Liberal Forum

Misty » 11 Aug 2017 12:03 pm » wrote: Putin didn't fire our diplomats. He just sent them home. They are still on the payroll.

Misty » 11 Aug 2017 1:21 pm » wrote:"Yet he still continues to suck up to Putin. Why?"

Good question.

Termin8tor » 11 Aug 2017 1:34 pm » wrote:Putin and Russia are bitterly anger at the sanctions, Dim.
Our relations are very bad.
Which you dishonestly equate with him getting along well with Putin.
Contrary to what Obama and HRC were doing, Trump is re-building our military, strengthening out standing in the world.
Lowering energy prices, the opposite of what helps Russia.
So you're claiming he's "Putin's pet?"
You can't even tell believable lies.

Termin8tor » 11 Aug 2017 1:34 pm » wrote:Ever heard of sarcasm, psycho?

Misty » 11 Aug 2017 3:39 pm » wrote: Name ONE time that he has criticized Putin for anything.

imbecile?

He has no problem criticizing anyone else including our allies, his own AG, the Senate Majority Leader and other members of Congress who are members of his own party.
But he NEVER criticizes Putin for anything, and in fact he praises him.

And you act as if I'm the only one who feels this way.
Do you live under a **** rock?

Misty » 11 Aug 2017 3:45 pm » wrote: OIC, so now he was just being sarcastic at a press conference, where he was being asked serious questions by reporters.

That's it?
That's what you want to go with now?

What happened to he was thanking Putin for doing us the favor of trimming some dead wood?

That's really how much you are willing to debase yourself for this disgusting human being?

Termin8tor » 11 Aug 2017 3:46 pm » wrote:Oh gosh, he hasn't said mean things about Putin?
Words are far more important than deeds, right imbecile?

Termin8tor » 11 Aug 2017 3:46 pm » wrote:Great job as usual at ignoring everything I wrote.

Termin8tor » 11 Aug 2017 3:48 pm » wrote:Here's a little hint, moonbat. When things are going badly in a negotiation, pretend you don't care.

Imbecile.

Misty » 11 Aug 2017 3:56 pm » wrote: WTF does that mean?
Don't get all testy with me because you can't keep your excuses for this sorry *** president straight.

First you said 45 thanked Putin because he was helping us trim some dead wood.
Then you said he was just being sarcastic, which BTW would be totally out of line at a serious press conference.

So which is it jackass?

The World of Cable News Is Trump’s Reality

Trump lives and breathes cable news.

It’s not just that, like so many ill-informed, emotionally immature, and insecure older white men, the guy who has the most powerful and sensitive job on earth reportedly wastes at least five hours a day with Fox et al.

It’s that the crazy world of Sean Hannity and Fox & Friends is his reality.

Because Trump possesses little actual knowledge about the real world outside his family and paid fluffers, the lunatic conspiracy theories that make up the programming day at Fox and, to a lesser degree, CNN and MSNBC—with a dollop of Bannon-supplied Breitbart—are the equivalent of Scripture.

Not only are Trump’s tweets often plagiarized versions of stupid Fox News arguments; so, too, are his legislative proposals and executive orders.

When members of Congress, world leaders, and even his own aides want to reach Trump, they often get themselves booked on TV to make sure he’s paying attention.

Anthony Scaramucci got his job by impressing Trump this way.

He lost it after complaining about a leak regarding his dinner with Trump, Fox host Sean Hannity, former Fox News honcho Bill Shine, and Fox News co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Shine and Guilfoyle have both been floated as candidates for top White House jobs, while Hannity couldn’t stand the pay cut.

Now the white-nationalist lunatic Stephen Miller is rumored to be ready to replace “The Mooch” because he had an argument about immigration with CNN’s Jim Acosta.

According to National Security Council staffer Sebastian Gorka, Miller received high fives after his appalling performance.

Gorka himself is a longtime associate of a Fascist-friendly organization in Hungary who, according to Axios’s Mike Allen, “was effectively a non-entity…until he began tearing shreds of CNN anchors.”

This cable-as-reality dynamic took a giant step into totalitarian territory when, according to a recent lawsuit filed by Rod Wheeler, a Fox News contributor and former homicide detective, Fox colluded with the White House—according to the suit, allegedly Trump himself—to push the phony/crazy story that ex-DNC staffer Seth Rich had been murdered because of his links to WikiLeaks.

The story, designed as an “alternative fact” to the likely-but-still-murky Russian role in the drama, was shamelessly and obsessively peddled on Fox, particularly by Trumpists like Sean Hannity and the cast of Fox & Friends, until Rich’s parents publicly objected.

