Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Squirrel-Hair wings it on the hair-raising crisis currently on the world's plate

Shoots off his mouth with no prior notification to his foreign-policy team:

Whatever strategic planning the Trump administration has for a North Korea with nuclear weapons capabilities, there was no preparing for the president’s comments on Tuesday. The White House, including the national-security team, was unaware President Trump was preparing to speak publicly about North Korea when he did so Tuesday at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” said Trump, his arms crossed. “They will be met with the fire and the fury like the world has never seen.” Trump said North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been “very threatening beyond a normal state.”
“And as I said, they will be met with the fire and fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” Trump said.
The president was responding to a report in the Washington Post that, according to a confidential U.S. intelligence assessment presented late last month, the North Korean regime has “successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles.”
Trump’s aides and staff will now be forced to fit their messaging and agenda to the president’s words. Dan Scavino, who runs the White House’s social-media operations, has already leaned into them by tweeting out a video of Trump’s comments at Bedminster.
The episode represents a change in posture: for most of Trump’s presidency, administration officials have been reluctant to respond too forcefully in public to North Korean aggression and threats. One administration source put it to me this way after a previous missile test by North Korea: there’s no upside to a war of words with the regime of Kim Jong-un, whose provocations are about seeking attention. The president, for some reason, seems to have decided otherwise. 
Everybody who wanted to see this administration avoid going over the precipice was heartened by the appointment of John Kelly as Chief of Staff. And that move is yielding results. But with regard to the Big Guy's spontaneity-based approach to expressing himself, there appears to be no change forthcoming:

But while the president has offered Kelly a level of control Priebus never managed to obtain, Trump has resisted giving his new chief of staff veto power over the spontaneous and provocative tweets that often serve as a distraction for his administration.
A series of news reports suggesting Kelly had sought oversight of Trump's Twitter account, including a report that claimed Kelly wanted to know in advance what the president planned to post, made their way to Trump's desk last week, a person familiar with the situation told the Washington Examiner.
Trump "was pissed when he read Kelly wanted to control his Twitter feed," the person said.
 So where this Trump-Kim volley of bellicose outbursts takes us is out of anyone else's hands, it seems.

27 comments:

  1. A darker shade of dark than even shock and awe. On the heels of UN sanctions Trump has to remind the world in hellish terms how exceptional we are.

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  2. McCain said Trump might have trouble backing it up. When does the show begin, because Kim responded by threatening Guam after being threatened by fire and fury, if not brimstone (too archaic a term for Stephen Miller)?

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  3. The President Trump Korean bravado is completely in line with his poor popularity rating. The bully pulpit speaks.

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  4. LITD, along with Red State, National Review, Weekly Standard, Charlie Sykes & Ben Shapiro tried to warn everybody

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  5. You did not have to warn me. All the shock jocks are defending him today and knocking pretty much every president since Ike on Korea. I always knew they were whacko birds (genus Accipitor aka Hawk), but bloggie evidently did not until they showed their colors on Trump.

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. The US and Russia got these nukes crawling out of their rears--over 15,000 between them. Trump, a few centuries back (seems like it but it was only a few months ago, but still within what seems like the millennia he has been in powa) was even hinting at jump starting the arms race again, and, if I recall correctly, bloggie was right there with him, as he has been on much of the Trump agenda. Perhaps it is PBS' swan song (since funding might be withheld in lieu of greater goals, again, just what the bloggie ordered) but a must watch will be Ken Burns' take on Nam. But bloggie probably won't watch on principle.

    The Vietnam War is a 10 part, 18-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick ... The Vietnam War premieres September 17, 2017 on PBS

    https://www.bing.com/search?q=pbs+ken+burns+vietnam+documentary&form=IE11TR&src=IE11TR&pc=EUPP_DCJB

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  8. ‘God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un,’ evangelical adviser says

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/08/god-has-given-trump-authority-to-take-out-kim-jong-un-evangelical-adviser-says/?undefined=&utm_term=.0beb5426826a&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

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  9. Probably won't watch. There will be plenty of synopses and credible assessments that can let me know how good or bad it was. But, no, to take x number of hours out of my life to watch a Ken Burns series on PBS is not likely to happen.

