Political Thread in memory of David Reid. (R.I.P.)

[The Bedlington Terrier]

Not A1 generated but worth a read anyway...
Essayist Allen Clifton gives a clear-eyed view of the 47th U.S. president & it's not pretty, but it's accurate…
*************
"Trump supporters don't need to believe me when I say he's an incompetent, corrupt, failed president. Using Donald Trump's own words, I can prove that he's exactly what he is.
"He once said Barack Obama would start a war with Iran due to plummeting approval ratings because he was 'weak' and 'lacked the skills to negotiate' a deal with the Iranians.
"Well, Obama never started that war — but Trump did.
"Speaking of Trump's war in Iran, he spent years warning voters that if they elected Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, we would end up at war with Iran.
"Well, Clinton and Harris didn't win, so we will never know — but Biden did win the 2020 election and never started a war with Iran. Trump, however, did.
"In 2022, when oil prices soared — taking gas prices along with them after Putin ordered his invasion of Ukraine — Trump blamed Biden's policies for all of it.
"Well, Biden had nothing to do with that war that led to oil nearing $100 a barrel and gas prices approaching an average of $4 a gallon nationally — but Trump's decision to attack Iran is exactly what that's what we're seeing now.
"During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised he would bring high prices down 'starting on Day 1' and said that if you elected Harris, prices would continue to soar and affordability would become an even bigger crisis.
"Well, we're over a year into his return to the White House, and inflation is no better today than when he took office. American households paid nearly $2,000 more for goods and services last year due to his tariffs, and concerns over affordability are getting worse. Trump now calls concerns about affordability a 'Democrat hoax.'
"Trump claimed he would end the war in Ukraine 'very easily,' 'within 24 hours,' with 'just one phone call,' and that the only reason it continued was due to Biden's 'weak leadership and inability to negotiate.'
"Well, again, we're over a year into his return to the White House and war rages on with shows no signs of slowing down. This is despite Trump repeating Russian propaganda about the war, publicly attacking the Ukrainian president in the White House, repeatedly setting deadlines he claimed Putin had to meet 'or else' — deadlines the Russian dictator ignored with no consequences — and even rolled out a red carpet to invite Putin onto American soil, which accomplished absolutely nothing but making this president, and our nation, look like fools.
"He also claimed that the 'world no longer respected us' due to the leadership of Obama and Biden and that, if he were president, we would 'be more respected than we've ever been.'
"Well, now our allies are ignoring calls from the United States to help bail Trump out of the crisis he started in Iran. Several are openly mocking his public temper tantrums and his claim that NATO owes it to him to send troops to a conflict he started and didn’t consult them about — proving that the world does not respect the United States 'more than ever.' In fact, our standing among our allies is probably the worst it has ever been.
"He's frequently claimed that massive deficits and huge increases to our national debt are caused by 'stupid people' who don't know how to do business.
"Well, after five total years as president, more has been added to the national debt during his time in office than under any other president in history — a trend projected to continue as his policies are expected to add trillions more in the coming years.
"Then there have been all his attacks on others such as claiming Clinton should be in jail for her handling of classified information, criticizing her foundation for taking donations from Qatar, attacking Biden by claiming his son was using his name to enrich their family, and broadly labeling Democrats as 'totally corrupt.'
"Well, his net worth has grown by more than $2 billion since he returned to office. He accepted a $400 million plane from Qatar. His sons continue to leverage their father's position and name to make business deals. His cryptocurrency venture is among the most blatantly corrupt financial schemes we've ever seen a president run while in office. And we have photos of boxes of top-secret documents that Trump took and improperly stored at his golf resort after leaving office in 2020.
"And what I've listed here isn't even everything. I could write a book detailing how so many of his accusations against opponents are really projections of his own behaviour.
"So, Trump supporters, you don't need to believe me when I say he's a failed president who will likely go down as one of the worst in our nation's history — Trump’s own attacks against his opponents have already done it for me."

[The Bedlington Terrier]

