PoliGAF 2017 |OT2| Well, maybe McMaster isn't a traitor.

Status
Not open for further replies.
Diablos said:
Susan Rice deflection, SCOTUS filibuster gone, Bannon getting kicked out of the NSC and now an air strike outta nowhere. Trump and the Republicans sure know how to get you to take your eye off the ball.

Not sure if this helps or hurts him in polls.

I really think this guy is going to start a war
Click to expand...
Trump trying to distract you from what he's REALLY up to.

I'm not sure what that is though, because literally all of it is terrible. Even just one of these should spark outrage.

(Wait, kicking out Bannon is great, nvm)
 
Aaron Strife said:
Trump trying to distract you from what he's REALLY up to.

I'm not sure what that is though, because literally all of it is terrible. Even just one of these should spark outrage.

(Wait, kicking out Bannon is great, nvm)
Click to expand...
It's great but ultimately only serves to distract. And really, how great is it that Bannon is out yet the administration still opted to do this strike without even going about it the right way? It doesn't make me feel any better about any upcoming foreign policy, immigration and military decisions.

This Pres is all about aggression and optics in the absolute worst way. He will stop at nothing and there will always be a fall person, be it legally or politically speaking, while he plots his next step when no one is grasping the big picture because he makes so much noise. It's infuriating and sickening.
 
Diablos said:
It's great but ultimately only serves to distract. And really, how great is it that Bannon is out yet the administration still opted to do this strike without even going about it the right way? It doesn't make me feel any better about any upcoming foreign policy, immigration and military decisions.

This Pres is all about aggression and optics in the absolute worst way. He will stop at nothing and there will always be a fall person, be it legally or politically speaking, while he plots his next step when no one is grasping the big picture because he makes so much noise. It's infuriating and sickening.
Click to expand...
My point is that you can't claim "Trump is just trying to distract us!" when everything he does is terrible. Kicking out Bannon is literally the only good thing of merit he's done in his presidency and then he went and bombed Syria.
 
Diablos said:
Susan Rice deflection, SCOTUS filibuster gone, Bannon getting kicked out of the NSC and now an air strike outta nowhere. Trump and the Republicans sure know how to get you to take your eye off the ball.

Not sure if this helps or hurts him in polls.

I really think this guy is going to start a war
Click to expand...

If you want to read the tea leaves (why not?) these latest moves seem designed to cozy Trump with the establishment GOP. Military action, defend Fox News' cash cow, taking incompetent people off the NSC (yeah OK Rick Perry joined but look at his position). I suspect whatever evidence traces back to Russian ties Bannon to the whole thing. He's cutting that weight now in anticipation of being able to say "I had nothing to do with that stuff," and he's making allies in order to survive that impending ordeal. Hell, Marco Rubio is running around telling people Trump made the right call. If you want to get super crazy, you could argue he's getting ready to pivot from alt-right crazy to mainstream GOP, but I'm not quite ready to believe that yet.
 
As with everything Trump does, there's no hidden agenda or secret high level scheme

He just wants to kill brown people for cheap approval points. There isn't really much there besides that.
 
DonShula said:
If you want to read the tea leaves (why not?) these latest moves seem designed to cozy Trump with the establishment GOP. Military action, defend Fox News' cash cow, taking incompetent people off the NSC (yeah OK Rick Perry joined but look at his position). I suspect whatever evidence traces back to Russian ties Bannon to the whole thing. He's cutting that weight now in anticipation of being able to say "I had nothing to do with that stuff," and he's making allies in order to survive that impending ordeal. Hell, Marco Rubio is running around telling people Trump made the right call. If you want to get super crazy, you could argue he's getting ready to pivot from alt-right crazy to mainstream GOP, but I'm not quite ready to believe that yet.
Click to expand...

At the end of the day, like Obama said, the office shapes the man more than the other way around. If Trump wants to have any hope of a successful Presidency, he needs competent people running the show. What we're seeing is the slow realization that knowing how to rile up racists to win an election /= governing a representative democracy.
 
Syria man, fuck, I dunno. I don't want us to go to war. I don't even want us leveraging force. I don't think sanctions are effective. How the fuck to we stop Assad?
 
