President Trump: Making America Great Again...

[BlueK]

Predicting that things will happen before 12/31 is never a good idea. They never happen

Trump will tell a lie before the end of the day, 12/31.

[falafel]

Trump will tell a lie before the end of the day, 12/31.

And so will the entire human race.

[frank ryan]

And so will the entire human race.

Weird retort. I see you've taken up sharing Ted's mantle.

[falafel]

Weird retort. I see you've taken up sharing Ted's mantle.

I didn't even post a link.

[myboynoah]

Better slow that roll on the Syria withdrawal. Sadness abounds.

[Walter Sobchak]

Better slow that roll on the Syria withdrawal. Sadness abounds.

Interesting comment. Hopefully, Trump will stick to his instincts and do the impossible... e.g. break one of America's worst habits.

If there's one thing that unites the establishments of both major political parties in the United States, it's a love of war.

We see it all the time: the projection of American military power around the world, the effort to maintain not just great strength but global primacy, the intervention in conflicts thousands of miles from our shores, the conviction that we can use force to control political outcomes in countries and cultures on the other side of the planet, the unwavering belief that doing all of this places us on the side of righteousness, demonstrating that we are both the world's "indispensable nation" and the defender of all that is decent and good.

Republicans act on these presumptions, and so do Democrats. Any attempt to question or break from them, as Barack Obama sometimes did, is met by a bipartisan flurry of angry denunciations. Appeasement! Weakness! Isolationism!

It is against this backdrop that the furious reaction to President Trump's decision to withdraw American troops from Syria and to significantly cut our forces in Afghanistan must be understood. Like everything Trump does, these decisions appear to have been made in an impulsive way, without consultation with Congress, allies, or Pentagon advisers. That's what policymakers call "process."

[...]

Process is good, but it doesn't guarantee wisdom. For an especially vivid example, consider Monday's New York Times op-ed from Susan Rice, national security adviser during the Obama administration. The column's opening lines bring the indictment: "This country's national security decision-making process is more broken than at any time since the National Security Act became law in 1947. Nothing illustrates this dangerous dysfunction more starkly than President Trump's reckless, unilateral decisions to announce the sudden withdrawal of all 2,000 United States troops from Syria and to remove 7,000 from Afghanistan."

What Rice fails to mention is that when she (along with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) helped to lead this much-vaunted "national security decision-making process," it persuaded her former boss to overthrow the government of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, an act that plunged the country into chaos, turning it into a haven for Islamist terrorists and a launch point for refugee flows from North Africa across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and the rest of the European Union.

And of course this decision was made less than a decade after the "national security decision-making process" during the administration of George W. Bush gave us the invasion of occupation of Iraq — a policy that plunged the country and, eventually the entire region, into chaos. Everything that's happened there since — the insurgency and civil war of 2004-2007, the rise of the Islamic State, the Syrian civil war, the battle to take back Iraq from ISIS, the Iraqi government's ongoing and possibly counter-productive efforts at retribution against supposed ISIS sympathizers — follows from the "national security decision-making process" of 2002 and 2003.

[...]

It would be comical if it weren't so tragic. The war in Afghanistan has now been underway for longer that the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. And yet the "national security decision-making process" tells us that the only reasonable response to this intractable stalemate is to … continue the stalemate indefinitely.

[Walter Sobchak]

God bless Rand Paul.

Indeed.

Status Quo Seekers Fear This Senator is Advising Trump

While the Blob freaks out, reports suggest Rand Paul is helping the president keep his campaign promises on war.

“Welcome to the world of President Rand Paul,” blared the headline at The Washington Post. In the piece that followed, columnist Josh Rogin took President Donald Trump to task for reportedly listening to the Kentucky senator too much.

“Several U.S. officials and people who have spoken directly to Trump since his Syria decision tell me they believe that Paul’s frequent phone conversations with Trump, wholly outside the policy process, are having an outsize influence on the president’s recent foreign policy decisions,” Rogin writes. “Officials told me that, throughout the national security bureaucracy, everyone is aware that Paul’s voice is one to which the president is paying increasing attention.”

“The existing concern over Paul’s influence on Russia policy has now boiled over with respect to Syria,” Rogin worries. He also warns, “In the run-up to 2020, Trump should realize that most Republicans—and most Americans—favor a robust U.S. foreign policy.”

This is Washington groupthink disguised as mainstream consensus. Polling this year has showed that most Americans are opposed to “robust” endless wars.

[...]

The idea that promoting a more restrained foreign policy is somehow a political liability reflects more what elites think voters should believe, not what they necessarily believe.

