US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7666

Merkel on Saturday labelled the result of the "six against one" discussion "very difficult, not to say very unsatisfactory".

"The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I've experienced that in the last few days," Merkel told a crowd at an election rally in Munich, southern Germany.

"We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands," she added

“Donald Trump, the Turkish president or the Russian president believe in the logic of the trial of strength, which doesn’t bother me. I don’t believe in the diplomacy of public invective, but in my bilateral dialogues, I don’t let anything pass, that is how we are respected,” he said.

On May 29 2017 01:25 Nyxisto wrote:
Obama pretty much single-handedly restored America's reputation in the world, where the idea comes from that Obama did anything else I will never know. I also don't think Trump supporters ever cared about any of that. If anything showing genuine cooperation and being respected raises their suspicion.

On May 29 2017 01:54 LegalLord wrote:
America is a great place to make money. Any Europeans who thought Obama was the herald of a more "worldly" America simply doesn't understand what kind of country we are.

On May 28 2017 17:36 Schmobutzen wrote:
Deconstruction can be a useful tool, but it has its limitations, besides the fact that its theoretical foundation is wonky, to say the least.

The biggest problem with it is that the whole world becomes the hammer that only looks for it to come down, because of its tight interweaving into power - and power only. If you make such a tool to a worldview, of course, the world will look spiked with nails, and nothing more than nails. The outcome is a shattering that sounds like cultural appropriation, identity politics, gender over the top and the group over the individual.

GH, you say something like the workers of the 17th century, as if there ever was a group like that, while there never was such a thing. Of course, there never was and never will be a "the whites" group, and if you look even further, how anyone can come out of postmodern thinking, that there is something derivable, especially if it ends in a construct like power-play, is beyond me.

On May 29 2017 01:55 zlefin wrote:

it comes from partisanship; the republicans opposed the Democrat and everything he does, cuz sometimes tha'ts how politics works, attack the other side for whatever they do.
and then a partisan lens makes a lot of stuff he did look bad.

On May 29 2017 02:19 Nyxisto wrote:


I'd actually say it goes farther than just political partisanship, that exists in many places. This sentiment that you basically need to get respect through fear or strongmen gestures and that every act of cooperation is immediately suspicious shows that something is seriously off. Just taking Obama again, the insults against him as a 'traitor' or 'Kenyan' aren't just racist attacks, they I think also exist because he genuinely treated other countries as peers. He did not do the usual "I'm not going to apologise for America" shtick. And if treating others as equals provokes fifth column conspiracy theories you've got a big problem.

Michael Hayden, the former director of the NSA and the CIA, told CNN on Saturday that the reported content of Jared Kushner's conversations with Russia's ambassador in December may have motivated former national security adviser Susan Rice to request his name to be unmasked in intelligence reports.

...

Hayden told CNN that it makes sense that Rice would have tried to determine who Kislyak and his superiors in Moscow were talking about when they said someone on the Trump transition team wanted to set up a secret backchannel line of communication.

"This is off the map," Hayden said. "I know of no other experience like this in our history, and certainly not within my life experience."

Hayden told Business Insider in March that the NSA "is notoriously conservative in revealing US identities in its reporting."

On May 29 2017 03:43 ChristianS wrote:
So there's been a lot of reports that Trump is assembling Kushner, Lewandowski, etc. for a "War Room" meeting about how to push back on the Russia scandal. Right now the narrative is pretty bad for him; what do TL's astute political analysts think will be his counter-narrative? How will he try to turn this around?

Here's my thoughts: whatever he comes out with needs to push back the miasma of assumed guilt that he'll suffer from as long as these investigations continue to make headlines. So he can't just try to change the subject by making headlines about something else – he needs to actually combat the Russia narrative. And at this point he's got enough of a credibility gap against his accusers that he can't just say "fake news, none of it is real." Even if we assume that the sharing intel with Russia report was false, and that Jared Kushner never tried to set up a back channel with Russia, and that the conversation described in the Comey memo wasn't obstruction, there's still no denying that Robert Mueller was brought in as special counsel partly to investigate Trump's campaign. That looks bad, and complaining about anonymous sources or overly critical media doesn't change that.

Remembering Trump's reputation as a counter-puncher, as well as his prior tendency to deflect criticisms onto Hillary Clinton, my best guess would be that he goes hard on the Seth Rich conspiracy theories. It pushes back on the Russia narrative by implying that Russia didn't even interfere in the election – it was all a dark, evil coverup by Clinton. The same way Trump can't prove definitively that he didn't collude with Russia, Democrats can never prove definitively that Clinton didn't kill Seth Rich, so it takes the vague miasma of assumed guilt he's suffering from and throws that back on the Democrats.

The only other stuff I can think of is some major military action outside the US, which is a pretty scary prospect. The big candidates in my mind would be Syria or North Korea, the latter of which could have disastrous consequences.