My take on last year's debacle. I have every expectation this year will be worse, and will be talking about that on @msnbc in the 11 am hour. — The Madness of King Trump on Full Display at the G7 thedailybeast.com/the-madness-of… via @thedailybeast
"It’s as if seven people went to a club to play poker, and one of them, the richest, threw the deck in the air and announced they would play 52 pick-up instead." @thedailybeast 2018
"Everybody else in the room knows that this is nuts. They also know that for better or worse, they have to live with it. But maybe they won’t invite him back." #g7 #2018
The G7 is not just a club for the rich, but for leaders who assume they shared the same basic values: belief in empirical facts, fundamental human freedoms, sacrosanct democratic processes, and the rule of law. "All of which is to say it’s a club where Trump doesn’t fit in."
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One of the most shameful aspects of the Civil War is that so many Southern men and women died to defend the interests of a small slave-holding elite that used its money and the exploitation of racism and fear to lead the masses to destruction. thedailybeast.com/confederate-ma…
Thomas Jefferson's indictment of King George III in the Declaration of Independence would make for suitable articles of impeachment against Donald Trump: 1) The King was “obstructing laws for the naturalization of foreigners, refusing to encourage migrations" [more]...
2) The tyrant "made judges dependent on his will alone" 3) He "sent hither swarms of new officers to harass our people" 4) He "cut off our trade with parts of the world" 5) He "altered fundamentally the forms of our government”
“A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people," Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.
In America, people who are stupid and incompetent can imagine they could be rich, so they don’t hate the rich. But they can’t really imagine themselves as intellectually brilliant or competent, so they hate those people who are. Trump knows that, and plays it.
It will be precisely Amb. Yovanovitch’s intelligence and competence that Trump and his sycophants will try to use against her, suggesting that she, and George Kent, and Amb. Taylor and other veteran public servants are part of the hated (smart, competent) elite.
In year’s past, know-nothing demagogues talked about eggheads, pointy-headed intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, etc. But those categories broadened under Trump to encompass professional public servants, dubbed the establishment and “the deep state.”
@PeterTurnley “Under a full moon we walked in the Tiergarten, following the path that the Wall cut through the park. A blind man could have done the same, just listening to the noise of picks and hammers.”
@PeterTurnley “Slightly more than half of the world’s population today was not yet born in November 1989, and have no idea, really, what the Cold War was like for people on both sides of that great divide.”
This is quite a column from @tomfriedman: Trump, Zuckerberg & Pals Are Breaking America nyti.ms/36eqYv6 - following are a few excerpts...
@tomfriedman But first, this thought from ol' Pogo ...
@tomfriedman This from @tomfriedman: "If America’s worst enemies had spent years designing a plan to erode our greatest strengths, they could not have done better than what some of our fellow citizens are doing to the country every day for short-term financial or political gain."
My latest. Read This: "The Kurds Gave Their Lives to Defeat the ‘Islamic State.’ Trump Just Pissed It All Away." thedailybeast.com/the-kurds-gave…
"No amount of Trumpian huffing and puffing, threatening and cajoling can change the widespread view in the Middle East—and in Congress—that almost on a whim he collapsed a fragile balance of power, then had to cut and run."
Trump "blames those he betrayed as if they were servants who failed him, and tries to claim credit for himself for the good that they did."