The Technomancer said:
Syria man, fuck, I dunno. I don't want us to go to war. I don't even want us leveraging force. I don't think sanctions are effective. How the fuck to we stop Assad?
Click to expand...

Well we've reached this point faster than I thought but this was inevitably going to happen. Even when ISIS is defeated in Syria, there was still a humanitarian disaster happening in the country. I wish someone else could get the world involved in a coalition because Assad can't be allowed to murder torture hundreds of thousands of people and continue in peace.

Oh and FUCK TULSI GABBARD, I would support a primary against her dictator loving ass anytime.
 
The Technomancer said:
Syria man, fuck, I dunno. I don't want us to go to war. I don't even want us leveraging force. I don't think sanctions are effective. How the fuck to we stop Assad?
Click to expand...

And if you dethrone him, then what? And what are ramifications with Russia and Iran?

This is why Obama stayed out of it. It's totally fucked.
 
The Technomancer said:
Syria man, fuck, I dunno. I don't want us to go to war. I don't even want us leveraging force. I don't think sanctions are effective. How the fuck to we stop Assad?
Click to expand...
There's no good answers at this point. Maybe if Obama had enforced his red line we could've stopped this thing before it metastasized, but now there really aren't any solutions that take less than a decade+ and God only knows how many billion dollars. And that's assuming the Russians LET us depose Assad, and that Trump and Co don't totally screw up any solution they attempt.
 
Would lessening the sanctions against Russia be worth it if they pulled out of Syria entirely? There is no good solution to this as long as they continue to prop the Assad regime up.
 
metalslimer said:
Would lessening the sanctions against Russia be worth it if they pulled out of Syria entirely? There is no good solution to this as long as they continue to prop the Assad regime up.
Click to expand...

It'll probably strengthen Russia and make Putin feel capable of holding the world hostage through proxy wars.
 
metalslimer said:
Would lessening the sanctions against Russia be worth it if they pulled out of Syria entirely?
Click to expand...

No. The sanctions are in response to Russia's annexation of Crimea and its continued support of the war in eastern Ukraine.

If anything, the West needs to increase the cost on Russia for its support of Assad.
 
More_Badass said:
What did I miss overnight?
Click to expand...
Trump apparently wasted about 80 million bucks worth of Tomahawk missiles to do nothing in particular except ratchet up tensions in Syria.
metalslimer said:
Would lessening the sanctions against Russia be worth it if they pulled out of Syria entirely? There is no good solution to this as long as they continue to prop the Assad regime up.
Click to expand...
No. Maybe if we imposed new, Syria specific sanctions, and made Russian withdrawal from Syria a condition of them being raised that'd do something. We can't let Putin get anything out of this mess or he'll keep on doing it.
 
The Technomancer said:
Syria man, fuck, I dunno. I don't want us to go to war. I don't even want us leveraging force. I don't think sanctions are effective. How the fuck to we stop Assad?
Click to expand...

We'd have to commit to war, reconstruction, and sacrifice, which the international community has demonstrated pretty conclusively that it doesn't care to do. Instead we offer more dead children upon the altar of realpolitik.
 
Sibylus said:
We'd have to commit to war, reconstruction, and sacrifice, which the international community has demonstrated pretty conclusively that it doesn't care to do. Instead we offer more dead children upon the altar of realpolitik.
Click to expand...
Yeah.

I've been saying this for a while, the problem isn't interventionism per se, it's the lack of willingness to follow through. You can't just depose a dictator, install a democracy and peace out. You need to massively invest in the country and its people. It's a long and extremely expensive process. The US has the money to do it, but not the will.
 
Richard Spencer supporting Liberal Firecracker Firebrand Progressive Icon Tulsi Gabbard.

Just further cements that the extreme left is not too far from the alt-right.
 
I've mulled it over after a heap of morning news. I think currently, it's too early to determine whether this is a win or lose for Trump. Later on it might never be a clear win or clear loss.

Chumley says this makes Trump look good as the guy who bombed a dude who was gassing children, but I think because of his actions since inauguration, everyone (except Trump supporters I guess) is highly skeptical of Trump and his ability to handle foreign engagements. They also doubt the sincerity of his goodwill, especially given that he tried to institute two bans on Muslims and also seemed quite gung ho about Assad just last week.

