When people resort to comparing someone or an action to that of Hitler they obviously intend to besmirch. When they do so, whether they realize it or not, the dirt they throw lands on them as well.
Unlike Krauthmmer, who used words as eloquent darts, those who seek to nail their opponents by using/associating the word Hitler undercut their own efforts by hammering themselves. (See 1 below.)
External sources, including billionaires whose financing benefit from chaos, are behind the various issues that create discord and distrust. The best defense to this new form of propagandist intrusion is clear headed reasoning and the ability to separate the fake from the truth. The question is, are we able to reach this required level of mature thinking? The jury is out but the evidence is not convincing. Time will tell and now that Krauthammer's writing/thinking is no more an additional assist is unavailable.
https://www.washingtonpost.
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Don't sweat climate change? (See 2 below.)
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Flawed Hillary could have saved the nation from a lot of trauma and expense.. (See 3 below.)
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This spoof was written by a long time friend of dear friends and fellow memo readers. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) Trump’s Critics Desecrate the Holocaust
Separating alien families was an inhumane policy. Likening it to the Nazi genocide is obscene.
By Jay Winik
Almost everyone, including President Trump, agrees that separating alien children from their parents and housing them in detention centers was an untenable policy that needed to be changed. Some have said, not without justification, that the images were reminiscent of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
But another comparison is indefensible. “Other governments have separated mothers and children,” tweeted Michael Hayden, who directed the Central Intelligence Agency under George W. Bush —with a photo of railroad tracks leading into the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. “Children are being marched away to showers,” said MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, “just like the Nazis said that they were taking people to the showers and then they never came back.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said in a television interview: “This is the United States of America. It isn’t Nazi Germany, and there’s a difference.”
Mrs. Feinstein is right. There is no comparison.
Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were rounded up and packed into cattle cars, with little air or light, no food and virtually no water, for a harrowing two- to three-day trip to Auschwitz. They rode in terror and anticipation, having no idea what was in store for them at the destination. Exhausted and scared, they frequently had to stand for the entire trip. Mothers clutched sons; daughters held on to fathers; children gripped both parents’ hands; grandparents and the infirm struggled to stay alive. Many didn’t survive the journey.
When the trains arrived at Auschwitz, it was a scene of chaos, confusion and horror. After days trapped in darkened cattle cars, squinting into bright floodlights lining the tracks was almost unbearable. So was the stench, like nothing the captives had ever smelled before. They didn’t know it at the time, but it was the odor of burning human flesh and hair.
Outside, they heard all kinds of noises: German shepherds and Doberman pinschers barking loudly, and commands in German most of them couldn’t understand. When they stumbled out of the cattle cars, disoriented and anxious, timidly asking questions, the German shouted back, “Raus, raus, raus!” (“Out, out, out!”). In the distance, the prisoners saw a skyline of chimneys, with bright orange plumes of flame shooting into the clouds. They didn’t know that most of them would be ash within hours.
The SS separated the healthy males, slating them for work details while everyone else was taken to the gas chambers.
Invariably, mothers wanted to stay with their children. The SS would say, “good, good, stay with child.” Under a rain of baton blows, women, children and old men were marched into “changing rooms” and told to undress. The Germans told the prisoners that they were going to be “disinfected.” Then they tightly wedged some 2,000 people at a time into the chambers, where they saw what looked like shower heads.
The massive airtight doors were locked with an iron bolt. It was dark. Zyklon B was released, and the screaming began. The prisoners huddled together, screamed together, gasped for air together. While children violently hugged their parents, hundreds of people tried to push their way to the door, trampling children in the process. In the dark, skulls were crushed and hundreds of people were battered beyond recognition. The bloodcurdling screams turned into a death rattle, then a gasp. Within 20 minutes, the job was done.
The bodies lay in heaps, every one of them dead—as many people as were cut down in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg; two-thirds of the 9/11 death toll. The bodies were then burned, the ashes used as filler for German roads and walking paths. Within hours, the Nazis would repeat the process, extinguishing another 2,000 human lives.
