with genius is mocked mercilessly. Genius? He's not even competent! He's a moron, a buffoon. Unlike Bezos, Gates and Buffet, Trump made his billions through a combination of family ties, dumb luck and chicanery.


Before I recently retired my time was heavily spent in negotiations. Over more than 40 years and more times than I can number, I sat across a table from someone who wanted to take as much money as he or she possibly could from my clients, and I can tell you that preparation is indeed critical for success and that the party that comes out ahead is most often the one that knows the strengths and weakness of both his position and the other party’s better than anyone else in the room. When millions of dollars are in on the line, you had better be prepared, and I can only imagine that it is even more so the case when the stakes involve war and peace. However you can prepare for days, weeks or months before your meeting and still get thrown a curve ball, or you can realize something about the other party that could only come out through a face to face. If you’re not able to analyze and modify your strategy on the fly, you are liable to come away disappointed and kicking yourself in the ass for days to come. I’ve no knowledge of whether or not Trump is capable of being nimble during negotiations, but my bet is that he is. It’s also my bet that he prepares a lot more than people think.

The man has been playing the MSM like a fiddle, and surprising his opponents on a regular basis since he was elected, and you think he’s lacking in imagination.

What the hell are “diplomatic instincts?” Not everyone is susceptible to flattery (although Trump has shown he is as capable as anyone of getting self-important cats to purr.) If, for instance, Kim responds best to blunt challenges, would it be a “diplomatic instinct” to approach him in such a manner? The fat little dictator didn’t grow up in French finishing schools or attend Sandhurst. His father and grandfather were hardly able tutors on “diplomatic instincts.” When was the last time he engaged in talks as important as these may be? The notion that Trump will be sitting across the table from Korea’s Klemens von Metternich is absurd.

As for political acumen, he only won the presidency, essentially corralled the Republican Establishment that had the long knives out for him as soon as he announced his candidacy, and forced Chuck Schumer, within 48 hours, to give up his scheme to shut down the government for the Dreamers. All dumb luck or the work of others… right? Your Party might not be on such a losing streak if they could kick their habit to ridiculously under-estimating their opponents. They are all so smug and self-important that they actually believe that their opponents are the morons their playbook has been telling them to cast them as for decades. It didn’t work with Reagan and Bush and it’s not going to work with Trump. The flip side, of course, is that every Democrat who wins the White House is a candidate for Mensa. Christ, we’ve been told ad nauseum that Obama was the smartest guy to ever sit in the Oval Office…and a Constitutional Scholar to boot. (After all, he went to Harvard and as we all know only the very brightest go to Harvard, unless of course they happen to be a Republican moron whose Daddy pulled strings and paid money to get him his Harvard MBA…the only MBA to have ever been earned by a US President) Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, oooohhhh….and he was a political genius and Jimmy Carter was portrayed as a nuclear physicist because 1) He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the Naval Academy and 2) While serving in the Navy was part of a maintenance crew that shut down the Chalk River Labs Nuclear Reactor after a partial melt-down, and began, but did not finish, a 6 month non-credit course at Union College in Schenectady NY, on nuclear power plant operation. Despite the Jimmy Carter mythos, he never even served on a nuclear submarine. Now all three of these Democrats are of above average intelligence and in their own ways quite talented; even gifted, but, by the same token, it’s simply foolish and false to assert that Reagan, Bush and Trump were or are low grade morons.

The meeting will not be held in Pyongyang



What rubbish.

Of course, Kim will walk away with a victory regardless of whatever transpires. First of all, he could kiss Trump’s ass in the meeting room and who back in North Korea would know? His regime controls all the information coming into that country, and it will only reports what it wants to and no matter what it reports it will be presented as a tremendous victory by Dear Leader. Secondly, the American and International press are so uniformly anti-Trump they are already salivating at the possibility of the talks being a diplomatic disaster. We can be certain that unless Kim does kiss Trump’s ass in the meeting room, the press (domestic and European) will file reports as if they were homers for the Pyongyang Penguins. They don’t want to see Trump resolve one of the greatest threats to world peace in our time; one no other president (two of whom were Democrats) could manage to do more than make worse.

