Time to get on the TRUMP train

[Just Stanley]

Iraq was a mistake plain and simple. I never understood why Bush thought Iraq was such a threat. It turns out Hussein was the glue that held that middle east shithole together all those years.

It's the same thing with Russia, I see these left wing whackos obsessing about Russia and how they hysterically claim "they meddled in our elections". Yeah, welcome to reality you dumb shits. Russia and the US have been meddling in other people's elections decades. Deal with it. So they hacked Podesta's emails, big deal. It's not like Podesta's emails changed anyone's mind, all it showed is what a POS he was to Bernie Sanders. 98% of the US still has no idea who John Podesta was, is or ever will be.

But back to world threats, my biggest fear is North Korea. They are terribly unstable and their leader just does not give a shit. Now that is a problem, especially if he decides one weekend on a coke bender to launch some missiles to their neighbors.

[Tellafriend]

Iraq was a mistake plain and simple. I never understood why Bush thought Iraq was such a threat. It turns out Hussein was the glue that held that middle east shithole together all those years.

It's the same thing with Russia, I see these left wing whackos obsessing about Russia and how they hysterically claim "they meddled in our elections". Yeah, welcome to reality you dumb shits. Russia and the US have been meddling in other people's elections decades. Deal with it. So they hacked Podesta's emails, big deal. It's not like Podesta's emails changed anyone's mind, all it showed is what a POS he was to Bernie Sanders. 98% of the US still has no idea who John Podesta was, is or ever will be.

But back to world threats, my biggest fear is North Korea. They are terribly unstable and their leader just does not give a shit. Now that is a problem, especially if he decides one weekend on a coke bender to launch some missiles to their neighbors.

Bush erroneously believed he was nation building and it would be his legacy; which it is, just not the way he intended.

The libs don't really care about the details of what Russia did or didn't do, this just a way to discredit Trump. Get used to it.

North Korea is nothing more than a petulant child. South park taught us how to deal with them We ust lacked the will:

[FPS_Russia]

Can we be honest about the Iraq war.

[Muck Ficon]

This is a very homogenized narrative.

The part that did the damage was right wing neo-conservatives deliberately doctoring/misrepresenting CIA intel that bolstered their preferred narrative, and then using that wholly invalid intel to rope politicians into backing a literal invasion of a sovereign power.

It was a combination of Bush Jr being a blood thirsty yahoo and his misguided belief that somewhere out there, there was a war we could 'win' in the traditional context of 'military victory', and that doing so would help America feel like it could somehow recover from 9/11 and, in the process, somehow repair the damage it did to Bush's legacy.

Trying to somehow lay blame at the foot of moderate Democrats is an act of belligerent ignorance; they were lied to, you know they were lied to, and yet you seem oddly unwilling to assign responsibility to the liars, even today.

George W. Bush was not a bloodthirsty yahoo. That's a narrative the left likes to push, but an incorrect one.

Like him or hate him, but George W. Bush always believed he was doing the right thing. I've said before that GW Bush and Bill Clinton were opposites regarding how they governed. Clinton was too obsessed with what the people wanted at the time, often letting popular sentiment dictate policy (rather than what he actually thought was right). Bush was too obsessed with what he thought was right, and ignored popular sentiment (also a problem, for obvious reasons).

Bush went to war in Iraq fully believing there were WMDs there, and that America needed to get Saddam out of power.

It wasn't "to win a war in the traditional sense", "to finish what Daddy started", or anything else like that.

Follow Bush's entire career, and you will see a man who believed what he was doing was right and necessary, even when he was actually wrong.

I'm not blaming the moderate Democrats, but rather stating that the Iraq war of 2003 was not a Republican war. All but the left wing of the Democratic Party (who oppose ANY war) were for the invasion at the time.

Regarding the reason for the invasion of Iraq, honestly Saddam gave us tons of them in the prior 12 years. Even if you want to say that this reason wasn't a good one, and that the CIA intel was exaggerated for political purposes, the bottom line was that Saddam was giving the middle finger to the US ever since the end of the Gulf War, and showing no signs of keeping to any of his agreements. Saddam was in fact getting more and more brazen, as he was no longer in fear of actually being invaded. We made so many threats in the prior 12 years that he wasn't taking any of them seriously. I'm sure Saddam was more surprised than anything else when the US finally took action against him.

