Tucker’s interview with Trump has been up (as this point) a bit more than an hour and it has more than 81 million views. This is going to far outpace whatever audience the Fox GOP debate will get. I didn’t watch the debate as I tend not to watch such things this early on, especially with that many people on stage. It is a bit silly. But I did watch the Trump interview with my Mrs – he’s still engaging and fun to watch. Clearly a little older but he seems in good shape. The usual run of Trump thinking out loud…but also, as per usual, did nail point after point. The Mrs was entertained – and she’s never particularly warmed up to Trump.
Trump is still a major political factor. To try to dismiss him is folly.
Now: we’ll see what happens when votes start being cast.
Do any of you remember the Eddy Grant song Electric Avenue? Lately a line in it has been rolling around in my head:
Who is to blame in what country?
Never can get to the one
Does seem like that, doesn’t it? Because we were all good, little GOPers back in 2001 – and patriots, always – we kinda let it slide that nobody in official circles went to jail over the attack. It was massive fail in intelligence, law enforcement and military…nobody paid a price (except for the 3,000 who died, of course). I think that’s when things really started to fall apart…when our Ruling Class found out that no matter how bad the failure, if they just scripted it right, they could breeze right past it…and maybe even get a commendation and promotion.
You know the song Putting on the Ritz where the line goes, “trying hard to look like Gary Cooper”? I never really got that because, for me, Gary Cooper was an older cowboy actor. But here’s a picture of him from a 1926 silent film. I get it, now.
The limit is 13. I repeat, the limit is 13!
Blogs For Victory 
I usually link to an article but given our recent and sometimes rancorous discussions about impeachment I am going to hijack Kurt Schlichter’s comments and use them as my own post. I’m going to bold the parts that echo or explain some of the points I especially wanted to or tried to make.
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Guys, chill. Yeah, Crusty O’Corrupto was taking bribes. Everyone knows it, except maybe the senile scamster himself, and only because he forgot. You have to be a moron or a liar to deny it, and the Democrats are both. But there is no cosmic ref who is going to come down and throw a flag on his graft. Certainly, the Department of Justice (sic) is never going to do it. So, those demanding impeachment are absolutely and unequivocally right that impeachment is the proper response even though we all know that once the impeachment gets to the Senate (assuming that the GOP Sissy Squad does not tank the vote in the House), the Democrats will ratify his misconduct even if the House prosecutors play a notarized videotape of him saying “I am Joe Biden and I am accepting this sack with a dollar sign on it in return for using my political office to illegally assist the guy handing me this cash.”
He needs to be impeached anyway – this is not open to serious debate. But we need to get the timing right.
And the time is not right now.
It’s frustrating, especially with the latest frame job of bogus criminal charges against President Trump. But this is not about our feelz. It’s about America’s future. Play it smart, not emotional. Take the time to put all the pieces in place, then spring the trap. Don’t let haste allow him to weasel out of his comeuppance unscathed.
Remember that impeachment is not an act of justice. It is not a legal act. It is, at its core, a political act. An impeachment trial is not governed by the same rules of evidence as are applied in a court of law when the defendant is not a Republican. An impeachable offense is not defined by a statute, but by what the voting members of the House and Senate think is worthy of removal from office and future disqualification. It is a serious act that should be undertaken soberly, and so we need to understand our objectives.
Our objective is not to remove Biden, because there will never, ever be enough Democrats voting honestly to remove him from office. The impeachment proceeding itself will ultimately fail, but we must focus on those objectives.
First, we need to demonstrate to the American people that Hunterdaddy really is a totally corrupt scumbag. To the progressives, that is actually a selling point. But to some number of Democrat voters, that is still a bad thing. And demonstrating his perfidy will hurt him in the election. Our ultimate goal is to evict him from the White House in 2024, and impeachment supports our campaign.
“Kurt, that’s totally cynical!”
Yep. Cynicism that inspires ruthlessness is the only rational response to the destruction of our national norms. Which brings us to our other objective.
Our second objective is to use the impeachment process to demonstrate that the New Rules are in full effect and hasten the day when the Democrats come crawling back to us to beg us to return to the Old Rules. That will only happen if we have inflicted sufficient pain upon them. And considering the endemic corruption among the Democrats and the fact that Trump’s antics made him uniquely susceptible to false charges in ways other Republicans are not, they have more to lose playing impeachment chicken than we do.
But our first objective is the most important. We must clearly and completely show the American people that Biden is a crook, and a particularly grubby and shameless one, to demonstrate his utter unworthiness. Let me share some trial lawyer hints about presenting a case to normal Americans.
You have to be ready to present the case. You need to have a full and complete story – beginning, middle, and end, followed by a call to action – that is easy to explain and simple to follow. You have to be able to back up every word you tell the jury – and here, the jury is the mass of undecided and persuadable voters – so that you do not end up at the end having promised A, B, C, D and E and only delivering A, C, and some of E. That is a recipe for failure and blowback. If you are going to play this game, you have got to win, because if you fail you lose credibility and end up in a worse spot than you were in before.
We are not ready to impeach Biden the Elder today. The so-called “impeachment inquiry” has not even begun. I would not even begin it yet. Calling it an “impeachment inquiry” telegraphs the outcome and gives the enemy the chance to portray you as going in with impeachment as a fait accompli – like an Atlanta Soros hack filing the charges before the grand jury indicts. Now, it totally is a fait accompli, because the evidence to date is overwhelming, but we don’t have to put that in neon.
We need to unleash the power of repetition and anticipation. The Republicans so far have been doing a fine job of dribbling out tidbits of damaging evidence over time in the manner of the great Andrew Breitbart. They should keep doing that. They should keep doing that until next spring. That’s the time to impeach this goon, after the sheer volume of evidence has become overwhelming and the nation has come to the accurate conclusion that this guy is as corrupt as a Chicago health inspector.
Oh, they will try to fight it. The regime media will back and protect him. Ignore it. Use alternative media channels to get the word out. Do not allow them to set our agenda. They cannot gatekeep the truth forever.
We need to establish the fact of his epic corruption in the minds of the voters long before the representatives start arguing on the House floor. The impeachment proceeding should be the icing, not the cake. And it should come when Donald Trump is being tried for having documents or otherwise existing while Republican. That will be a nice contrast – Trump kept boxes at his house where it was guarded by Secret Service guys. Biden took tens of millions from skeevy foreigners to sell out his country. Advantage Trump.