But why let reality get in the way of a good Beltway narrative? “Ideally, Trump will soon realize that adopting Paul’s vision for the future of U.S. foreign policy is not only dangerous for our national security but bad politics as well,” Rogin insists.

Is this even remotely true given what we know about America’s recent foreign policy and political history?

That Trump has now roundly bucked the advice of virtually all of his foreign policy advisors—so much so that his secretary of defense resigned in protest—is certainly unprecedented in modern American politics.

That’s the point.

To date, Trump has agreed to troop commitments in Syria and military build-ups in Afghanistan at the behest of his inner circle. This month, after two years of taking their advice with no endgame in sight, he essentially said “no more.”

This is consistent with what Trump promised during the election. It’s consistent with what Rand Paul has advocated during his time in Congress.

It’s also what Barack Obama once promised.

As The New York Times reported, “However precipitously Mr. Trump acted, he was channeling the same reservations that Mr. Obama had. Both presidents questioned the open-ended nature of these campaigns, pressed their advisers to define success, and faced the problem of ‘mission creep.’”

Obama campaigned on resisting Washington’s longstanding predilection to rush into war, particularly in Iraq, and promised to challenge the status quo. But a main difference between Obama and Trump, or at least Trump’s actions this month, is that Obama was never able to fully break from Washington foreign policy consensus, which some progressives lamented.

Anti-war rhetoric can be tolerated. Following through never will be. “Criticizing past U.S. policy at a campaign rally is one thing,” Rogin observed of Trump’s speech to American troops in Iraq at Christmas. “The commander in chief telling U.S. soldiers in a war zone that he has lost faith in their generals, and is therefore changing their mission, is another.”

“Trump’s Iraq trip moved U.S. foreign policy one big step in Paul’s direction,” Rogin writes.

And why wouldn’t the president move foreign policy in Paul’s direction, considering it is also the direction Trump himself had promised? Trump reportedly seeks counsel from Paul because Paul is one of the few in Congress who agrees with him.

This isn’t crazy or reckless or subterfuge or whatever other barbs foreign policy elites will continue to come up with. Again, it’s consistent.

It’s also rational. “These commanders have been singing this tune year after year for 17 years of occupation, and secretaries of Defense have kept agreeing with them,” Andrew Sullivan writes regarding the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. “Trump gave them one last surge of troops—violating his own campaign promise—and we got nowhere one more time. It is getting close to insane.”

So now, Trump is finally being sane. “Obama was elected and reelected to end the Iraq occupation, and was then sucked back in by the exact same arguments we are hearing today,” Sullivan continues. “Trump was even more adamant in ending imperial overreach, but after two years, guess what? We are still in Syria and we have more troops in Afghanistan….”

[...]

Right now, the president of the United States is actually, finally, challenging Washington’s conventional foreign policy thinking. Expect the establishment to give him no quarter.

[BlueK]

People from Utah are the most anti-Trump Republicans:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/03/polit...ort/index.html

[frank ryan]

Interesting comment. Hopefully, Trump will stick to his instincts and do the impossible... e.g. break one of America's worst habits.

lol @ wanting Trump to follow his instincts.

[Uncle Ted]

People from Utah are the most anti-Trump Republicans:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/03/polit...ort/index.html

People from Utah must be the dumbest anti-Drumpf republicans as well given that RMoney accepted Drumpf’s endorsement and they still voted for him in yuge numbers.


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[YOhio]

People from Utah must be the dumbest anti-Drumpf republicans as well given that RMoney accepted Drumpf’s endorsement and they still voted for him in yuge numbers.


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Lol. Stick to posting articles. It’s not pretty when you post without a crutch.

[frank ryan]

People from Utah must be the dumbest anti-Drumpf republicans as well given that RMoney accepted Drumpf’s endorsement and they still voted for him in yuge numbers.


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He pretty much ignored it. He said thanks and then said he wanted the people of Utah’s. He wasn’t exactly fawning over Trumplestiltskin’s mighty endorsement. Good lord stop repeating everything Trump/Fux News/The_Donald say.

[BlueK]

Romney just begged Trump for his generous endorsement for the senate because there is no way he could win a senate race in Utah without it. #thetruthiswhateverdearleadertellsusitis

[Commando]

lol. Trump clearly went out and endorsed Mitt because he needed at least one W on the scorecard.

[Jeff Lebowski]

People from Utah must be the dumbest anti-Drumpf republicans as well given that RMoney accepted Drumpf’s endorsement and they still voted for him in yuge numbers.

People from Utah electing a republican. Will wonders never cease?