I think my biggest concern over the next 13 months is two-pronged: a recession, which Americans tend to unfailingly blame on the sitting president and punish come election-time; or a serious health problem with the president. I am pensive every single day.
Don’t be pensive - there will never be another Republican president - now that they know they can stop the voting and then continue it as long as needed the whole exercise is moot. My vote was canceled, but I’m fine with it, because now I know the fix is in.
What I find interesting about the JAA comments here is that while attempting to feign intellectual points through questions, he or she makes no points at all. Forget the questions: tell us what you think are the failings of this President’s cabinet.
Blinken, for example, doing an outstanding job building a multinational coalition around numerous global political events including the recent outrageous upheaval in Israel and Gaza. Americans out of work stands at the lowest number it’s been in decades and that’s been since Biden took control of the Oval Office. People are working and feeding their families. The ACLU has been working around the clock to defend voting rights in multiple states where Republican legislators have been attempting to curtail the votes of their citizens.
Hiding behind “Just An American” is your code name for an old white guy who doesn’t like losing the privilege you’ve been accustomed to for your lifetime. Sorry to point this out, but it’s only the old white dudes listening to Fox NotNews asking Tucker-like questions. TELL US what you think has gone wrong in the last two years of Biden’s tenure in the Oval.
The good news is the US doesn't really face any external existential threats that are close by.
But the bad news is that means the electorate will be willing to vote for clowns who sabotage American national security for a LONG time before they take national security seriously.
I have news for you - both parties are a joke - clinging to Biden and his woke handlers is like sitting in a sinking raft knowing it’s going down - it’s just a matter of when - we have far worse ahead.
God. I am no fan of Trump but it sure looks like "setting the world on fire" has long held strong bipartisan support. Undeterred Russian aggression? Can we please give up the stupid obviously false propaganda that Russia was unprovoked when it went into Ukraine.
"Waves of new members joined the alliance in 1999 and 2004. Then, in April 2008, at the urging of the George W. Bush administration, NATO, in a communiqué known as the Bucharest Declaration, affirmed that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members” of the alliance one day, but did not initiate the formal accession process, known as a Membership Action Plan (MAP), for either country.
At the time, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Russia might launch a preemptive strike against Ukraine or Georgia if either country tried to continue its westward shift, according to Fiona Hill, a top Russia expert on the National Security Council in the Trump administration, who was then a senior U.S. intelligence analyst."
It is indisputable that we willfully, knowingly, provoked Russia by arming Ukraine and refusing to shut down the possibility of NATO membership. The sheer glee of all the neocons and defense contractors thinking they had finally found a way to topple Putin was evident from day one. The faux concern over Ukrainian lives as they demand we send endless amounts of weapons was nauseating. And honestly, this sickening amount of death and destruction never would have been possible without the entire mainstream media lighting their hair on fire about Russiagate for years and then categorically refusing to admit there was no there there. I bet you could have easily convinced most democrats that we needed war with Russia before they invaded Ukraine.
And it's rich that you call out Trump and Ramaswamy while Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham are on TV demanding we start WWIII. This would be hilarious if it wasn't so unhinged and also completely divorced from our actual ability to accomplish anything militarily. As anyone who has been paying attention to Ukraine knows, we literally cannot send them any more arms because we don't have any left. We let neoliberalism turn the 'arsenal of democracy' into a Wall Street and defense contractor enrichment scheme. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-military-industrial-stock-buyback
No sane person without a death wish would want any of the serious contenders for either party anywhere near the levers of power. There is no rule that we need to defend Taiwan, Israel, or Ukraine. It will not improve anyone's life in this country by doing so.
Daniel, I couldn’t agree with you more. Not only is everything you say spot on, you forgot what’s happening right before our eyes.
TurDville is holding up the confirmations of over 300 promotions for senior military officers; over culture and religious wars.
Additionally, I would posit that Republicans are not strong on n military defense, and never have been; they are strong on military spending. When it comes to the troops and veteran care, they always have to be shamed into action and allocating funds for the troops.