We have to create the narrative using the evidence before the impeachment process starts, and why present the climax now when it will be long forgotten by the time the election rolls around? We want the truth fresh in the voters’ collective mind. There are several Democrat senators running for reelection in 2024 who we need to toss on the rack and torture by making them either vote to let off the crook-in-chief and alienate decent Americans, or vote to remove him and alienate Democrat voters. Why would we give them a year to let voters forget they covered for the Grafty Gaffer by impeaching Biden now?
Again, isn’t this all cynical? Hell yeah – cynicism means you have been paying attention. Our goal is not to bring Crusty and his cronies to justice before the law because the deep state has ensured that courtroom justice is never going to happen – why else would the same schmuck who slow-walked Huntergate so far get appointed “special prosecutor?” Instead, we need to use this political process for political ends, to wound Biden and his Senate enablers and help the GOP win. What is not cynical is the reality – Biden and the creeps who cover for him are bad people who are wrecking our country and they deserve this. They deserve it good and hard.
So, do not rush into this impeachment. Be patient. Build the case. Savor it. Release the information to the American people over time in easy to digest bites so they get an understanding of what a trash organization the Biden Cosa Nostra is long before the impeachment hearings even start. At the hearings, present a TV-ready, simple but clear case backed up with mountains of evidence. And then use that to beat him and his toe-sucks up for the rest of the election cycle.
I know people are eager to see this happen, but winners choose the time and place for their decisive battle – just ask Hannibal. We control when, where, and how this happens. We hold all the cards. Let’s play them smart and ruthlessly, and to win.
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Yeah. What he said.
Cynicism that inspires ruthlessness
That’s exactly where I’m at lol ….
It is disappointing though that what Biden is doing doesn’t rise to the level of treason, which it should in my opinion. This isn’t just your run of the mill “political impeachment” like spying on your opponents ie: Watergate, or making a phone call to inquire about corruption ie; Trump. We have direct evidence now of Biden accepting $3.5 million dollars from a Russian Oligarch, who just weeks later, was left off the sanctions list. We have direct evidence of Biden withholding foreign aid to have a prosecutor fired just months after Hunter was awarded a very lucrative position on the board of a company the prosecutor was investigating.
IMO this is treason, and rises well above political gamesmanship.
Aside from the fact that “treason” has a specific legal definition not related to corruption or abuse of power, you are missing the point about timing. You can dismiss it as “political gamesmanship” but Schlichter not only lays out the case for careful and strategic timing of an impeachment he carefully explains it.
We have to create the narrative using the evidence before the impeachment process starts, and why present the climax now when it will be long forgotten by the time the election rolls around? We want the truth fresh in the voters’ collective mind.
18 U.S. Code § 2381 – Treason
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason.
(This section authorizes Congress to set the penalties for treason but not to change the definition or create degrees of treason.)
The Constitution is specific that the Treason clause can only be applied for acts committed during times of war. While certain acts committed during peacetime may be illegal, they would not be considered treason, according to the Constitution’s definition.
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ENEMY, international law. By this term is understood the whole body of a nation at war with another. It also signifies a citizen or subject of such a nation, as when we say an alien enemy.
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In general terms “treason” means betrayal of trust. But in legal terms, especially in terms of treason against the nation, the rules are pretty clear and specific.
Well meanwhile, we have a compromised President who still has a year and half of which to award our foreign adversaries at Americas expense. So there is that too. In my world, that’s cause for immediate removal
Thanks for repeating this—-again—-Captain Obvious. You seem convinced that no one else grasps this.
How would an impeachment change that? Surely you understand that impeachment does not mean “removal”. Don’t you? Do you truly think the Senate would vote to remove Biden from office even after impeachment? Really?
I only watched bits and pieces of it … I did like Haley’s response to abortion, I did like DeSantis response to the border, and I found Pence to be insufferable. I like the energy, ideas, and youthfulness of Ramaswamey, but he needs more seasoning and experience. Nominating Asa Hutchison would be a YUGE mistake, and the rest of them are just non starters.
Before it was deleted, I noticed a post from Forty claiming the question of climate change was not addressed properly, saying the “young people” care about climate change. I disagree. Despite 20 years now of propaganda and false predictions, the majority of Americans including the youth, are realizing that climate change is the BIG LIE. Storms are not climate change. Hot summers are not climate change. This is just another issue that the American Government has been lying about to keep the money rolling into their donors preferred industries. People like Forty haven’t figured that out yet.
Besides, there’s no way that a GOP candidate could respond to the climate change issue that will satisfy those for whom it’s the most important issue (hint – not a big number) while at the same time not alienating those who know, or at least suspect, that it’s the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on a populace.
I was going to watch, but my Direct TV quit working. It doesn’t look like I missed much. The reactions have been nearly nonexistent.
I hate the format and find it almost totally uninformative. I’d much rather see a format where, for example, each potential candidate underwent an interview like the one with Tucker and Trump. Put each candidate in a room with an interviewer, have the exact same questions asked, and then show the half hour or so video of each response from candidates who don’t know how the others responded. And skip the issues and ask things like why the candidate thinks he or she is qualified for the job, what he or she brings to the job that the others don’t, and what he or she would like to accomplish in four years.
I think a response similar to “I would like to end my first term with stopping the practice of laws being made by unelected political appointees who are running our federal agencies and getting back to having laws made by the legislature, with a strong border that respects the right of this nation to decide who can come here and under what conditions…” and so on.
When I see the focus on each narrow “policy” I am reminded of trying to teach people to drive. The tendency is to focus tightly on the road directly in front of the vehicle. So there is no peripheral vision, little situational awareness, and most of all there is constant micro-correcting for every single little thing. When the new driver learns to look out at the horizon, with what is called in the horse world a “soft eye” or not a tightly focused one, the big picture takes over, everything smooths out, and decisions are not abrupt.
The debate format is the equivalent of asking each person to stare intently at the road 20 feet in front of the bumper, blocking out everything but the one question, eliminating its relationship to everything else around it. It’s artificial and it’s limiting and it creates a false impression of how many of these people would actually govern.
If you’re not still under contract. You should switch to Dish network.
I have Dish in Wyoming and don’t like it. It’s probably just because I am so used to the Direct TV format. I think my problem is a tree branch hanging over the satellite dish. I got out of the habit of watching TV so never bothered to fix it. A friend just dropped her cable altogether and went with some online system and I might look into that and save a lot of money.
