Posted on 07/08/2017 5:24:13 AM PDT by Kaslin
An enthusiastic Polish crowd chanted President Donald Trump's name and "USA, USA, USA" as the American president gave a valentine of a speech in Warsaw's Krasinski Square by a memorial to the 1944 Polish Uprising.
In a half hour, Trump essentially wrapped America in Polish history and likened the Poles' resistance to the Nazis -- most dramatically in a 63-day pitched battle that left more than 150,000 Poles dead and Warsaw a ruin -- to America's and the West's fight against radical Islamist terrorism.
"The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive," Trump told the crowded square.
Trump also used the occasion to urge Russia "to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes -- including Syria and Iran -- and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself."
The president delivered an expected slap toward NATO nations that, unlike Poland, have missed the benchmark of spending more than 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. However, that criticism was balanced with an unsolicited embrace of Article 5, NATO's mutual-defense clause, which Trump failed to endorse during his first trip to Europe in May.
Crowds waving U.S. and Polish flags gathered in and around the Warsaw square to hear Trump speak. "America loves Poland, and America loves the Polish people," Trump said. The crowd returned the love.
It was a far different scene later in the day when Trump arrived in Hamburg, Germany, where columns of police tried to keep order as waves of protesters -- some demonstrating their intent to commit violence by wearing black masks -- hit the streets. Authorities expect as many as 100,000 protesters at the Group of 20 Summit, a two-day gathering of the world's top economic powers.
German police used water cannons, pepper spray and batons to disperse marchers after some attacked them with bottles and other objects.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is hosting the G-20 Summit, has made clear her differences with Trump on climate change, refugees and trade. "We are not going to paper over the differences but rather, we will call discord discord," Merkel said last month.
Trump met with Merkel after arriving in Hamburg. The pair shook hands and spoke briefly while looking directly at each other. They then left for closed-door discussions.
The German government said Merkel and Trump discussed issues including North Korea, the situation in the Middle East and the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Trump is scheduled to meet face-to-face Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. A number of high-ranking Democrats in Washington on Thursday demanded that Trump confront Putin over Moscow's meddling in the 2016 election, but Trump has refused to say if he will raise the issue.
Before his Warsaw address, Trump held a joint press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda. It was the first time he took press questions overseas.
During the press conference, Trump declined to definitively declare that Russia tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. "I think it was Russia," he said, but added that other countries also may have been involved.
Trump used the question to slam former President Barack Obama for failing to do more to combat foreign meddling when he was informed of it in August.
Trump reminded the room that the intelligence community is not infallible, and harkened back to the intelligence community's near certainty under President George W. Bush that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
"Everybody was 100 percent sure," Trump recalled. "Guess what? They were wrong."
Trump also used the occasion to again call CNN "fake news" and to chastise NBC for being almost as bad -- even though his reality TV show, "The Apprentice," made the network so much money.
Trump then looked to Duda and asked if the Polish president had to deal with the same sort of media coverage. Duda appeared quite sympathetic.
The "fake news" detour began when Daily Mail reporter David Martosko asked Trump about the fallout from a controversial tweet the president had sent that showed him wrestling with a man whose head had been replaced with a CNN logo.
Martosko then asked Duda about his Law and Justice Party's attempts to clamp down on press freedoms by "limiting who can cover the parliament." (Last year the Law and Justice Party made such a proposal, but Duda abandoned the plan after public protests.)
Duda's answer could have come straight from Trump's "fake news" playbook. The Polish president accused a Polish TV station of not covering his visit to Croatia, "because this broadcaster does not like me as the president of Poland."
The more I see of Trump, the better I like him.
He casts the light of Truth on the decadent, corrupt, evil establishment. The more Truth illuminates their darkness and evil, the more they hate the man who casts the light--and the more the decent, truthful people of the world love him and the light he casts.
It's hard to believe that anyone could be so blind to his own stupidity. We must remind ourselves that one must never underestimate the power of denial--and that the further a society drifts from Truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
I could not have said it any better
Islam is much more dangerous than Nazism because it masquerades as a religion.
Like Nazism, it needs to be eradicated as an ideology.
I often think of ISIS as Shinto Kamakazis
Well!I’d see that equating these radical Islamist with the Nazi’s is quite accurate.
The only thing the Islamist haven’t done yet is open gas chambers to kill us Infidels.
At first I preferred Crux and was a little bit disappointed at first when Trump got the nomination. Now I’m very very pleased at the results, and you are correct, Trump has some kind of special ability to make sophisticated but evil people reveal themselves.
I never thought I could see a political disorder stronger than Bush Derangement Syndrome but now I see that the poison runs much more deeply than I thought.
The right man really did win the election.
At first I preferred Crux and was a little bit disappointed at first when Trump got the nomination. Now I’m very very pleased at the results, and you are correct, Trump has some kind of special ability to make sophisticated but evil people reveal themselves.
I never thought I could see a political disorder stronger than Bush Derangement Syndrome but now I see that the poison runs much more deeply than I thought.
The right man really did win the election.
Russia, The Mosin Nagant and the PPSH 43 helped the world beat the **** out of the Nazis.
Then we had the arms race when we each raced toward missile supremacy and went our separate ways
Russia could be the key to putting the kibosh on Lil Kim, China and Iran.
Ivan is a worthy allie and adversary
(President Trump) “likened the Poles’ resistance to the Nazis “
While our own national socialists pull out their Alinsky playbook (accuse your opponent of ... ) and use the word “resistance” to imply that their fellow Americans who oppose the `rat agenda are Nazis.
What made imperial Japan a horror was they thought the emperor was a GOD.
I think it was McAurthor that wiped that notion away
He order all 12 leaf chrysanthemums destroyed (The symbol of the Emperor as deity)
Mecca/Medina are you listening?
Thomas Jefferson's views on the importance of a free press are well known. Nevertheless, Jefferson was well aware of the dark under belly of a segment of the press which might set itself up, as he called it, "to serve the ministers" of a "despotic government."
Note that in the last of the following quotations on the subject, Jefferson noted, "But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood," he declared, "I leave to others to restore it to its strength by recalling it within the pale of truth."
"[A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632"[I have seen] repeated instances of the publication of what has not been intended for the public eye, and the malignity with which political enemies torture every sentence from me into meanings imagined by their own wickedness only... Not fearing these political bull-dogs, I yet avoid putting myself in the way of being baited by them, and do not wish to volunteer away that portion of tranquillity, which a firm execution of my duties will permit me to enjoy." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:226
"Conscious that there was not a truth on earth which I feared should be known, I have lent myself willingly as the subject of a great experiment, which was to prove that an administration, conducting itself with integrity and common understanding, cannot be battered down even by the falsehoods of a licentious press, and consequently still less by the press as restrained within the legal and wholesome limits of truth. This experiment was wanting for the world to demonstrate the falsehood of the pretext that freedom of the press is incompatible with orderly government. I have never, therefore, even contradicted the thousands of calumnies so industriously propagated against myself. But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength by recalling it within the pale of truth. Within that, it is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and of civil liberty." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807. ME 11:155
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