Trump, of course, cannot abide by any dissing from anyone, so he's shot back, strutting his supposed alpha-male feathers.
The reason this may be ill-advised is that Corker's still going to be a key player in his remaining fifteen months:
. . . let’s do some first-grade math. McConnell has 52 votes. The party’s going to *try* to pass tax reform via reconciliation, which means he needs 50. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are perennially tough “gets” in the center; Rand Paul is similarly uncompromising on the right. McCain, who’s also almost certainly in his last term, has spiked health-care reform not once but twice and obviously enjoys sticking it to Trump, for understandable reasons. Now here’s POTUS doing everything he can to alienate another must-have Republican in Corker, who’s already iffy on tax reform if it raises the deficit. Why would McConnell even bother to pursue a bill? It’s dead on arrival, thanks in part to Trump’s vain need to avenge personal insults publicly.But it gets worse. Corker’s also the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Foreign Relations Committee will be the main body tasked with figuring out what to do about the Iran deal once Trump decertifies it this month. The administration’s reportedly hoping Congress will hit Iranian entities like the Revolutionary Guard with targeted sanctions; having an ally in the chairman of the Committee would make that task much easier. Having an enemy in him will make it less predictable. Trump’s 100 percent right that Corker was complicit in getting Obama’s Iran nuclear deal through the Senate but trying to shame him publicly about that now as part of an all-out attack on Corker won’t make the decertification process easier. On the contrary.
Will Trump's thin skin prevail over any ability he might be able to muster to strategize in order to achieve his objectives?
That is where the smart money is, it seems to me.
Trump is a lot of things but diplomatic is not one of them. He and your party are also failing to achieve their promises goals that fewer than half the electorate supposedly elected them to achieve.
ReplyDeleteCorker (R-Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) don't want war either? Bloggie has called me infantile for confessing the same concerns, but I'm sure he'll parse it all out for me.
ReplyDeleteMy party? I've publicly declared on this blog that I no longer consider myself a Republican.
ReplyDeleteParse it for you? Glad to. All Corker has said is that Trump's reckless tweets increase the likelihood of it. I don't think he's anywhere on record from any point in his career in public life as being an across the board pacifist. Like most people, he knows war is horrible and must be avoided if at all possible.
ReplyDeleteThat said, he's been a horrible Foreign Relations Committee chair. Hard to forgive him for his role in letting the Iran deal happen.
ReplyDeleteGot a better deal there do ya, peacemaker, or will you inherit the kingdom creating mass slaughter?
ReplyDelete"If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying
ReplyDeleteas to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide,you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution."-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Was Corker a big hawk on Nam?
ReplyDeleteReply to President Eisenhower: You would think, but 56 years after your leaving office, it hasn't happened.
ReplyDeleteWho's starting the war? Another preemption?
ReplyDeleteThe one other than the one that blinks first, I'd say.
ReplyDeleteAwful to contemplate, but I really can't see any radically different course of action to encourage US policy-makers to pursue. Can't see a third way between what we're likely headed for and the option of living with a nuclear North Korea for the foreseeable future.
You may well regret your heinous position, truly heinous and I ain't gonna write an essay explaining why. Fie upon your fire and fury!
ReplyDeleteCan you see a third way?
ReplyDeleteThe second option, living with a nuclear NK, just prolongs the hair-raising game of chicken. It's really no different from the first position.
What does Norkor want to do to the rest of the world with their nukes? My read is that it is all defensive because they do not trust the USA and the UN that the USA is a part of. Nothing new there, it's still an armistice for now.
ReplyDeleteOh, and the US is under some kind of obligation to get NK to " trust us?" After the Agreed Framework violations, several UN resolutions violated, and the failure of the Six-Way Talks?
ReplyDeleteYou are so tough, man. You frighten me. Like not.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Corker. Do you think he will heed Bannon's call for him to resign? Likely not.
ReplyDeleteI see you didn't actually defend your position that it is incumbent on the US to get NK to "trust" us, opting instead for schoolyard taunting.
ReplyDeleteAre we to assume it's because you don't really buy it yourself?
Oh no, I buy it. Was I supposed to defend my position? Well, that is why I returned to this page to post this, as Donnie and the Jets are cruising airspace over there: U.S. and South Korean wartime operational plans, including a plan to wipe out the North Korean leadership, were stolen by North Korean hackers last year, a South Korean ruling party lawmaker said on Wednesday. Iran and Iraq don't trust us either. Oh well, what's trust in war? Half the American people or more don't trust us either, and I am one of them.
ReplyDeleteSome 235 gigabytes of military documents were taken from South Korea's Defence Integrated Data Centre in September last year, Democratic Party representative Rhee Cheol-hee said in radio appearances on Wednesday, citing information from unidentified South Korean defense officials.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-flies-bombers-over-korea-as-trump-discusses-options/ar-AAthefK?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=SL5JDHP
Well, of course, the US is going to have such plans. North Korea is a dire threat, a hostile force. If our top defense officials weren't fleshing out such scenarios, I'd want them fired.
ReplyDeleteBut I want to come back to your glaring avoidance of defending your position.
We're supposed to trust a regime that sends Otto Warmbier home to his parents in a comatose state? That kills its own dictator's half-brother with VX nerve agent in a foreign airport? A regime that trades nuclear-explosion and missile technology with Iran? That engages in world-wide drug trafficking? That inserts counterfeit money into the world's money supply?
The term for such trust is "unwise in the extreme."