Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Martin Weidmann]

Tell it to Obama who advised Trump that N. Korea was the biggest threat that he would face.  It's a small "concession" to meet with Kim for a couple of hours to avoid a global conflict.  Trump maintained the peace with N. Korea and didn't involve the US in any foreign conflict.  In fact, he did his best to bring American soldiers home over the outraged protests of the establishment politicians on both the right and left.  Yet it's Trump who is Hitler according to you with your vast knowledge of history.  Not the establishment politicians like Old Joe that put Americans at risk around the world for decades for no purpose except to receive kickbacks from the tax dollars used to fund these endless wars.

It's a small "concession" to meet with Kim for a couple of hours to avoid a global conflict.

You are talking about an imaginary global conflict that paranoid right wing warmongers have been predicting for decades. There's always some enemy who is out to destroy the country, yet it never happens. North Korea is playing a poker game and Trump fell for their bluff.

Trump maintained the peace with N. Korea and didn't involve the US in any foreign conflict.

No. Trump maintained the status quo with North Korea, which was always going to be there, because Kim isn't stupid enough to start a war that will result in the total destruction of his country. And as for Trump not involving the US in a foreign conflict, which of course is a good thing, refresh my memory please; in what foreign conflict, that didn't already exist, did Obama involve the country in?

In fact, he did his best to bring American soldiers home over the outraged protests of the establishment politicians on both the right and left.

As did Obama, who had pulled most of the troops out of Iraq by December 2011.

Yet it's Trump who is Hitler according to you

Classic Smith misrepresentation. I never said Trump is Hitler. I said that in time he could become one! Fortunately he never got to that point!

Not the establishment politicians like Old Joe that put Americans at risk around the world for decades for no purpose except to receive kickbacks from the tax dollars used to fund these endless wars.

Talk to the Republicans. Reagan brought us the Iran/Contra deal and the invasion of Grenada and the Bush family brought us two Gulf wars and the invasion in Afghanistan.

[John Tonkovich]

Hey John,

Hope all you guys (and gals) in the US are safe and well.

Variants vs vaccines is a sort of battle but the various amino acid substitutions and deletions that enhance binding are being closely tracked since the first major one, the UK variant first appeared. I think the South African and Brazilian variants are now thought to be the most contagious. Simply put they increase the chance of spread to more people with less particles. You lower the effective infective dose. That said the current vaccines in use, Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford are still effective although somewhat diminished in their ability to prevent infection. The key is if you do get infected the symptoms are mild. No need for hospitalisation. I believe the vaccine technology developed will allow for "tweaks" to take care of variants down the track before they get out of hand.

For the US the vaccine rollout looks to be reasonably good. Almost 2 million doses per day now I believe. Remember it takes almost three weeks for the vaccine to promote a protective response so there will be a lag. Also the second dose provides best protection. As the most at risk are first in line along with health workers et al I believe you will see a dramatic downturn in deaths and hospitalisations by summer. The only spanner would be the variants taking off. The case numbers have fallen lately which suggests they haven’t taken hold "yet". You might see a bounce in numbers again if they do.

As for comparison of administrations, as an observer I think the obvious difference is consistency of approach. It seems steady with less bluster and just getting on with the job rather than holding daily press conferences that were thinly disguised election promotions. Perhaps the best description is the depoliticising of a public health crisis, as much as we could expect to happen in a political environment.

I think there is great optimism for a much better 2021.

Mr. Crow - oops - Dr. Crow:
Could you do that " math" thing, and compare deaths per capita, U.S.. versus other countries? Including your own.
We have reached an amazingly horrifying figure.
Thx.

[Rick Plant]

Tell it to Obama who advised Trump that N. Korea was the biggest threat that he would face.  It's a small "concession" to meet with Kim for a couple of hours to avoid a global conflict.  Trump maintained the peace with N. Korea and didn't involve the US in any foreign conflict.  In fact, he did his best to bring American soldiers home over the outraged protests of the establishment politicians on both the right and left.  Yet it's Trump who is Hitler according to you with your vast knowledge of history.  Not the establishment politicians like Old Joe that put Americans at risk around the world for decades for no purpose except to receive kickbacks from the tax dollars used to fund these endless wars.

Sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.  Imagine someone complaining that nothing happened with N. Korea like maybe a war.  Instead four years of peace and quiet.  Shame on Trump!  He should have done "something."  What exactly is left to our imagination.     

 

Richard has forgotten the past 4 years of Criminal Donald's disaster where he tried to start a nuclear war with Kim on Twitter and watched Kim parade his new nuclear arsenal down the street during a military parade and tested new missles frequently. Criminal Donald is an easy mark which is why North Korea continuously soft soaped him and used him for a fool to advance their nuclear arsenal right under his nose. The ignorance above is amazing with nothing but total propaganda.     