Trump will want a win. That is for certain and every sane person on earth should be hoping he gets one, but the expectations have already been set by journalists like Fisher and they are that nothing will come of this meeting. We can be certain that unless some solid agreements have been secretly worked out in the background, the president’s supporters will be trying to lower everyone’s expectations as well. And what sort of embarrassing failure does the fevered mind of Max Fisher imagine might happen? That an agreement that no one expects to happen will not happen? How humiliating! And by the way, apparently Fisher hasn’t noticed that nothing seems to embarrass Trump. This is a quality the left finds so dear in Trump. No matter what happens, he won’t be embarrassed if for no other reason that he will never acknowledge that he failed.



Note to Fisher: No, it’s not worth belaboring this bogus point. Again, there is nothing normal about talks with North Korea and if there are they should be abandoned because they have failed miserably every single time in the past. And just what are the splashy public commitments Trump has made?

If denuclearization means something vastly different to North Korea than it does to the US, it is by design and not because of cultural differences. North Korea knows exactly what Trump wants. They are unlikely to give it to him but no amount of public statements for no matter how long would help assure they did. What does Fisher think is going to happen? Kim will show up honestly thinking that he can clear the whole mess up by scraping a couple of warheads and then be stunned and disappointed when he finds out what we really mean by “denuclearization?”



Another version of the same argument Fisher has been peddling through his whole article: “This just isn’t the way Foggy Bottom does things!” And my response is the same: Good! Foggy Bottom’s axioms have proven to simply be the preferences of a bunch of timid career diplomats who care more about avoiding surprises and embarrassment than results. Trump can’t do any worse than his predecessors. Nowhere is the Establishment more cowered by Trump’s spontaneity and flamboyance than at the State Department. It's reminiscent of Victorian Age society where pompous “gentlemen” huffed and puffed about that which was just not done by a gentleman (like work for a living) and all the while were screwing the Downstairs maids or frequenting bordellos and opium dens.



I don’t know? What do they do? Does anyone know what they do? And why haven’t they been filled? Couldn’t be that Democrats are blocking Trump appointments could it?

And Oh No! The Economist is predicting that Trump will be played like a gold-plated violin. Apparently they too subscribe to the belief that Kim Jung Un is the Bismarck of his time. This is the same magazine that ran an article in 2007 on the “perils of prediction” and the reliable failure of prognosticators to take account of “Black Swans:” an event that is unexpected, has an extreme impact and is made to seem predictable by explanations concocted afterwards, and, by the way, who do you think they predicted would win the 2016 election?



Indeed, and it just might work where all the by-the-book efforts of the past have failed.



While it is unquestionable that the North Koreans hope that they have achieved this result and I’m sure all of the boot-lickers in Pyongyang are assuring Fat Boy this is the case, it’s also unquestionable that at the time of this announcement there was reporting around the world talking about how maybe Trump’s bombastic threats amounted to application of the Madman Theory and helped bring NK to the negotiating table. Fisher obviously didn’t want to include this point of view in his article because it might make it seem like there is a method to the Trump madness. You may recall that the originator of the Madman Theory was our old pal Richard Nixon (who for some reason the Democrats never tried to cast as a moron. Evil and psychotic yes, but stupid? N, . ) Of course he was the first president to visit Communist China. It’s pretty safe to say that the Chinese considered his visit a symbolic victory that elevated their backwater nation to equal footing with the powerful US, but do you think Fisher believes that trip was ill considered for that reason? Nixon’s normalization of relations with China is about the only thing for which the left will give him any credit. (They should also credit him for establishing the EPA but most are too ignorant to know he did).

I’m not prepared to predict the talks will even be held, let alone what the outcome will be. It’s a pretty safe bet that if they are held, they will not result in the ball being moved very far at all. I doubt it will be a repeat of the past attempts during which the US bribed North Korea to make some small concessions on their nuclear weapons program, but if it is, there will be the same ultimate result: After receiving partial payment, NK will renege on their promises and no further payments will be made by the US. NK will have gotten something for nothing out of the US, but will have bought the most precious commodity also for nothing…time.

It should be fun to watch what happens and liberals would be foolish in giving Trump supporters big odds in betting against a positive outcome.