President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

And Molly Ivins. What Miss Molly could have done with Trump...

 

One writer/observer we don't need alive today is my personal hero, George Orwell.

He's already "been there, done that."

 

FFS

Trump Insists Whistleblower’s Identity Must be Revealed, Must Testify

 

He wants his revenge.

 

If a CEO of a public company who was the subject of a whistleblower’s complaint sent out numerous company-wide e-mails demanding to know the identity of the whistleblower, they would be fired.

 

I'm on the mailing list for the WaPo's Daily 202, essentially a news digest for those who are on the wrong side of the paywall. Today's digest of events re Syria/Turkey/Kurds was particularly beefy. Nothing really new, just well stated.

Trump hands Putin another win with Syria pullout

THE BIG IDEA: Vladimir Putin has won so much these past three years that he may get tired of winning.

BY JAMES HOHMANN
with Mariana Alfaro


The U.S. intelligence community’s January 2017 report on Russian interference in the previous year’s presidential campaign sought to explain why Donald Trump was so attractive to Moscow. This sentence has fresh salience: “Pro-Kremlin proxy Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, proclaimed just before the election that if [Trump] won, Russia would ‘drink champagne’ in anticipation of being able to advance its positions on Syria and Ukraine.”

Coming on the heels of Trump holding up assistance for Ukraine as his administration urged its new president to investigate a Democratic challenger, Trump’s order on Saturday to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria has given the Russians a new reason to reach for the bubbly.

The American retreat forced our Kurdish allies, outmanned and outgunned by the invading Turks, to turn toward the Kremlin and seek help from Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus that they had spent years fighting to break away from. Syrian government forces, propped up by the Russian military, have long been held in abeyance by the U.S. presence. Now they’re filling the vacuum. Kurdish leaders announced late Sunday that they have invited these troops into towns that have been under their control for years.

“The announcement by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that they had reached an agreement with the Iranian- and Russian-backed government of [Assad] further undermined the prospect of any continued U.S. presence in the country,” Liz Sly, Louisa Loveluck, Asser Khattab and Sarah Dadouch report. “The deal followed three days of negotiations brokered by Russia between the Syrian government and the SDF, which had reached the conclusion that it could no longer count on the United States, its chief ally for the past five years in the fight against the Islamic State … It represents a gamble for the Kurds, who appeared to have secured no guarantees for the survival of the autonomy they have secured over the area over the past seven years. …

“Badran Jia Kurd, a senior Kurdish official, said the Kurds felt they had no choice but to turn to Damascus in light of what he called the ‘betrayal’ of the United States. ‘This has obliged us to look for alternative options,’ he said. … Residents of northeast Syria said they were stunned by the speed with which SDF defenses appeared to be collapsing … Hundreds of Islamic State family members escaped a detention camp after Turkish shellfire hit the area, U.S. troops pulled out from another base and Turkish-backed forces consolidated their hold over a vital highway, cutting the main U.S. supply route into Syria.”

“We don’t want the Russians and Syrians in there, but obviously we understand why they reached out,” a senior Trump administration official told one of my colleagues. “This is total chaos,” the official added, “a total s---storm.”



-- Mazloum Abdi, the commander in chief of the SDF, said the Kurds didn’t want it to turn out this way: “We believe in democracy as a core concept, but in light of the invasion by Turkey and the existential threat its attack poses for our people, we may have to reconsider our alliances,” Abdi writes in a new Foreign Policy op-ed. “We know that we would have to make painful compromises with Moscow and Bashar al-Assad if we go down the road of working with them. But if we have to choose between compromises and the genocide of our people, we will surely choose life for our people. …

“At Washington’s request, we agreed to withdraw our heavy weapons from the border area with Turkey, destroy our defensive fortifications, and pull back our most seasoned fighters. Turkey would never attack us so long as the U.S. government was true to its word with us. We are now standing with our chests bare to face the Turkish knives,” he adds. “We know that the United States is not the world police. But we do want the United States to acknowledge its important role in achieving a political solution for Syria. We are sure that Washington has sufficient leverage to mediate a sustainable peace between us and Turkey.”