As for the prisoners who were selected to work in the camps, the Germans stripped them of their identities, referring to them instead by numbers tattooed on their forearms. Prisoners were forced to stand half-naked, doused with buckets of ice-cold water, or lashed 50 times with a whip. They were awakened at 4 a.m., forced to do backbreaking work for 12 hours with virtually no rest or food. They slept almost naked, with no blankets in temperatures often below freezing in the winter. Most died within weeks of arriving at the camp.
Between the gas chamber and the work detail, more than a million people were murdered this way at Auschwitz.
The debate over the child-separation policy is a morally weighty one. How does the U.S. balance controlling the border with the obligation to treat people, including illegal aliens, humanely?
But the comparison to the Holocaust is an obscene lie.
Mr. Winik, formerly the inaugural historian-in-residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, is author of “1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History.”
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2)Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up?
James E. Hansen wiped sweat from his brow. Outside it was a record-high 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, as the NASA scientist testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources during a prolonged heat wave, which he decided to cast as a climate event of cosmic significance. He expressed to the senators his “high degree of confidence” in “a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.”
2)Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up?
James E. Hansen wiped sweat from his brow. Outside it was a record-high 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, as the NASA scientist testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources during a prolonged heat wave, which he decided to cast as a climate event of cosmic significance. He expressed to the senators his “high degree of confidence” in “a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.”
With that testimony and an accompanying paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Mr. Hansen lit the bonfire of the greenhouse vanities, igniting a world-wide debate that continues today about the energy structure of the entire planet. President Obama’s environmental policies were predicated on similar models of rapid, high-cost warming. But the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s predictions affords an opportunity to see how well his forecasts have done—and to reconsider environmental policy accordingly.
Mr. Hansen’s testimony described three possible scenarios for the future of carbon dioxide emissions. He called Scenario A “business as usual,” as it maintained the accelerating emissions growth typical of the 1970s and ’80s. This scenario predicted the earth would warm 1 degree Celsius by 2018. Scenario B set emissions lower, rising at the same rate today as in 1988. Mr. Hansen called this outcome the “most plausible,” and predicted it would lead to about 0.7 degree of warming by this year. He added a final projection, Scenario C, which he deemed highly unlikely: constant emissions beginning in 2000. In that forecast, temperatures would rise a few tenths of a degree before flatlining after 2000.
Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios—enough to determine which was closest to reality. And the winner is Scenario C. Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago.
What about Mr. Hansen’s other claims? Outside the warming models, his only explicit claim in the testimony was that the late ’80s and ’90s would see “greater than average warming in the southeast U.S. and the Midwest.” No such spike has been measured in these regions.
As observed temperatures diverged over the years from his predictions, Mr. Hansen doubled down. In a 2007 case on auto emissions, he stated in his deposition that most of Greenland’s ice would soon melt, raising sea levels 23 feet over the course of 100 years. Subsequent research published in Nature magazine on the history of Greenland’s ice cap demonstrated this to be impossible. Much of Greenland’s surface melts every summer, meaning rapid melting might reasonably be expected to occur in a dramatically warming world. But not in the one we live in. The Nature study found only modest ice loss after 6,000 years of much warmer temperatures than human activity could ever sustain.
Several more of Mr. Hansen’s predictions can now be judged by history. Have hurricanes gotten stronger, as Mr. Hansen predicted in a 2016 study? No. Satellite data from 1970 onward shows no evidence of this in relation to global surface temperature. Have storms caused increasing amounts of damage in the U.S.? Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show no such increase in damage, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product. How about stronger tornadoes? The opposite may be true, as NOAA data offers some evidence of a decline. The list of what didn’t happen is long and tedious.
The problem with Mr. Hansen’s models—and the U.N.’s—is that they don’t consider more-precise measures of how aerosol emissions counter warming caused by greenhouse gases. Several newer climate models account for this trend and routinely project about half the warming predicted by U.N. models, placing their numbers much closer to observed temperatures. The most recent of these was published in April by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry in the Journal of Climate, a reliably mainstream journal.