    Re: the evangelical leader: what a bonehead.

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  10. http://www.aim.org/special-report/ken-burns-student-of-history-or-left-wing-gasbag/

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  11. Yep, PBS is tax supported. And 65% of the population supports PBS. You will be able to watch it on your own time whenever. PBS is not in to making a bunch of bucks from commercial advertising.

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  12. Correction: make that 83% of voters, including 70% of Trump voters want Congress to look elsewhere than PBS for their cuts. But no, to boogie and his ilk (agreeing wit Trump here again) we run our democracy on their principles rather than the will of the people.

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  13. Painting Nam as anything other than a colossal mistake from inception through execution to withdrawal the way it was done, is like putting lipstick on a pig. Glad you are willing to forego viewing an earnest years long effort to come to terms with it by a proven master of the documentary.

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  14. I just don't watch television made by West-Haters like Burns. And I don't watch PBS. It has a smell wafting off of it that smells a great deal like Unitarian coffee hour.

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  15. I know, you call it principled. I call it shallow.

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  16. my·op·ic.
    .

    [ˌmīˈäpik]







    ADJECTIVE



    nearsighted.



    synonyms
    nearsighted · shortsighted






    •lacking imagination, foresight, or intellectual insight:

    "the government still has a myopic attitude to public spending"



    synonyms
    unimaginative · uncreative · unadventurous · narrow-minded · shallow · small-minded · short-term · shortsighted

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  17. Oh, horse shit. "Public spending" is a supremely insidious term.

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  18. "Public spending" on anything tax dollars have gone for since 1913 have been bad and wrong.

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  19. "Public spending." The more I roll that phrase around in my mind, the harder my teeth grind.

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  20. And the last fucking thing this country needs is "imaginative public spending."

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  21. You lost me. I am still for public spending on education, including our major state and municipal public colleges and universities and, of course their libraries and all public libraries everywhere. PBS is a part of public education. You are vastly outnumbered. But of course you will pester the crap out of us,, win or lose. Go pull up a chair somewhere and wait for a war to watch.

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  22. If all these people think socialist television is so great, why aren't the ratings higher?

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  23. Too high brow for the ignorant mesmerized masses. And you know it.

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  24. Just had this commentary come across my endless feed. I realize I dichotomize between hawk bad and dove good. Your beloved Ronnie finessed the hawk to achieve the dove, but I think Saint John Paul was the real miraculous figure in ending the cold war, but something wicked this way has come again, the devil's in the military-industrial complex. Yet the Pope is often never mentioned in favor of the politicians of Mammon.

    "The Cold War was eventually won by the U.S. and the West without launching a major attack in its final 10 years. And the way the U.S. won it then was by following President Ronald Reagan's clear and unwavering policy of showing up.

    Showing up in the 1981-91 era meant increasing NATO's missile defense and offensive missile presence along the borders with Eastern Europe and even into outer space, boosting the size and scope of the U.S. Air Force and Navy, and not agreeing to back down until a very tangible concession on Soviet nuclear arms was in hand.

    President Reagan's domestic political opponents and pro-Soviet propaganda outfits attacked this strategy in full force. The prevailing message was that the Reagan policies of building up our forces, even if no attacks took place, put the world too much at risk for a nuclear confrontation. The media became flooded with nuclear doomsday warnings and dramatizations, hitting their zenith with the 1983 TV movie "The Day After" that posted record high ratings.

    Even President Reagan himself said the program left him "greatly depressed."

    But depressed or not, Reagan stayed the course. And thanks to unwavering support from Great Britain's then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Soviet Union realized it could not simply scare the U.S. out of defending Western Europe and could not scare Western Europe into urging the U.S. to stand down."



    https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/10/how-ronald-reagan-would-have-handled-north-korea-commentary.html

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  25. Well, he'll yes. It's tough not to get depressed about the fallen - that is, rough, mean and hair-raisingly dangerous- space-time realm. Thank God for the Cross and the empty tomb.

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  26. That's what Saint John Paul said, many times, many ways as a matter of course, for many human years and he's still working too as a saint.!

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  27. In the case of our President it has nothing to do with Korea or any other concern rather than self preservation in the vista of relentless investigation which follows.

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