Posted on 08/14/2015 8:19:19 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
In what may be the most important development in the 2016 Presidential race to date, Donald Trump has announced, and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) office has confirmed, that the GOP front-runner is consulting with the Alabama Senator in crafting his immigration plan for the future of America.
The real estate mogul’s announcement will send shock waves through Washington D.C. and all across primary states.
Trump, whose campaign has focused primarily on issues of immigration and trade, has seen a meteoric rise since entering the race, with throngs of supporters across the country rocketing him to the top of every single poll, despite an extraordinary effort of establishment Republicans to take him down. Republican pundits have lobbed every imaginable accusation at Trump. Yet these same pundits, while seemingly furious at the man, have demonstrated no similar concern, angst, or passion about the dissolution of our southern border, the rampant exploitation of guest-worker programs, the collapse of middle class wages, and the growing illegal immigrant crime wave.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Interesting that the Germans don’t like Trump. Usually they admire excellence.
He certainly is these days, to some very thirsty ears and hearts.
They are collectivists who hate ‘cowboys’ because he is the figure of an individualist, the figure of a rank capitalist.
His gaffes are the tools with which they characterize him -I almost said caricature him but that would be unfair to the Europeans.
His biography is not one of unmixed excellence with four bankruptcies. In Germany the idea is to build excellence with training etc into the enterprise to prevent it failing. They remain the world’s third largest exporter with a quarter of our population.
Groovy move
The old saw, a poll is but a snapshot in time is right but a series of snapshots linked together make a motion picture, a trend if you will. We are trying to link a lot of snapshots together to give us a trend that will prevent the GOPe from coronating another RINO because we saw what happened when we squabble among ourselves taking conservatives out seriatim and leaving the way open for the RINO.
So, partly out of fear we see a juggernaut for Trump when it is way too early. The polls are not even apples to apples yet.
I stand corrected.
Nevertheless, I do not think Trump is the "one trick pony" his detractors seem to believe. Whether by choreography or improvisation, he has defied expectations, and that under unprecedented opposition.
While I understand your and Krauthammer's thesis, without some galvanizing act I can't see anyone else catching him with a slow steady ground game.
His initial appeal may indeed be a nominal 20%, but success has its own appeal, and thinking in terms of an absolute cap seems a bit premature to me.
Yep
I was there when it started
Across from the Plaza and Sherry
59/5th
It had languished for a good while
He banged it out with unions and city bs In about 4 months for 3 million and under budget and schedule for cost only.....he milked the PR though
Wanted it called Trump rink and referred to it as “his” in media events which drove the Commies running the boroughs crazy
It was around 86/87 and the city had worked on it for over 10 years and 12 million wasted in red tape and graft
The woolman rink or something
I skated there with all my girlfriends and one wife
Trump really publicized it like crazy and his calling it his rink really pissed off that red diaper baby Stern who was like Kochs right hand man
Koch always kinda liked the Donald
It’s funny now as a former Manhattanite watching him plow thru the race for POTUS
Trump is a one-off no question
I agree with those points but that does not make the original decision a good one. I can’t get to my computer right now so I can’t use Dragon which mercifully spares you a lengthly reply which is needed here.
Bottom line: we went to war against the wrong country for the right reasons.
We are in the early innings so we are both entitled to our own guesses, er, analyses.
WooHoo!!!! Everybody pile on Nathan while we can!
Do you give any credence to the "flank the crazy Muslims" theory?
Wow! This is great news and very exciting!
This is hilarious!
Trump has a meeting with Jeff Sessions and the praise comes flowing from his supporters.
I have yet to hear Trump endorse one part of Sen Sessions extensive position on immigration (both legal and illegal).
If I have a meeting with Bernie Sanders, it does not mean I endorse socialism. I just had a meeting.
But so many of Trump supporters are not thinking at all.
Do not get me wrong, I love the energy and unapologetic strength of Trump’s recent stance on illegals, but I know this man from years of following him.....he is not a conservative.
I fear there will be quite a hangover when Trump turns his bombastic language against conservative positions.....and it is going to happen. This is what populists do.
PS: Walker didn’t just meet with Sessions, but adopted his entire immigration stand very publicly. Cruz supporters dismissed it as showmanship and grandstanding, saying Walker is GOP-e based on past words, but Trump is a solid conservative and we can safely ignore his past words.
FReepers should be smarter than this.
Rereading these thoughts, I think I can say they stand the test of time going back nine years but it would be misplaced of me to take pride in that because so much of the pessimism contained therein has only become realism.
