Tag Archives: Donald Trump

national news, political news

‘Re-litigate the election’? Really, Kellyanne?

Kellyanne  Conway might need a dose of something to enhance her memory.

Donald J. Trump’s senior policy adviser now says the anti-Trump protesters are seeking to “re-litigate” the 2016 presidential election. She’s calling on Democratic Party officials to implore the demonstrators to tone down their protests.

Wow, young lady.

I believe I’ll revisit a thing or two with Conway.

I believe the president himself has been guilty of continuing to “re-litigate” the election. He has done so repeatedly while fielding questions regarding geopolitical matters. The president has gotten queries about this or that international problem and he would launch into some recital of his “massive electoral landslide.”

Well, there’s nothing “massive” about the “landslide.” It was even a landslide.

Protests offer a glimpse of division throughout the land.

I need not remind Conway that her boss polled nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Rodham Clinton while winning enough Electoral College votes to be elected president.

Critics of this blog are welcome to spare me the lecture about how Trump won the election outright. I get it! However, he has done next to nothing to bring the country together since winning the presidency. He has continued to sow seeds of division and conflict among demographic groups.

As for the protests that continue to plague his presidency, Trump and his team — which remains largely under construction 80-plus days after the inaugural — will have to learn how to deal with it. They don’t need to accept the protests, but they need to understand that protest and dissent are quintessentially American activities.

The nation was founded, after all, by dissenters.

Conway does make a valid point about the violence that has erupted at some of these protests. No one should want to see Americans attacking other Americans simply over political differences.

However, must I remind the young woman that there have been recorded instances of violent treatment by Trumpkins against those who have demonstrated against him? Furthermore, must I also remind her of the things the presidential candidate said about demonstrators while they were being hauled away from his political rallies?

A bit of self-awareness would provide needed perspective and context to these concerns expressed by Kellyanne Conway.

military news

‘I know more than generals about ISIS, believe me’

Strange things occur to individuals who campaign for the presidency and then actually become president.

They boast about how smart and savvy they are on matters about which they have no experience. Then they learn that — by golly — they aren’t as smart as they proclaim themselves to be.

Donald J. Trump once boasted, “I know more the generals about ISIS, believe me.” Sure thing, candidate Trump, who had zero military experience — let alone political experience — prior to running for president.

Then he wins the election. He gets a few briefings and finds out the truth, which is that he doesn’t know squat about the Islamic State, its tactics and strategy or the best way to fight and “destroy” the terrorist organization.

The military then deployed its largest non-nuclear explosive device on an ISIS compound in Afghanistan, killing dozens of terrorists and destroying many tons of valuable equipment.

Now the president says he relied on “my military” to take care of things, that he trusts the brass implicitly to know how to fight the Islamic State.

It is baffling to me in the extreme as I try to understand how this guy got elected president after saying the things he did about the greatest military force in world history.

At least, though, he is acknowledging what he should have acknowledged all along.  Which is that he doesn’t know “more about ISIS” than the career military personnel upon whom he will depend if he has a prayer of keeping his pledge to “destroy” the Islamic State.

International news

How might Trump persuade China to lean on North Korea?

This holy weekend seems like an odd time to comment on the possibility — remote as it seems at this moment — of nuclear war with North Korea.

Here goes anyway.

How might Donald J. Trump have sought to persuade Chinese President Xi Jinping to lean hard on North Korean dictator/madman Kim Jong Un?

Trump met with Xi this past weekend at the president’s posh Mar-a-Lago resort, where he said he was enjoying that piece of chocolate cake when he told Xi of the Syrian air strike.

I’m pretty sure, though, that North Korea came up. What might have Trump have told Xi? How might he have pleaded with him to do something — anything within reason — to persuade Kim Jong Un to avoid testing a nuclear device?

China is North Korea’s major economic benefactor. The People’s Republic is North Korea’s No. 1 trading partner. There would seem to be plenty of economic muscle that Xi could apply to Kim Jong Un to tell him — in no uncertain terms — that threatening the United States, South Korea and Japan is sincerely not in North Korea’s best interests.

Let’s remember, too, that North Korea is a desperately poor nation. Its people are starving while Kim Jong Un keeps spending nearly a quarter of the country’s GDP on military hardware.

The U.S. Navy is sending a strike group led by the USS Carl Vinson — a nuclear-powered attack aircraft carrier — to the Korean Peninsula. It’s a tremendous show of American military power that must not go unnoticed in Pyongyang.

Is the U.S. president capable of appealing to Xi to lay it all on the table with Kim Jong Un? Is he able to use the kind of language heads of state use with each other when talking about serious threats to international security? After all, whatever threat the North Koreans pose doesn’t just involve the United States, or China or any other single nation in the east Asia region. This is a worldwide matter.

My hope would be that Trump would plead Xi — if that’s what it would take — to lean very, very hard on Kim Jong Un, to tell him about the terrible price the world would pay if he pushes the United States to where many observers fear might occur.

