President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

So, a couple of things:

A. I think it's funny that if you criticize Obama, you must also lay out a complete plan to solve the Syrian crisis. This same demand is not made of those who criticize Trump.

2. I think I've been pretty clear, that unless and until a coalition of Muslim nations commits to putting troops on the ground to liberate and hold Syria -- in which case we could assist with air power, intelligence, training, weaponry, etc. -- there's not much more that we can do but to try and limit civilian deaths, and allow the stalemate between Assad and opposing forces (ISIS) to continue.

Again, if Muslim nations will take the lead, we could possibly set up "safe zones" in the country.

Assad is a brutal dictator, who has no problem murdering innocent civilians in order to remain in power in parts of Syria.

The time to deal with him was when he first took office, and when the Civil War first broke out. Instead, we had John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton kissing his ass, and referring to him as a reformer.

The Syrian Civil Was started in 2011. There was a non-Islamist opposition at the time. There no longer is.

Toppling Assad now will lead to ISIS taking over. It will be a failed state like Iraq and Libya are now, and Alawites and Christians will be slaughtered.

Let's keep one other thing in mind when discussing Syria: President Obama took no action against Assad because he didn't want to upset the Mullahs in Iran, who he was trying to do a deal with. He was unwilling to do anything that would jeopardize his deal with Iran. The Iranian and Cuban deals wold be his foreign policy legacies.

Instead, the slaughter, and refugee crisis, in Syria is his true legacy.

 

Maybe, maybe not. But I wouldn't hold up a tweet citing Cernovich being right as an example of all that's wrong with modern journalism.

 

Yah yah yah. The feckless mooslim neegro groveling in front of the Mullahs.

And the shit that's going on in Syria is Obama's fault. Yah yah yah.

 

I think I understand your complaint here, but I want to make sure.

Even though Reuters passed along information that turned out to be correct, you feel like the process for how they made the decision to report it was faulty. It did not follow a rigorous, logical, defensible framework that shouldn't be expected to lead to the correct outcome most of the time. Judging it on a single outcome misses the bigger picture of whether it is acting carelessly and what the consequences are for doing that over and over.

Is that a fair summary of how you feel?

 

This isn't a revelation. Anyone who's been paying attention knows it to be true.

 

Magellan was killed as a result of someone trying to co-opt him into fighting a battle on that person's behalf?

 

Mostly.

But, it's a little more than that. Reuters did not "reporting" at all. They didn't even speak to anyone -- well, there's only one person to talk to -- at the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. They simply passed along an unverified "report". They had no idea what kind of sourcing he/they had.

And, the way they wrote the tweet -- granted, twitter has limitations, including the number of characters -- it appeared that this was verified information.

This is irresponsible. The SOHR is an advocacy group -- to the extent it's a group at all. The name is misleading. They are not an impartial observer, which the Reuters tweet didn't convey at all.

 

Yes.

He got involved in a feud between rival groups, based on false information provided to him by one group, on whose behalf he went into battle, and was killed.

 

Ok, fair enough.

That's how I feel about Donald Trump.

 

Baquet should really hire you to be media ombudsman.

 

You might try reading this article:

More than half of Syria's pre-war population now falls into one of the following categories: dead; dying; disabled; tortured; terrorized; traumatized; sick; hungry; homeless. The regime of Bashar al-Assad is responsible for the bulk of this rampant, remorseless criminality. The administration of Barack Obama, if it stays on its present course, will make it through noon, January 20, 2017, without having defended a single Syrian civilian from the Assad-Russia-Iran onslaught. This thoroughly avoidable result may well serve to define Mr. Obama—accomplishments at home and abroad notwithstanding—as a failed president.

A Bad Defense for a Mistaken Policy

Now, since so few of the "experts" here know who any of the players are, I'll fill you in a little on the author's bio:

Ambassador Frederic C. Hof

Director, Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, Atlantic Council; Former U.S. Special Advisor on Transition in Syria

Ambassador Frederic C. Hof is director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East in Washington, DC. He served as special adviser for transition in Syria to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012.

On March 28, 2012 President Obama conferred on Hof the rank of Ambassador in connection with his new duties as Special Adviser for transition in Syria. Hof was previously the Special Coordinator for Regional Affairs in the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, where he advised Special Envoy George Mitchell on the full range of Arab-Israeli peace issues falling under his purview and focusing on Syria-Israel and Israel-Lebanon matters. He joined the State Department in 2009 after serving as the President and CEO of AALC, limited company, an international business consulting and project finance firm formerly known as Armitage Associates LC.

Ambassador Frederic C. Hof | The Huffington Post

 

Hmm, Hillary's name is in that so Hof must be bad?