These corrected climate predictions raise a crucial question: Why should people world-wide pay drastic costs to cut emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made?
On the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s galvanizing testimony, it’s time to acknowledge that the rapid warming he predicted isn’t happening. Climate researchers and policy makers should adopt the more modest forecasts that are consistent with observed temperatures.
That would be a lukewarm policy, consistent with a lukewarming planet.
Mr. Michaels is director and Mr. Maue an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science.
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3)Hamartia is a personal error in a protagonist’s personality, which brings about his tragic downfall in a tragedy. This defect in a hero’s personality is also known as a “tragic flaw.”
Mr. Hansen’s testimony described three possible scenarios for the future of carbon dioxide emissions. He called Scenario A “business as usual,” as it maintained the accelerating emissions growth typical of the 1970s and ’80s. This scenario predicted the earth would warm 1 degree Celsius by 2018. Scenario B set emissions lower, rising at the same rate today as in 1988. Mr. Hansen called this outcome the “most plausible,” and predicted it would lead to about 0.7 degree of warming by this year. He added a final projection, Scenario C, which he deemed highly unlikely: constant emissions beginning in 2000. In that forecast, temperatures would rise a few tenths of a degree before flatlining after 2000.
Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios—enough to determine which was closest to reality. And the winner is Scenario C. Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago.
As observed temperatures diverged over the years from his predictions, Mr. Hansen doubled down. In a 2007 case on auto emissions, he stated in his deposition that most of Greenland’s ice would soon melt, raising sea levels 23 feet over the course of 100 years. Subsequent research published in Nature magazine on the history of Greenland’s ice cap demonstrated this to be impossible. Much of Greenland’s surface melts every summer, meaning rapid melting might reasonably be expected to occur in a dramatically warming world. But not in the one we live in. The Nature study found only modest ice loss after 6,000 years of much warmer temperatures than human activity could ever sustain.
Several more of Mr. Hansen’s predictions can now be judged by history. Have hurricanes gotten stronger, as Mr. Hansen predicted in a 2016 study? No. Satellite data from 1970 onward shows no evidence of this in relation to global surface temperature. Have storms caused increasing amounts of damage in the U.S.? Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show no such increase in damage, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product. How about stronger tornadoes? The opposite may be true, as NOAA data offers some evidence of a decline. The list of what didn’t happen is long and tedious.
The problem with Mr. Hansen’s models—and the U.N.’s—is that they don’t consider more-precise measures of how aerosol emissions counter warming caused by greenhouse gases. Several newer climate models account for this trend and routinely project about half the warming predicted by U.N. models, placing their numbers much closer to observed temperatures. The most recent of these was published in April by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry in the Journal of Climate, a reliably mainstream journal.
These corrected climate predictions raise a crucial question: Why should people world-wide pay drastic costs to cut emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made?
On the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s galvanizing testimony, it’s time to acknowledge that the rapid warming he predicted isn’t happening. Climate researchers and policy makers should adopt the more modest forecasts that are consistent with observed temperatures.
That would be a lukewarm policy, consistent with a lukewarming planet.
Mr. Michaels is director and Mr. Maue an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science.
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3)Hamartia is a personal error in a protagonist’s personality, which brings about his tragic downfall in a tragedy. This defect in a hero’s personality is also known as a “tragic flaw.”
Hillary’s Hamartia
Hillary Clinton could have spared the country hours of wasted investigations, debates, and near civil war had she just made three easy ethical and logical choices.
One: Had she, as Secretary of State, used a standard Department of State email server for her official correspondence, there would have been no Inspector General’s 500-page plus report. Indeed, there would have been no three-year-long email scandal that has all but destroyed the reputation of the Washington hierarchy of the FBI.
In other words, there would have been no need for all the distortions by Clinton, the FBI, and the Department of Justice. Just think of it: no bit-bleaching of Clinton hard drives, no smashing of mobile devices, and no secret meeting between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac.
