TDub wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2020 11:29 am
This is a terrible thread. All around.
General rule of thumb I have discovered is that, the more times I see Sea or Feral’s names in the thread, the more I know it will suck. Only so much OuTRaGe one can stomach.
Classic
Are you offended that I left you out? You actually make me laugh sometimes, and, on rare occasions, we agree. Can’t put that in the “Suck” column, I’m afraid.
“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” - Mark Twain
General rule of thumb I have discovered is that, the more times I see Sea or Feral’s names in the thread, the more I know it will suck. Only so much OuTRaGe one can stomach.
Classic
Are you offended that I left you out? You actually make me laugh sometimes, and, on rare occasions, we agree. Can’t put that in the “Suck” column, I’m afraid.
ousdahl wrote: ↑Tue Feb 04, 2020 7:47 am
Ted Cruz: the impeachment is nothing more than lefty rage...if tomorrow Trump cured cancer, dems would accuse Trump of contributing to overpopulation
Valid point.
“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” - Mark Twain
Fox News anchor Sandra Smith cut off contributor Jessica Tarlov, telling her not to get into President Donald Trump's "personal relationships" while a panel discussed Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg's marriage and recent homophobic criticism from conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh, who was granted a Presidential Medal of Freedom during Trump's State of the Union address earlier this month, made the remarks on his popular right-wing radio show last week.
"They're saying, OK, how's this going to look, 37-year-old gay guy kissing his husband on stage next to 'Mr. Man' Donald Trump? What's going to happen there?" Limbaugh said, arguing that the U.S. was not ready to have a gay president.
Tarlov called the remarks "homophobic" during a Fox News panel discussion on Monday, drawing comparisons between what she said is Buttigieg's apparently happy monogamous marriage and Limbaugh, who has been married several times, and with Trump, who is reported to have had affairs during his multiple marriages over the years.
"You see a loving, monogamous couple like Pete Buttigieg and Chasten, his husband, up there showing what is possible, that someone who is in a same-sex relationship could be running for president and doing as well," Tarlov noted.
"And then they're torn down by Rush Limbaugh, who's been married four times I think," she said, before pointing out the president's past infidelity.
"We have Donald Trump, three times married, cheated on all of those wives," she said. But anchor Smith then cut in, objecting to discussing the personal life of the president—despite the show's discussion of the relationship of a Democratic presidential candidate.
"Let's not bring in personal relationships," Smith interjected. She then turned to read Limbaugh's original comments, which were about Buttigieg's personal relationship.
[...]
“The Electoral College is DEI for rural white folks.”
Derek Cressman
Foreign leaders serve only one purpose in President Trump’s extraordinarily blinkered vision: to serve his personal interests.
He established that for Russia’s Vladimir Putin in campaign speeches in 2016 and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in the now-infamous telephone call last July. More recently, Trump has warped a half-century of American diplomacy in the Middle East by entering into a nefarious mutual vote-gathering scheme with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that they falsely call a peace plan.
If you are not interested in moral corruption — as seems to be the case for Emmanuel Macron of France, Angela Merkel of Germany and Canada’s Justin Trudeau — Trump is not interested in you. But if you can be bought, politically or otherwise, and provide something for him in return — think China’s Xi Jinping, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman or Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — Trump is your man.
It is not autocrats this American president admires among his peers. It is the charlatans.
Covering the Middle East from Beirut four decades ago, I never anticipated labeling an Israeli prime minister thusly. But the pending charges of bribery, fraud and abuse of public trust brought against Netanyahu in Israel provide a basis for questioning whether the man seeking reelection in Monday’s parliamentary balloting has any claim to moral superiority over the Arab leaders he consistently denigrates.
So does the tainted 181-page proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement put forward by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in late January. This too forces a change in my Middle East semantic habits.
Having written a book about apartheid in South Africa, I have always resisted comparing that doctrine of white supremacy to the far less systematic laws and practices of Israel in its occupied territories. Now, the Palestinian “state” that Kushner proposes would be a Bantustan and easily qualify for the a-word — as Martin Indyk, a former senior official in Middle East policymaking in multiple administrations, pointed out in a talk to the Center for the National Interest here on Thursday.
Trump gave Netanyahu an electoral down payment by letting the Israeli leader dictate these terms and then falsely glorifying them as “the deal of the century.” In exchange, Trump clearly would hope to reap Jewish American votes in November, particularly if Netanyahu is returned to power.
That an American president could even put forward a proposal so deeply damaging to Palestinian interests — and get almost no visible reaction from Arab governments — is a significant measure of how much the Middle East, and the U.S. role in that region, have changed since Henry Kissinger established peacemaking as a central U.S. goal there in 1973.
Then, Arab governments, claiming to act as protectors of Palestinian rights, declared an oil embargo against the United States.
Today, they avoid talking about the Palestinian cause or oil supplies. Oil, and Palestinian despair, are less important in world politics today, since the United States is no longer dependent on oil imports.
Those can be seen as positive developments. But the returns for the heavy U.S. investment that Republican and Democratic presidents have made in Middle East diplomacy are not imposing. The cold peace that treaties with Egypt and Jordan brought Israel has not prevented the growth of terror networks directed against the United States; civil wars raging in Syria, Libya and Yemen; and intermittent strife in Lebanon and elsewhere.
Indyk, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, offers, for a seasoned diplomat, a surprising remedy. It is for the United States to scale back its ambitions and involvement in the Middle East.
“Israel can defend itself by itself today. . . . The United States no longer has the capabilities, the interests to defend, or the will” to dominate the Middle East that it once had, Indyk said. “It is time for the U.S. to become more realistic” and cooperate more closely with other nations to contain the conflicts, particularly with Iran, rather than to pursue regime change and deeper involvement.
[...]
“The Electoral College is DEI for rural white folks.”
Derek Cressman