That would be a pre-emptive strike on North Korean military targets.

Trump vows to “take care” of North Korea “alone” if China doesn’t do what it must. I do hope — and pray — the president is able to persuade the Chinese leader to step up.

national news, political news

Open the White House visitor logs

Transparency has been tossed into the crapper at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

That’s where the president of the United States hangs out for part of the week; his posh Florida resort appears to be where Donald J. Trump’s heart belongs.

But the White House is the people’s house. The president is just staying there. We own the place. You and I do. It’s ours, man.

Which is why the White House visitor logs need to be opened up to public review, as it was done during the years the Barack Obama family was living there. The White House announced that those logs will be kept secret. The White House brass contends there’s some issue with national security.

Closed logs anger watchdogs

As The Hill reported: “‘It’s disappointing that the man who promised to ‘drain the swamp’ just took a massive step away from transparency by refusing the release the White House visitor logs that the American people have grown accustomed to accessing over the last six years,’ Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in a statement.

“Bookbinder said the records ‘provide indispensable information about who is seeking to influence the president.'”

Drain the swamp, eh?

The swamp isn’t drained in the least. It remains as infested with special interests and well-heeled fat cats as always. The public has a right to know who is calling on the president, or on his senior staff. The public pays the bill for that big ol’ house and as its landlords, the public has every right to know who’s darkening its doors.

business news, national news, political news

Tax returns, Mr. President … give ’em up

Gosh, I hate talking about Donald John Trump’s tax returns.

Just kidding. No, I don’t.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., says tax-filing time is a good time to see what — if anything — the president is hiding from the American people he governs.

I agree with the Bay State’s senior senator.

We’ve waited long enough to see what precisely is in those returns. Trump has balked long enough at doing what other presidential candidates for 40 years have done, which is to release their complete returns for public inspection.

Trump keeps telling us he can’t release his returns because he’s being audited. The Internal Revenue Service says, in effect, that the president is engaging in a dodge; an audit doesn’t prohibit the returns’ release.

Meanwhile, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has said that any hope of enacting tax reform depends on the president releasing those returns. Sure, that’s hardball politicking. Inquiring minds want to know, especially the minds of those of us who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016.

Time to come clean

I mean, he’s still the president of all Americans. We’re all required to file our taxes. Here in Amarillo, candidates for public office are required to provide full financial disclosure.

The president of the United States of America is not above the law. In this case, even though releasing the returns isn’t a legal requirement, it has been a longstanding custom that’s been accepted as standard operating procedure for all candidates for the presidency.

Sure, many Americans don’t seem to think these returns matter. Others of us, though, think quite the opposite.

Many of us are waiting, Mr. President. Please show us, sir, that you aren’t hiding something.

national news

Trump’s first 100-day report card coming due

Franklin Delano Roosevelt set the bar for measuring the progress of a new president’s administration. He put it at 100 days.

Presidents had that amount of time to establish the pace and the tone of how they intend to govern, FDR determined. It’s been the benchmark ever since.

How has the 45th president done as his 100th day in office approaches? Not well at all.

That’s the view of almost every observer who gets paid to analyze such things. Donald J. Trump, though, sees it differently. Imagine that, if you can. He’s done a “fantastic” job, he’ll tell you. He’s assembled the “best” team ever created, he will insist. Why, he got a Supreme Court justice nominated and confirmed all within the first 100 days, he has said.

Trump has signed a lot of executive orders, too. He has rolled back many of the policies enacted by President Barack H. Obama. He’s repealed, for instance, regulations that sought to ensure clean air and water; Trump wants to bring more jobs back and he says those job-killing regulations just had to go.

Oh, but legislatively? What has the president done?

Umm. Not much, folks.

The effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act went down in flames. That would be his “first priority.” He got nothin’, man.

Absent a victory there, he then turned his sights on reforming the federal tax code. Now that effort appears stalled. Why? Because a few of his allies in Congress want to restart the ACA repeal/replace effort.

The president has failed to fill most of the key deputy Cabinet posts that need filling. Key Cabinet secretaries are lacking go-to men and women who serve as backstops for them.

The 100th day is less than two weeks out. Will the president be able to proclaim any significant legislative victory? I do not think so.

As one point of comparison, I believe I’ll look back eight years ago to the then-new presidency of Barack Obama. All he managed to do in the first 100 days was shepherd through Congress a $787 billion economic stimulus package that managed to rescue the nation’s collapsing financial system.

How would I grade the current president?

I’ll give him a D-minus. The only thing — in my view — that keeps him from failing outright is that missile strike on the Syrian government.

military news

MOAB does what it’s supposed to do

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It’s called the MOAB.

The acronym actually stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb. Its colloquial meaning is Mother of All Bombs.

The military dropped one of these devices on an Islamic State operation in Afghanistan. And, sure, there’s debate on why the military chose to use the device.