Nor would there have been embarrassing press conferences by former FBI Director James Comey during the 2016 campaign. Loyalists like Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin would have had no need to lie about their knowledge of their boss’s illegal server.
There would been no need for silly euphemisms inserted into the FBI reports to exonerate Clinton. No investigation of Anthony Weiner’s laptop would have followed. No deceptions would have arisen about “yoga” and a “wedding” as the topics of some 30,000 deleted Clinton emails.
There would have been no conflict of interest of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who investigated the Clinton email scandal, shortly after his wife had received Clinton-related campaign donations. McCabe would not have had any private server emails in the first place over which to exhibit his lack of judgment.
Two: Had Hillary Clinton campaigned more in the key purple swing states—especially Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—during the key last month of the election, she might well have won the Electoral College. Instead, quite delusionally, she sought a “mandate,” headquartered in Brooklyn and camping out in unwinnable red states like Georgia and Arizona, squandering resources as a frenetic Trump pilfered her supposedly secure Midwestern base.
Much of the illegal behavior at the Department of Justice and FBI was predicated on the administrative state assuming that Clinton would win the election. Had she done what all the experts and polls predicted—campaigned logically and won her predicted landslide—we would currently have no scandals in quite another sense.
A President Hillary Clinton would have squashed the 2016 email investigation of herself. No FBI or DOJ careerist would have been so naive as to risk a career pursuing it. There would be no inquiries into 2016 FISA court abuse. The lovebird texting of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok would either never have emerged, or would have been dismissed as innocent overzealous supportive banter by President Clinton.
No one would care that a President Clinton had silenced inquiries into how her campaign had hired Christopher Steele to dig up dirt on her rival Donald Trump.
Under a President Clinton, we also would have had no idea that the Obama FBI had inserted a spy into the Trump campaign in the person of Stefan Halper.
No one would have known or probably cared that the Obama national security team had unmasked the names of U.S. citizens swept up with FISA court surveillance and leaked them to the press. Indeed, a President Clinton would likely have envisioned overzealous careerists who may have broken the law on her behalf as loyalists to be rewarded, rather than as lawbreakers to be referred to federal prosecutors.
Three: Had the defeated Hillary Clinton only accepted the results of the Electoral College, like all other defeated candidates, there would have been no post-election collusion hysteria. Had Clinton acted magnanimously like other sorely disappointed losers—Jimmy Carter in 1980, Walter Mondale in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988, George H.W. Bush in 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012—there would have been no accusations of scandal.
We would not have heard that the voting machines in particular states were supposedly rigged (they were not). Third-party candidate Jill Stein would not have sued over the results. There would have been no pathetic effort to warp the postelection voting of the Electoral College. The entire Russian collusion myth and the misadventures of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations arose largely because an embittered Clinton wished to blame almost anything but her own ill-starred campaign for her loss.
Instead, an embittered postelection Clinton went on an endless global book tour. She tweeted as if she were Trump. She joined the “Resistance.” She hit the talk shows.
In these venues, she has blamed almost everything and everyone for her humiliating defeat: the Russians, James Comey, the cash-poor Democratic National Committee, red-state racists and sexists, bullying husbands who silence their wives, the Electoral College, the deplorables and irredeemables, the WikiLeaks email revelations, right-wing media, the mainstream media in general, Republican efforts at voter suppression, right-wing donors, Steve Bannon and Breitbart News, Facebook, Bernie Sanders and his socialist agenda, Barack Obama, Netflix, fake news accounts, the Republican National Committee, her own campaign staff, Jill Stein, Anthony Weiner, and on and on it goes.
The irony is that as the 2016 campaign wound down and most experts and pollsters forecast a 90% likelihood of a Trump defeat, both President Obama and Clinton had warned Trump not to be a sore loser. Obama had condescendingly advised likely losing candidate Trump to stop whining. Obama sermonized that it was absolutely impossible for any foreign nation to tamper with a U.S. election (and by extension equally impossible for Trump to win).
Clinton seconded Obama’s assertions. She chided the sputtering Trump campaign for questioning whether the 2016 election would in retrospect be fair.