You are a master at spinning things to fit your own "narrative". You fucking piss and moan about tomatoes on the side. You believed you were right. You will unleash hell based on your "belief" that you were robbed out of $1. Then you spew shit like this. "I'm not blaming Bush, but he was wrong, but also justified, and probably completely correct."

[hongkonger]

How long did it take most Republicans to admit the Iraq war was actually US initiated terrorism? It took years and small steps. IRAQ has WMD ==> Saddam is a bad dictator ==> It was best for long term peace ==> omg what a fuckup ==> Jesus Christ we were wrong ==> Oh well, USA USA USA. 8 years for most.

The Trump nutters are far more invested in the Donald than those invested in the Iraq war so when the train hits the wall, and it will, the division in the US will be a "tremendous disaster" for years.

Republicans always got a bad rap for the "Iraq has WMD" thing.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Saddam was playing a frustrating hide-and-seek game with the UN regarding his WMD program.

Republicans did not invent some WMD scare in order to justify invading Iraq. In reality, Saddam had a WMD program dating back to before the 1991 Gulf War, and he kept secretly restarting the program every time after he agreed to "really stop it for good this time".

He also kept thwarting UN attempts to inspect them, dating all the way back to mid-1991. He would agree to inspections, and then either go back on the agreements or only let inspectors look at certain areas.

We will never know for sure, but I believe that Saddam had a WMD program shortly before our 2003 invasion, but dismantled it for whatever reason.

Saddam was also going to be a constant thorn in the United States' side for as long as he ruled Iraq.

The US basically had enough of him, and they felt that they had enough justification to invade, given the intelligence reports stating that WMDs existed there at the time.

Keep in mind that most centrist and left-centrist Democrats also supported the 2003 Iraq invasion, which gave rise to John Kerry's infamous 2004 quote, "I voted for it before I voted against it."

The neocons that dominated the Bush administration wanted to topple Saddam even before Bush was elected, and advocated for it vocally. Their motivation was pure realpolitik: part oil and part to have a "friendly" launching pad for further operations in the region, particularly against Iran. They were very open about this. It had nothing to do with WMD. They cited his possible WMD programs and violation of international sanctions as reasons to consider him a rogue but didn't consider it a priority and actually encouraged it prior to his invasion of Kuwait. They were looking for an excuse and decided to turn 9/11 into an excuse even though he had
Nothing to do with it. The very next day after 9/11 when the sole focus should have been the people who actually did it, Cheney, Rumsfeld & co were already trying to figure out how to turn it against Iraq, who had nothing to do with it. This was when Saddam's possible WMD programs were brought to the forefront, since they could easily be conflated with terrorism and 9/11. In the absence of hard evidence of any actual WMD, Cheney and Rumsfeld (not Bush) did indeed push very weak evidence including some that had been intentionally fabricated. The Democrats mostly bought into these lies and/or declined to vociferously oppose it for political expediency, and even the so-called liberal media like the NY Times allowed themselves to be used as part of the propaganda machine building up to the war. A serious mark against all of them and nobody on the left should defend their spinelessness during that episode IMO.

Kerry's dumb remark about voting for it before he voted against it wasn't about the war. It was about an $87B defense appropriation. He voted for it, then later some unrelated amendments were added (quite common in Congress unfortunately) that made it impossible for him to vote for, so he voted against it. He explained it poorly.

[snake_in_the_ass]

Can we be honest about the Iraq war.

I agree. Israel is having the USA knock out their middle east enemies. Iran is the main event.

[FPS_Russia]

Not many people know we almost went to war w Iran already.
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/01/...-brink-of-war/
TRUMP’S “MODERATE” DEFENSE SECRETARY HAS ALREADY BROUGHT US TO THE BRINK OF WAR

Quote: DID YOU KNOW that the Trump administration almost went to war with Iran at the start of February?

Perhaps you were distracted by Gen. Michael Flynn’s resignation as national security adviser or by President Trump’s online jihad against Nordstrom. Or maybe you missed the story because the New York Times bizarrely buried it in the midst of a long piece on the turmoil and chaos inside the National Security Council. Defense Secretary James Mattis, according to the paper, had wanted the U.S. Navy to “intercept and board an Iranian ship to look for contraband weapons possibly headed to Houthi fighters in Yemen. … But the ship was in international waters in the Arabian Sea, according to two officials. Mr. Mattis ultimately decided to set the operation aside, at least for now. White House officials said that was because news of the impending operation leaked.”