I used to like Direct, but when I found out they lean heavily left I don’t like them anymore.
I understand though where you’re coming from with regards to being used to the format and everything, I guess it’s like anything you do it takes time getting used to.
I don’t watch sports and am considering doing what my friend did and cutting cable altogether and going with a couple of subscription services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. I moved to Florida for the winter the week after Hurricane Ian so of course there was no service and then it took weeks to reestablish a lot of the infrastructure, so I got used to no TV or sometimes some old series on Netflix. I haven’t had a set on in either state for six months now and usually don’t miss it but on long winter nights I do like to watch something.
I’ve heard a lot people doing that. My cousin did Netflix and Amazon prime for a while, but then he switched back to satellite tv.
I think I need to review my satellite package and strip it down to local and the major cable channels like Fox.
You can do that, sure.
I like satellite for the local news and of course Newsmax.
Doesn’t Haley want a federal law banning abortion? Does she explain how this would be possible, given the fact that the federal government seems to have no authority over decisions like abortion? Wasn’t that the core of the recent Dobbs decision—that Roe was not valid because abortion is not one of the areas of authority of the federal government?
What you call energy and youthfulness of Ramaswamy were described by others as rude, arrogant and poorly thought out. I looked at a video clip of what was supposed to show how “devastating” DeSantis’s slow reaction was to the question of supporting Trump if he were the nominee, and while my take on it was that he was looking around as if to say “I can’t believe we are stooping to this childish crap” what really struck me was Vivek, eagerly shooting his hand up as high as possible and nearly waving it around, and keeping it up after everyone else put theirs down, with a huge grin on his face. He was so proud of his reaction and wanted to make sure everyone saw it and I thought “what an idiot”. Now, being an opponent of Identity Politics, if I thought he was (1) even eligible to be on the stage competing for the spot as a candidate for the presidency and (2) even remotely qualified, his being an idiot wouldn’t make that much difference to me. But he came across in that one short clip as the obnoxious show-off in every classroom.
Rut ro ……
Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy won the first Republican 2024 debate on Wednesday evening, according to an exclusive poll for DailyMail.com, narrowly beating out Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He put up a combative performance, trading blows with opponents such as Mike Pence who seemed intent on cutting him down to size. It made him the focal point for much of the debate. That was enough for 28 percent of respondents to say that he had the best night, pipping DeSantis who won the approval of 27 percent.
Oh, well, since you put it that way….
Now that an English newspaper has decreed that Ramaswamy “won” the debate–though buried in the prose is the fact that this seems to be because his “combative performance” made him the center of attention (focal point)—-I guess other observations about him are now simply moot.
Good to know.
I don’t agree with the assessment, but it’s interesting these viewers did
I know a lot of people are “impressed” by him. I’m not. And from what I read of the debate, a lot who were are not so much any more. He evidently interrupted, talked over people, did a lot “speed talking” and came across as an arrogant smart-ass brat.
But I agree, he is the newest shiny thing for the short-attention-span crowd to swoon over.
Excellent short piece by Robert Malone this morning about the use of fear by those who would lead us down the path to totalitarianism.
That is a very accurate characterization of Forty, Fielding, and Casper. But they think they’re saving democracy and the planet at the same time LMAO
After reading their posts for years, I don’t think they truly believe that they are trying to “save democracy” or the planet. What I have seen is an oppositional pathology, the reduction of serious matters to merely choosing an opponent and then having an automatic rejection of anything that person says and an automatic dispute with it.
After reading their posts for years, I don’t think they truly believe that they are trying to “save democracy” or the planet.
I don’t think any of them even knows what they believe. If they do, they’ve never been able to articulate it. Their posts almost always involve attacks on “the other” rather than how their ideas are better, or even historic evidence of where their ideas have worked.
Exactly. And the “other” they go after is one they invented.
I did watch Trump and his calm and resolute demeanor re: the indictments was reassuring. I too believe there is zero substance to any of this. And whatever your opinion of Trump is … he is unquestionably a CEO, and this is the guy I want walking in the room to negotiate with China, Russia, Ukraine, etc., etc. I just don’t see a suitable replacement right now. Not yet.
Trump is a good man. All this phony indictments is just for show by the democrats to try to sway the American peoples opinion of him.
My opinion of Trump, and this is purely intuitive, is that he is a good man. I’ve known men who thought success included licentious behavior who finally realized that wasn’t what made them happy and I think I have seen this with Trump. My sense is that he found a strong woman with high standards who told him to shape up or else and he looked back on his life and thought “I don’t want to be that man any more” and made the decision to be a better man. I also believe that he truly loves this country and wanted, and wants, to serve it.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t deeply flawed in some ways. His ego is his biggest failure. It takes a strong ego to succeed in the arenas where he has, but a healthy strong ego can handle criticism and change and admit to mistakes and it doesn’t look like his can. I think this is his worst characteristic. He has huge blinders when it comes to recognizing even minor changes that would help him, such as understanding that his choice of words doesn’t always help him (like insisting his Ukraine phone call was “perfect”).
But we can’t expect a man to be perfect and I find his quirks and so on to be primarily personality quirks and not character defects. I do think he is cluelessly self-destructive because of his blinders, but if he can survive his own self-inflicted wounds he can do a lot of good.
Sadly, the ego and bull-headedness will keep him from doing as much as he could.
I don’t it’s as much his ego, as it is his passion for getting things done. I likes action, but it’s difficult when we have such a deeply divided congress. The one thing I look forward to when he returns to office is throwing out all the trash Biden signed into law.
Since this is getting some traction, allow me to comment because that’s what I do lol
Megyn Kelly blasts GOP hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy for his ‘footsie with 9/11 trutherism’ after he tries to deny his comments about government agents on the planes
Let’s not forget the first attempted bombing of the WTC in 1993, the blind Sheik remember?. 9/11 was the second attempt, which succeeded. Now think back to when Andrew Card walked in the class room to tell President Bush, and just think of Bush’s reaction. Now I know everyone reacts differently, but upon hearing that terrorists had just flown two airplanes into the WTC’s and tens of thousands Americans may be dead, I would expect a more startled reaction, but Bush was amazingly calm. Now I know the narrative was that he didn’t want to “upset the children” but that doesn’t pass the smell test anymore. Bush even finished reading the book to the kids. Keep in mind, the Military Industrial Complex at the time really had no one to drop bombs on … the world was mostly peaceful at the time. Well that changed, and the Military Industrial Complex was up and rolling again. 9/11 served a purpose. Just an opinion from someone very cynical.