I support its use. Donald J. Trump promised during the campaign that he would “bomb the s*** out of ISIS.” Well, there you go. The MOAB does do that.

It’s the largest conventional explosive device in the U.S. arsenal. It weighs about 25,000 pounds. It does significant damage.

ISIS has earned this kind of response

Let’s not get too namby-pamby about this device. The Islamic State has performed some heinous actions against innocent victims. It has performed hideous acts with regard to prisoners it has taken — and executed.

I get that the debate about the MOAB is important in one respect: The bomb is so powerful that the military must be certain to avoid civilian casualties, given that the United States as a matter of military policy doesn’t kill civilians knowingly.

Trump — who used to criticize the military as feckless and weak — now proclaims great faith in its ability to carry out missions such as the one involving the MOAB. His criticism while campaigning for the presidency was misplaced; the president’s endorsement of the U.S. military’s extraordinary capability now is quite appropriate.

Thus, the MOAB has been introduced into this fight.

My own view is that the military should use this devastating weapon whenever feasible against a ghastly enemy that has earned the civilized world’s rage.

national news, political news

‘My military’? No, Mr. POTUS, it’s ‘ours’

Some commentators and analysts on MSNBC are getting a bit worked up tonight over Donald J. Trump’s use of the first-person singular pronoun.

Trump was speaking today of the use of the so-called “mother of all bombs” on Islamic State targets in Afghanistan. He referred to “my military” taking charge of the mission and executing it with precision.

My military? Umm, no sir. It’s our military, the people’s military, the nation’s military.

Now, to be fair …

Other presidents have done the same thing, taking direct ownership of the office they occupy. Barack Obama was fond of referring to “my national security team,” or “my vice president,” or “my economic team,” or “my presidency.”

I once challenged the former president’s generous use of that pronoun, trying to remind him that none of it belongs to him personally. I also sought to remind him that every single government employee — and they number in the millions — belong to the taxpayers who pay the bill.

That includes the president of the United States of America.

The message I imparted then still applies to the current president.

“My military”? No, Mr. President. The men and women who defend our nation do not belong to you.

They belong to us. For that matter, Mr. President, so do you.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2014/07/take-ownership-not-possession/

 

International news

Worst ever U.S.-Russia relations? Hardly

History lessons sometimes need to be delivered on the fly.

Donald John Trump said recently that U.S.-Russia relations are at their “worst” in the history of the two nations. Tensions are rising over the Russian involvement in the Syrian civil war. The president wants relations to improve. Indeed, he still cannot bring himself to say out loud that the Russians are complicit in Syria’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.

Are bilateral relations the worst ever?

Ohhh, no. Not even close.

Let’s flash back about, let’s see, nearly 55 years.

Russia was known as the Soviet Union back then. The communists ran the government. Vladimir Putin would become head of the commies’ spy agency, the KGB.

What did the communists do to bring U.S.-Soviet relations to their nadir? They began installing offensive missiles in Cuba, capable of hitting targets throughout the Western Hemisphere with nuclear weapons.

Thus, the Cuban Missile Crisis was born.

President Kennedy got word of the intelligence. He summoned his National Security Council to the White House. He heard suggestions from his national security brass ranging from invading Cuba, bombing the missile sites, leveling economic sanctions, none of the above, all of the above.

The president settled on a naval blockade and an ultimatum: He told Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to remove the missiles or else. He went on national TV and told the nation — and the world — that any attack from Cuba against any target in this hemisphere would be seen as an attack on the United States and would produce a “full retaliatory response” from this country against the Soviets.

The commies blinked. They took down the missiles in exchange for our taking down of missiles in Turkey.

Crisis averted — along with a nuclear holocaust.

That qualifies as the worst, Mr. Trump.

International news, military news

Mr. President, we already are in Syria

Donald J. Trump said the other day that the missile strike on a Syrian air force airfield doesn’t mean we are “going into Syria.”

Hold on, Mr. President!

We already are in Syria, sir. President Barack Obama ordered several hundred special forces troops onto that battlefield to assist and train and coordinate attacks launched by “free Syrian” rebels fighting the Russian-backed government of dictator Bashar al Assad.

I also would add that the missiles launched from ships off the Syrian coast suggest that a more serious involvement by the United States in that conflict.

Times and circumstances do change, Mr. President, as you now are learning. Someone will need to remind the president that he used to believe that we should leave the fighting to the rebels. He also used to suggest that Assad’s forces — along with the Russians — could be capable of taking out the Islamic State terrorists.

Let the Russians deal with ISIS, he said. Sure thing, Mr. President. That will work out just fine.

My point, though, is that we already are engaged in Syria. Our special forces put their lives on the line every moment of every day they are deployed there.

The bigger, more important, question is whether we’re going to commit thousands of troops to fight ISIS head to head.

I’m now concerned that the president hasn’t given that option the careful, thoughtful and prayerful consideration it deserves.