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Trump Fatigue

He's getting harder and harder to take

You know, I’m old enough to remember when Republicans in Congress called down fire and brimstone on the Obama administration for not cooperating with Congressional oversight in the Benghazi probe. Here’s a 2012 clip of Congressman Trey Gowdy blasting executive branch members at an oversight hearing. Gowdy has just joined Team Trump, to help Build The Stonewall.

This ought to be a big deal to conservatives: to protect the right of Congress to do oversight on the imperial executive. I don’t respect the administration’s contempt for Congress. We all know Adam Schiff gonna Adam Schiff, but Trump brought this entire mess onto himself, and he can’t bluster his way out of it.

People — including Republican voters — are getting fed up with it. These numbers are not moving in the way the president needs them to:

 

He is getting what he deserves with this query. I don’t know that he deserves to be impeached, but any president who carries on as he did should face a Congressional investigation. And he said what he did only one day after the Mueller Report’s release! Just so unbelievably cocky.

I just read what President Trump said about the wife of an American diplomat wanted in Britain in connection with a road accident that killed a British citizen. It’s disgusting, and shameful:

Donald Trump has defended the wife of a US diplomat who allegedly killed a British teenager in a car crash by saying it is hard to drive on the other side of the road.

Trump acknowledged that ‘a tragedy occurred’ and described suspect Anne Sacoolas – who he did not name – as ‘driving on the wrong side of the road,’ then suggested he had done the same too in the UK, where he has two golf courses.

‘Those are the opposite roads. That can happen,’ Trump said. ‘I won’t say it ever happened to me, but it did. When you get used to driving on our system and you’re all of a sudden on the other system, where you’re driving, it happens. You have to be careful.’

Trump on Wednesday publicly rebuffed a plea from Prime Minister Boris Johnson to waive diplomatic immunity for Sacoolas who is suspected of killing Harry Dunn, 19, and instead suggested the victim’s family meet her for ‘some healing’.

Dunn was killed when his motorbike crashed into a car on August 27 and Sacoolas, 42, who is married to a US intelligence official, fled to the US despite telling police she would not do so.

She is alleged to have killed a teenager with her bad driving. Trump doesn’t deny that. He just says that her diplomatic immunity should get her off. He won’t even send her back to be questioned by our closest ally. What an insult to the British. What a shameful moment for us Americans.

And now, we go to what Trump has done to the Kurds. Here is one of the US’s top Syria experts:

This is vomitous:

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From Fox News:

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Did you read the big Mark Bowden piece in The Atlantic based on his interview with generals? This part really stood out for me, in light of his Kurdish decision:

In the long run, however, unpredictability is a problem. Without a coherent underlying strategy, uncertainty creates confusion and increases the chance of miscalculation—and miscalculation, the generals pointed out, is what starts most wars. John F. Kennedy famously installed a direct hotline to the Kremlin in order to lower the odds of blundering into a nuclear exchange. Invading Kuwait, Saddam Hussein stumbled into a humiliating defeat in the first Gulf War—a conflict that killed more than 100,000 people—after a cascading series of miscommunications and miscalculations led to a crushing international response.

Unpredictability becomes an impediment to success when it interferes with orderly process. “Say you’re going to have an engagement with North Korea,” a general who served under multiple presidents told me. “At some point you should have developed a strategy that says, Here’s what we want the outcome to be. And then somebody is developing talking points. Those talking points are shared with the military, with the State Department, with the ambassador. Whatever the issue might be, before the president ever says anything, everybody should know what the talking points are going to be.” To avoid confusion and a sense of aimlessness, “everybody should have at least a general understanding of what the strategy is and what direction we’re heading in.”

None of our military leaders knew he was going to do that then. None of the Congressional leadership knew. He just got off a phone call with Erdogan, and then made his move. Because the Kurds didn’t help us at Normandy, I guess.

I’m worn out with this guy. Once more, I’ll have to remind myself of what losing the White House is going to mean to the causes I care most about. But it’s starting to look like if he remains, and continues with this crackpot leadership style, he’s going to lose the White House anyway.

 

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