I could not agree more, especially in light of everything that’s happened since.
I’m not sure what you are agreeing with
Seriously? We are back to “My pet goat” territory?
I saw Bush’s reaction as one of profound shock accompanied by mature discipline. As an adult, he knew very well that there was literally nothing he could DO at that moment, other than wait for more news. So he maintained a calm demeanor while waiting for more information.
I’ve always been amazed by the attitude that he should have, somehow, for some reason, done something else. What? Act “startled”? Leap up in a panic?
One narrative was supposedly that he “didn’t want to upset the children” which you find unconvincing, as if upsetting the children would have accomplished one damned thing except to upset some children. And, it turned out later, impress people who are impressed by dramatic emotional reactions.
You really hate the question and basic concept of “and then what?” but a lot of people actually do think ahead, contemplate options, consider consequences and evaluate choices before rashly reacting and/or rushing into thoughtless action. They are not the people who think “Let’s just go ahead and do it and worry about the consequences later”. In other words, not your people.
Bush’s handling of that day and those that followed was one of the things I admired most about him. His dithering about invading Iraq as he tried to head off criticism by getting repeated permission to act eroded that to some degree. But at the time I was quite grateful that we had elected a man who did not “startle” when given bad news. I thought it was obvious by his demeanor that he was simultaneously processing the information he had been given while still remaining outwardly calm and finishing that brief period of reading to the children.
And I find the implications of the comment 9/11 served a purpose to be appalling.
I was agreeing with Cluster more on complicity of elements of our government in 9/11 than on Bush’s reaction. You and I definitely see that time in American history through completely different lenses. Even though I had been retired from the Naval Security Group for 12 years at that point, I still had a few active contacts, and was privy to things that I still can’t discuss. If you want to do a little research, you might look into Operation Able Danger, if all the pertinent info hasn’t been purged.
That said, IMO, George Bush is neither intelligent enough nor did he possess the self-awareness to respond the way he did without some prior knowledge. I obviously have a much lower opinion of Bush 43 and the people he surrounded himself with than you do. We’ll just have to agree to disagree.
Yes, we will definitely strongly disagree.
complicity of elements of our government in 9/11 in what? In being unable to connect the dots? In allowing political considerations (Jamie Gorelick protecting the Clintons by instituting a ban on intelligence agents sharing information) to cripple our ability to learn what we needed to protect ourselves? In covering up these mistakes afterward?
First, though I came to question George W. Bush’s judgment on many things, I never bought into the idea that he was stupid or incompetent. And even if you DO think he was either or both of these things, his reaction could just as easily be attributed to slow thinking, IMO much more likely than prior knowledge that the event was going to occur. It is just as likely that it was an “Oh, shit! They were right!” reaction if in fact anyone had connected dots and given a specific warning. It seems that the lack of a Chicken Little response is a weak foundation for assuming prior knowledge. Given the wide range of explanations for his apparent calmness—-slowly processing the horrors of the attack, slowly processing the political implications of being a president whose daily briefings had hinted at such an attack, sorting out the sequence of reactions that would be immediately called for, considering his position as either a president in the White House during a crisis or protecting the presidency by not being there and so on—it seems a leap to choose the one that would implicate him in an act of terror and murder on his own country and its people. Plus, he knew he was in front of cameras and his reaction would become part of history.
I respect your additional fund of knowledge and understand that many of us don’t know these things, but I wonder about the term “complicity”. Does it mean complicity in incompetence or even complicity in planning? Do you mean complicity in the DIA hiding classified programs — such as “the alleged government cover-up and blanket denial of Able Danger, a special operations data-mining project to root out terrorists in the United States”?
Able Danger’s existence threatened to reveal the United States’ failure to act on early intelligence warnings of terrorist cells operating within the country prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Controlled by US Special Operations Command and dating back to 1999, Able Danger cross-referenced open-source and classified information to craft a data-mining algorithm that identified terrorists.
So wasn’t the government coverup of Able Danger something that took place AFTER 9/11?
I see a huge chasm of difference between being inept, weak, indecisive or just plain stupid when it came to intelligence matters including when to act and what to do and actually advocating for and even purposely contributing to an attack.
I have no problem understanding the human weaknesses of intellect, ego and courage affecting the ability of bureaucrats to understand the implications of some information and/or the gumption to act on it. I have no problem understanding the stupidity and short-term thinking of “solving” an immediate problem (sharing of information about Clinton foreign dealings) by implementing a policy with horrible and dangerous long-range consequences. But what I wonder is if you have reason to believe that included in this wide range of defects in competence was actual specific knowledge of the impending 9/11 attacks and/or a desire for them to occur.
I agree with you Retired Spook. After some time, a long time actually of listening to experts, CIA whistleblowers, and reading articles and books. It all started coming together when I went back and looked at the footage, I saw how staged and recited everything was when Bush was at that elementary school. He knew with a hand full of others that September 11 would happen long before everyone else.
Of course you do. You still have faith in our government. I’ve been lied to too many times in the last 20 years and that’s what I find appalling. So again, we agree to disagree.
You do remember that they lied about the extent of WMD’s in Iraq. That happened. And I agree with Trump on this. Going into Iraq was the biggest mistake America ever made.
No, I do NOT “remember that they lied about the extent of WMD’s in Iraq”. What I remember is month after month of evidence of large WMD manufacturing going on in Iraq while they blocked inspections, shuffling evidence around just ahead of delayed inspection efforts, and the frustration here as we watched it happen. What I remember is them actually using WMD on their own people. And what I most clearly remember is watching, in real time, convoys of semis pulling up to the same manufacturing plants identified by the inspectors and then leaving to cross the Syrian border, every single night, while Bush tried to set up an unbreakable defense by delaying action till he thought he had built up enough permissions from enough sources to cover his ass. What I remember is a top Iraqi official testifying that every day one of the two “passenger” airlines allowed to leave Iraq would fly directly to Syria, with its seats removed and replaced by brackets designed to hold the large tanks of chemicals loaded every day to be moved before we invaded.