Presently the downsides of the strike seem to outweigh the optics more. Lack of collaboration with Congress, lack of collaboration with other countries, confused handling of the situation with Russia, and so on are just this particular action's problems. We have yet to know if there is a long-term plan. Supposing that there is one pre-developed plan the WH is acting on right now, wouldn't such a plan be easily interrupted by Trump's mood swings and need to cater to popular will?

There is a lot of uncertainty right now that some bits can be resolved over time ("What is the strategy?") while other uncertain aspects will create more problems ("Are we engaging in another war and regime change?"). Obama, Hillary, and Kerry spent so much time and effort rehabilitating the US image abroad and it's ridiculous how easily Republican presidents destroy that work with unilateral action.
 
Wilsongt said:
Richard Spencer supporting Liberal Firecracker Firebrand Progressive Icon Tulsi Gabbard.

Just further cements that the extreme left is not too far from the alt-right.
Click to expand...
She's not even extreme left Smh. She's just an opportunist who latched on to Bernie Sanders and his cult of personality automatically assumed she must be as much of a lefty as Saint Bernard.
 
Poodlestrike said:
Yeah.

I've been saying this for a while, the problem isn't interventionism per se, it's the lack of willingness to follow through. You can't just depose a dictator, install a democracy and peace out. You need to massively invest in the country and its people. It's a long and extremely expensive process. The US has the money to do it, but not the will.
Click to expand...

Yes. There isn't a 1 year, 5, 10 or 20 year solution to Syria. It's a generational thing at this point where you would need long term peacekeeping and nation building.
 
Poodlestrike said:
She's not even extreme left Smh. She's just an opportunist who latched on to Bernie Sanders and his cult of personality automatically assumed she must be as much of a lefty as Saint Bernard.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this. She's never been particularly progressive as a Representative (and certainly never was before being elected!)
 
That a certain segment of the left seems to have latched onto her says more about them than it does about her, frankly. I'm not even saying they agree with her
 
Poodlestrike said:
Yeah.

I've been saying this for a while, the problem isn't interventionism per se, it's the lack of willingness to follow through. You can't just depose a dictator, install a democracy and peace out. You need to massively invest in the country and its people. It's a long and extremely expensive process. The US has the money to do it, but not the will.
Click to expand...

And the US isn't alone in this, either. We collectively look away and settle for half-measures and feel-good Tomahawks and air strikes.
 
It's because a lot of folks don't know their own ideology, they only know tribalism. The far left and the far right are night and day as far as the ideology goes, but you find people of similar dispositions in there because the common thread between the fringes is that they are fringe, and so are filled with contrarians and shit-stirrers, along with a lot of people who actually believe what they're doing. Hence you see the overlap between groups like Die Linke and the French National Front both having oddly pro-Russia positions, or Glenn Greenwald's opinions being held up as proof at R/T_D
 
Sibylus said:
And the US isn't alone in this, either. We collectively look away and settle for half-measures and feel-good Tomahawks and air strikes.
Click to expand...

I would say that the US is alone in being able to afford it, honestly. Unless we start counting the EU as a collective entity which in this arena they're definitely not.

Ogodei said:
It's because a lot of folks don't know their own ideology, they only know tribalism. The far left and the far right are night and day as far as the ideology goes, but you find people of similar dispositions in there because the common thread between the fringes is that they are fringe, and so are filled with contrarians and shit-stirrers, along with a lot of people who actually believe what they're doing. Hence you see the overlap between groups like Die Linke and the French National Front both having oddly pro-Russia positions, or Glenn Greenwald's opinions being held up as proof at R/T_D
Click to expand...

Well said.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

  • Locked
Poligaf 2017 |OT| It Almost Isn't Fair
9
4K
Bonen no Max'd replied
Football Thread 2017/18 |OT2| Fractured but Ox
166 167 168 169 170
8K
548K
Hideous Snake replied
Formula 1 2017 Season |OT2| A Dutch Horror Story - Sundays on Sky
54 55 56 57 58
3K
342K
Grieves replied
  • Locked
PoliGAF 2017 |OT5| The Man In the High Chair
395 396 397 398 399
20K
2M
RDreamer replied
  • Locked
PoliGAF 2017 |OT3| 13 Treasons Why
393 394 395 396 397
20K
2M
Zaraki_Kenpachi replied
Top Bottom