What. The actual. Fuck.
NJP won’t cut it here, there needs to be a court-martial. I’m down with the idea that soldiers, sailors, and airmen are citizens entitled to political beliefs of their own, but this a clear bright line.
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Seems like.
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… and then the 46th president of the United States, on a nice January 22nd, flips over the sign…
… and discovers that there never was a 2.
Maybe that’s a perfect place to hide a time capsule that won’t be opened until the Trump presidency is over?
I don’t want to editorialize, but it has never even occurred to me to call it anything else. Maybe “intervening” to underline the specific nature of the invasion, as opposed to an invasion with the goal of occupying the country?
Well, if Mexico became a full-on drug cartel state, the US could of course threaten war. “Threatening” national security is not enough (the UN Charter forbids “preventive” wars), but if, in some hypothetical future, you can make the case that the drug cartels are de facto part of the Mexican government and that they are committing acts of war against the USA, then you can go to war.
Which might involve invading your enemy’s territory.
“Considering the use of our military” is just an euphemism for threatening war and invasion. Refusing to call it by those names is editorializing.
Which is the reason why American foreign policy in Central and South America since WW2 is never mentioned when people want to prove what a great and benevolent force for peace, prosperity and freedom the US is on the world stage.
It’s pretty clear by now that all involved sides agree that Trump never threatened but rather offered military help. It’s one thing to disbelieve the White House on this, but the Mexicans say so, too.
What I find most scary about this is that by now, people are perfectly ready to believe that the president of the strongest military power on the planet would so casually threaten invading a neighboring country.
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Oh Canada… Trump is eyeing you…
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Early?! Chrissake, he’s 70!
“You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.”
It sounds like an offer they can’t refuse.
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Uneasy lies the ridiculous hairdo that wears the CLOWN.
(I assume it was a typo?)
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Early symptoms- not early onset.
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It’s a question of whether you believe the official sources’ recollection of what happened and statements to the press, or the anonymous source who has actually shown news organisations what is claimed to be a transcript of the conversation (and which bears a striking resemblance to what everyone agrees was actually talked about; it can’t be an outright fake; it has too many details right which weren’t revealed officially until later).
A person with access to the official transcript of the phone call provided an excerpt to the Associated Press. The person gave it on condition of anonymity because the administration did not make the details of the call public. – LA Times
Speaking only for myself, right now I find a random anonymous source whom I don’t know to be much more credible than the Trump White House; they’ve simply done too much obvious lying. If the White House wants to get information out and be believed by me, at this stage, their best strategy is probably to put it out anonymously and not tell me that it’s them that’s saying it.
Similarly, seeing how Turnbull has framed Trump’s call with him, it would not surprise me at all if Mexico was similarly covering for and downplaying what was actually said. It makes sense to me that they would do that.
Personally, I think the most probable thing is that the president did threaten invasion, and everyone is now collectively walking that back. That matches the mental profile I’ve built up of all the major people involved, and explains where the transcript came from.
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Aid highly experienced with hurricane disasters, no less.
Late stage Assheimers.
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Believe me, we know. Everyday on the news are reports of people being scared/elated over NAFTA being scraped or renegotiated. Somehow many people think we can negotiate a better deal with the blow hard.
Justin Trudeau is doing his best to kiss up to the orange dictator while saying to us we support the opposite of what the orange one decrees. I am almost feel sorry for him for the tightrope he is trying to walk. Almost.
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I think he shows signs of dementia, yes. The way he speaks, to me it indicates that he can’t really follow a conversation. I’ve seen a lot of old people do this. They talk about themselves because it’s the only safe subject. They talk about politics because everyone can have an opinion and it’s kind of a fact free zone. What they don’t talk about are things where they can be caught in a lie, and if they are caught in a lie they deny it.
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I regret that I have but one like to give to this comment,.
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While some folks are pointing to Mexico’s official denial that any threats or invasion talk took place, and that the call was genial and friendly and productive, it seems to me that it’s in their best interest to deny that their President was intimidated by Trump to the point of “stammering”, as the reports indicate. He’s already not very popular; they don’t want him portrayed as someone frightened by a phone call.