What I remember is the world-wide knowledge that they were making WMD in Iraq. What I remember is our military personnel finding traces of WMD in some of those buildings, proving that they had been there. What I remember is the discovery or rockets designed to deliver WMD.
And then I remember the sudden blanket amnesia as millions of people had Men In Black moments of remembering none of this. THAT is “what happened”. Going into Iraq was a mistake, but not the mistake of lying about WMD. It was a mistake of timing, waiting so long to act, exacerbated by the foolishness of not fully understanding the consequences of leaving a power vacuum and planning ahead for it. (“We’ll just do it and worry about the consequences later”) And it was not “the biggest mistake America ever made”.
And it has become fashionable to now accept the Leftist narratives about our war in Iraq, dismissing the reality of what we actually experienced leading up to the invasion.
I can’t believe this information is still out there after 23 years. Pretty interesting read.
It IS interesting, with a lot more detail than I had seen before. But in spite of the conclusion that It is a pattern that reflects not incompetence or “lack of coordination” but something much worse. It is a pattern of conscious, purposeful action aimed at thwarting those who are tasked with defending America in the “war on terror.” it still falls short of asserting actual complicity IN THE ACT. Complicity in lack of intelligence, complicity in lack of analytical ability, complicity in complacence, complicity in lack of courage to act, complicity in craven hiding of responsibility, lots and lots of complicity, and all of it very disturbing. But never, that I have seen, complicity in overtly, purposely, contributing to the attacks.
And that is the appalling implication of Cluster’s claim that “9/11 served a purpose”.
And isn’t it interesting that the conspiracy theory of Ramaswawmy has us haring off like hounds after a rabbit after 20-some-years-old allegations? Boy, talk about getting off-topic!
Yet nearly every conspiracy theory has come true. The CIA killed JFK too. So that’s how trustworthy our government is. Truman warned us about the Military Industrial Complex and we still don’t get that warning. Note to all the Constitutionalists in the crowd. Bush never gained full authorization of force from Congress and neither did Obama, and neither did Biden. They cited “emergency declarations” and when a government knows that they can suspend order when emergencies arise, they will always create emergencies. Covid was just the latest.
There is compelling evidence that the CIA did not kill JFK.
Eisenhower is who warned us about the military-industrial complex.
In October 2002, the U.S. Congress passed Public Law 107-243, titled “Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq Resolution of 2002.”
It was not “an emergency declaration”.
(In the United States, a declaration of war “automatically triggers many standby statutory authorities conferring special powers on the President with respect to the military, foreign trade, transportation, communications, manufacturing, alien enemies, etc.,” according to the Congressional Research Service. This is not necessarily so with authorizations to use force. )
You can just replace “emergency declaration” with emergency dictatorship. Cause that’s what’s coming down the pike.
I know some of you (all of you?) are annoyed by my dogmatic approach to words and how they are used, but I keep coming across examples of people extrapolating to arrive at conclusions that are simply not borne out by the original comments.
Here’s an example from an article on Townhall:
What is stunning is to have someone like Ron DeSantis declare that the 2020 election was valid.
Is that what he said? I haven’t seen that comment. He did say Trump lost the election. Because he did. Without any additional input of opinion on the legitimacy of the election, whether it was fair or not, etc, he just made a simple declaratory statement. Trump lost the election. Period. You can tell he lost, because someone else is president.
That is in no way a comment that “the election was valid”.
I don’t know if any of you have ever had to testify in court or in a deposition, but if you have you were probably told to just answer the question. Period. Don’t explain, don’t elaborate. Stick as close as you can to a simple yes or no, and if there is additional information you think is important don’t volunteer it but let your lawyer ask more questions to bring it out. So when an experienced lawyer makes a simple factual declarative statement like this, he is (IMO) expecting that he will be asked a followup question about the legitimacy of the election.
When that didn’t happen, and the statement was just left to stand as is, it allowed fuzzy thinkers to elaborate on it, to expand upon it, and to apply their perceptions of what they thought he really MEANT. And so we now have claim, in writing, in a respected online journal, that Ron De Santis claimed the election was valid when he was really just commenting on the outcome.
It’s this kind of hop-scotching from what was said to what was heard to what is later claimed was really said that contributes to so much conflict.
(Years ago some of us were talking about a TV panel discussion that included Neil Cavuto. He had said something I liked and I said “I like Neil Cavuto”. Which is when my braindead sister in law chimed in with “I can’t believe you think he is cute!” What came through her filters had nothing to do with the context of the conversation or what I said, but to this day she is convinced I find Neil Cavuto physically attractive.
Some ranchers were talking about a new county hire of a recent graduate who had come in like gangbusters with all sorts of Progressive ideas of how to “fix” ranching. I said she had not even let the ink dry on her thesis before she packed up her Birkenstocks and headed to the hills. What a friend got out of the entire conversation, beginning to end, was that I don’t like Birkenstocks.)
The effects of filters and the tendency to hop from one statement to another and make unsupportable connections where none exist are common, and we see a lot of that here, especially in some recent exchanges.
I have no issue with your “dogma approach to words”. What I do have an issue with, is that quite possibly, this focus on words is why we lose every year. I will mention again …. Conservatives have lost ground every single year since 2000. Reversing that trend is the only thing I care about.
And thanks for the correction on Eisenhower and authorization of force … weird that we invaded Iraq when the hijacker’s came from Saudi Arabia. Not sure how Saddam was a threat to the United States when he had his hands full with Iran. Any even weirder is that our government still refuses to release all the info they have re: JFK even 60 years later. Only one reason for that IMO. And remember Jack Ruby, who was a mafia associate, killed Oswald shortly afterwards. I guess they didn’t want Lee to talk.
Going into Iraq was a huge mistake and your friend Bush failed your own litmus test …. He never asked “what then”? They really had no plan.
I didn’t defend going into Iraq, just the claim that we were lied to about WMD.
I got very into the JFK assassination thing, and it always seemed to get murkier. One thing was the government smear job they did on Oswald. He wasn’t a doofus. He had a security clearance, he was a radar operator at our base in Atsugi, Japan, which is where the U-2 spy plane was based, and he somehow managed to be a real-life Forrest Gump, involved in so many different scenarios and plots that it is impossible to sort them out.
