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The US Presidency 2019

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Remius said:
So the POTUS asked about nuking hurricanes in a meeting.

Regarding that,
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=8O9jXcabMurD_QaqsKuYAQ&q=trump+denies+hurricanes&oq=trump+denies+hurricanes&gs_l=psy-ab.3...2094.8294..8504...0.0..2.1090.7748.1j15j0j2j6-2j3......0....1..gws-wiz.......35i39j0i67j0i131i67j0i131j0.E4KUbYWMKPE&ved=0ahUKEwjG09Hf4qDkAhXqYd8KHSrYChMQ4dUDCAs&uact=5#spf=1566830588477
 
mariomike said:
Regarding that,
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=8O9jXcabMurD_QaqsKuYAQ&q=trump+denies+hurricanes&oq=trump+denies+hurricanes&gs_l=psy-ab.3...2094.8294..8504...0.0..2.1090.7748.1j15j0j2j6-2j3......0....1..gws-wiz.......35i39j0i67j0i131i67j0i131j0.E4KUbYWMKPE&ved=0ahUKEwjG09Hf4qDkAhXqYd8KHSrYChMQ4dUDCAs&uact=5#spf=1566830588477

Fair enough.  my point though  is even if he did, it is something that was studied before and proposed.  I don't think it was a absurd thing to inquire about if he did.
 
Remius said:
Fair enough.  my point though  is even if he did, it is something that was studied before and proposed.  I don't think it was a absurd thing to inquire about if he did.

But there is a significant difference (or there should be) between ill or non-informed Joe Lunchbucket who regularly emails NOAA suggesting nuclear explosions as a possible counter to a hurricane and a septagenarian "best brain" with the "best education" who if he had any interest in the world past his personal gratification would have already been aware of the very public discussion during and after his high school and college years of "peaceful nuclear explosions" and "Project Plowshare".  Yes, it was something that was studied and proposed, a half century ago, when nuclear bombs were shiny new toys and all sorts of ideas were floated about, mining, digging a new Panama Canal, oil and gas exploration, . . . , however, after several underground and atmospheric tests in the continental United States the absurdity and dangers of such uses were finally recognized.  There's nothing wrong with the chief executive questioning his agency heads about alternatives to ameliorate the destruction from a weather phenomenon, however, if the reporting that the president spontaneously raised the "nuclear bomb proposal" is accurate, then it suggests a baseline of common knowledge more in line with a regular National Enquirer reader than someone who aspired to the presidency.

It may be low hanging fruit for certain media outlets to latch onto some of the things that the current US president says and use them as an example of either poor judgement or lack of knowledge, but such use is valid and is not something new.  It's just that the current president provides more opportunities than his predecessors.
 
Ex-Pentagon chief Mattis says bitter politics threaten US
By ROBERT BURNS, ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Aug 28, 2019, 11:10 AM ET

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis warns in a book excerpt of the bitter political divisions that seem to be tearing apart American society, echoing themes he often cited before he resigned from the Trump administration in protest.

The retired Marine general, who quit in December amid policy disagreements with President Donald Trump, says he is concerned about the state of American politics.

"We all know that we're better than our current politics," Mattis wrote in the excerpt published Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal. "Tribalism must not be allowed to destroy our experiment."

Mattis said that "our own commons seems to be breaking apart" to a degree not seen in the past.

"What concerns me most as a military man is not our external adversaries; it is our internal divisiveness," he wrote.

Much of the excerpt is a recitation of the reasons Mattis has previously given for agreeing to become the Pentagon chief despite not having known or spoken to Trump before being interviewed for the position in November.

Regarding his reasons for leaving, Mattis offered a slightly more pointed explanation than what his resignation letter outlined.

"When my concrete solutions and strategic advice, especially keeping faith with our allies, no longer resonated, it was time to resign, despite the limitless joy I felt serving alongside our troops in defense of our Constitution," he wrote.

Mattis resigned shortly after Trump announced he was pulling all U.S. troops from Syria. In Mattis' view this amounted to betraying the Syrian Kurdish fighters who'd partnered with American troops to combat the Islamic State group.

Mattis' book, "Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead," is scheduled to be published Sept. 3.

https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/defense-secretary-jim-mattis-us-breaking-point-65240981?cid=clicksource_4380645_null_headlines_hed
 
"When my concrete solutions and strategic advice..."