Trump also redirected much needed dollars for the border wall that was supposed to be used to improve military barracks, bases and troop supplies. Not to mention, sending troops to the border which harms our military readiness, since those troops aren’t participating in the drills needed for their deployments in case of war.
We always knew that Trump didn’t care about America, just himself as evidenced by the fact he was considering inflating his financials with a “presidential” premium.
Now that he has taken over the party, it’s clear his sycophants in Congress have ignored their oaths of office, and are just in it for themselves.
The Dispatch is 100% committed to telling the world that protesting college students is a bigger national security problem than Coach Tuberville and Rand Paul putting all appointments on hold for the murkiest of reasons. But good luck, and I love reading the truth.
Ah yes...the old "my party is in control of the government, but it's the other guys who are messing everything up!" argument.
"Imagine… what a second Trump term would actually look like. If he only appoints toadies to cabinet-level positions, there would be no adults in the room." - laughable.
We were told that when Democrats regained power, the adults would be back in the room. I guess that statement depends on your definition of adult. What we have now is the complete opposite of the standard definition. Kirby and Biden are out there claiming that the biggest threat to Americans and the world is the sun monster all while radical Islam goes on the march. Name one thing that has gone right under the Democrats: Just. Name. One. Thing.
We’re still alive, and live in a democracy (flawed as it is right now), and not being forced to learn Russian. Your guy seems very keen on overthrowing our gov and letting oligarchs move in their place. The list is very, very long in terms of why our lives are better with a Dem as president and the rest of congress as SCOTUS is corrupt and compromised.
How absolutely deluded do you have to be to write that paragraph and not take part in some reflection before hitting Post. You didn't address anything I wrote. Just a bunch of blathering nonsense word-salad ad-hominem. To be fair these days that is par for the course from Democrats. My guy? Russian? You think the Russians are going to overrun and rule the United States?! Thanks for the laugh!
If I understand your position, the Democrats now in power aren't adults. Accepting that for the sake of argument, do you believe the Republicans when in power were adults, or when they get back in power they will be adults?
You know the definition just as well as I do. As far as foreign and domestic policy, yes, I do think the previous administration were adults. They made mistakes in some policy, but it wasn't rampant.
The fact of the matter is that the people in power now are grossly incompetent. Again...name one thing they have done right that has benefited the United States that was also Constitutional and therefore legal? I can't think of a single thing. Wholesale incompetence with no responsibility for your failures is NOT what being an adult means, that's for sure.
The actual Constitutional edict of the Federal Government isn't to be nice to reporters and do what they want, it is to run the country within the bounds of law and do what that law lays out FOR THE PEOPLE.
This current Administration isn't doing anything close to that. Instead they are worried about the sun monster killing us and people playing make believe with their gender while World War III breaks out and their citizens overdose and fall into despair. That isn't just incompetence: it's child like naivety of what their actual job is.
No, I don't know your definition of "adult". It isn't chronological, I understand. My definition would include sober consideration of alternatives, of right and wrong, legality and illegality, good planning and careful execution. I see some of that in the previous administration: notably Operation Warp Speed. and the Abraham Accords. What other policies and programs did they execute which you consider to exhibit adulthood?
Wow, do you work for MSNBC? Because they lied about all three of those "classic hits" just as you did.
If you still believe they are true statements that have been verified as such you are intellectually compromised.
Donald Trump, the adult in context:
"Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group. Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name."
"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."
"These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen," Trump tweeted just past midnight on May 29. "Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts."
"Looting leads to shooting, and that's why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night," Trump tweeted May 29. "Or look at what just happened in Louisville with 7 people shot. I don't want this to happen, and that's what the expression put out last night means."
All of those quotes were pulled from Politifact, a leftist website that will do anything to dunk on Trump. All were lies pushed by media on the weak willed and intellectually dishonest.
Seriously - who needs to grow up? The answer might cost you a mirror.
(Just some simple markup in comments, Substack, that´s all I ask.)
¨The evidence is mounting that Netanyahu’s cabinet ignored intelligence warnings due to a preoccupation with their domestic agenda;¨
You have to work really hard to leave the south that wide-open to a known lunatic terrorist group (that has launched repeated rocket attacks over the last almost two decades!) where your front-line kibbutzim is maybe half-mile away (too close!).
