dagblog - Comments for "Trump refuses to denounce Russian involvement in election at joint presser with Putin"

In terms of the connection

moat — Sat, 21 Jul 2018 00:07:54 +0000

In reply to this is an especially good

In terms of the meeting blowing back upon Putin, the ignorance component may be the deadliest.

It is all going your way. You have the ear of the U.S. President without anybody from his administration present to interfere with the conversation. But it soon becomes apparent that all the agreements being made involve circumstances and relationships the President does not actually understand and the details of which will not be remembered by any but Putin.

The most brilliant intelligence coup of our generation foiled by the paradox of solipsism.

That was the sentence that

AmericanDreamer — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 20:35:50 +0000

In reply to this is an especially good

That was the sentence that jumped out at me as well. But...I cut and paste, you (plural) decide.

this is an especially good

artappraiser — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 20:02:25 +0000

In reply to Jackson Diehl, Deputy

this is an especially good point

in his ignorance and naive zeal to strike deals with strongmen, he is making actual accords impossible

except that I think it is also important to add "to the point of frustration of his own staff". He turns our whole system upside down by making all things wide-open non-ideological whims of personality of one person. I.E., if John Bolton were running things, we would know what the ideology and mindset is and see the reasoning, and others can argue and work against the policies. But we don't really even know what this administration wants to do in the world because all the leader seems to want to do is shake things up and see what happens. And in the rare instance that a reasoning and policy is given, like with his tariffs, results are coming in counter-productive to ideology. In all of that Trump is more of a "chaos" creator than Putin?

Jackson Diehl, Deputy

AmericanDreamer — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 19:49:02 +0000

In reply to Trump refuses to denounce Russian involvement in election at joint presser with Putin

Jackson Diehl, Deputy Editorial Page editor, WaPo, op ed this afternoon, "Putin is probably still smirking about Helskinki. He shouldn't be." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/putin-should-wip...

Excerpts:

Vladimir Putin is probably still smirking about the chaos created by President Trump’s European tour, which has led thoughtful people on both sides of the Atlantic to conclude that not just NATO but the whole post-World War II liberal order led by the United States is doomed.

They may be proved right. But I suspect that before they are, Putin, too, will come to regret the Helsinki summit. More than likely, it has torpedoed the Russian president’s chances of extracting practical benefits from Trump’s fervent attempt to court him — favors Putin badly needs. As the foreign relations scholar Stephen Sestanovich put it on Twitter, “an idiot who’s too big an idiot can’t be a useful idiot.”

We still don’t know all that Putin and Trump discussed during their two hours alone — but that is part of Putin’s problem. He evidently got Trump to nod along to the preposterous idea that Russian investigators should be allowed to observe interrogations of present and former senior U.S. officials on bogus political charges. So we can assume Trump swallowed a few other hooks on Syria or Ukraine or nuclear weapons.

..........

Trump will continue to tweet, and he has invited Putin to Washington this fall. But if the Russians think there was a breakthrough on nuclear weapons, they’ll have to explain it to John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser and one of Washington’s foremost opponents of arms control. If they think Trump agreed to Putin’s plan for Syria, they’ll have to tell it to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, both of whom have repeatedly condemned Russia’s intervention.

Putin might check in with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, who must have thought he had gotten everything he wanted from Trump during their Singapore summit last month. After Pompeo appeared for follow-up talks three weeks later, Pyongyang was left sputtering about “one-sided and robber-like” demands.

This is not to suggest Trump is pursuing a cleverly two-faced strategy designed to extract the maximum from Putin and Kim. Rather, in his ignorance and naive zeal to strike deals with strongmen, he is making actual accords impossible. In the case of North Korea, that’s bad for the United States, which is trying to alter the unacceptable status quo of the North’s possession of nuclear weapons. In the case of Russia, the big loser is likely to be Putin, who needs American help to escape the quagmires of Syria and Ukraine, not to mention the sanctions that are squeezing his inner circle.

................

No, he did not win. He stole

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 08:49:00 +0000

In reply to That is why it comes down to

No, he did not win. He stole votes and illegally denied voters - dropping them off voter rolls (besides using illegal foreign money and foreign support and undeclared domestic money). This will come out. It is already being verified. The fact that we don't have vote auditing has compounded this problem immensely, but it will come out - 2 years late, but hopefully relatively fully before November.

This was the theft of the millennium, and it's just started.

Okay, finally getting to the

artappraiser — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 03:21:33 +0000

In reply to Trump refuses to denounce Russian involvement in election at joint presser with Putin

Okay, finally getting to the immediately serious stuff now. New headline @ WaPo:

As Russians describe ‘verbal agreements’ at summit, U.S. officials scramble for clarity

Officials at the most senior levels across the U.S. military, attempting since Monday to determine what President Trump may have agreed to on national security issues at his private meeting in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin, had little to no information on Wednesday. The administration has offered few specifics on meetings that the president described as a “tremendous success.”

By Karen DeYoung, Missy Ryan and Anton Troianovski

I notice it rocketed to #1 most read story pretty quickly, no doubt because of the nature of the paid readership.

If threatened with

moat — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 02:08:34 +0000

In reply to He won the office.

If threatened with impeachment, Trump will probably resign. So that gives Pence a lot of juice unless he is clearly shown to be a part of the Trump thing.
The G.O.P. will go with whatever gives them a margin in Congress.
They are open minded in that regard.

The party of Presidents who

rmrd0000 — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 02:00:01 +0000

In reply to He won the office.

The party of Presidents who faced impeachment proceedings, or resigned before the proceedings, have to date been replaced in the White House by the opposition party in the following election ( see Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton). Note that this even happened when there were acquittals in the Senate. Let Pence be a space holder.

He won the office.

barefooted — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 01:13:37 +0000

In reply to That is why it comes down to

He won the office.

That part is not very odd.

Not even a bit ...

What's odd is that winning it

Was all that really mattered.

That's why he can't let go of the winning part; the piece that put him on top of Hillary Clinton, and by extension, Obama. That's what his ego required - the job itself is an annoyance.

As for Pence (whose very visage is enough to make me literally turn away), do you see him being possibly impeached alongside Trump? I don't see that. Though a friend has said that there is a possible Constitutional clause (?) to remove the VP prior to the president ... I don't see it. So we land after all this - best case with Trump impeached - with Pence??

That is why it comes down to

moat — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 00:28:38 +0000

In reply to What we need to remember is

That is why it comes down to what unfolds in the investigation.

Trump appealed to a larger audience. There has been a lot of debate about what that means. He won the election with slim margins. But that part is not very odd. The odd part is that winning that office meant little to the winner. It was smaller than him.