Was he a spy for the USSR? That is hinted at since he had access to the highly classified information on the height the U-2 could fly at. When Francis Gary Powers was taken prisoner after his U-2 came down over Russia the Russians pestered him for that altitude information, which he says he never gave them. But he claimed he was not shot down, that there was an explosion behind his seat on the plane.
Then if Oswald worked for the CIA the agency was a wild combination of Curly, Moe and Larry meet the Keystone Kops, as he was on one street corner advocating for Cuba and on another for the Free Cuba anti-Castro contingent. He supposedly went to Havana and made multiple public scenes doing everything possible to call attention to himself, repeatedly loudly identifying himself as Lee Oswald and acting very erratically including in a bizarre appearance at the Russian Embassy, though many witnesses said the guy doing this only had a passing resemblance to Oswald.
Then somehow he managed to talk Russia into letting him move there, where he managed to hook up with and marry the niece of a high-ranking KGB official, after which Russia let the two of them move back to the U.S. (when Russians were fishing runaway sailors out of the harbor in New York when they jumped ship trying to get out of the country)—and the U.S. let them in!
And when he left the book depository that fateful day he set the tone for the next famous slow-mo “escape”, that of OJ Simpson, as he strolled away, took a bus, and exhibited absolutely no concern about being seen or getting far from the scene. When arrested he denied shooting anyone and was confident he would quickly be cleared, and when he wasn’t and realized he was being moved to another location in a highly irregular way he started to get nervous and realized he was “just a patsy”.
In addition to this, there were evidently several people in the book depository that day, including one whose fingerprint was never identified till years later, after he died. That belonged to “Mac” Wallace, LBJ’s fixer and alleged hit man.
So no, there is no proof that the CIA killed Kennedy.
Now do the grassy knoll.
Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Smart-ass. 😉
Several years ago the BBC did an in-depth series on the assassination, by far the best thing ever done. It was a 12-part series. For a long time, even fairly recently, it was for sale on their website, with the exception of the last show, which was shut down due to, if I remember correctly, objections from the Johnson camp.
It had interviews with witnesses who were never heard from here, and a detailed analysis of the “grassy knoll” (which is really a very small area). One of the most fascinating witnesses was a nurse at Parkland Hospital who was coming to work that morning and when she and a friend came around the corner of the hospital a big limo was parked out front, with a bullet hole in the windshield, and several guys in suits lounging around. She had grown up shooting and was showing off a little, going up to the car and explaining how you could tell where the bullet had come from because of the spalling on the inside surface of the glass, and how it was easy to tell that this bullet had come from the front, toward the back.
Then the men saw her close to the car and looking at it and rushed over to shoo her and her friend away. When she saw the car a couple of days later on TV the windshield was intact.
Lol
I think they probably had a plan; it was just not a very good plan. And you know what they say about the best of plans: they rarely survive when the shooting starts.
I’ve become very anti war in the last 20 years. I was all gung ho over going to get Osama Bin Laden and doing some damage to radical Islam but that effort just lost focus over the years and morphed into an industry for defense contractors and lobbyists. 20 years and trillions of dollars later, we are worse off then when we started because now the Taliban is the most well armed terrorist group on the planet.
We need new people, a new focus, and a new approach, to just about everything.
now the Taliban is the most well armed terrorist group on the planet. thanks to a great extent on the strategy of just barging ahead with the idea that consequences can be dealt with later.
I think the Bush “plan” such as it was was based on the belief that once Iraq was freed of Saddam the people would joyfully embrace Western style government and we could leave them to develop their own nation. It was just short-sighted and based more on wishful thinking than facts and accurate assessment of the opposition.
I don’t think a “focus on words” has been our problem. It’s been using the wrong words, in too limited a venue. We need more words, but better words, and a way to say them louder and to more people.
I think this give and take over the last couple of days has been very entertaining and informative. I’m liking it and have become somewhat convinced now that Amazona, Spook, and me, represent three different factions of the GOP – I’m the highly skeptical, conspiracy minded, and volatile one, along the lines of Dan Bongino. Spook is more measured but still highly skeptical along the lines of Tucker, and Amazona takes the highly measured, well thought out approach along the lines of a Victor David Hansen. And Mark would be the historian lol
The thing is, we have to mesh these factions into a focused effort in order to win. One VERY interesting thing to note, the Tucker Carlson interview with Trump has over 237 million views. Now let’s assume that everyone watched it twice, that still means 118 million people watch it. How many people watched last nights debate on Fox? Maybe 3 million?? I think a lot of Americans are remembering how good things were under Trump, and they want that back. Mean tweets and all.
I agree with your assessment, and I think it’s great that we can disagree without being disagreeable. That’s something most on the Left have never learned to do.
I’m thrilled at being associated with the Victor Davis Hansen model though I think all three of us fit into any of the three types at one time or another.
I was wrong. This is an impressive showing
Fox News Republican Debate Scores Whopping 12.8 Million Viewers — Even Without Trump
The thing is, it wasn’t anything like a real debate. It was more like a group job interview. It may have given a chance to see the prospective candidates, but I don’t see how it could change many minds except maybe in a negative direction, like Pence.
Every time I have told someone I would drop Trump into the Oval Office if I could, I get agreement. And every time I say it is the campaign that scares me I also get agreement.
It’s not a matter of not wanting Trump back, it’s concern that his level of opposition might not have budged with about 46% adamantly opposed to him with great ferocity and passion and that the subsequent accusations and indictments and fears of the chaos of electing a president who is a convicted felon, etc., will inhibit gaining new support.
And a major element in Trump support is the observation that we have a different “Trump” without the baggage, without the melodrama, and with a few additional tools in his skill set, so we don’t have to depend on Trump to make the changes we need to make in this country.
Right now, in light of tonight’s events, I will crawl over broken glass and hot molten lava to vote FOR Trump, and I think there are more Americans like me than not. Do I now think he can win the general, yes I do. Democrats are damn near guaranteeing that.
OTOH, there is this. Admittedly from the AP, but still:
Trump faces glaring vulnerabilities heading into a general election, with many Americans strongly dug in against him. While most Republicans — 74% — say they would support him in November 2024, 53% of Americans say they would definitely not support him if he is the nominee. Another 11% say they would probably not support him in November 2024.
Math is not my strong suit, but I still get 64% of the general public saying no or probably no.
I just saw another AP poll with similar figures for Trump and nearly identical negatives for Biden, which is interesting.