¨Senate Republicans have placed so many holds on so many national security positions that the executive branch lacks confirmed diplomats and officers in the region.¨
That is on the Senate Democratic caucus, and apparently Dick Durbin in particular, who are just determined to assist Tommy Tuberville in his sabotage campaign.
¨While there are individual Republicans taking national security seriously, the party as a whole has become worse than a joke. Their actions threaten the national interest. It is no longer possible to act as if that is not true.¨
I think the part where they keep saying they gotta shrink (or destroy!) the federal government so they can drown it in a bathtub (or destroy all the elites R & otherwise) to prevent the oppression of uh....[checks notes] poor, oppressed [squint] neo-nazis & their uh, extremely wealthy friends with their felony bribery charges is maybe a hint that they are not fond of the national security of the United States. Especially when the one guy keeps going about how much he adores several murderous avowed enemies of the United States. Like, Kim Il-Jong, Vladimir Putin & other assorted dictators and thugs. (Curiously, he never seems to talk about how much he admires the Ayatollahs of Iran, even though you´d think they´d be right up his alley. Maybe they´re too harsh on cocaine enjoyers or international hotel chains or something? They never play ´YMCA´?)
elm
me, i´d figured the over-enthusiasm for the ´let´s overthrow the government party by sacking some government buildings´ was a clue of some sort
Senator Durbin went on the Sunday shows to say that yes, he totally supported the blue slip/hold system EVEN IF just one Republican senator was blocking everything (which Tuberville had started at that point). He´s the majority whip for the Democratic caucus.
The majority can change the rules if they want. They don´t have to honor the hold system.
If "shrill" means truth-telling, then we need an army of shrill voices.
Thank you for posting this essay.
I think my biggest concern over the next 13 months is two-pronged: a recession, which Americans tend to unfailingly blame on the sitting president and punish come election-time; or a serious health problem with the president. I am pensive every single day.
Don’t be pensive - there will never be another Republican president - now that they know they can stop the voting and then continue it as long as needed the whole exercise is moot. My vote was canceled, but I’m fine with it, because now I know the fix is in.
Shocking - I know - don’t worry, I won’t be voting in any more presidential elections.
What I find interesting about the JAA comments here is that while attempting to feign intellectual points through questions, he or she makes no points at all. Forget the questions: tell us what you think are the failings of this President’s cabinet.
Blinken, for example, doing an outstanding job building a multinational coalition around numerous global political events including the recent outrageous upheaval in Israel and Gaza. Americans out of work stands at the lowest number it’s been in decades and that’s been since Biden took control of the Oval Office. People are working and feeding their families. The ACLU has been working around the clock to defend voting rights in multiple states where Republican legislators have been attempting to curtail the votes of their citizens.
Hiding behind “Just An American” is your code name for an old white guy who doesn’t like losing the privilege you’ve been accustomed to for your lifetime. Sorry to point this out, but it’s only the old white dudes listening to Fox NotNews asking Tucker-like questions. TELL US what you think has gone wrong in the last two years of Biden’s tenure in the Oval.
The good news is the US doesn't really face any external existential threats that are close by.
But the bad news is that means the electorate will be willing to vote for clowns who sabotage American national security for a LONG time before they take national security seriously.
I'm horrified as a US soccer fan to recognize the US Men's national team jersey worn by the raving lunatic in the post's photo
Same here. I had to do a double take. Hopefully he’s just wearing it because it says USA.
I have news for you - both parties are a joke - clinging to Biden and his woke handlers is like sitting in a sinking raft knowing it’s going down - it’s just a matter of when - we have far worse ahead.
Really brilliant writing Dan - as usual!
God. I am no fan of Trump but it sure looks like "setting the world on fire" has long held strong bipartisan support. Undeterred Russian aggression? Can we please give up the stupid obviously false propaganda that Russia was unprovoked when it went into Ukraine.
"Waves of new members joined the alliance in 1999 and 2004. Then, in April 2008, at the urging of the George W. Bush administration, NATO, in a communiqué known as the Bucharest Declaration, affirmed that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members” of the alliance one day, but did not initiate the formal accession process, known as a Membership Action Plan (MAP), for either country.