Here is the consolidated reply:
So This Is How Iraq Ends, in Futility, Bitterness, and Recrimination
After nearly 5000 body bags, tens of thousands of limbs, and $1 trillion, Obama is skedaddling from Iraq, vainly attempting to put the best face on the ignominy of our departure which is demanded by the very Iraqi nation we built. A war, originally started to make a safe from weapons of mass destruction, was waged against a psychotic dictator who had no such weapons. We succeeded in regime change, which was a good thing and proceeded to build a nation, which was a futile endeavor. Somehow, we lost sight of our national strategic interests for which we sacrificed our blood and treasure.
Today, we are facing a new Islamist crescent, dominated by Iran, and running from Pakistan nearly to the Atlantic shores of northern Africa. One of these nations is in possession of nuclear weapons and a second, even more fanatical than the other, will soon be possessed of such a weapon and poses a real existential danger to the security of the United States. The original justification for the war, to prevent Iraq from building an atomic bomb and passing it off to terrorists who would smuggle it into America and destroy one or more of our cities, is even more threatening today than it was the day before we commenced hostilities.
Whatever gains we have made in making the American people safer have been achieved almost exclusively by virtue of national technical means and by old-fashioned spy vs. spy sleuthing.
Our national security posture is substantially weaker. The nation has contributed to its own bankruptcy by squandering trillions of dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan. The war has estranged us from Europe and left us vulnerable to attack through that flank. It has aroused and energized the Arab street. The Mexican border remains a backdoor open to infiltration by terrorists carrying weapons of mass destruction as small as a mason jar full of germs. At the other end of the spectrum, Iran is at the verge of obtaining an atomic weapon and the means to explode it in the heavens over the homeland which could knock out our electric grids and leave tens of millions to die of thirst and starvation because they would be beyond the nation's power to succor them.
Whatever chance we had to prevent Iran from getting the bomb was always limited to a military strike and that option was swallowed up in the sands of Iraq.
Out of bitterness and frustration, we have turned upon one another in recrimination, even blaming John McCain of all people.
As a result of the American electorate's frustration with the war, Republicans were driven from office on Capitol Hill just days after the piece quoted below was written and they were later driven from the Oval Office. Today, we are ruled over by a potential tyrant whose allegiance to this country is dubious. His elevation to the highest office in the world could not have happened without our involvement in Iraq.
The following is a post which I first put up on these boards on November 4, 2006. As it says at the foot of the post, I invite your reaction. I do not repost this out of vanity but out of frustration and an aching heart. Above all, I ask what have we learned and where are we going?
Here is the piece:
Before the invasion I wrote that "God help me" I wanted the invasion to begin as soon as possible before the inspection regime or the French could so undermine the administration that the war could not be started.
Unlike these treacherous neocons, I will admit that I was wrong. In my own defense I can say, for what it's worth, that I was never seduced by the idea of imposing Wilsonian democracy on Iraq, although I of course would not have spurned it, but I saw the war in what I arrogantly believed were grown up and real world considerations of geopolitics. I wanted forward bases in the Mideast from which to strike at Syria and Iran if intimidation alone did not work. I wanted us to get all our hands on the oil fields to deprive Muslim terrorists of petrodollars with which to buy weapons of mass destruction. I wanted us to demonstrate to the Muslim world that no leader could sleep safe if he played a double game with America. I wanted to so intimidate the Muslim world with our military prowess that they themselves would turn against the terrorists in their midst because I believed, and still believe, that the only way we ultimately can win this war is to turn the sane Muslims against the crazies. And, of course, I wanted a regime change as the only effective defense against WMD's in Iraq. My mistake, and I believe Bush's, was to underestimate the tenacity of the Muslim belief system and to see the war in a two dimensional geographical box, like a game of checkers, where squares were to be taken and held.
Not only was I wrong but the result has been calamitous and every one of the "strategic" reasons for waging war in Iraq have been stood on its head. I suspect that the main reason there has been no terrorist attack on the heartland is because Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, as well as Iran, are quite content to see America founder in Iraq. Iran, likewise, is the big winner from all of this as it moves closer to upsetting the entire balance of power in the Middle East when it acquires the bomb and perhaps fashions a Shi'ite Crescent running to the Mediterranean Sea. I believe my error came out of the false understanding of the nature of the global intergenerational war against terrorism: that somehow it was a war which could be conceived of in geographical terms. It is not-- although if it is lost the ultimate impact will be geographical. This is a war for the soul of Islam and we must not lose our own souls before we can save theirs.
Perhaps the very worst legacy of this whole Irak tragedy is that we are a daily demonstrating to the world that we are presently incapable of winning asymmetrical wars of terrorism. The Israelis just proved that in Lebanon. The people in Afghanistan are beginning to understand it. The tide in the Muslim world is rising against us as their fear drains away. So the goal of saving the soul of Islam has been made more elusive.
