Well, it's outrageous.
WATCH:
Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education - from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Well, it's outrageous.
WATCH:
Here's Sean Hannity from earlier tonight:
Hannity asked Barr several times what she would say to Jarrett if she were watching. It took her a while to get around to something, but eventually Barr said:
Let’s talk about it. Let’s really turn this into a teachable moment. We need to talk about race and everything that’s connected to it. Her skin tone is like mine, and I’m brown. I didn’t know she was African-American. I assumed because she was from Iran and she lived in Iran for such a long time. If she’s watching, I’m so sorry you thought I was racist and you thought that my tweet was racist because it wasn’t. It was political. I’m sorry for the misunderstanding that caused my ill-worded tweet. I’m sorry that you feel harmed and hurt. I never meant that."For that, I apologize. I never meant to hurt anybody or say anything negative about an entire race of people. My 30 years of work can attest to that,” she added.
And then: "Plus, I'd tell her she needs to get a new haircut."
If the last part sounds insensitive, well, sure, but it also speaks to what made the interview so bizarre and unsatisfying: Barr is a comic, first and foremost, and she could not stop being one Thursday night...
President Trump, seeking to stanch a national furor, said on Tuesday that he misspoke at his Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin, and meant to say that he does in fact see Russia as the culprit that interfered in the 2016 election, just as U.S. intelligence agencies have found.
The president's new version was unlikely to satisfy many critics. It is undercut by his full, widely watched remarks on Monday, which gave weight to Putin's denials while criticizing the United States.
To many, Trump had missed his chance to speak truth to power alongside Russia's president. He made his correction to reporters at the White House, as he sat alongside Republican lawmakers.
In his attempt to walk back his remarks in Finland, Trump said he accepts the consensus of American intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the election. Yet in a sign that he cannot fully accept those findings — seeing them as a challenge to his election legitimacy — he added that the perpetrators "could be other people also." That assertion is not supported by known intelligence.
At a Helsinki news conference, as Putin looked on, Trump said the following to a reporter's question about whether he believed U.S. intelligence agencies, or Putin's denials of interference: "My people came to me...they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it's not Russia. I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be" Russia.
On Tuesday, however, he said this: "The sentence should have been 'I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be' Russia."
"I have the strongest respect for our intelligence agencies, headed by my people," Trump told the reporters at a hastily scheduled session ahead of his meeting with some House Republicans about additional tax cuts.
He also said, "We're doing everything in our power to prevent Russian interference in 2018," referring to midterm elections.
Trump afterward ignored questions that reporters shouted, including whether he would criticize Putin, as White House aides pushed them out of the Cabinet room.
The day before, the president had blamed the United States for sour relations with Russia and criticized the FBI, Democrats, Hillary Clinton and the special counsel's investigation of Russia's election activities and possible Trump campaign complicity — all as Putin, occasionally smiling, stood feet away in the Finland presidential palace.
The scene almost instantly drew condemnation as it played out on television screens in the U.S. Trump, who repeatedly praised and deferred to Putin, was criticized by foreign policy and national security veterans as weak, an insult that is particularly galling to him.
In two subsequent interviews with Fox News and in his tweets after the summit, Trump sounded defensive, and more surprised and frustrated by the reaction than contrite. He did not, however, make any attempt to correct his remarks until more than 24 hours later.
"I came back and I said: 'What is going on? What's the big deal?" Trump said Tuesday...
"European allies have freeloaded off U.S. defense while rolling up huge trade surpluses at our expense. Those days are over. Europeans are going to stop stealing our markets and start paying for their own defense. There will be no Cold War II." Buchanan: https://t.co/smXDYWl4ZH
— The American Conservative (@amconmag) July 17, 2018
Helsinki showed that Trump meant what he said when he declared repeatedly, “Peace with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
On Syria, Trump indicated that he and Putin are working with Bibi Netanyahu, who wants all Iranian forces and Iran-backed militias kept far from the Golan Heights. As for U.S. troops in Syria, says Trump, they will be coming out after ISIS is crushed, and we are 98 percent there.
That is another underlying message here: America is coming home from foreign wars and will be shedding foreign commitments.
Both before and after the Trump-Putin meeting, the cable news coverage was as hostile and hateful toward the president as any this writer has ever seen. The media may not be the “enemy of the people” Trump says they are, but many are implacable enemies of this president.
Some wanted Trump to emulate Nikita Khrushchev, who blew up the Paris summit in May 1960 over a failed U.S. intelligence operation — the U-2 spy plane shot down over the Urals just weeks earlier.
Khrushchev had demanded that Ike apologize. Ike refused, and Khrushchev exploded. Some media seemed to be hoping for just such a confrontation.
