On the bright side it may help them forget 1923.

JFLNYC wrote:

swishnicholson wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:What we are doing in Turkey/Syria, which seems out of nowhere, seems scary.

Not sure I understand the question as what we are doing is doing nothing.

swishnicholson wrote:

JFLNYC wrote:Not exactly.

WASHINGTON — In a major shift in United States military policy in Syria, the White House said on Sunday that President Trump had given his endorsement for a Turkish military operation that would sweep away American-backed Kurdish forces near the border in Syria.

I'd say that's pretty exactly. Our position is "you do you."

Withdrawing our troops from Syria is not pretty exactly “doing nothing.”

I'm not taking the time to walk back the news cycle. I will give credit to Trump for recognizing the tunnel vision of American interests and actions afflicting all levels of politics, media and popular indignation.

Oh geez Swish, remain in light!

azrider wrote:

Uncle Milty wrote:

traderdave wrote:Fourteen stitches, a black eye and a large bandage are no match for former President Jimmy Carter, who turned 95 last week. Just hours after suffering injuries from a fall in his home Sunday morning, Carter traveled to Nashville to kick off a week of volunteer work. Despite his injuries, the oldest living former US president and his wife Rosalynn Carter have been working on building the new porches of 21 Nashville homes this week as part of the 36th Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project with Habitat for Humanity.

Certainly not among our best presidents but Carter is, seemingly, one hell of a human being. He has more dignity in a single strand of hair than Trump's entire family put together.

He's probably the best president post-presidency.

William Taft and Grover Cleveland will probably disagree with you.

I guess you are referring to Grover Cleveland's "come back" but after he was all done being President, he wrote this:

Grover Cleveland wrote:...sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by men and women in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence.

I know, I know, it was the times he lived in. 1905 to be exact.

But he has a rest stop named after him on the NJ Turnpike, while Jimmy Carter doesn't

@realDonaldTrump

The so-called Whistleblower, before knowing I was going to release the exact Transcript, stated that my call with the Ukrainian President was “crazy, frightening, and completely lacking in substance related to national security.” This is a very big Lie. Read the Transcript!

He getting his wires crossed. These are different people. The “crazy/frightening" stuff is a leak.

jerseyhoya wrote:But he has a rest stop named after him on the NJ Turnpike, while Jimmy Carter doesn't

This is true.

momadance wrote:

Warszawa wrote:Wondering about the latest republican talking point about schiff not releasing the entire transcript of the volker texts. Is this really a thing? And why doesn’t schiff just release it to diffuse their argument?

Because it was an Intel Committee hearing and likely contains classified information. Volker is also texting with people with whom the State Department have forbade to testify and procure their end of the texts. You can't release them without corroboration. Volker's appearance was only a deposition. He'll be called to testify publicly eventually.

I get it but I would at least like a democrat rebuttal in the press to statements like this

"“I’m all for bringing the ambassador in,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, told reporters Tuesday in the Capitol, referring to Sondland. But let’s only do so after we release the full [Volker transcript].

State Department officials have not said they’ll block Yovanovitch’s testimony, but Republicans in Congress have made clear they see Volker’s closed-door testimony as an exoneration of any presidential wrongdoing, and the administration's letter suggests she will not be appearing.

Another right wing topic making the rounds is that Schiff solicited ukraine (actually a prank call) for nude trump pics, although what is deemphasized in the incident is that Schiff wanted to hand them over to the FBI. Anyway, when you look at how the story is presented its no wonder 99% of the comments to the story call Schiff a traitor.

Meet the 'super democrat' representing the whistle blowers

Zaid, who runs his own law firm, says he hasn’t been fazed by all of the attention, and that his career — which included representing five of the Benghazi whistleblowers as they testified before Congress — has prepared him for it.

Yep, those Democrats going all in on justice for Benghazi.

He also represented the RNC on the 2016 Clinton emails (but the emails!).

Mark Zaid and Andrew Bakaj are "funny sounding names" so the thinking mus be that they must be foreigner democrats.

Zaid is a registered independent and says he has no patience for partisan politics.

Why believe him?

Chaotic scenes in northern Syria as people flee for their lives

I wonder if Trump has gotten out of bed yet. Or maybe he's taking a dump

The Ingrahm Angle always delivers the crazy. Using the most incendiary terms to discredit the whistle blowers and espouse conspiracies with the aid of guests found on the fringe.

momadance wrote:Probably just had to threaten his hotels in Turkey. I'm sure that call was a doozy.

“I have a little conflict of interest ’cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump told Breitbart radio during his campaign. “It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers—two towers, instead of one, not the usual one, it’s two.”

Good job with the crystal ball: Did we betray the Kurds for Trump Towers?

On a broader political question, does anyone else ever think about the inherent contradiction among progressives to support nascent national liberation movements when they rebel against existing states, but left-wing aversion to the assertion of nationalist policies within existing states, and question the wisdom of either?

Kurds and Palestinians: fight to form your nation! We must support them! It was stolen from them!

Israel and most European Nation States: Stop with the extreme nationalism! It's racist!

