HAHAHAHAHA, worst take ever?

um, sorry for the hand grenade...


But... if we really want to break it down...

If you believe in a god that...
..."saves" people who only worship and praise said god; even if only in the last moments of life no matter how poorly they lived the other 99% of their life.
...condemns people to rot forever in the fires of hell for merely not believing in said god, no matter how good of a life that person lived (see point 1).
...is basically a preteen looking for reassurance as said god asks a believer to kill their own child just to prove their love.
...allows some of the most horrible events to happen, while allegedly performing miracles to "save" some believers from a horrible fate.
...whose "sacred word" was a book sanctioned by a king several centuries after the supposed events, a book which was created as a way to help the king control hit subjects.
...flooded the world, killing people and animals alike because said god didn't like what was happening (again, yet stood by while the nazis systematically killed millions).
...created the world with a "big red button" which he told the created ones to "not press"; a control thing?
...the world began with Adam, Eve and their two sons, one of which killed the other...think about it...
...wanted to toy with one of the believers by allowing his "rival" to do his worst to said follower.
...loved the chosen group of believers so much that they were forced to roam the desert for years.


Okay, said my piece, you may return to your regularly scheduled thread...

You win the discussion. :D

Unless we are seriously discussing Trump being the anti-Christ, may I suggest we move religious discussions to this other thread?

Does Religion Belong In Politics? - Front Office Football Central

Erdogan is refusing to meet with Pence and Pompeo.

At least we're respected again.

dola

WTF?


https://www.thedailybeast.com/anne-s...he-white-house

EDIT: possible spam link removed

Is that an actual link albion?

It's a youtube video.

To me right now it looks like a link to spam. Just checkin.

Great and unmatched wisdom

It was a youtube video from my end. But it was a Russian one, and I really don't want to err on the side of spam, so I removed it.

The short of it is--I don't think Trump is a very good president, and this was just one more data point.

The person who thought this was a good idea has the nuclear codes.

When you can only see the world through the prism of a D-list reality TV star it actually is a great idea.

I'm sometimes taken aback when I realize how much happier he would be right now if he had stayed on the fringe of politics and remained a celebrity/reality TV guy who occasionally appeared on Fox News as a guest to give the "business" perspective on things.

He's still have fame; he'd still have money; he'd still have attention; he'd still get to watch TV all day. But he wouldn't have all of these people attacking him and trying to hold him accountable for things.

dola: Apparently Taft also hated the presidency and would sometimes just leave the White House and go walking without telling anyone he was going just to get away from it.

Howard Stern, who knows him quite well, and hates him as president, said a while back Trump never wanted to be president. It was all a publicity stunt that just snowballed.

Wasn't there someone involved in his campaign that said the same thing.

I've told my wife many times that he wakes up every day and says "Who can I fuck with today just for the fun of it?"

There was a lot of smoke that the plan was to start a news network that spent four or eight years attacking everything Hillary did.

So we're going to impose sanctions that will devastate Turkey because they attacked them.

Good fucking luck figuring out our national policies.

Is there ANY chance (say, greater than 1%) that you could get enough GOP Senators to convict on an Article of Impeachment that was basically "fucking over the Kurds?"

Like, they may not be able to electorally survive if they support impeachment for corruption. But is there some National Security path they could walk that would let them get rid of him while still being on team MAGA/GOP?

I have long subscribed to this line of thought and there are a lot of signs that seem to point to it.

1-The outrageous statements, that at times seemed like intentional trolling, and others self sabotage so he could bow out, but never damaged his base support.
2-The complete lack of transition planning, that to this day still has not filled all of the open positions in the admin.
3-The near 80% turnover, again bur to rushed hiring and of course the frustration that anyone with half a fucking brain endures working for this clown.

As it went on and he realized he had a shot, it then became more about ego and just how much he could push the envelope. And here we are, with a very real chance we could have to deal with this insanity for another 4 years.

I don't think he really knows much about the region. Just parroting talking points from Erdogan.

I read this somewhere else, but this feels like an episode of Quantum Leap where Sam was sent back as Trump to ensure Trump gets impeached and removed, and complains to Al what more can he do to trigger the next leap.