-- “Putin likely can't believe his luck,” a Western military official from a NATO member country, who recently served in Syria as part of the anti-ISIS coalition, told Business Insider. “A third of Syria was more or less free of ISIS and its security was good without any involvement of the regime or Russia, and now because of the Turkish invasion and American pullout, this area is wide open to return to government control. What was supposed to be a diplomatically complex issue that would have involved U.S. and European military power suddenly got as simple as sending in tanks and units unopposed throughout the eastern third of Syria.”

“Putin continues to get whatever he wants and generally doesn't even have to do much,” an unnamed NATO official also told Insider. “He got to sit back and watch the Turks and the Americans unravel five years of success and not only did it not cost him anything, he didn't even have to try to make it happen. Small wonder he'd interfere on Trump's side in an election.”

-- The Russian Air Force has repeatedly bombed hospitals in Syria to crush the last pockets of resistance to Assad, according to a damning New York Times investigation published on Sunday: “An analysis of previously unpublished Russian Air Force radio recordings, plane spotter logs and witness accounts allowed The Times to trace bombings of four hospitals in just 12 hours in May and tie Russian pilots to each one. The 12-hour period beginning on May 5 represents a small slice of the air war in Syria, but it is a microcosm of Russia’s four-year military intervention in Syria’s civil war. … Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group that tracks attacks on medical workers in Syria, has documented at least 583 such attacks since 2011, 266 of them since Russia intervened in September 2015. At least 916 medical workers have been killed since 2011. …

“Russia’s position as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council has shielded it from scrutiny and made United Nations agencies reluctant to accuse the Russian Air Force of responsibility. … The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, opened an investigation into the hospital bombings in August. The investigation, still going on, is meant in part to determine why hospitals that voluntarily added their locations to a United Nations-sponsored deconfliction list, which was provided to Russia and other combatants to prevent them from being attacked, nevertheless came under attack. Syrian health care workers said they believed that the United Nations list actually became a target menu for the Russian and Syrian air forces.”

 

I've no clue who Beau is, but I did watch a decent chunk of that and, yeah, his point is accurate. Our foreign policy loyalties are now for sale. Forget about nonsense like prior loyalties or human rights, if you've got the coin we'll take your side. The Kurds are small, insignificant and poor, where's the gain in siding with insignificant poor people?

 

In describing what I think - what I believe - I'd start with this: I believe there was a Jewish rabbi, 2000 years ago, who was the son of God, enter the world as a man, died for each and every sin ever committed or to be committed and then rose from the dead, leaving behind a spirit that inhabits us.

That's not a PR line. That's the crux of Christianity. There are many extraordinary claims in the Bible, but that one's right up there, and it alone offended the religious leaders at the time to such a degree that Jesus was killed for it.

Now, if I believe that, if I really believe it, I'm either divinely inspired to do so or...nuts. If the God I believe is in truly God, and brought salvation in this way, then he's the creator, I'm not, and I'm stuck, like the rest of his believers, trying to figure out what constitutes disputable matters and what is more sacrosanct.

If we are, indeed, talking about something as significant as the cosmos and eternity, getting bound up in that particular political question - especially as it pertains to worldly statues - is truly "of this age" and legalistic. You're free to read the Bible yourself - there are multiple passages in the New Testament - and decide what it is God tells Paul about these things and why Paul might be wrong, and whatever else you want to think or feel about it. I just think gay marriage, as a political issue, is completely irrelevant. I'm fine with it being legal. I am far less fine with the effect abortion has America's soul, to be honest, but neither is the thing upon which my salvation hinges. Christianity is not a political religion; even Pilate knew that. It saddens me it has been made into such - mostly by other Christians.

 

I think all pornography is sinful. If that were illegal, we'd have to fine millions. Lying is in the Ten Commandments.

Warren's response, in a sense, had a logic to it - what you choose to believe is your business. But it was delivered in a way that suggested something very different. And the idea that only a man would ask that question, or think that, speaks to something, too.

 

By suggesting only a man would ask it.

 

Alma, I don't agree with everything you posted, but that is a good summation of Christianity pithed of the political trappings Americans keep trying to add to it.

 

Lying is not in the 10 commandments. Perjury is in the 10 commandments. Or making false accusations that’s are tantamount to libel or slander whether criminal or civil.

BTW we all agree that Warren’s statements receive a great level of lasting scrutiny than trump’s statements.