When Trump spoke of the “foolishness and stupidity” of the U.S. foreign policy establishment that contributed to this era of animosity in U.S.-Russia relations, what might he have had in mind?
Was it the U.S. provocatively moving NATO into Russia’s front yard after the collapse of the USSR?
Was it the U.S. invasion of Iraq to strip Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction he did not have that plunged us into endless wars of the Middle East?
Was it U.S. support of Syrian rebels determined to oust Bashar Assad, leading to ISIS intervention and a seven-year civil war with half a million dead, a war which Putin eventually entered to save his Syrian ally?
Was it George W. Bush’s abrogation of Richard Nixon’s ABM treaty and drive for a missile defense that caused Putin to break out of the Reagan INF treaty and start deploying cruise missiles to counter it?
Was it U.S. complicity in the Kiev coup that ousted the elected pro-Russian regime that caused Putin to seize Crimea to hold onto Russia’s Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol?
Many Putin actions we condemn were reactions to what we did.
Russia annexed Crimea bloodlessly. But did not the U.S. bomb Serbia for 78 days to force Belgrade to surrender her cradle province of Kosovo?
How was that more moral than what Putin did in Crimea?
If Russian military intelligence hacked into the emails of the DNC, exposing how they stuck it to Bernie Sanders, Trump says he did not collude in it. Is there, after two years, any proof that he did?
Trump insists Russian meddling had no effect on the outcome in 2016 and he is not going to allow media obsession with Russiagate to interfere with establishing better relations.
Former CIA Director John Brennan rages that, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki … was … treasonous. … He is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”
Well, as Patrick Henry said long ago, “If this be treason, make the most of it!”
Throughout the 2016 campaign, many people opposed to Donald Trump’s candidacy were nonetheless reluctant to endorse Hillary Clinton, in part because of her relative hawkishness. Candidate Trump had a decades-long career in the public eye that demonstrated plenty of reason to worry he would be a disastrous president, but he lacked the long career in public service that fueled worries about Clinton’s approach to the use of force, and her alleged desire to expand executive war-making powers past what she inherited from her predecessor.More (FWIW).
Six months into Trump’s presidency, we now have enough data to assess his own approach. The results are clear: Judging from Trump’s embrace of the use of air power — the signature tactic of U.S. military intervention — he is the most hawkish president in modern history. Under Trump, the United States has dropped about 20,650 bombs through July 31, or 80 percent the number dropped under Obama for the entirety of 2016. At this rate, Trump will exceed Obama’s last-year total by Labor Day.
In Iraq and Syria, data shows that the United States is dropping bombs at unprecedented levels. In July, the coalition to defeat the Islamic State (read: the United States) dropped 4,313 bombs, 77 percent more than it dropped last July. In June, the number was 4,848 — 1,600 more bombs than were dropped in any one month under President Barack Obama since the anti-ISIS campaign started three years ago.
In Afghanistan, the number of weapons released has also shot up since Trump took office. April saw more bombs dropped in the country since the height of Obama’s troop surge in 2012. That was also the month that the United States bombed Afghanistan’s Mamand Valley with the largest non-nuclear bomb ever dropped in combat.
Trump has also escalated U.S. military involvement in non-battlefield settings — namely Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. In the last 193 days of the Obama presidency, there were 21 lethal counterterrorism operations across these three countries. Trump has quintupled that number, conducting at least 92 such operations in Yemen, seven in Somalia, and four in Pakistan.
Hand in hand with Trump’s enthusiasm for air power comes a demonstrated tolerance for civilian casualties. Increased air power in Iraq and Syria has resulted in unprecedented levels of civilian deaths. Even by the military’s own count, civilian casualties have soared since Trump took office, though independent monitors tally the deaths as many as ten times higher. In Afghanistan, Trump’s tolerance for killing civilians has led to 67 percent more civilian casualties in his first six months than in the first half of 2016, according to the United Nations.
The expansion of air power and acceptance of civilian harm are together a problem, but they are made worse by the fact that they are occurring without any diplomatic strategy to wind down the wars...
Fox News finally retracts its story on the Seth Rich investigation https://t.co/WTF1ecrYMU— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) May 23, 2017
A remarkable rant by Hannity on his radio show re: Seth Rich. Read for yourself. "I retracted nothing!" https://t.co/t523hnckwd pic.twitter.com/rY0Wu0FOkS— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) May 23, 2017
I #standwithsean - gentleman, patriot & mensch. Grace under fire. See you on Hannity 10pm. https://t.co/JUF2m7htx7 pic.twitter.com/svH8KOyMTH
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) April 24, 2017
"Stand by Me. "
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