President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

It's much better to make shit up out of thin air.

 

Syria was fucked up long before Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya. It'll be fucked up long after any of us are gone.

Obama's policies didn't do much to unfuck Syria, but among the things he did wrong, refusing to go charging in balls-out as the Screech Machine was demanding, was not among them.

Hey, he could have sailed 60 drones at a semi-abandoned airport. I suppose the Screech Machine would have gone delirious with joy over that, eh? No?

Nah.

 

Syria was far less fucked up than some of its neighbors, and far less fucked up than it is now.

And, look, the right wing screech machine isn't alone in criticizing his (lack of) action in Syria.

Hillary Clinton was calling for a no-fly zone in Syria during the campaign.

I've provided criticism from former Obama State Department officials.

Lots of people who worked for, and supported him, think he was a failure in his dealings with Syria, and that he failed in part because he didn't want to disrupt his deal with Iran.

Here's some more:

“He’s proved he’s not Obama—and that’s useful to him,” one former senior Obama official told me, one of many veterans of the previous administration I spoke with Friday who were supportive of Trump’s airstrike on Syria.
...
“Our administration never would have gotten this done in 48 hours,” one former senior official of the Obama administration told me. “It’s a complete indictment of Obama.”

“I feel like finally we have done the right thing,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served as Obama’s first-term chief of policy planning at the State Department and long publicly urged a more forceful response to Assad’s horrific attacks on civilians during the six years of war that have wracked Syria, told me. “The years of hypocrisy just hurt us all. It undermined the U.S., it undermined the world order.”

Slaughter, now the head of the New America Foundation and a major backer of Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton last November, tweeted, “Donald Trump has done the right thing on Syria. Finally!! After years of useless handwringing in the face of atrocities.” I later asked her if it was awkward to be cheering for Trump now. “I’m just glad to see it,” she said. “It was the right thing.”

President Not-Obama

 

Never.

 

So on the Sunday shows today, UN ambassador Haley said Assad must go. NatSec Adviser McMaster said Russia had to know about Syria's use of chemical weapons in advance. And Sec. of State Tillerson said fight against ISIS remains top US priority and that involves some cooperation with Syrian government. I know Syria is complicated, but apparently so are we.

 

Would you like to remind me how consistent our Syrian policy was under the previous administration?

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, following a day of meetings in Moscow with Russian officials, said the U.S. wasn’t committed to a policy of regime change in Syria—a sign of a further softening of the American position on President Bashar al-Assad’s role in a political transition.

Mr. Kerry said Washington still believed Mr. Assad needed to step down in order for there to be stability in Syria. But he said that the U.S. wasn’t focused on the country’s past and that the Syrian people needed to decide the future of their country.

“The United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change, as it is known, in Syria,” Mr. Kerry said in remarks following a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. “What we have said is that we don’t believe that Assad himself has the ability to be able to lead the future of Syria.”

Mr. Kerry’s comments came as he won Russia’s backing for the next round of negotiations between the Assad regime and opposition groups, after continued differences between Moscow and Washington had raised questions about whether it would happen. After a 3½-hour meeting Tuesday evening, Mr. Lavrov said Russia supported convening the next meeting of the International Syria Support Group in New York on Friday.

Kerry Softens Position on Syrian President Assad

 

YF, Trump hit Syria with a few spitballs, which was every bit as feckless as Obama declaring a red line then cowering behind it.

 

I think Trump is fine with Russia having an airbase and personnel staging ground in Syria. And America will benefit immensely, hugely and bigley from Trump,resort properties in Moscow, St Petersburg, Odessa and the Arabian Peninsula. Trump will continue to receive royalties but Putin's oligarch subordinates will keep their dirty money invested on the Eastern Side of the new and extended Berlin Wall instead of Trump Towers, Plazas and Resorts in America.

 

It's slightly less feckless.

I would imagine that another instance of such behavior from Syria would result in a more robust response.

We really don't want to topple Assad, as terrible as that sounds. We want to send a message, that we won't tolerate the use of chemical weapons, and we did. Obama never sent that message.

Let's see what happens next. Does Assad receive the message, or not?

 

I don't give a shit what the old bag Hillary said during the campaign.

And anybody who tweets the words "Donald Trump has done the right thing" needs to be hit in the head with a fucking baseball bat.

If he does anything that appears to be the "right thing," you can rest assured it was, I. totally by accident, and 9, motivated by utter self-aggrandizement.

The idea that kindly softhearted Trump was spurred to action by harrowing pictures of children victimized by gas attacks is particularly hilarious. You can show him pictures of the 24 million American children and former children he intends to rip off from health care, and he couldn't give a fuck less.

 

The most recent pages of this thread prove that the week's events have been perfect for Trump. The debate is now on Syria because it conjures fear of worst-case, we're-all-nuked-into-oblivion scenarios. So we are no longer talking about the fact that the current POTUS is coddled by bigots and plutocrats and theocrats, all of whom are ruining the country. He gets a pass on his continued silence on Sandy Hook deniers. He doesn't have to say anything about the fact that deep-red Alabama, where, of course, they practice good, Christian family values, shames and humiliates indigent schoolchildren for the crime and character defect of poverty. He can go play golf -- again -- because he made something go boom. His alleged pivot on Syria confirms his humanity. Because he allegedly proved his humanity with a publicity stunt of a military action, everybody seems to have glossed over his advance warning of his buddies from Russia. Am I missing something? Is this not a big deal? Looks fishy to me.