Did Mattis really say that??  No wonder he's gone.
 
QV said:
"When my concrete solutions and strategic advice..."

Did Mattis really say that??  No wonder he's gone.

I am confused.  What part of this is worthy of your disdain?  That the solutions were concrete (ie not abstract)?  Or that the advice offered by a strategic leader was strategic in nature?

For the record, here is the whole sentence: 

When my concrete solutions and strategic advice, especially keeping
faith with our allies, no longer resonated, it was time to resign, despite the limitless joy I felt
serving alongside our troops in defense of our Constitution.
 
QV said:
"When my concrete solutions and strategic advice..."

Did Mattis really say that??  No wonder he's gone.

A defense secretary is appointed basically to provide exactly those things, are they not? Any executive with any modest amount of professional quality endeavors to surround themselves with the necessary experts to allow them to make sound and informed decisions. There’s a reason the former commandant of the Marine Corps was appointed. It wasn’t for his looks. If the president thought he could mould Mattis into just another sycophantic clapping seal, he blundered.
 
Reports say he had more turnover in his Cabinet in the first two and a half years than any of his five predecessors had in their entire first terms in office.
 
Mattis is interviewed by The Atlantic:

The Man Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore
“I had no choice but to leave,” General James Mattis says of his decision to resign as President Trump’s secretary of defense.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG  OCTOBER 2019 ISSUE 

On December 19 of last year, Admiral Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met James Mattis for lunch at the Pentagon. Mattis was a day away from resigning as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, but he tends to keep his own counsel, and he did not suggest to Mullen, his friend and former commander, that he was thinking of leaving.

But Mullen did think Mattis appeared unusually afflicted that day. Mattis often seemed burdened in his role. His aides and friends say he found the president to be of limited cognitive ability, and of generally dubious character. Now Mattis was becoming more and more isolated in the administration, especially since the defenestration of his closest Cabinet ally, the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, several months earlier. Mattis and Tillerson had together smothered some of Trump’s more extreme and imprudent ideas. But now Mattis was operating without cover. Trump was turning on him publicly; two months earlier, he had speculated that Mattis might be a Democrat and said, in reference to NATO, “I think I know more about it than he does.” (Mattis, as a Marine general, once served as the supreme allied commander in charge of NATO transformation.
...
I thought back to what he’d told me earlier in the summer, when I had asked him to describe something Trump could say or do that would trigger him to launch a frontal attack on the president. He’d demurred, as I had expected. But then he’d issued a caveat: “There is a period in which I owe my silence. It’s not eternal. It’s not going to be forever.”

See rest of article here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/james-mattis-trump/596665/

:cheers:
 
PPCLI Guy said:
I am confused.  What part of this is worthy of your disdain?  That the solutions were concrete (ie not abstract)?  Or that the advice offered by a strategic leader was strategic in nature?

For the record, here is the whole sentence:

If concrete = not abstract, then I have no disdain.
 
QV said:
If concrete = not abstract, then I have no disdain.

General Mattis does not seem like he’s an “abstract” kind of guy.
 
Taylor Swift Will “Do Everything I Can” to End Donald Trump’s Autocracy
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/08/taylor-swift-donald-trump-autocracy-gaslighting

Big guns have been called out!

Taylor Swift Fans 'Take Down' Kellyanne Conway After Aide Says Singer Lost 'Handily' to Trump
https://people.com/politics/taylor-swift-fans-slam-kellyanne-conway-says-singer-lost-trump/
“SWIFTIES IT’S TIME. WE’VE BEEN TRAINING FOR THIS MOMENT. THIS IS THE BOSS LEVEL. WE MUST TAKE DOWN KELLYANNE CONWAY,” user @ryanferreira wrote.