Conservative writer Matt Walsh felt that the booking was a massive boon to Trump’s 2024 chances.
‘Fani Willis is easily the most brilliant campaign manager Donald Trump has ever had. She might have just single handedly won him re-election,’ he tweeted.
I agree with Matt. Just like Johnny Cash, Jimi Hendrix, & Frank Sinatra, Democrats are making Trump out to be an American folk hero. And Americans love folk heroes.
I hope so. My VDH analytical side 😉 is and will remain concerned that the country will vote not for a man as much as for a desire for relief from the incessant trauma and drama of the past few years, and that Trump will be a symbol of that. That could go two ways: It could end up in a vote for him as triumph over the chaos and evil, or it could be a retreat from the melodrama by voting for someone seen as less of a lightning rod.
I think if Trump can rein in his PT Barnum persona now and settle down to act like a statesman, he can pull this off.
I think if Trump can rein in his PT Barnum persona now and settle down to act like a statesman, he can pull this off.
In Jesus name we pray … lol
So Fox polls on the debate just came out and DeSantis won, followed closely by Vivek, and Haley was next but a distant third. And this tells us where the energy is in the GOP, and it’s clearly not with the establishment which is great news. Vivek had a good line when he said that many of his colleagues comments sounded like they were from a 1990’s GOP debate … and he was right.
War mongering is over. Americas borders and interests take precedence over everything else. And that being said, America has an unhealthy obsession with Putin. I guess he makes a great villain, but he is ZERO threat to America. Zero. And he is zero threat to Poland, Germany, etc. If you’ll notice, those countries don’t seem the least bit worried … but the American establishment sure is, and I wonder why? (just kidding, we all know).
Even without the natural born citizen issue, which everyone is studiously ignoring, the fact that these two (Ramaswamy and Haley) are second and third in the primary polling is good news for me, because each is inherently a very weak prospect, which will show up more and more as time goes on.
(re: the natural born issue. Do not think for a minute that this would not be brought up by the Left if either of these two were to get the nomination. It’s a time bomb waiting to be used, just like Operation Warp Speed resulting in so many vaxx deaths and injuries is for Trump. Either one of these issues would post major blowback for the Left, but they don’t care. If either one disrupted the election enough to be effective, they would count on their base ignoring or forgetting any immediate negative reaction.)
One thing we can expect for sure … whoever the GOP nominee is, the Democrats will be as ruthless to them as they are to Trump. The questions is, can they weather that assault like Trump has …
I keep hearing this fretting about how, with Trump out of the way the long knives will just come out for the next guy. Well, uh, YEAH! It’s the Left, it’s what they do. It’s all they can do.
For one thing, as wildly unfair and unethical and downright inexcusable the assaults on Trump have been, the fact is he provided the basic framework for all of it. Throughout his rise to political fame I have repeatedly cringed at something he has said or done, wondering why he could possibly have thought that was a good idea.
Asking a foreign president to specifically investigate Joe Biden? How could that have been considered smart? And look what it provided to the Left—a matrix upon which to build a whole elaborate impeachment scheme. And it went on from there, all the way to a private call to the Georgia Secretary of State asking him to intervene in the election vote counting. Not asking him to do anything wrong, but asking him to get involved. If Trump had not made the massive blunder of setting himself and his followers up for certain disaster by having a big ego rally in DC instead of somewhere else, he would not have set up the entire conservative movement for false flag incursions, infiltration by various bad actors intent on both creating mayhem and blaming Trump for it, etc. Look at the fallout from J6, ranging from the Cheney debacle to innocent people being held for years in inhumane conditions without trial to the tsunami of negative PR and subsequent accusations and indictments.
It’s true that Trump has weathered a lot of storms, but he created some of them, or at least set the stage for them so they could be developed by his enemies.
AU Trump (that is, Alternate Universe Trump) would have realized his phone calls would be transcribed and made public and been sure to keep them above criticism, passing along anything sensitive like a nudge to look more closely at Biden through secure back channels. He would have told his followers in January of 2021 that they had done all they could do and now it was time to let the process proceed and count on the integrity of Congress to act to do what it could to ensure the legitimacy of the election process, as Senator Cruz was petitioning them to do. And so on.
Yes, Trump has been steadfast in holding up under a ceaseless barrage of persecution and abuse from his own government, and some of that has been prompted by the threats his presidency had posed to the internal structures of that government erected and maintained by the Left. BUT he made it so much easier for the Left to attack him by giving them a list of unforced errors to build on.
So while we worry about the effects of the Left’s Politics of Personal Destruction, aided and abetted by the State Media and the lapdog judiciary, we need to remember that a different president is not likely to provide nearly as much material to work with.
And people north of Atlanta might not be aware of the savagery of attacks on DeSantis in Florida. And how he has just shrugged it off and kept on keepin’ on, calmly winning battle after battle.
There’s no reason to worry about him folding when that expands to a more national assault. When all they’ve got is pudding fingers and a spouse’s eyebrows and some carping about who is backing him, that is just another way of saying we would have another Teflon president.
See, this is the kind of wholly unnecessary crap that drags Trump down. He needs to make up his mind. Is he a serious statesman capable of governing the nation or a petty Mean Girl hooked on infantile insults and name calling?
Former President Donald Trump took aim at GOP presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday, telling Newsmax that “DeSanctimonious, as I call him,” has “dropped like a rock.”
“He’s dropped like an ailing bird out of this sky, and I think he’s finished,” Trump said on “Greg Kelly Reports.”
I’ll say the same thing about RDS that I said about Trump: You don’t get flack if you’re not over the target. And he is telegraphing his fear that RDS is squarely over the target and well armed. If he’s not really a threat, STFU, and if he is, then address it like a man, not like a schoolyard bully.
So very very good
I’m not by nature a vulgar person, but occasionally the f-bomb has the impact that no other word can achieve.
Love it
Right after seeing this I was reading an older post about Reagan, and the comments. One woman commenter wrote about her late husband what a great guy he was, got along with everyone, etc. but also that his favorite maxim was “I’m a nice guy. Don’t [expletive] with me.”
And it all reminded me of you, Spook.
Yup, that’s me.
To paraphrase Col. Hannibal Smith in the A-Team, I love it was a news story and a meme come together:
Democrat policies killed the people in Lahaina. Democrat policies are needlessly killing innocent Russians and Ukrainians. Democrat policies are killing women and children at the border. Democrat policies are killing babies in the womb. Democrat policies are killing the dreams of young Americans.