North Korea Continues to Flout Trump, Advance Nuclear Ambitions
A U.N. panel concludes that the U.S. president’s outreach to Kim Jong Un has changed little in his behavior
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/20/north-korea-trump-advance-nuclear-ambitions/



Kim Jong Un’s Nuclear Weapons Got More Dangerous Under Trump
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-28/four-ways-kim-jong-un-got-more-dangerous-under-trump-sanctions



Threat from nuclear weapons has grown under Trump administration

North Korea's new road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile, paraded through the streets of Pyongyang this past weekend, has underscored a worrying reality: The global threat from nuclear weapons and menacing missiles has grown since President Donald Trump entered office, despite his administration's fitful efforts to control them.

The unveiling of the untested weapon – which appeared to be a larger version of a North Korean missile that can reach the United States – came less than a week after Russia test launched an anti-ship hypersonic cruise missile on President Vladimir Putin's birthday and a month and a half after China test fired its "carrier killer" and "Guam killer" ballistic missiles into the disputed South China Sea.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-nuclear-weapons-missiles-north-korea-china-russia-b1009550.html


North Korea was Trump’s chief foreign policy boast, but things got worse on his watch
AUG. 24, 2020 4 AM PT

WASHINGTON —  Days before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Barack Obama gave him an urgent warning: North Korea was a serious threat and might soon be capable of marrying a nuclear warhead to a long-range missile that could reach American shores.
Almost four years after that meeting at the White House, as Trump faces the prospect of possibly turning over the presidency to Joe Biden, there is little evidence the danger has been reduced, despite the most sustained and aggressive diplomacy of Trump’s tenure.

If anything, North Korea poses a greater threat, according to Korea specialists: The country has tested and developed more weapons; its leader, Kim Jong Un, has become less isolated; and international resolve to confront North Korea has weakened after Trump’s three meetings with Kim.

Victor Cha, who negotiated with North Korea for President George W. Bush and was once considered for a top post in the Trump administration, warned in a recent podcast of “the big choice that’s coming down” as North Korea’s weapons program advances. Soon, he said, North Korea may reach the point at which American leaders will have to consider tacitly accepting the country as a nuclear power in exchange for limits and verification of Pyongyang’s stockpile.

Cha did not advocate that approach, which would be a fundamental change from decades of American insistence that North Korea drop its nuclear program entirely. But the fact that he broached it points to the lack of options America has in dealing with the secretive and autocratic adversary.

North Korea wants to be “like an India or Pakistan,” both of which developed nuclear weapons in violation of international anti-proliferation efforts, said Jung Pak, who helped with transition efforts at the CIA when Trump took office and is now an informal advisor to Biden. “Everybody just looks the other way.”

Kim “needs periodic bouts of tension and military aggression to maintain his rule,” Pak said. “So he doesn’t want peace.”

Trump still believes he can campaign on the issue, claiming in an interview in July that “if Democrats had gotten in, we would right now be in a war.”

But Trump’s 2017 threat to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea “was the closest” the countries came to a confrontation in recent years, Pak said.

Trump’s declaration in 2018, after his first meeting with Kim, that North Korea is “no longer a nuclear threat” rings increasingly hollow, according to experts who served administrations of both parties.

In John Bolton’s recent memoir about his time serving as Trump’s national security advisor, he portrayed Trump as ill-informed about history, unwilling to prepare for talks with Kim and obsessed with media coverage — with the president telling Bolton that he was “prepared to sign a substance-free communique, have a press conference to declare victory, and then get out” of Singapore.

Kim and his ruling circle “think they’ve got Trump’s number,” said Susan Thornton, who served as acting assistant secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific during Trump’s first 18 months in office.

The North Korean autocrat has sent several signals suggesting he wants Trump to win in November, labeling Biden “a rabid dog” that needs to be beaten. Some Korea analysts believe the North is making a calculated effort to refrain from provoking the United States during the campaign, even as Pyongyang takes aim at South Korea, blowing up a joint liaison office in Kaesong in mid-June.

“They want Trump to be able to keep saying he has basically fixed the North Korea situation …glossing over the notion that they’re still building up weapons, and they’re still shooting off short-range missiles,” said Thornton, who spent 28 years at the State Department.

Neither the Trump campaign nor the Biden campaign has released a plan for dealing with North Korea. The White House declined to allow any official to be interviewed on the record about the potential future of North Korea policy.

Interviews with officials in and out of government and the Biden campaign suggest that if Trump is reelected he will continue his efforts at diplomacy with Kim. Biden would try to firm up international sanctions and cooperation with regional allies, waiting for an opening to restart more traditional low-level negotiations — essentially resuming Obama’s approach.

Advisors to Biden also said they would restore pressure on North Korea over its human rights abuses, a contrast with Trump’s approach to downplaying Kim’s record of killings and mass incarcerations.

But even Biden’s campaign advisors offered little hope of an easy fix. They said that, near the end of Obama’s term, they believed they might have had an opening to make progress. At the time, China and U.S. regional allies had pushed Kim closer to desperation.

But they argue that Trump has squandered the opportunity by giving Kim the international legitimacy he craves and by halting major joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea that Kim views as a threat.