Boss level! Say goodbye to Mr President







 
Jarnhamar said:
Say goodbye to Mr President

Not to worry as long as the Kremlin continues to find him useful .  :)

08/29/19

Kremlin-backed TV runs mashup of Trump singing 'Señorita' to Putin
https://thehill.com/policy/international/russia/459322-kremlin-backed-tv-runs-mashup-of-trump-singing-senorita-to-putin
Trump's Praise of Putin Mocked On Russian TV With 'Señorita' Mash-up

Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax...And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist. So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media,.....
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1134066371510378501?lang=en





 
Jarnhamar said:
Taylor Swift Will “Do Everything I Can” to End Donald Trump’s Autocracy
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/08/taylor-swift-donald-trump-autocracy-gaslighting

Big guns have been called out!
https://people.com/politics/taylor-swift-fans-slam-kellyanne-conway-says-singer-lost-trump/
“SWIFTIES IT’S TIME. WE’VE BEEN TRAINING FOR THIS MOMENT. THIS IS THE BOSS LEVEL. WE MUST TAKE DOWN KELLYANNE CONWAY,” user @ryanferreira wrote.


Boss level! Say goodbye to Mr President
And good riddance. Thanks T Swift and crew!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
#POTUS45 meeting with Taliban leaders firing alright, meeting - STOPS!
Peace talks between the U.S. and leaders from Afghanistan and the Taliban have been called off, after the Taliban admitted they were behind a deadly bombing in Kabul last week that resulted in the death of a U.S. soldier.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this Sunday the Taliban “overreached” and showed that they cannot be trusted to move forward with a peace process at this point in time.

“What they did here was they tried to use terror to improve their negotiating position,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”

President Trump revealed the existence of the planned talks and their cancellation Saturday night, announcing that he had intended to hold a secret meeting at Camp David on Sunday, but called it off due to the Taliban’s role in the attack.

Trump added that if the Taliban cannot agree to a ceasefire, "then they probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway."

Pompeo echoed this, saying the administration is “looking for more than words on paper,” and that the Taliban has demonstrated that they cannot commit to peace at this time. Still, he said peace talks could pick back up again if this changed.

“I hope we get them started,” he said, saying it was up to the Taliban.

Host Chris Wallace pressed Pompeo about the idea that the president of the United States was willing to meet with the Taliban on U.S. soil just days before Sept. 11. The secretary did not address the timing but defended inviting the Taliban to Camp David.

“It’s almost always the case,” he said, “that you don’t get to negotiate with good guys.” Pompeo noted that President Trump “has always been someone … willing to take risks if he believes he can deliver a good outcome for the American people.” ...
POTUS notice attached.
 

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milnews.ca said:
@realDonaldTrump: "How many more decades are they willing to fight?"
Maybe he should get one of his staffers who can read to have a look at RAND's How Insurgencies End,  to see how these things tend to play out.... particularly when the foreign power has made it obvious that they want to bail.


(Don't bother with details like 'more parties involved = a more complex and protracted ending' -- stuff like that will just baffle him, and he'll take a Sharpie to the chapter)

- mod edit to fix link -
 
I don't agree with the administration meeting with the talban without including the Afghan government. I don't trust the Taliban and I remember what they did after the Russians withdrew. The only way for peace is with the help of Pakistan and the complete distruction of the Taliban. We have been negotiating as they continue to attack our forces which is what the North Vietnamese did  and we remember how that worked out. I think if we ramped up our drone campaign coupled with our use of FAE's and maybe our biggest non-nuclear bom which is delivered by C130.
 
Trump Is Not Well
Accepting the reality about the president’s disordered personality is important—even essential.

SEP 9, 2019
Peter Wehner
Contributing editor at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC

During the 2016 campaign, I received a phone call from an influential political journalist and author, who was soliciting my thoughts on Donald Trump. Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was still something of a shock, and he wanted to know the things I felt he should keep in mind as he went about the task of covering Trump.

At the top of my list: Talk to psychologists and psychiatrists about the state of Trump’s mental health, since I considered that to be the most important thing when it came to understanding him. It was Trump’s Rosetta stone.

I wasn’t shy about making the same case publicly. During a July 14, 2016, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, for example, I responded to a pro-Trump caller who was upset that I opposed Trump despite my having been a Republican for my entire adult life and having served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and the George W. Bush White House.

“I don’t oppose Mr. Trump because I think he’s going to lose to Hillary Clinton,” I told Ben from Purcellville, Virginia. “I think he will, but as I said, he may well win. My opposition to him is based on something completely different, which is, first, I think he is temperamentally unfit to be president. I think he’s erratic, I think he’s unprincipled, I think he’s unstable, and I think that he has a personality disorder; I think he’s obsessive. And at the end of the day, having served in the White House for seven years in three administrations and worked for three presidents, one closely, and read a lot of history, I think the main requirement for president of the United States … is temperament, and disposition … whether you have wisdom and judgment and prudence.”

