Profiles in courage.
This sounds vaguely familiar, no?
By next week: âI think the Crown Prince may have gotten me coffee once.â
Crown Prince Kushner?
âI donât remember⌠did he date the First Lady a while back?â
Many people are saying this.
Letâs be clear about what this backtracking is about: the election. If this were happening in a Democratic administration, the punditocracy would be ejaculating all over themselves about the political impact. It would feed the built in âDems are doomed; Dems in Disarrayâ narrative. No one in the cable news media is talking about it, but the Khashoggi murder has been on the news every day, non-stop. It has made its way into debates and local news as well. It is not a good look for Trump because he looks like he is bought and paid for by Saudi money. This is Helsinki 2.0, but itâs being drawn out over several days as more revelations are made known and the Administration continues to backtrack. A big factor in the election is checking Trump. There is no more tangible example of why Trump needs to be checked in matters of foreign policy than the Khashoggi murder.
It seems Trump patterns himself after the Edward G. Robinson character in Key Largo. It bears remembering, though, that Johnny Rocco reveals himself to be a bully and a coward. Hates women, too.
Another coffee boy? Man, Trump must drink a lot of fucking coffee.
Trump has told allies that he âbarely knowsâ bin Salman
The truth of the matter is ⌠other than in the Biblical sense, Trump barely knows anyone.
Crown who? Oh, Prince! You mean that purple guy! Yeah, he used to work for me!
Here we go again, barely knew him. Where have we heard this before? You would think that after all this time he could come up with some new way of saying the same old thing.
[quote=âcervantes, post:9, topic:79228â]
other than in the Biblical sense, Trump barely knows anyone.
[/quote]Speaking of the biblical, thereâs a powerful PSA on the benefits of coitus interruptus just sitting there. Cut from Trump to Junior and the other idiot in their Safari get-up. Youâd barely need words.
Iâd also note the following passage from the article which I found interesting:
âUnless the miracle of all miracles happens, I would acknowledge that heâs dead,â Mr. Trump said. "Thatâs based on everything â intelligence coming from every side.â Later, before leaving on a trip to Montana, he was asked what the consequences would be if Saudi Arabiaâs culpability was established.
âWell, itâll have to be very severe,â he said. âI mean, itâs bad, bad stuff.ââŚ
âŚIn conversations with allies, the president has begun to distance himself from Prince Mohammed, 33, saying he barely knows him. And he has played down the relationship that Mr. Kushner has cultivated with the Saudi heir.
Intelligence coming from every side. I think Trump is making a cryptic reference to Russian intelligence. Putin had a statement saying that the US had responsibility for Khashoggi. My suspicion is that Putin is encouraging Trump to distance from MBS. Putin may have his own motives. One might be to take advantage of political controversies like this to drive the price of oil upwards (as he needs capital). Another might be that he has grown tired of the MBS gambit and may think Russia is extending itself too much in that direction while jeopordizing relations with Iran, a longer time ally.
Another reason might be because the Qataris are effectively bribing Putin. After all, the Qatar Investment Authority bought the 19% stake in Rosneft at a time when no one else would touch it. The Qataris did so to help the Russians out for political reasons and buy themselves an ally. After the Saudi led blockade and the financial concessions they ended up making to Kushner, it would seem natural for Qatar to turn to Russia as a balancing force in the Middle East, as the US had put all of its eggs in the Saudi-Omani-UAE bucket. MBS is potentially politically vulnerable here, so perhaps Putin is weighing in because diminishing MBS would help his friends in the Middle East, Qatar (and also Iran). Qatar is also one of the Gulf States that does not want a hostile relationship with Iran and has sought to build some bridges to counterbalance the Saudis.
This is speculation on my part, but that statement struck me.
If this was just an American story, the administration could wait it out and it would disappear. But, because itâs international, Iâm hoping it wonât get dropped.
Sarah is now going to be telling us that the Crown Prince only got coffee.
Bandy Lee, the Yale-based psychiatrist whoâs among the medical people sounding the alarm about this man, said an interesting thing about his behavior; as you get sicker, the pathological behavior becomes more predictable. In the past few years Trump has been responding to attacks and accusations, really any stimulus, as predictably as a simple animal or mechanical device, a shark, say, or a toaster. He barely knows anyone who could implicate him: Manafort, Cohen, Papadopoulos, Sater, even Putin in the beginning. Barely know him, wouldnât recognize him if he were in the room. Heâll be saying it about his children eventually.
Trump vacillates from bully to coward to bully to coward to bully to cowardâŚ
He already did this at least once, with Junior, when he threw him under the bus about the 2016 Russia meeting.