It was based on the “reporting” of Malia Zimmerman, a FoxNews.com fantasist who has repeatedly reported on events for which no evidence exists.

A closed circle in which an administration colludes with a faux-independent media to purposely mislead the nation on behalf of its program of political control is one that has no room for democratic practice of any kind.

It’s long past time to stop treating Trump like any other legitimate leader and Fox like an actual news network.

They are, respectively and collectively, a metastasizing cancer on our body politic.

Misty » 11 Aug 2017 3:52 pm » wrote: [/size]So what deeds has he done to punish Russia for interfering in our election?

(The sanctions law he signed does not count, since he signed it reluctantly knowing that Congress would have overridden his veto anyway.)

Misty » 11 Aug 2017 3:56 pm » wrote: WTF does that mean?
Don't get all testy with me because you can't keep your excuses for this sorry *** president straight.

First you said 45 thanked Putin because he was helping us trim some dead wood.
Then you said he was just being sarcastic, which BTW would be totally out of line at a serious press conference.

So which is it jackass?

Misty » 11 Aug 2017 3:52 pm » wrote:
Thank you.
I try my beast to do that.

Combative Trump Pulls His Punches for One Man: Putin

The roster of villains in President Trump’s world is legion.

The list of people he has been willing, even eager, to publicly attack includes not just Mitch McConnell, his latest target, but Jeff Sessions, Chuck Schumer, Paul D. Ryan, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

And don’t forget James B. Comey, Robert S. Mueller III, Andrew G. McCabe, Rod J. Rosenstein, John D. Podesta, Nancy Pelosi, Lisa Murkowski, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rosie O’Donnell, Meryl Streep, the mayor of London and the cast of “Saturday Night Live.”

The countries he has assailed include not just North Korea and Iran but also Germany, Canada, Mexico, China and Sweden.

But for all of that feistiness, for all of those verbal and online fisticuffs, there is one person who is definitely not on Mr. Trump’s target list: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Ever since Mr. Trump jumped into political life, Washington has scratched its collective head over his curious affinity for the strongman of the Kremlin.

But the president’s determination to avoid saying anything even remotely critical of Mr. Putin was brought home in stark relief on Thursday when he twisted himself into a knot over a question about the Russian leader’s decision to order the United States Embassy to slash its staff by more than half. Rather than complain, Mr. Trump expressed gratitude.

“I want to thank him because we’re trying to cut down on payroll,” Mr. Trump told reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

“And as far as I’m concerned, I’m very thankful that he let go of a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll.

There’s no real reason for them to go back.

So I greatly appreciate the fact that they’ve been able to cut our payroll for the United States.

We’ll save a lot of money.”

On Twitter, many initially assumed that quote was from The Onion, the ripped-from-the-headlines satirical newspaper that has long mocked presidents and politicians by exaggerating their better-known traits.

But even the cutting-edge Onion has a hard time keeping up with today’s head-spinning news events.

In an email on Friday morning, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump meant his comment to be funny.

“He was being sarcastic,” she said.

But she did not explain why Mr. Trump remained so reluctant to utter a word of criticism against Mr. Putin.

Mr. Trump has long expressed admiration for Mr. Putin even as American politicians of both parties have denounced the Russian leader for fomenting a separatist war in Ukraine, trying to destabilize the West, bolstering President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and collaborating with Iran.

In the years leading up to his election, Mr. Trump expressed repeated praise for Mr. Putin, calling him “so nice” and a “strong leader” who was doing an “amazing job.”

When interviewers asked him about the killing of so many opposition leaders and journalists, Mr. Trump has brushed it off by saying even the United States has engaged in killing.

Mr. Trump’s latest comment came just a week after he posted a message on Twitter blaming the deterioration in relations with Moscow on Congress for passing sanctions on Russia.

The sanctions were passed to punish Russia for interfering in last year’s American presidential election and seizing its neighbor’s territory by annexing Crimea, but Mr. Trump made no mention of those actions.

Mr. Putin’s response to the sanctions was to seize two American diplomatic properties and order the United States to cut 755 positions from its embassy and consulates by Sept. 1, the most sweeping such action against American interests in Russia in decades and a decision that typically would have drawn at least a polite letter of complaint by previous presidents, if not a full-throated condemnation.

Most of those who will lose their jobs will be Russian nationals who work for the embassy in nonsensitive positions.

Any American diplomats who might have to leave will almost certainly be entitled to keep their jobs and be reassigned to the State Department headquarters or other home agencies in Washington or other overseas postings.