That statement has been validated.

Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining characteristic of his presidency. It manifests itself in multiple ways: his extreme narcissism; his addiction to lying about things large and small, including his finances and bullying and silencing those who could expose them; his detachment from reality, including denying things he said even when there is video evidence to the contrary; his affinity for conspiracy theories; his demand for total loyalty from others while showing none to others; and his self-aggrandizement and petty cheating.

It manifests itself in Trump’s impulsiveness and vindictiveness; his craving for adulation; his misogyny, predatory sexual behavior, and sexualization of his daughters; his open admiration for brutal dictators; his remorselessness; and his lack of empathy and sympathy, including attacking a family whose son died while fighting for this country, mocking a reporter with a disability, and ridiculing a former POW. (When asked about Trump’s feelings for his fellow human beings, Trump’s mentor, the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, reportedly said, “He pisses ice water.”)

The most recent example is the president’s bizarre fixation on falsely insisting that he was correct to warn that Alabama faced a major risk from Hurricane Dorian, to the point that he doctored a hurricane map with a black Sharpie to include the state as being in the path of the storm.

“He’s deteriorating in plain sight,” one Republican strategist who is in frequent contact with the White House told Business Insider on Friday. Asked why the president was obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by the storm, the strategist said, “You should ask a psychiatrist about that; I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment.”

We have repeatedly heard versions of that sentiment over the course of Trump’s presidency. It’s said that speculating on Trump’s mental health is inappropriate and unwise, especially for those who are not formally trained in the field of psychiatry or psychology.

That’s true, up to a point. Yes, it is best to leave it to experts to determine whether Trump satisfies the criteria for a clinical diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, some combination of both, or nothing at all.

But if a clinical diagnosis is beyond my own expertise, Trump’s psychological impairments are obvious to all who are not willfully blind. On a daily basis we see the president’s chaotic, unstable mind on display. Are we supposed to ignore that?

An analogy may be helpful here. If smoke is coming out from under the hood of your car, if you notice puddles of oil under it, if the engine is overheating and you smell burning oil, you don’t have to be a car mechanic to know that something is wrong with your car.

Accepting the reality about Trump’s disordered personality is important and even essential. For one thing, it will help us to better react to Trump’s freak show.

Even now, almost a thousand days into his presidency, the latest Trump outrage elicits shock and disbelief in people. The reaction is, “Can you believe he said that and did this?”

To which my response is, “Why are you surprised?” It’s a shock only if the assumption is that we’re dealing with a psychologically normal human being. We’re not. Trump is profoundly compromised, acting just as you would imagine a person with a disordered personality would. Many Americans haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that we elected as president a man who is deeply damaged, an emotional misfit. But it would be helpful if they did.

Among other things, it would keep us feeling less startled and disoriented, less in a state of constant agitation, less susceptible to provocations. Donald Trump thrives on creating chaos, on gaslighting us, on creating antipathy among Americans, on keeping people on edge and off balance. He wants to dominate our every waking hour. We ought not grant him that power over us.

It might also take some of the edge off the hatred many people feel for Trump. Seeing him for what he is—a terribly damaged soul, a broken man, a person with a disordered mind—should not lessen our revulsion at how Trump mistreats others, at his cruelty and dehumanizing actions. Nor should it weaken our resolve to stand up to it. It does complicate the picture just a bit, though, eliciting some pity and sorrow for Trump.

But above all, accepting the truth about Trump’s mental state will cause us to take more seriously than we have our democratic duty, which is to prevent a psychologically and morally unfit person from becoming president.

The office is too powerful, and the consequences are too dangerous, to allow a person to become president who views morality only through the prism of whether an action advances his own narrow interests, his own distorted desires, his own twisted impulses. When an individual comes to believe his interests and those of the nation he leads are one and the same, it opens the door to all sorts of moral and constitutional devilry.

Whether or not his disorders are diagnosable, the president’s psychological flaws are all too apparent. They were alarming when he took the oath of office; they are worse now. Every day Donald Trump is president is a day of disgrace. And a day of danger.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/donald-trump-not-well/597640/

:cheers:
 
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