Get that? It was only thanks to what Mattis’s commander in chief has called “illegal leaks” that the operation was (at least temporarily) set aside and military action between the United States and Iran was averted.

Am I exaggerating? Ask the Iranians. “Boarding an Iranian ship is a shortcut” to confrontation, says Seyyed Hossein Mousavian, former member of Iran’s National Security Council and a close ally of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Even if a firefight in international waters were avoided, the Islamic Republic, Mousavian tells me, “would retaliate” and has “many other options for retaliation.”

Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council and author of the forthcoming book “Losing an Enemy — Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy,” agrees. Such acts of “escalation” by the Trump administration, he tells me, “significantly increases the risk of war.”

In an administration overflowing with Iran hawks, from CIA Director Mike Pompeo (“I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism”) to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly (“Iran’s involvement in [Latin America] … is a matter for concern”) to former National Security Adviser Flynn (“We are officially putting Iran on notice”), some may have naively expected Mattis to be the responsible adult in the room.

The defense secretary has been lauded by politicians and pundits alike: the “scholar-warrior” (New York Daily News) and “most revered Marine in a generation” (Marine Corps Times) with “the potential to act as a restraint” (New York Times) on an impulsive commander in chief as he is “the anti-Trump” (Politico) and therefore “good news for global order” (Wall Street Journal).

So why would a retired Marine Corps general such as Mattis be willing to provoke a conflict with Tehran over a single ship? The fact is that Mattis, too, is obsessed with Iran. He has hyperbolically called the Islamic Republic “the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East” and — in a Trump-esque descent into the world of conspiracy theories — suggested Tehran is working with ISIS. “Iran is not an enemy of ISIS,” Mattis declaimed in 2016, because “the one country in the Middle East that has not been attacked” by ISIS “is Iran. That is more than happenstance, I’m sure.”

According to the Washington Post, in the run-up to the talks over Iran’s nuclear program, “Israelis may have questioned Obama’s willingness to use force against Iran. … But they believed Mattis was serious.” The general, in his capacity as head of U.S. Central Command, even proposed launching “dead of night” airstrikes on Iranian soil in 2011, in retaliation for Tehran’s support for anti-American militias in Iraq — a proposal rejected by White House officials who were worried that it “risked starting yet another war in the Middle East.”


More in link

Factoid: The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety .The USA spends more money on its military than the next eight nations combined.with 200,000 troops stationed in over 144 countries (2015)
Let that sink in, the troops make peanuts so where's all the money going?

[FPS_Russia]

TYT picks up the interstate crosscheck story.

They don't call me the trendsetter for nothing.

[sonatine]

Trump tax returns getting dox'd in 70 minutes.

[blake]

Trump tax returns getting dox'd in 70 minutes.

was just about to post this and ask if it's legit. i haven't seen anything else on this yet

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/twt/status/841795163664089089

[thesidedish]

I'm sure the guy who talks about Russia every night is really on to something here

[RealTalk]

heard rumor this is potentially clickbait and they have his 2005 returns and will show he claimed $150 million income

[sonatine]

heard rumor this is potentially clickbait and they have his 2005 returns and will show he claimed $150 million income

this would basically destroy Maddow's credibility.


not to say its impossible or even unlikely.

[FPS_Russia]

too late
I may have to lift my Maddow boycott, I heard she's pwning Trump on Russia. She supposedly edged out FOX in ratings wtf.

A few other headlines

Trump's pick for national security role now lobbying for Ukrainian tycoon

Why is the federal government trading away public land to the 1 percent?

Monica Crowley Lost White House Job, Now She’s Got One With Pro-Russian Oligarch

She makes $26k, will pay $14k for health care

What We Already Know About Trump’s Ties to Russia Amounts to Treachery to the Republic

The US will be a shell of itself if this is allowed to continue 4 years

[Krypt]

something about the way she worded trump tax returns makes me feel like this wont be what sonatine was hoping for

[blake]

heard rumor this is potentially clickbait and they have his 2005 returns and will show he claimed $150 million income

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/twt/status/841807273513107456

[blake]

also if it's just the 1040 without the schedules, the tax return wouldn't tell you much, and nothing anything about any foreign investment

[sonatine]

could not give a fraction of a shit about 2005

[sonatine]

literally if he paid 0 taxes in 2005 it would mean less than nothing to me.

[RealTalk]

pretty faggot thing to put up a countdown timer labeled "TRUMP TAXES EXCLUSIVE" for this bullshit