Tag Archives: Malcolm Turnbull

International news

POTUS’s ignorance seems bottomless

Whoever leaked those phone transcripts of Donald J. Trump Sr. conversing with two world leaders deserves a medal.

He or she has revealed to the world the utter ignorance of the man who now holds the title Leader of the Free World. That would be, of course, the president of the United States of America.

A Vanity Fair article almost damn near explains itself. It concerns a chat Trump had with the prime minister of Australia; the other leaked transcript is of a phone conversation between Trump and the president of Mexico. I might have something to say about that one later.

Read the article here. If you’re in the correct frame of mind, you’ll be highly amused. Or … you might be as horrified as I am.

The article chronicles a discussion Trump had with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull shortly after the president took office. The chat began with Turnbull explaining Australia’s policy banning immigration by anyone by boat to the island nation. The policy aims to stop human trafficking, a risky endeavor no matter what, but particularly so regarding a nation surrounded by water. As Vanity Fair writer Bess Levin notes: “The details of said deal were fairly straightforward: in order to deter human smuggling, as well as to prevent people from drowning at sea, Australia has a policy of not allowing refugees who arrive by boat to enter the country. That means you could be the second coming of Mother Teresa, Mr. Rogers, and Albert Einstein all rolled into one, but if you arrive by boat, you’re not coming into the country.”

The conversation devolved into an argument stemming from the president’s inability to grasp precisely what Turnbull was trying to explain to him, which is that Australia couldn’t keep sending boat people to an island and asked if the United States could take some of them. Trump wouldn’t budge. Turnbull insisted that America had the right to deny anyone it wanted, that it didn’t have to accept every one of them.

The deal in question was struck by then-President Barack Obama. It involved 1,250 refugees. Trump kept misconstruing the number. Turnbull said the number was fixed at 1,250; Trump either didn’t hear it or ignored it willfully.

The conversation went on and on. Turnbull tried his best to explain to Trump as plainly and simply as possible what was at stake. Trump was having none of it.

The conversation is graphic insofar as it demonstrates Trump’s absolute ignorance of foreign policy. But the president “tells it like it is,” dammit!

To the individual who leaked these transcripts to the world, I say “Thank you for your profound public service.”

medical news

As if we needed reminding … POTUS is clueless

Donald J. Trump’s endorsement of the Australian universal health care system confirms what many of us have thought for as long as this individual has been involved in politics.

He doesn’t know anything. Not about public policy. Or governance. Or public service. Nothing outside the realm of personal enrichment and self-aggrandizement.

The president and his Republican colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives had just passed a bill that repeals the Affordable Care Act and replaces it with something called the American Health Care Act. Then he jetted to New York and sat next to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull — and then lauded the Australian health care system.

The president said we should pattern our system after the Aussies’ system of providing universal health care for every citizen. How do they do it? The government pays for it.

But wait! Didn’t the GOP members of Congress want to do away with government mandates? Didn’t they insist on letting the marketplace set the price for health care insurance? Haven’t they been savaging the ACA as some sort of “socialized medicine” scheme cooked up by the socialists ensconced in the White House, led by President Barack Obama?

The GOP’s main man, the president of the United States, just endorsed a government-run health care system that reportedly works pretty well for the people it serves.

The president doesn’t know anything! He is utterly and completely unaware of the very public policy he says he favors.

He’s been involved in politics for less than two years. He rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his presidential campaign. He got elected and has continued almost daily to demonstrate his absolute ignorance of the office he now holds and the awesome responsibility he has assumed.

I truly don’t expect him to learn all there is to know about everything in such a short span of time. However, it wasn’t too much to expect that he at least had some semblance of a grasp of policy matters before deciding to run for president of the United States.

International news

How about that? Trump unifies Congress!

Donald Trump has done something his immediate predecessor as president, Barack Obama, couldn’t do: He has brought Republicans and Democrats together for a bipartisan resolution.

Members of Congress have introduced a resolution reaffirming this nation’s support of Australia. The bipartisan resolution comes in the wake of that ridiculous phone call between Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull that reportedly ended when Trump hung up on the PM.

We have few stronger allies than the Australians.

Why the president chose to scold Turnbull is beyond most of us who pay any semblance of attention to such things. The Hill reported that Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., stated, “but I do know this, the people of the United States do not have better friends than the people of Australia. We’re more than friends.”

Trump reportedly lashed out at Turnbull during a phone call between Washington and Canberra.

Indeed, Australian military personnel have fallen on battlefields alongside Americans in every war going back to World War I. As Sen. Alexander noted, “We’re more than friends.”

And so the president continues to give Russian butcher/strongman/president Vladimir Putin a pass on his conduct while enraging our nation’s strongest allies and, in the case of Mexico, an important neighboring nation.

Hey, the president said he would “unify” the nation. He seems to have achieved a unity of sorts on Capitol Hill.

Go figure.

International news

Trump not playing well Down Under

An e-mail came to me overnight from a friend in Australia.

My friend is a former journalist, an erudite man, a student of America politics. He knows far more about U.S. politics and policy than I do about Australia.

He writes this about the rant Donald J. Trump’s launched against Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull while on a long-distance phone call with his colleague Down Under:

Shocking, yes. Disappointing, certainly.

Surprising, ‘fraid not! 

This was always on the cards, and I can’t help wondering whether Obama perhaps had laid this as a trap for Trump in the event he did win the presidency.  

A good analysis from an Australian academic here:  

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/03/australia-needs-to-adapt-to-the-new-circumstances-of-trumps-america

Trump picked his target well. Australia is small enough, friendly enough and inconsequential enough to be the perfect scapegoat for Trump to demonstrate what now substitutes for diplomacy.

He wanted to make an example of someone in his typical swingdick manner, and we fit the bill perfectly. Think of the school bully singling out the smallest kid in a group of friends and beating the s*** out of him just to show the others who is boss. That the leader of the US… any leader of the US… publicly behaves like this is sad, pathetic… and dangerous. I was going to say Leader of the Free World… but Angela Merkel has assumed that mantle, while China is showing maturity and poise in its stewardship of international trade.  

Over here, we are dreading to think what favours Trump will extract from us if he’s going to honour this deal. Possibly military intervention in the South China Sea, which we cannot afford and certainly don’t need. Sadly our Prime Minister is a hostage to the hard right in his own party here, so us taking these unfairly-detained refugees is off the table for nothing more than base political reasons. Karma at work, some would say.

I thought the job of government was to bring order to chaos and protect the citizenry. I must be clearly mistaken.

Trump is scary alright … but Steve Bannon is terrifying! Him along with the cabal of crooks, vandals and liars they’ve assembled as an administration.

I know Michael Moore has suggested it’s actually a coup in all but name.

It’s a sad day when someone whose nickname is ‘Mad Dog’ stands out as the sanest person in the room.  

I’ve been reading commentary this week suggesting either impeachment or the 25th Amendment as fail safes. 

My money’s on impeachment – tax returns, business conflicts-of-interest, or eventual proof of collusion between Russian hackers, Putin and the Trump campaign on the Podesta emails.

It’s in there somewhere! The question is, how much damage will be done beforehand, and to what extent will it be irreparable. 

Take care my friend … We’re still holding our breath over here.

Hmmm. So are many of us here.