The absurdity of Donald Trump

[Griff]

We need a blow out election but Fox Entertainment...

[sexobon]

[Griff]

Mattis:

Full statement:

"I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.

Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad."

My bold.

[Griff]

https://www.chicagotribune.com/natio...qu4-story.html
Russia was paying bounties on US troops.
The intelligence finding was briefed to President Donald Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Trump took care of that by inviting Putin to the G-7 and promising to pull 10,000 US troops out of Germany...


...and maybe a blowjob later.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by Griff

https://www.chicagotribune.com/natio...qu4-story.html
Russia was paying bounties on US troops.
The intelligence finding was briefed to President Donald Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

Some denials from the WH now, but the louder though less unifying scandal is the report of his retweeting a video from "The Villages" where a parade of golf carts moves through a standing group of protesters. The drivers are all rabidly pro-Trump and the chants of "white power! white power!" can be heard clearly.

Trump has two objectives by promoting this:

1 -- he likes it, he likes actions that show he's liked and these drivers are mad for him.

2 -- we're not talking about Russian bounties on American soldiers now, are we?

Do you remember that comic where the people on the balcony are looking down on the angry mob and reflect that all they have to do is to get the pitchforks to start fighting with the torches...

That's Trump up on that balcony with his handlers.

[BigV]

Found it

.

[Griff]

That's pretty much where we are.

[sexobon]

All that's left to do is to see if Biden can keep from blowing it before election day.

[Diaphone Jim]

I just read this at lunch today:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar...even-for-putin

I wonder if this guy could have been a even worse admiral than a political columnist. Those damn Rooskies make him so mad he could just spit. Scary.

Surface to air missiles were OK, of course.

[BigV]

If Trump is The Lone Ranger, then this guy is Tonto.

[tw]

Every time Putin comes out of a private meeting with Trump, he always has a smirk. He can even put a bounty on Americans soldiers, deny it, and then Trump will believe Putin. As usual deny or blame American intelligence for incompetence.

We have not seen so much contempt for the American soldier since Cheney, et al kill 5000 in Iraq for no useful purpose. To only protect Cheney's et al's legacy.

[Luce]

https://apnews.com/8513ec966d26d1c850e7cab0b269997c

“In a crisis, when you lack an operational solution, all you are left with is humanity,” Dezenhall said. “This is just a situation where Trump cannot pivot because he views empathy as the equivalent of running down Pennsylvania Avenue in high heels and a tutu.”

[BigV]

c'mon man. show a little empathy. do you know how hard it is to run in heels?

[BigV]

Apparently *not* all attention is good attention. Here's a fresh news item where Trump didn't make the cut.

Fox News "mistakenly" (riiiiiiiiight) edited the picture in this news article about Jeffery Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell to "mistakenly" exclude our (mistakenly elected) President Trump.

Fox News broadcast a segment on Sunday about Ghislane Maxwell, the 58-year-old British socialite who was arrested by the FBI in New Hampshire last week and charged with the sex trafficking of children in the 1990s. Maxwell was a close friend of deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and Fox aired a photo of Maxwell that should look familiar to anyone who followed reports of Epstein’s abuse of teenage girls. But there was one thing missing from the image that Fox put on screen: President Donald Trump.

The original photo, which is available online from Getty Images, shows Donald Trump, his then-girlfriend Melania (now the First Lady), Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislane Maxwell. The photo was taken at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida on February 12, 2000. Twitter users were the first to spot the strange edit by Fox News.

I can't easily post the image here, but it's worth a click.

I post this here to give the man the credit he's due.

ETA:
Here's a tweet from a fellow who recognized @FLOTUS on the left hand side of the picture that aired