A lass with a heart from the US posted this in response to Trump saying he was “glad” Robert Mueller had died.
“I tried to take a break from current events & political news for the afternoon & evening to get ready for a short getaway. Then, this happened & I couldn't pretend it didn’t.
Just when you think he's hit rock bottom as a despicable human & embarrassing president, he shows the entire world that there is a basement.
How can anyone justify their support for this vile, self-serving, walking, talking rectum?
What policies or actions of his are so great that you're willing to overlook the lack of character in this personification of orange pond scum?
What justification is there for your undying support for this amalgamation of all the characteristics you've claimed to despise your entire life?
What has he done that would make you give up your self-respect if it somehow honors this corrupt cruelty in a baggy blue suit with a too-long red tie?
Though I shouldn't be surprised by his callous disregard for the life & death of a good man, it's still startling when he chooses to put his personal brand of narcissistic puke on blast for all the world to see. He has the self-control of a caffeinated toddler who was once again incapable of doing the right thing & just being quiet.
Robert Mueller was a war hero who spent his entire adult life asking what he could do for his country & then doing just that. By contrast, the current president has only ever asked what his country (& everyone else) could do for him & then taking & taking & taking.
Where Mueller spent decades as an accomplished, honourable, selfless civil servant, FOTUS has only ever used his office to personally enrich himself & his family, to make himself the perpetual center of attention & to avoid the consequences of his felonious acts.
Today, he again showed us all what an absolute ass he is. I could not be more baffled by & ashamed of the millions of Americans who inflicted this vile man on the rest of us, knowing exactly the content of his character that's been on full display for more than half a century for anyone who simply chose to look. These are the same people who will show up for church tomorrow morning claiming to be Christians, while worshiping the least Christ-like "leader" this country has ever seen.
Jeez, now I don't just need a break to get ready for a trip. I need a bath to get his filth off me.”

[The Bedlington Terrier]

It seems an awful lot of decent people are now seeing that an evil grifter is running the White House. Time is up TW@T!

[Supersub6]

It seems an awful lot of decent people are now seeing that an evil grifter is running the White House. Time is up TW@T!

What about the other 77,302,580 people who actually voted for him? What's their viewpoint?
You seem to be obsessed with the views of people who are obviously of a different political persuasion.
Meanwhile, life goes on and all the so-called 'leaders' just continue to do their own thing, regardless of what effect it has on their own citizens.
It's a very sad world but we're stuck with it ------be happy and don't worry about something that you can't do anything about.
Money rules and lots of people are making a mint out of all this upheaval. Plus ca change!

[The Bedlington Terrier]

What about the other 77,302,580 people who actually voted for him? What's their viewpoint?
You seem to be obsessed with the views of people who are obviously of a different political persuasion.
Meanwhile, life goes on and all the so-called 'leaders' just continue to do their own thing, regardless of what effect it has on their own citizens.
It's a very sad world but we're stuck with it ------be happy and don't worry about something that you can't do anything about.
Money rules and lots of people are making a mint out of all this upheaval. Plus ca change!

Welcome home to the voice of reason.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

The Arabian vassal states of the Evil Orange Emperor of the New World Order and his Polish Jewish gimp Benny the Pole have discovered to their great cost that being friends with the US and Israel is beyond dangerous, it’s lethal.

To their great cost they have discovered they are not being protected, simply proving to be a magnet for Iranian counter attacks and reprisals.

Anyone on here fancy a week of high jinks in Dubai?

[Supersub6]

welcome home to the voice of reason. ;d

Thank you sir.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

Thank you sir.

De nada mein freund.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

Is the mard tw@t going to bomb Iran again or not.

We had exactly the same type of schoolyard bully until I gave him a right hook that left him nursing a black eye for a week.

[ballcock]

Weighed in heavy on Friday into my isa allowance and the gods have come out on my side. I new Trump would back down and hopefully I have timed my investment to perfection.

Lots of money to be made with Trump he is the best President ever, he looks after us capitalist

[The Bedlington Terrier]

God Bless America!
I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones...
Robert Mueller died last night.
He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam.
He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.
He had integrity.
And tonight the President of the United States said good!
I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.
I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.
Good.
This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened.
The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.
America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.
And the church said nothing.
Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.
Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.
JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.
Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.
Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.
And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbors. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.
When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming.
Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honor. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.
He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.
He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.
The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be.
A man died. His family is broken with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good.
And the country that once stood for something looked away.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

Weighed in heavy on Friday into my isa allowance and the gods have come out on my side. I new Trump would back down and hopefully I have timed my investment to perfection.

Lots of money to be made with Trump he is the best President ever, he looks after us capitalist

The Iranians will bring both the Evil Orange Emperor of the New World Order and his Polish Jewish gimp Benny the Pole down - and soon.

[ballcock]

Special heads up to the Millwall lads who were out in London this weekend, clearing our streets of the facist Antifa scum

Well done Millwall


Shout out to West Ham
My mate from Leigh on Sea assures me that he will be up in London with his fellow West Ham mates in support of Tommy Robinson and fellow patriots this May. He and his wife are retired London cabbies, east end born and bred. They are disgusted by what has and is happening to their once great city, which has being ruined by Muslim immigrants

[The Bedlington Terrier]

FFS ballcock is this the best you have got?

[The Bedlington Terrier]

ICE agents are now deployed at the nation’s airports, including the world’s busiest, conducting immigration enforcement while TSA workers go without pay. And it turns out Trump was offered a clean plan to fund TSA and end the airport chaos, and said no. Resulting in two pilots dead and plane crash on the tarmac in New York. The man is a clown.
Has he bombed Iran yet?