To compound the catastrophe, the "socialist" world of Cuba and Venezuela, Russia and China can read the daily events in Iraq and are emboldened as they have not been since the first Iraq war and seem eager to make mischief 1960s style.
Meanwhile, we've increased the danger of losing our own soul as defined as the will to win. Western Europe already lacks it and half of America possesses an anemic red blood count. Another tragedy of the Iraq war might will be to cause the installation of a Democrat regime in America which will align itself with the appeasers in Europe and so fatally succumb to jihad. The danger is as near as next Tuesday when, if the Republicans suffer a stinging repudiation of the polls, Bush might be left in as feckless a state as Gerald Ford was during the final pathetic agony of Vietnam.
Our dilemma is that we cannot win in Iraq and we cannot abandon it. We cannot win until we learn how to fight asymmetrical insurgencies against our occupation. We show no evidence that we have any idea how to do this at a price America is willing to pay. The training up of Iraqi forces, especially the police, is clearly a failure. So we are mired in a situation that spills our blood and empties our treasury and turns our friends against us. Meanwhile, the existential threat against America, represented by Iran's possession of a nuclear weapon which it passes off to terrorists to explode in the heartland, grows daily closer to reality. Our efforts in Iraq have so attenuated our military force that we probably cannot mount an invasion and air power alone probably cannot interdict Iran's nuclear program. This is well known to the whole world and especially to Iran so our ability to intimidate the Iranians into good behavior has bled into the sands of Iraq along with the Bush Doctrine.
Soon it will be fashionable even in conservative circles to blame Bush just as the neocons now are doing so ignominiously. My belief is that the miscalculation was to presume that the Iraqis, read Muslims, would behave rationally when presented with the opportunity for self-determination and democracy. It is not really that we made fatal tactical military mistakes in Iraq which we can lay at the feet of Bush or Rumsfeld, rather it is the nature of the traditional Muslim society that caused all of this bloodshed to be inevitable. Iraq has revealed that America has no stomach for the pain which must be endured to see such a traditional Muslim society through to Western democratic values.
Asymmetrical warfare works against armies of occupation but these tactics do not work against 21st-century Blitzkrieg, American-style. I fear that the American military will engage in another Vietnam style soul-searching and draw the wrong conclusion, that military force does not work at all in the war against terrorism. I am tempted, therefore, to argue that it was the occupation and not the war itself which was the bridge too far. After Iraq, I am humble enough to admit and perhaps it is I who misses the lesson.
I am well aware that new military adventures will be virtually impossible to sell until the inevitable happens: a strike is made against the homeland. If Al Qaeda strikes with anything less than a mortal blow, ie. a series of nuclear explosions, America might yet be able to find its finest hour. But strike it must if Al Qaeda intends fulfill its ambitions. God grant that they settle for half a loaf with an intensity level not exceeding 911.
We must fashion a new policy, a new strategy for winning this intergenerational worldwide war against a portion of 1.4 billion Muslims who inhabit the earth. We must turn rational Islam against this jihad or we will perish because we will rot from the inside out or we will simply surrender after our cities are turned into glass. We cannot hope to prevail if we eschew all military operations as ultimately counterproductive. We must find what works. Above all, we must not lose our soul.
I would be grateful for your reaction to all this.
regardless of what transpires, you are in my prayers.
About time somebody consulted with Mr Sessions.
Buzz Paterson doesn’t agree. Many others don’t agree. Iraq was the primary sponsor of terror, giving $10,000 to every family that produced a jihadi. He was an absolute tyrant in his own country, per Amir Taheri and others, getting rid of subordinates in a paranoid frenzy the way Stalin did. Anyone who doubts the existence of the WMD need only ask the Persians and the Kurds, or read the news reports of ISIS finding and using them, or stop in a bookstore and ask for Christopher Hitchens’s book and turn to the photo section. Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait and audacious approach to the Saudi border showed that his ambitions in the Middle East were megalomanical and dangerous. We brought democracy and peace to Iraq and Obama trashed it for his own electoral ambitions.
Everyone now conveniently has amnesia on this issue. Monday-morning quarterbacking, but even worse than that because the decision WAS correct at the time. Obama’s destruction of every act of valor and drop of blood shed by our troops does not make the original decision wrong. An isolationist recently informed me that Saddam was justified in invading Kuwait because Kuwait was drilling diagonally to obtain oil that was in Iraqi territory. I ask you.
Wrote the answer to 209 before reading your long post. Interesting essay. It partly corroborates what I posted, but does not deal with the neo-isolationist naysayers and indiscriminate Bush-bashers who now want to change history so they can be thought of as being correct.
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