Whether Mr. Trump’s response was intended to be sarcastic or not, longtime Russia policy makers said they were astonished.

“It is outrageous that he would thank Putin for anything, given everything Putin has done to attack American sovereignty and how poorly the Russian government has treated American personnel posted in Russia,” said Evelyn Farkas, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former deputy assistant defense secretary under Mr. Obama.

“The president appears completely determined to find no fault with anything Putin does,” she added.

“What if Putin threatened Guam with a military attack?”

David J. Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush and now a senior fellow at Florida International University, noted that Mr. Obama expelled 35 diplomats and seized two compounds before leaving office in retaliation for the election meddling.

“Putin’s decision to force cuts in the embassy staff by 755 positions and seizing two compounds is actually an escalation, not retaliation for what we did, and wholly undeserving of any praise,” he said.

Given Mr. Trump’s propensity to criticize just about anyone else, including members of his own staff, cabinet and party, his resolute refusal to say anything negative about Mr. Putin has only fueled suspicions about last year’s election.

While Mr. Trump adamantly denies any collusion between his team and Russia during the campaign, an email sent to his son, Donald Trump Jr., last summer setting up a meeting with a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties said the visit was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Mr. Trump lately has tried to argue that Russia actually worked against his campaign because he has moved to increase military spending and energy supplies and that, if anything, it was Mrs. Clinton who had the support of the Kremlin.

That is not how investigators working for Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, or the House and Senate Intelligence Committees see it.

“They’re investigating something that never happened,” Mr. Trump complained on Thursday.

“There was no collusion between us and Russia.

In fact, the opposite.

Russia spent a lot of money on fighting me.

And if you think about it, I want a strong military.

You see our budget is up by — it will be hundreds of billions of dollars, our military budget.

Russia doesn’t like that.

Hillary was going to cut the budget substantially, the military budget.”

Some foreign policy scholars said that even if there was nothing untoward between the Trump campaign and Russia, the president and his team may be soft-pedaling criticism of Mr. Putin in hopes of striking a grand bargain on Syria and the Islamic State.

“Trump’s consistent reluctance to say even a halfway critical word about Putin is bewildering,” said Andrew Weiss, a former Russia adviser to Mr. Clinton now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Trump continues to cling to this idea” that teaming up with Moscow on the Middle East and China “is an essential element of his foreign policy strategy.

“Unfortunately,” he concluded, “it’s a totally unfounded and unworkable way of thinking about the world, let alone running U.S. foreign policy.”

Termin8tor » 11 Aug 2017 4:47 pm » wrote:It's both, psycho.
If you weren't so busy lying and babbling, you could have figured that out by yourself.

Termin8tor » 11 Aug 2017 4:46 pm » wrote:You always play the game crooked.
Signing sanctions against Russia doesn't count because blah, blah, blah, blah.
Psychopath.

President Trump reluctantly signed a Russian sanctions bill Wednesday, bending to the will of Congress as he slammed the legislation as “significantly flawed” and an affront to his executive powers.

The law punishes Russia, Iran and North Korea. But unsubstantiated accusations of Trump campaign collusion with Moscow loomed large because lawmakers, distrustful of the president’s relationship with the Kremlin, curtailed his ability to unilaterally lift the sanctions.

In a signing statement, Mr. Trump said the bill contained “clearly unconstitutional provisions,” and he chided lawmakers for hamstringing his executive authority.

He said it would “displace the President’s exclusive constitutional authority to recognize foreign governments.”

“While I favor tough measures to punish and deter aggressive and destabilizing behavior by Iran, North Korea and Russia, this legislation is significantly flawed,” he said in the message to Capitol Hill.

The check on his executive power raised doubts about whether Mr. Trump would sign the bill.

He was forced to put is name on it, however, when the legislation passed with veto-proof majorities in both Republican-run chambers of Congress.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... ions-bill/

Misty » 11 Aug 2017 6:46 pm » wrote: It can't be BOTH jackass.
He was either serious or he was just being sarcastic.


Of course it can be both, Dim.

The US will save money from fewer federal employees, but by directing it at Putin, he was expressing sarcasm.

Misty » 11 Aug 2017 6:41 pm » wrote:Combative Trump Pulls His Punches for One Man: Putin

Misty » 11 Aug 2017 7:03 pm » wrote: And you always play the game stupid.
He did not want to sign the sanctions bill.
He was forced to because Congress had the votes to override his veto.

Maybe if you ever read something besides wingnut websites, you might know that.