Trump announced his decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and abandon our allies, the Kurds, on Putin’s birthday, October 7. Happy birthday, Vlad!
From today’s New York Times:
President Trump on Wednesday distanced the United States from the conflict between Turkey and America’s Kurdish allies in Syria, saying that the battle “has nothing to do with us” as he defended his decision to withdraw American troops from northern Syria.
Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters alongside the visiting president of Italy, said the American soldiers he had ordered to pull back were not in harm’s way and that “they shouldn’t be as two countries fight over land.”
“That has nothing to do with us,” Mr. Trump said, all but washing his hands of the Kurdish fighters who have fought alongside American troops against the Islamic State for years but have now been left to fend for themselves. “The Kurds know how to fight, and, as I said, they’re not angels, they’re not angels,” he said.
The president’s comments came as Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Robert C. O’Brien, the president’s new national security adviser, were preparing to fly to Turkey in a bid to persuade President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to pull back his offensive.
Republicans and Democrats alike have denounced the president for abandoning the Kurds, who now are fighting Turkish forces in a chaotic battlefield that also has put at risk American troops pulling back from the Syrian border with Turkey. Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the small American force from the border, where they had served as a kind of trip wire deterring Turkish aggression, has been widely criticized as a signal permitting Turkey to launch its offensive.
He dismissed concerns that his decision has opened the way for Russia, Iran and the Syrian government to move into the abandoned territory and reassert their influence in the area. “I wish them all a lot of luck,” Mr. Trump said. “If Russia wants to get involved in Syria, that’s really up to them.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
More blood on Asset Orange’s tiny hands
Sounds like Pontius Pilate.
The Democracy Initiative Network, affiliated with Nancy MacLean, the Duke history professor who wrote Democracy in Chains is made up of 72 civil rights, environmental, labor and civic organizations who are working against the political inequality inflicted on the American people by the richest.
It is one of many efforts, like Diane’s NPE, that gives us hope. The website provides answers to what we can do in defense of democracy.
At the Unchain Our Democracy site there is a list of the tools/efforts used by billionaires to create political inequality that benefits the rich. Under the heading, “Sacralize the Agenda”, there is a list of “religious allies”. One is the Council for National Policy. Wikipedia provides the names of members which include, Betsy and Erik Prince’s mother, Elsa Prince, Steve Bannon, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Michael Peroutka, Kellyanne Conway. etc. The entry states that Sun Myung Moon (Washington Examiner) has given billions to members of the Council for National Policy.
And Trump’s threats of imposing sanctions on Turkey, after throwing the Kurds under the bus, are raising questions about the continued protection the US is offering to the US charter school business created by Fethullah Gülen.
In January, 2019, Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig reported in detail about the growth Gülen
Charter schools in the United States, then about 175 of these schools, with ancillary businesses set up to serve the schools.
With Trump’s on and off again relationship with Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, several news reports are also looking into the “sympathetic” relationship of prior administrations to the proliferation of Gülen Charter Schools, and whether the Fethullah Gülen—a religious figure residing in a secluded Pennsylvania compound–will be sent back to Turkey. See for example, a recent mention in the Wall Street Journal (Turkey has Legitimate Grievances Against the U.S., by Michael Doran and Mike Reynolds).
Gulen has been in his protected enclave since 1999. Gülen has a world-wide group of followers who are said to be centrally organized by Gülen. Some Gülenists have been accused of organizing the attempted 2016 coup of Erdogan. Although Gülen denies any involvement in the coup or other attempts to overthrow Erdogan, there is not much clarity about why he remains secluded and in residence, and apparently with the full knowledge of the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.
Gülen has a cult-like following. He and his followers have had the savvy to set up an elaborate network of charter schools in the US with huge outflows of taxpayer funds to these and to ancillary businesses serving these schools, including salaries and H1-b Visas for Turkish teachers and administrators.
See this excellent report on the Gülen charters, by Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig
Also https://religionnews.com/2019/01/04/who-is-fethullah-gulen-and-why-is-the-us-talking-about-extraditing-him-to-turkey/
I dunno, are we supposed to feel sorry if Fethulah Gulen gets thrown to the wolves?
“Look, the U.S. is the center of the most powerful empire that’s ever existed. We’re not in the Mideast for moral reasons, like protecting the Kurds, so you can forget about that. We’re there to keep the oil flowing (even though any Mideast government will happily sell their oil to anyone buying), to get whatever profits we can for U.S. corporations and to make sure our Saudi friends recycle their profits back into the American economy.