At the time, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Russia might launch a preemptive strike against Ukraine or Georgia if either country tried to continue its westward shift, according to Fiona Hill, a top Russia expert on the National Security Council in the Trump administration, who was then a senior U.S. intelligence analyst."
https://news.yahoo.com/in-closer-ties-to-ukraine-us-officials-long-saw-promise-and-peril-090006105.html
It is indisputable that we willfully, knowingly, provoked Russia by arming Ukraine and refusing to shut down the possibility of NATO membership. The sheer glee of all the neocons and defense contractors thinking they had finally found a way to topple Putin was evident from day one. The faux concern over Ukrainian lives as they demand we send endless amounts of weapons was nauseating. And honestly, this sickening amount of death and destruction never would have been possible without the entire mainstream media lighting their hair on fire about Russiagate for years and then categorically refusing to admit there was no there there. I bet you could have easily convinced most democrats that we needed war with Russia before they invaded Ukraine.
And it's rich that you call out Trump and Ramaswamy while Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham are on TV demanding we start WWIII. This would be hilarious if it wasn't so unhinged and also completely divorced from our actual ability to accomplish anything militarily. As anyone who has been paying attention to Ukraine knows, we literally cannot send them any more arms because we don't have any left. We let neoliberalism turn the 'arsenal of democracy' into a Wall Street and defense contractor enrichment scheme. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-military-industrial-stock-buyback
We literally helped China build missiles to aim at us. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-bill-clinton-and-american-financiers.
No sane person without a death wish would want any of the serious contenders for either party anywhere near the levers of power. There is no rule that we need to defend Taiwan, Israel, or Ukraine. It will not improve anyone's life in this country by doing so.
Daniel, I couldn’t agree with you more. Not only is everything you say spot on, you forgot what’s happening right before our eyes.
TurDville is holding up the confirmations of over 300 promotions for senior military officers; over culture and religious wars.
Additionally, I would posit that Republicans are not strong on n military defense, and never have been; they are strong on military spending. When it comes to the troops and veteran care, they always have to be shamed into action and allocating funds for the troops.
Trump also redirected much needed dollars for the border wall that was supposed to be used to improve military barracks, bases and troop supplies. Not to mention, sending troops to the border which harms our military readiness, since those troops aren’t participating in the drills needed for their deployments in case of war.
We always knew that Trump didn’t care about America, just himself as evidenced by the fact he was considering inflating his financials with a “presidential” premium.
Now that he has taken over the party, it’s clear his sycophants in Congress have ignored their oaths of office, and are just in it for themselves.
America, be damned!...:)
The Dispatch is 100% committed to telling the world that protesting college students is a bigger national security problem than Coach Tuberville and Rand Paul putting all appointments on hold for the murkiest of reasons. But good luck, and I love reading the truth.
Ah yes...the old "my party is in control of the government, but it's the other guys who are messing everything up!" argument.
"Imagine… what a second Trump term would actually look like. If he only appoints toadies to cabinet-level positions, there would be no adults in the room." - laughable.
We were told that when Democrats regained power, the adults would be back in the room. I guess that statement depends on your definition of adult. What we have now is the complete opposite of the standard definition. Kirby and Biden are out there claiming that the biggest threat to Americans and the world is the sun monster all while radical Islam goes on the march. Name one thing that has gone right under the Democrats: Just. Name. One. Thing.
We’re still alive, and live in a democracy (flawed as it is right now), and not being forced to learn Russian. Your guy seems very keen on overthrowing our gov and letting oligarchs move in their place. The list is very, very long in terms of why our lives are better with a Dem as president and the rest of congress as SCOTUS is corrupt and compromised.
How absolutely deluded do you have to be to write that paragraph and not take part in some reflection before hitting Post. You didn't address anything I wrote. Just a bunch of blathering nonsense word-salad ad-hominem. To be fair these days that is par for the course from Democrats. My guy? Russian? You think the Russians are going to overrun and rule the United States?! Thanks for the laugh!
