Ignatz Mouse
Banned
Macbeth is overrated but has some great lines. Makes for good adaptations to other settings.
Hamlet is godamned brilliant.
Romeo and Juliet is the one I could do without.
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PoliGAF 2017 |OT2| Well, maybe McMaster isn't a traitor.
- Thread starter ItWasMeantToBe19
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Macbeth is overrated but has some great lines. Makes for good adaptations to other settings.
Hamlet is godamned brilliant.
Romeo and Juliet is the one I could do without.
A Serious Man
Member
Can they please confirm Gorsuch already, I don't think I can take another day of Republicans acting indignant over filibusters and partisanship.
Aaron Strife
Banned
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)
I can't believe the democrats made us do this, we really didn't want to.
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.
Seriously it makes me want to punch someone
Aaron Strife
Banned
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.
FloydtheFathead
Member
Titus Andronicus?
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.
balladofwindfishes
Member
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.
He just wants to kill brown people for cheap approval points. There isn't really much there besides that.
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.
cartoon_soldier
Member
Just 98,000 jobs added in March.
UE still dropped to 4.5%
UE still dropped to 4.5%
Obama really dropping the ball.
HanShotFirst
Member
Is it still the Bush recovery or is it finally the Obama recovery?
Rand Paul just wanted to make sure he knew where the new healthcare bill was being kept.
Bush recovery, Obama recession.
cartoon_soldier
Member
Cook PVI index is out.
http://cookpolitical.com/file/Cook_Political_Report_Partisan_Voter_Index_.pdf
http://cookpolitical.com/file/Cook_Political_Report_Partisan_Voter_Index_.pdf
ErasureAcer
Banned
Cartwright,
four!
twenty
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
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?
lastflowers
Banned
We send Seth Rogen and James Franco to Syria to interview him.
metalslimer
Member
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.
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.
cartoon_soldier
Member
No good solution. Syria is a quagmire of epic proportions with three parties fighting each other.
Poodlestrike
Banned
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.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
nvm
metalslimer
Member
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.
Ignatz Mouse
Banned
A glaring omission in the plays I've read or seen. And I have read or seen a *lot* of them.
I'm also missing a bunch of histories, which is weird because the histories I have read are among my favorites of his. O, for a muse of fire...
Crimson_Gold
Member
It'll probably strengthen Russia and make Putin feel capable of holding the world hostage through proxy wars.
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
Member
What did I miss overnight?
Poodlestrike
Banned
Trump apparently wasted about 80 million bucks worth of Tomahawk missiles to do nothing in particular except ratchet up tensions in Syria.
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.
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.
reggieandTFE
Member
Should there be a thread for the monthly report? Especially after all the crowing from the Rs about last month's bigly #s. This is the lowest in a long time.
Poodlestrike
Banned
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.
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.
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.
- Media and Washington Establishment like intervention and praise Trump
- Trump likes praise and intervenes more
- Media and Washington Establishment like intervention and praise Trump
- Trump likes praise and intervenes more
- Repeat
- "Profit"?
Cook PVI index is out.
http://cookpolitical.com/file/Cook_Political_Report_Partisan_Voter_Index_.pdf
Go Go Sunbelt Strategy for the House in 2018?
Poodlestrike
Banned
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.
Dubbedinenglish
Banned
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.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Christ I finally read the actual Tulsi Gabbard account of her visit to Syria in its entirety
What the flying fuck
https://medium.com/@TulsiGabbard/the-syrian-people-desperately-want-peace-e308f1777a34
What the flying fuck
https://medium.com/@TulsiGabbard/the-syrian-people-desperately-want-peace-e308f1777a34
Carpe Libertatem
Member
Yeah, this. She's never been particularly progressive as a Representative (and certainly never was before being elected!)
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
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
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
Poodlestrike
Banned
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.
Well said.
Dominican Power
Member
Do Hawaiians even like Gabbard?
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