The only thing Democrats know how to do …. is destroy.
It looks like they have been paying attention to California, which has had the same problems.
But I keep coming back to that “local government” phrase and wondering if it wasn’t a job of the local government to provide some oversight and control over these issues. If not, there should be, and maybe Maui should create an agency to monitor the condition of the electrical lines. It’s kind of a big deal.
I don’t know if it’s still a thing in Hawaii, but I suspect it is. When my wife and I were there in 1984, the most popular expression was “hang loose.” In other words, no sweat, it’s all good. We’ll worry about it later.
Just a reminder … God chose and preferred imperfect men and women to lead … He never chose the self righteous.
No greater example than the apostle Paul who went from persecuting and executing Christians to spreading the Gospel across two continents and writing nearly half the books in the New Testament.
https://x.com/warlorddilley/status/1695050517909557269?s=46
That is a point I repeatedly made when the Church Ladies were pinching their lips and declaring they could never ever support Trump because of his immoral history.
I always came back with the observation that the Apostles were sinners and imperfect, and wondered if these scolds would have, 2000 years ago, scolded Christ for choosing the “wrong kind” of followers.
I also said that my Christianity is based on the principles of redemption, salvation and forgiveness, while they seem to reject all of these principles.
And the irony just keeps piling up.
Wind and solar energy are better for the environment—-except that mining the materials needed to make them is environmentally disastrous, they are wildly expensive, they have relatively short lives and recycling when possible at all is prohibitively expensive so they have to be sent to landfills, they cannot provide consistent or predictable power, because they have to be sited in remote areas they call for massive transmission lines across many hundreds of miles, and BTW the wind turbines kill millions of birds a year.
Electric vehicles are the answer to pollution from petroleum-based fuel—-except that the materials needed for the batteries must be mined in horrible conditions both for the semi-slaves doing the work and the surrounding environment, the batteries are dangerous, the vehicles are really only suited for dense urban use which is also where electricity is expensive, they require a large infrastructure investment to recharge efficiently whether in private homes or public areas, the recharging is slow and the vehicles substantially underperform in extreme heat or cold. And, of course, most of the electricity they need is produced by the petroleum products they preen over replacing.
Banning plastic grocery bag reduce pollution except It wasn’t long after those bans became popular that it was revealed that the production of paper and even reusable bags actually does more harm to the earth than just producing one-time-use plastic bags. Further, as RedState reported, reusable bags are unsanitary and help spread diseases (because no one washes them).
And now, we learn that paper straws are toxic.
…a study in Belgium found that 18 out of 20 paper straws tested, and four out of five bamboo straws, contained what are called PFAS. They are called “forever chemicals” because linger “almost permanently” in the environment, from the soil to the water supply.
……………………..
Exposure to PFAS can be associated with low birth weight, high cholesterol, thyroid disease and an increased risk of kidney and liver cancers, but researchers are still learning about these health risks and aren’t sure which levels of exposure are problematic.
More irony, though I am no longer sure if that is the right word. In any case, a poster child for government control, a face of Soviet-style government abuse of power and use of that power to persecute, intimidate and control or eliminate political opposition, is now piously wrapping herself in the 10th Amendment.
“The Constitution limits Congress’s powers to those specifically enumerated, and the 10th Amendment ensures that any unenumerated powers are reserved to the States. New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144, 155-56 (1992). It is therefore generally understood that a Congressional committee may not “inquire into matters which are … reserved to the States.”
Naturally, as a Leftist she has to twist the wording a little. In fact, the Constitution limits all federal powers to those specifically enumerated, not just those of Congress.
And no, it is NOT “generally understood” that Congress may not investigate matters which some claim are “reserved to the States”. When a state is acting to influence a national election and pursuing legal action against a man for actions taken while he was president of the country, then Congress clearly has standing to intervene.
But it’s funny to see a Leftist trying to invoke the very political philosophy that forbids nearly everything it stands for.
More irony, though I am no longer sure if that is the right word.
I think the word you’re searching for is hypocrisy.
Not that the two are mutually exclusive
So many good ones, hard to pick a favorite.
Too funny!
Saw this headline pop up just a few minutes ago…
New Biden Admin Regulations Could Push You to Say Goodbye to Hunting, Fishing, and Hiking
One of those new regulations is they’re going to try and ban lead ammunition. The alternative they said would be solid copper. All for the “environment.”
And once again, the “fix” leads to a litany of Unintended Consequences.
One is pollution. As one of many examples Eight of Arizona’s top 10 ranked (pollution) releases in 2018 came from copper mines and smelters.
And Copper mining wastes make up the largest percentage of metal mining and processing wastes generated in the United States. There is a broad range of TENORM concentrations in copper mining wastes.
And: Demand for copper is booming, but supply can’t keep up, jeopardizing net-zero emissions targets, according to a new report from S&P Global.
Copper is key to electric vehicles, wind and solar power, as well as the infrastructure that transports and stores renewable energy.
S&P Global’s new report forecasts copper demand nearly doubling by 2035.
“The energy transition is going to be dependent much more on copper than our current energy system,” said Daniel Yergin, vice chairman at S&P Global.
But I’m sure that making ammunition prohibitively expensive would just be an accidental side effect of moving to copper ammo. //sarc off
And I’m sure that not one of these proposed “regulations” (which would have the power of law) will be legislated by our only legal legislative body, which is Congress, but will either be imposed by unelected political appointees in some federal agency or another or by an Executive Order.
Sounds about right. We’re living in a dictatorship with Obiden in office. I say Obiden because I believe Obama is running a shadow government, he’s the one directing all this behind the scenes.
Well, we know Joe can’t find his way off a stage and Jill is just in it for the status and doesn’t seem to have the intellect of a box of hair, so someone else is pulling the strings. The question is, who is pulling Obama’s because he has always been controlled by someone else—the “someone else” who got him into Ivy League schools when he was a mediocre stoner, who paid for it all, who set him up with domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn, who wrote his scripts and arranged for a cover marriage to Michelle, who staged his performances. It’s not as if Barry was ever a mastermind.
Probably none other than billionaire George Soros, or possibly Bill Gates. Bill seems like the kind of guy who would buddy up to Obama.
Even possibly Hillary Clinton. They all seem to have a lot in common.