If I understand your position, the Democrats now in power aren't adults. Accepting that for the sake of argument, do you believe the Republicans when in power were adults, or when they get back in power they will be adults?
What is your "standard definition" of "adult"?
You know the definition just as well as I do. As far as foreign and domestic policy, yes, I do think the previous administration were adults. They made mistakes in some policy, but it wasn't rampant.
The fact of the matter is that the people in power now are grossly incompetent. Again...name one thing they have done right that has benefited the United States that was also Constitutional and therefore legal? I can't think of a single thing. Wholesale incompetence with no responsibility for your failures is NOT what being an adult means, that's for sure.
The actual Constitutional edict of the Federal Government isn't to be nice to reporters and do what they want, it is to run the country within the bounds of law and do what that law lays out FOR THE PEOPLE.
This current Administration isn't doing anything close to that. Instead they are worried about the sun monster killing us and people playing make believe with their gender while World War III breaks out and their citizens overdose and fall into despair. That isn't just incompetence: it's child like naivety of what their actual job is.
No, I don't know your definition of "adult". It isn't chronological, I understand. My definition would include sober consideration of alternatives, of right and wrong, legality and illegality, good planning and careful execution. I see some of that in the previous administration: notably Operation Warp Speed. and the Abraham Accords. What other policies and programs did they execute which you consider to exhibit adulthood?
Wow, do you work for MSNBC? Because they lied about all three of those "classic hits" just as you did.
If you still believe they are true statements that have been verified as such you are intellectually compromised.
Donald Trump, the adult in context:
"Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group. Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name."
"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."
"These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen," Trump tweeted just past midnight on May 29. "Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts."
"Looting leads to shooting, and that's why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night," Trump tweeted May 29. "Or look at what just happened in Louisville with 7 people shot. I don't want this to happen, and that's what the expression put out last night means."
All of those quotes were pulled from Politifact, a leftist website that will do anything to dunk on Trump. All were lies pushed by media on the weak willed and intellectually dishonest.
Seriously - who needs to grow up? The answer might cost you a mirror.
(Just some simple markup in comments, Substack, that´s all I ask.)
¨The evidence is mounting that Netanyahu’s cabinet ignored intelligence warnings due to a preoccupation with their domestic agenda;¨
You have to work really hard to leave the south that wide-open to a known lunatic terrorist group (that has launched repeated rocket attacks over the last almost two decades!) where your front-line kibbutzim is maybe half-mile away (too close!).
¨Senate Republicans have placed so many holds on so many national security positions that the executive branch lacks confirmed diplomats and officers in the region.¨
That is on the Senate Democratic caucus, and apparently Dick Durbin in particular, who are just determined to assist Tommy Tuberville in his sabotage campaign.
¨While there are individual Republicans taking national security seriously, the party as a whole has become worse than a joke. Their actions threaten the national interest. It is no longer possible to act as if that is not true.¨
I think the part where they keep saying they gotta shrink (or destroy!) the federal government so they can drown it in a bathtub (or destroy all the elites R & otherwise) to prevent the oppression of uh....[checks notes] poor, oppressed [squint] neo-nazis & their uh, extremely wealthy friends with their felony bribery charges is maybe a hint that they are not fond of the national security of the United States. Especially when the one guy keeps going about how much he adores several murderous avowed enemies of the United States. Like, Kim Il-Jong, Vladimir Putin & other assorted dictators and thugs. (Curiously, he never seems to talk about how much he admires the Ayatollahs of Iran, even though you´d think they´d be right up his alley. Maybe they´re too harsh on cocaine enjoyers or international hotel chains or something? They never play ´YMCA´?)
elm
me, i´d figured the over-enthusiasm for the ´let´s overthrow the government party by sacking some government buildings´ was a clue of some sort
It's all Dick Durbin's fault is quite a take.
Senator Durbin went on the Sunday shows to say that yes, he totally supported the blue slip/hold system EVEN IF just one Republican senator was blocking everything (which Tuberville had started at that point). He´s the majority whip for the Democratic caucus.
The majority can change the rules if they want. They don´t have to honor the hold system.
elm
so they own it
Wouldn't be the first time.