Can you please stop calling it anything other than the “Republican Administration”, calling it ‘Team Trump’ or ‘Trump Administration’ excuses all the Republicans from the mess? The orang-utang isn’t doing this alone.
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TrumpGOP. Make sure they all get tarred with this shit.
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Thank you for that. Just wonderful!
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Apparently so.
These quotes contain some moderate national self-criticism, as well as typically right-wing praise of a “strong leader” and an attack on previous US presidents for not being “leaders”. That wish for a “leader” (in German: “Führer”) always creeps me out, but apparently that’s not what’s being criticized.
I can see the ultra-nationalist right wing (of any country) taking offense at having crimes committed by your own country acknowledged (even if they are downplayed as “mistakes”); I can also see them taking offense at someone failing to use sufficiently evil words for “the enemy”. But why should anyone else care?
I’m interested now… if you were the president of the USA, and your stated goal was to improve relations with Russia, how would you respond in that interview?
Would you go for a traditional axis-of-evil speech?
I don’t think it takes a diplomacy genius to come up with something like, “Yes, we’re very troubled by some of Russia’s policies—and Mr. Putin has rightly been criticized—but we believe improving relations with Russia will benefit everyone bigly.”
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Let me be the first to use the words “Trump” and “diplomacy genius” in the same sentence and say that he isn’t one.
But it would take more of a diplomacy genius than I am to figure out just how much damage would be done by explicitly answering “yes” to the question of whether the head of state of a country I’m trying to improve relations with is “a killer”.
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My answer didn’t include an acknowledgement that Putin is a killer. (I said he’s been rightly criticized.) I also didn’t say we shouldn’t criticize Russia because the US is just as guilty.
I think I’ve lost the thread of our back-and-forth at this point. I said (and still think) that Trump side-stepped any criticism of Putin. Indeed, he took the opportunity to minimize Putin’s crimes and disparage the US. Regardless of the facts of US crimes, Trump’s response is remarkable for a US president, and I think anyone else would have been pilloried for it.
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During and before WW1 a lot of German Jews saw themselves primarily as Germans, at least according to sources I’ve found. In WW1, German Jews joining the German army was no different from British, Austrian, Hungarian, Italian or French Jews joining their national armies. The German Jewish population, after all, comprised some of the leading families of Germany. One of the things that was so terrible about Hitler was, in effect, his betrayal of values held by many educated Germans. Let’s just hope that we don’t end up having to make the same comment about Trump.
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…and gave the strong impression that he viewed Putin’s behaviour as admirable and worthy of imitation.
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I just noticed that. I guess you’re referencing the actions of the Austrian corporal, i.e. retire or demote; I don’t think Bannon is adopting the screenplay of the Georgian psychopath, as things got a bit difficult for him in 1941.
I took the first word in your answer (“Yes”) as confirming the statement that Putin is a killer.
I did of course notice that you didn’t refer to any US guilt in your answer.
Note that for me, the statements “has guilt as well” is not at all the same as “is as guilty as”.
True. My point was that I actually consider side-stepping that kind of criticism of Putin the proper statesmanlike thing to do, even though I don’t suspect for a minute that Trump did it for the right reasons.
Minimizing Putin’s crimes: True. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to side-step the criticism (see above) without actively contradicting it.
“Disparaging” the US: Here’s the core of the matter.
Admitting to past crimes is just acknowledging a fact, not “disparaging the US”.
In Austria, we actually actually have a word that we use for people who think that mentioning and acknowledging our country’s past crimes is “disparaging Austria”.
It’s one of those German compound words - it has 17 letters.
The word is Nationalsozialist.
Of course, the situation in the US is different. But I still don’t get why anyone who does not support the invasion of Iraq would complain about a president mentioning that the Iraq war was a mistake.
Yes, it’s remarkable, but he is being pilloried for it. But I don’t think anyone should be pilloried for that. And there sure is plenty of other stuff Trump does wrong…
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I see your point, but I’m still very fond of “collaborators.”
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