Absolutely, it really doesn’t matter at this point whether it’s true or not – it certainly sounds like something Trump would say or do, and it’s being reported as truth by the AP, so it may as well be true. Trump & Bannon are propagandists. They should know that propaganda works both ways.
They could solve this in five seconds by issuing an official transcript of the call, as they did for his call with Theresa May. They haven’t, which makes me inclined to believe that he did in fact say asinine things to Mexico.
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Haven’t we already sent “advisers” to Mexico and various South and Central American countries to combat the various cartels? Honestly, it is bravado BS but I am not going play hysterics on this one. I guess I am numb to the fact that he doesn’t have a diplomatic or “Presidential” bone in his body when it comes to approaching and talking about things. He is used to walking into a room and yelling “jump” with everyone else asking “how high?”
Fun fact - over 11% of the Army is Hispanic. Good luck with that.
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It’s not news that the guy is an asshole at the best of times; and really works at ramping it up if he doesn’t like the situation; but I’m amazed at the degree of “and the threshold for ‘not getting it’ is very low”(as you aptly observe).
Taking offense at Australia’s level of cooperation with the US requires a level of entitlement verging on complete disconnection from reality. They are kind of far away, and not terribly heavily populated; but it is those logistical constraints, not a lack of willingness, that are the primary limit on how much being helpful to US interests they do. Trade and tourism hums along merrily; they’ve contributed a solid(in proportion to their size) contingent of troops for every war we’ve fancied a role in since WW1, they tend to go along with our treaties and trade agreements and such. Short of sending us a delegation of exotic slaves bearing litters of gold and ivory as tribute; what more could you want?
Mexico isn’t quite as rosy, given its role in immigration issues; but you still have to be utterly clueless to overlook the fact that they have (honestly somewhat surprisingly; they must be really, really tempted to just say ‘fuck it, anyone moving drugs north of the border will be tacitly ignored; we will only go after you for domestic dealing or murder/kidnapping/etc, let the Americans fight their precious drug war.’) been enormously accommodating in terms of being one of the bloodier battlegrounds for our war on the drugs we like to consume.
This is another one of those situations where I just can’t understand how Trump made it to this point(not just the presidency; but any semblance of success in business): wealth can certainly reduce the number of people you have to curry favor with, since it increases the number of necessities and luxuries that one can obtain on a purely market basis; but even the wealthy and powerful have social networks, do favors for one another, and so on.
If you can’t grasp “Obama agreed to take a relatively tiny number of carefully inspected refugees off Australia’s hands because Australia was caught between an intensifying PR hit abroad and total lack of willingness at home; and they’ve been our solid buddies on most issues for decades”; how do you successfully interact with people, even on the level of mercenary schmoozing? Does Mr. “Art of the Deal” not understand things like ‘comparative advantage’ and ‘rational actors tend to base their behavior toward you in future interactions based on your past interactions with them’?
It’s not as though ‘effective diplomacy’ and ‘nice guy diplomacy’ are the same thing; indeed the genre is marked by some rather brutally cold-blooded pragmatism at times; but ‘self-interested neutral evil’ and ‘petulantly unhinged’ are very, very, different things.
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Mexico(for various reasons) has been less willing to have armed Americans overtly running around in their territory(it’s not like that has ever led to trouble for them in the past, right?) compared to Colombia and some of our other Freedom Buddies in the War on Drugs; but there is a nontrivial level of law enforcement cooperation; and they fairly regularly extradite drug lords when they catch them(which is sort of a win/win given that cartel infiltration of the prison system is a known issue that leads to embarrassing escapes; so if the Americans are willing to foot the bill and provide a more secure supermax, why not?); but given the enormous price in blood paid by Mexico for their work against the cartels; it’s hard to argue that they aren’t mostly doing what we want on that score, honestly to a somewhat surprising degree.
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Rereading my post I couldn’t tell who I was talking about – my old boss or Trump. This is exactly what I thought would happen.
Frederick Douglass is being talked about more and more these days! Let’s get an interview with him, stat!
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