“We can protect people like the Kurds only with a massive enlargement of our empire. So if you care about them, get ready for much higher taxes and your kids dying in Rojava. Or we can get rid of our empire — in which case you better start thinking about how to restrain all the other countries who’d like to run the Mideast and care about the people there as much as we do. Or we can muddle along in our current half-assed fashion, in which we agree not to ask too much of you and you agree not to ask any tough questions. You tell us!”
I do not accept this editorialist’s view that throwing the Kurds under the bus is inevitable. While he is quite correct in that the US is often found in history neglecting its allies both maliciously and unavoidably, he uses this history to suggest that all the democrats are foolishly ignorant of foreign policy. I think he took that to an extreme. Why?
I think he was more suggesting that the Democrats (with the exception of Tulsi) are willfully ignorant of foreign policy. Because their positions largely line up with Republicans when it comes to expanding and enforcing the American empire and they really don’t want to talk about that with the American people. It’s so much easier when we can just pretend that Republicans are the war party and the Democrats oppose “stupid wars”.
Tulsi Gabbard? Are you talking about the woman who got a special award from Sheldon Adelson’s pal in 2016 and posed with his wife? Who was one of the few progressives who attended Netanyahu’s address to Congress? Who then met with Syria’s Assad and now seems to be all over the place in her policies depending on what the Republicans and Putin want. I respect her service, but I don’t respect her using her service to promote a foreign policy that seems to be about staking out whatever ground the Republicans have and then mischaracterizing the Democrats as warmongering child killers who only care about oil and expanding their empire.
If she had any real principles, I can’t imagine why she was such a favorite of Israel when Obama was trying to pressure Israel to act more morally. Why didn’t Tulsi support that? Bernie Sanders refused to watch Netanyahu, but Tulsi wanted her Republican pals to know she was on their side and made it a point to attend to show her love. Sure more recently she had criticized Israel, but next year she will probably go back to being their best friend again. She isn’t trustworthy at all, and next year who knows which dictator she was cozy up with next. If that is the ideal, give me the Democrats any day.
“We can protect people like the Kurds only with a massive enlargement of our empire. So if you care about them, get ready for much higher taxes and your kids dying in Rojava.”
For some reason my tablet can’t get the article, but just going on your cite: yes of course to the oil economics, But aren’t we viewing protecting ‘people like the Kurds’ in another capacity, i.e., an ally in keeping ISIS jihadists jailed? That’s a whole ‘nother budget, National Security, which will have to be ramped up at taxpayer expense if/ when escapees reassemble & start up random attacks on the West.
The US also abandoned its allies, the Degar people, aka the Montagnards, in Vietnam. https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-ones-we-left-behind-ca5a6f7293df
Shameful then. Shameful now.
Asset Orange’s other big recent payoffs to Vlad for contributing so greatly to bailing him out of bankruptcy and helping to get him elected include dropping out of the INF and Open Skies treaties so that Vlad can easily go forward with an extensive militarization strategy and fielding of new military technologies. Vlad is calling in his chits because he knows that Moscow’s Asset Governing America (MAGA) is going down. It’s just a matter of when. The Russian (and Chinese) increased militarization is quite disturbing, including Russia’s expansion of facilities bordering the Arctic and its fielding of hypersonic nuclear missiles and China’s artificial island military bases in the South China Sea and its Belt and Road Initiative.
I hope never again to read a comment about the president having no real power. These are very, very serious matters, and we have a deranged and compromised idiot in charge.
Seriously- Does anyone exist anymore who can’t see that the president is controlled by Vladimir Putin?
It keeps getting worse….when will it bottom out with this President? Despicable behavior at the highest level of our government.
This seems way worse than just deserting allies. The speed with which Turkey’s totalitarian leader moved to fill the political and military void left with the American departure seems to raise the distinct possibility of coordination with Turkey, a country whose government is rapidly becoming an enemy of freedom everywhere.
All the trump administration can do is to bluster, a position they might have avoided with help of European allies. Of course these have already been alienated by trump and the America firsters who want to go back to the days of the Spanish Civil War, when the whole world ignored forces hostile to democratic principles. And lo! just this week they are arguing about Franco’s burial.
The Russians are moving to take control of what had been American assets.
Trump said today that our allies, the Kurds, are “worse than ISIS.”
Remember ISIS? They beheaded captives.