Someone involved with the campaign said there was no vetting done prior to the election. That played a major role in the early turnover. The vetting process ended up being "is there child porn or anything obvious in this guys background".

They didn't expect to win and therefore didn't spend the money to create a viable list of candidates for key cabinet positions.

Yup, according to Wolfe in Fire & Fury, Ailes, Bannon and the denizens of Breitbart were going to put together a competing network vs Fox, and O'Reilly and Hannity were both purportedly on board to join up.

Then Ailes died.

And, yes, I have read an account or two that basically said Trunp and his campaign didn't think they had a snowball's chance in hell of winning, so they spent little time preparing for that prior to election day.

It's supposedly one of the reasons why Trump's campaign pursued building a Trump Tower in Moscow and kept up ties with Russian oligarchs-- Trump assumed he wouldn't win and didn't want to miss out on a potential business deal just because he was running for President.

From last week:

Felt the need to ask WH if this is actually real and it is. pic.twitter.com/bHyIFw6cvO

— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) October 16, 2019

And apparently he went completely off the rails in a meeting with congressional leaders at the White House regarding Syria after the resolution came out condemning his actions.

Clearly, Dems fell into his impeachment trap.

He better be a playable character in Civ7 with that kind of elegant banter to other leaders.

As a copywriter, I don't know whether to laugh, cry, hurl myself out a window, get drunk, snort coke, or some combination of things.

How the (expletive) did that pass the screeners?

Oh, God. The letter wasn't leaked, Trump handed it out at his meeting with congressional members to show how tough he has been.

Are you sure that's real?

I mean, at least it wasn't in comic sans.

and he left the Kurdish general who was doing the dirty work against ISIS out to dry by forwarding on the confidential letter.

Yes. The WH has acknowledged it is real.

Turkey's Erdogan 'threw Trump's Syria letter in bin' - BBC News

THE FANTASTICALLY PROFITABLE MYSTERY OF THE TRUMP CHAOS TRADES

In a better functioning country someone would be investigating these trades. It may not be someone in the government, but it's certainly fishy enough to check.

dola

Mulvaney has now moved the ball to the inevitable, of course we did a quid pro quo and that's fine.

Either this is part of the "if you admit your actions openly, then they don't look wrong" strategy.

Or [tin-foil hat], the GOP has decided Trump needs to go and they are all in on it (Pence, Mulvaney, McConnell, etc) and are laying groundwork.

dola: I hope it is the former, because coups (even intra-party) are not good for Democracy

What I read so far was aid was tied to Ukraine investigating the 2016 election, not Biden specifically. I don't see anything wrong about it based on what it says below. Trump asking Ukraine to investigate Biden and son specifically is a different and more problematic.

Mulvaney appears to confirm Ukraine aid was tied to probe into 2016 election - POLITICO

This "cease fire" in Turkey sounds more like a "surrender."

We did investigate the election and confirmed who was responsible for the hacking and misinformation campaign. The Ukraine thing is a weird boomer conspiracy that was debunked by our own government multiple times.

I don't disagree with your statement, its Trump trying to distract from his own tainted election. Nevertheless, Mulvaney did not turn on Trump and this specific quid pro quo does not rise to the level of impeachment.

I would like to believe that the President trying to leverage a foreign government to discredit his own intelligence agencies is a line we don't want crossed.

Not even a cease-fire. The Turks are being clear this is just a pause.

Look at the call memorandum, it's all the same thing to Trump.

Told you we'd fix this, we just left Istanbul yesterday......

Certainly an interesting time to visit. We booked this part of our trip long ago, and I certainly got some looks from people when I told them where we were going. Fascinating and beautiful place to visit though - I was mostly drawn by the history and the idea of going to a place culturally more different than home than I've ever been. Felt completely safe once you learn how to fend off the scammers.

They also do something security-wise that I'm surprised we haven't picked up in the U.S. yet - security to get INTO the airport. It's not full TSA style, just police and low- sensitivity metal detectors that don't care about your cell phone or belt. Of course Istanbul had a big terrorist attack at one of their airports a few years ago - and I always felt like the masses sitting there queing in security and ticket lines was a more vulnerable spot than the actual plane.