Obviously wherever there is a sense of stolen land, there is a moral dimension to siding with the nationalist movement. Hence support for the Kurds and Palestinians. And the concept of self-rule seems natural, moral, and understandable.

But "self-rule" often means, for example, an ethno-linguistic group electing or otherwise appointing people who look and speak like them to run the government, and, once established, that same group often takes a hostile view of the rights of people who don't look and speak like them within their borders and under the jurisdiction of their government, particularly when the minority starts to get big enough to have real political influence. Take the good old USA for example and "English as the national language" movements. Successful nationalist movements tend to lead to nationalist states, after all, and sometimes it seems to me it can be hard to reconcile the two. There is a power dynamic aspect that can justify, say, a chiding of Israel for extremist nationalist positions taken by its government versus a supportive attitude toward the Palestinian nationalist movement, and certainly to support the Kurds over the chemical-weapon-wielding Bashar al-Asad thug administration of in Syria.

On balance I think nationalism is bad because it usually winds up becoming a tool of the powerful to oppress the non-nationalist minority within a given set of borders. We see that here, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Israel, now and throughout history.

Certainly evaluating each conflict on a case-by-case basis is important, and the Trump administration is in the wrong here, and the Kurds need to be supported given the current lay of the land. But there are, it seems to me, broad and interesting philosophical questions that aren't so easily dismissed.

The famously secluded Amish are the target of a Republican campaign to drum up Pennsylvania votes for Trump

Also notoriously down with adultery, blasphemy, lying, and other commandment that Trump runs over, then backs up to do it again, and again, and again.

Nationalism is weird, and doesn't easily map onto left/right distinctions. Was is leftist to say support Irish nationalism before the Belfast accords? A lot of this in the US depends on ethnic ties and the political influence certain ethnic groups can bring to bear on US policy--Irish, Jewish, Armenians among others all have powerful constituencies in American government.

Certainly, the Kurds have support in the US from all points on the political spectrum, though neo-cons might have different reasons for supporting the Kurds than realpolitik types, and both differ in their reasons from liberal interventionists. However, there really is no legitimate view that could support Turkish invasion of Kurdish/Syrian territory. A realpolitik type might look the other way if they believed Turkey was an important enough ally that we had no real choice but let them do whatever. (This argument is a pretty terrible one in many cases--consider support of Saudi Arabia's interventions in Yemen for example. This I think shows that at best realpolitik is short sighted at best, and far too tolerant of evil in most cases.)

If the mainstream progressive view on foreign affairs is liberal internationalism, than a good deal depends on whether the nationalist movement appears to be one that accepts or promotes liberal democratic forms of government. Thus, even progressives I think aren't wildly enthusiastic about support for Hamas and aren't exactly wild about Fatah in Palestine, but because Israel is increasingly both occupying Palestinian lands there is great deal of sympathy with the plight of Palestinian people, and maybe Fatah is as good as it's going to get there.

Obviously, this runs into all kinds of practical problems--why intervene in Serbia (eventually) but not Rwanda? And there's really no commonly held progressive view on any number of nationalist movements.

thephan wrote:

The famously secluded Amish are the target of a Republican campaign to drum up Pennsylvania votes for Trump

Also notoriously down with adultery, blasphemy, lying, and other commandment that Trump runs over, then backs up to do it again, and again, and again.

that has been no problem for other groups with allegedly the same moral convictions

Wolfgang622 wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:But he has a rest stop named after him on the NJ Turnpike, while Jimmy Carter doesn't

This is true.

nor is carter on the phillies wall of fame.

I don’t support statehood for the Palestinians or Kurds because I think the nation-state is some great political achievement that all peoples should aspire to, I support it because that is the best way to secure the basic human rights that are currently being denied to them by various bad actors. As another example, I think the Vietnamese struggle for independence and national unity was basically just not because they “deserved” their own country, but because Chinese domination, French colonialism, Japanese expansion, and American meddling were worse.

I also don’t think nationalist self-determination movements inevitably result in illiberal enthostates. Ireland is a relatively new nation and seems to have resisted all the blood and soil crap. Meanwhile the English, who have either been their own country or dominated the politics of the UK for a very long time, are Brexiting themselves into oblivion because Polish plumbers or something.

Augustus wrote:I don’t support statehood for the Palestinians or Kurds because I think the nation-state is some great political achievement that all peoples should aspire to, I support it because that is the best way to secure the basic human rights that are currently being denied to them by various bad actors.

This. Keep in mind though that nation-states need not be ethno-nation-states.

Augustus wrote:I don’t support statehood for the Palestinians or Kurds because I think the nation-state is some great political achievement that all peoples should aspire to, I support it because that is the best way to secure the basic human rights that are currently being denied to them by various bad actors. As another example, I think the Vietnamese struggle for independence and national unity was basically just not because they “deserved” their own country, but because Chinese domination, French colonialism, Japanese expansion, and American meddling were worse.

I also don’t think nationalist self-determination movements inevitably result in illiberal enthostates. Ireland is a relatively new nation and seems to have resisted all the blood and soil crap. Meanwhile the English, who have either been their own country or dominated the politics of the UK for a very long time, are Brexiting themselves into oblivion because Polish plumbers or something.

Good answer.