And meanwhile, the pampered, spoiled rich boy who got half a billion from Daddy and squandered it all, the monster in the now Whiter House, is now stealing food from the mouths of poor people, including up to a million poor kids who get free lunch and breakfast at school:
https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/trump-rule-million-kids-lose-automatic-free-lunch-66320782
I just ran Trump’s letter to Ergodan through the Lexile Reading level analyzer. 700-800L. That’s 4-5th grade reading level, according to the Common Core State Standards for ELA (645-845L, Grades 4 and 5).
SecDef James Mattis might have been right when he said that Trump has the “understanding of a fifth- or sixth grader,” but he uses the language of a fourth- or fifth-grader.
He’s 73 years old and President of the United States.
Must have been Propaganda Minister Steve Miller’s day off.
So, by this analysis, Trump’s language skills (4th or 5th grade) lag behind his mental age (5th or 6th grade). I think based on other evidence that both are too generous.
OK, I just did the same Lexile Analysis on Trump’s remarks defending his withdrawal from Northern Syria given today as he stood next to Italian President Sergio Mattarella at the Whiter House. Score: 500-600L. That’s 2-3rd grade reading level, according to the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] for ELA (450-790L, Grades 2 and 3).
I think that placing Trump at the 2nd or 3rd-grade level is more accurate.
Note that in both cases, I used the full text (the body of the letter to the Turkish president and a transcript of Trump’s remarks about his birthday gift to Vlad.
One doesn’t have to manipulate the input AT ALL to get scores this low for Trump. The man’s a moron.
If one digs even deeper into readability analysis of Trump’s ramblings, a a few characteristics are particularly striking. He repeats himself a lot and uses an extremely limited vocabulary. He uses the same formulaic phrases again and again and again (“They hate America.” “Fake news.” “A beautiful thing.”
I suspect that his active working vocabulary is ASTONISHINGLY low, definitely below that of a typical middle-school graduate and more in keeping with someone who has severe cognitive impairment. But even more interesting is the childishness of his syntax. He almost never uses dependent clauses. He uses even less frequently sophisticated syntactic structures like appositives or correlative conjunctions or introductory participial phrases. Again, his syntax seems that of someone with severe cognitive impairment.
Many of his sentences are what are called by traditional grammarians “simple sentences”–a few words long. When he does utter a longer sentence, it is typically a few simple sentences (N + V, N + V + N, N + LV + ADJ, or N + LV + N) strung together with the conjunction and. You know the kind of thing I mean: He speaks the way Charlie Brown used to write a book report:
This is my report, and it is a good report. And it is about Tom Sawyer, and I read the book, and it was a really, really good book. And it was by Mr. Mark Twain. The end. OK?
Of course, his speech contains lots and lots of errors in standard usage, and lots of vague or improper pronoun reference. It would be interesting, I suppose, to do a formal analysis of his speech–a kind of pathology examination.
It will be amusing to watch him in the 2020 debates, if the Repugnicans don’t wise up and remove him from office before then so that they can run a sane person who isn’t a criminal and a traitor and hasn’t experienced severe cognitive decline.
“All roads lead to Putin”
Exactly, since the 1980s, in Trump’s case. Trump has been a Russian asset for a long, long time.
Agreed !
If there is anyone in the US intelligence services who still doubts that Vlad’s Asset Orange is playing for the other team, then we really have to rethink using the term “intelligence” when speaking of him or her.
SO TRUE! dpt is a traitorous LIAR and a FASCIST/DICTATOR. He is Hitler.
In the meanwhile, crazy people are protesting TMT and the building a Wind Farm in Hawai’i. I smell a Putin.
I suspect that you have read this, Joel, and a lot more about the Trump/Russia connection. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-first-moscow-trip-215842
There are some people who support Trump because they are rapacious opportunists like Moscow Mitch McConnell or Ted Cruz or Newt Gingrich or Bill Barr, but what of the rest of the Trumpeteers? What of the 30 percent of Americans who idolize this amoral idiot despite the fact that every action he has taken has hurt them and their ilk? They are either blinded by the racism that they share with Vlad’s Asset Orange, aka Don the Con, or they are utter morons and totally clueless about the consequences for them and their loved ones of everything he does. Watching a Trump on the Stump with His Chumps Rally is like watching a convention of Field Mice for Feral Cats.
I want to believe in democratic rule, but when this many people are this ignorant. . . . well, it could all end very badly. The great democratic experiment could self destruct, as people like H. L. Mencken predicted that it would.