“It’s going to be a real heavy lift to get us back to a place where we’re actually advancing interests,” said Antony Blinken, Biden’s foreign policy advisor, who served in several top positions in the Obama administration.

Advisors did not point to many specific actions Biden took in forming Obama’s policy toward North Korea, but they made general note of his leading role in dealing with American allies — South Korea and Japan — as well as with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, each of whose support is necessary for economic sanctions against North Korea to have an effect.

“The approach that Biden supported was more along the lines of a war of attrition with North Korea,” Russel said. “If giving up its nuclear program is the last thing on earth that North Korea wants to do, we need to make it the last thing on earth that North Korea can do in order to survive.”

But that approach takes time and sustained effort at keeping together a fragile coalition, and it carries the risk that Kim will keep building nuclear weapons and possibly provoke a military confrontation. North Korea improved its missile capabilities and testing during Obama’s presidency.

Although some believe Kim might give up his nuclear weapons if he could stay in power and unlock his country’s economy, others argue he sees weapons as his only leverage, both domestically and abroad, and would never give them up.

“I’m frustrated that in a sense time ran out on what we were doing,” said Blinken, who acknowledged he could not prove the Obama-Biden approach, sometimes dubbed “strategic patience,” was close to bearing fruit.

Ken Farnaso, the Trump campaign’s deputy press secretary, said in a statement that Trump “inherited a broken and openly hostile U.S.-N.K. relationship from his predecessors” that left North Korea as “the preeminent international threat to the United States.”

“President Trump aimed to deescalate tensions with Kim Jong Un while still applying maximum political and economic pressure on the rogue regime, allowing for two historic summits further demonstrating the administration’s commitment to a denuclearized Korean peninsula,” he continued.

Trump has repeatedly expressed a willingness to hold another summit. His top negotiator, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, was in the region this month, but North Korea preemptively rejected talks while accusing the United States of hostility.

Cha said in an email that he believed Trump would almost certainly pursue more summits with Kim “not because he wants denuclearization but because he loves the media frenzy.”

He worries Trump — who has repeatedly complained about the costs of basing American troops in South Korea while trying to drive up the amount that Seoul pays to have them — will seek to pull them out. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the Pentagon had presented the White House with options for reducing the force.

Many analysts believe that would not only ease pressure on Kim, but also fundamentally shift power in the region toward China, while ratcheting up the potential for war.

“The North Koreans would much rather see Trump than Biden,” Cha added. “Trump is the perfect mark: loves the show, doesn’t care about substance and hates the alliance."
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-08-24/north-korea-trump-foreign-policy

[John Iacoletti]

Outstanding.  Playing to Kim's ego to avoid a nuclear holocaust.  Trump is the first president in over 40 years not to become involved in a foreign conflict.  He effectively neutralized Kim with non-military measures.  The establishment repubs and dems were furious that they had no new wars to fund for their paymasters.  Any suggestion of minimizing the US military presence in places like Europe or Afghanistan was met with substantial pushback due to all the money that flows to organizations that fund the campaigns of the establishment politicians.  Only Trump had the independence to do that.

Trump could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot "Richard's" child in the face and Richard would still say "outstanding".  That's how deep his cult of devotion is.

[John Iacoletti]

Sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.  Imagine someone complaining that nothing happened with N. Korea like maybe a war.  Instead four years of peace and quiet.  Shame on Trump!  He should have done "something."  What exactly is left to our imagination.     

Right unlike all of those years of war that we had with North Korea before Trump took office.

 

[Colin Crow]

Mr. Crow - oops - Dr. Crow:
Could you do that " math" thing, and compare deaths per capita, U.S.. versus other countries? Including your own.
We have reached an amazingly horrifying figure.
Thx.

John, lots of info at this page.....

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

A quick comparison USA 1538 deaths per million population. Ranked number 9.  Australia 35. We currently have 11 active cases in the country, none in ICU. Ranked 144. Can’t remember when we last had a death.

[Rick Plant]

There is much more than Trump’s tax returns that prosecutors will get: Top Mueller prosecutor
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-tax-returns-accounting-documents/

'The horse is really out of the barn': Norm Eisen reveals how Trump lost big against Manhattan DA
https://www.rawstory.com/manhattan-da-subpoenas-trump/

Rudy Giuliani tried dodging getting served with $1B Dominion Voting Systems suit
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-giuliani-dominion-lawsuit-service-20210222-6ejrl7c3rva3xbvhzqijoloe3y-story.html

What NY prosecutors could learn from Trump’s tax records
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-personal-taxes-new-york-courts-trump-investigations-0fa3d5f8dba60353aa8a5b25b94b1071

Fulton County DA discusses investigation into call between Trump, Raffensperger:  Donald Trump could face potential criminal cases for actions in Georgia
https://www.11alive.com/article/news/politics/elections/trump-call-investigation-fani-willis/85-2a87233a-cb3f-48cd-a16f-e5cc5b823dd3

[Rick Plant]

Trump could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot "Richard's" child in the face and Richard would still say "outstanding".  That's how deep his cult of devotion is.

That's how the whole Trump cult operates.