Of course, to imagine what a more savvy, humble, and gracious Hillary Clinton might have done during and after the election is an exercise in futility.
Hillary Clinton is by nature sometimes clueless, often haughty, and characteristically vindictive. To understand her response to her defeat, it would be wise to turn to the Athenian tragedian Sophocles and other Greek authors.
Sophocles, Euripides, and the Greek epic poets, historians, and tragedians explore the idea of hamartia. Such an innate character flaw, such as Oedipus’s self-regard or Jason’s obtuseness, can be repressed, but it will inevitably resurface at the most inopportune moment. From Clinton’s cattle-future imbroglio and the “missing” Rose Law Firm files to the Uranium One and Clinton Foundation scandals, Clinton for over 40 years has never much worried about the wages of chronic deception and ends-justifying-the-means morality.
The next step in the slow cycle of classical self-destruction is koros—a greed or overreaching ambition that is the result of hamartia. It thus deludes the apparently successful into believing there will be few consequences to their excess. Koros makes self-reflection impossible. As first lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and a presidential candidate, Clinton saw no ostensible connection between her character flaws and a lack of success. Indeed, her fabrications, excesses, and deceptions previously led to ever-greater career advancement, and were seen as integral to her good fortune.
Koros—the mindset that there are no consequences to surrendering to innately destructive impulses—leads to hubris, or a pattern of blindness brought on by overweening arrogance. Hubris is why no one questioned why Hillary Clinton was using a private email server. No campaign aide or staffer risked suggesting to a hubristic Clinton that she was wasting her time campaigning in Georgia or in bitter defeat joining the Resistance.
The Greeks saw atê as the concrete result of hubris. Atê was synonymous with individual acts of abject folly. In the-emperor-has-no-clothes-
The final act in a multistoried Greek tragedy is the advent of Nemesis or divine retribution. At some point, the gods decide they’ve had enough of mortal excess, arrogance, and folly, and intervene to destroy the perpetrator—and often everyone in his or her vicinity.
Usually that happens at the pinnacle of the tragic hero’s perceived success, as in the case of a clueless but innately haughty King Oedipus of Thebes. In Clinton’s case, Nemesis approached in late 2016, when experts had all but coronated her as president-elect months before Election Day.
When Nemesis finally hit Clinton on November 8, 2016, she was stunned, unable to even extend a simple public gesture of concession on election night. From there, Nemesis took her on a downward spiral. Clinton descended from once polling as the most popular woman in the U.S. to a rather sad figure, scapegoating, weaving conspiracy theories, blame-gaming, and endlessly replaying the disaster of 2016—a sort of poor, blinded and dethroned Oedipus wandering in exile in the fashion of peripatetic former FBI Director James Comey, whose character and fate in some ways are similar to Clinton’s.
In sum, Clinton made a series of nearly inexplicable, but clearly disastrous decisions—assuming that she could set up an unlawful private server as Secretary of State, that her 2016 victory was foreordained, and that she would deny and seek to overturn rather than accept her defeat. At any time, easy and obvious choices would have spared her a great deal of humiliation and her associates and supporters disaster.
But then again, according to the classical belief in fate and necessity, Clinton may have had little choice after all—given that her innate flaws were a sort of bomb that was always ticking until blowing up at the most appropriately tragic time.
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4)
Foreign Policy by
Dummies
There seems to be some confusion about the president’s foreign policy, so here is a guide that might prove useful. By the policy-maker in chief, himself, as told to this writer during a nightmare.
* * *It starts with my devotion to the Rule of Awe. Unlike the wimps that proceeded me in office, and that goes all the way back to George Washington, who was so afraid of foreigners that he wanted to avoid any entanglements with them, I intend to inspire awe, to prove to our allies and enemies that I am Awe-full. I also want them to know that Zhou Enlai had it wrong when he tweeted that diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means. Not for this president. It’s the other way around. War is diplomacy by other means.
Diplomacy is so yesterday. Meeting after meeting to prepare for more meetings. I don’t need preparation. I can walk into a room and tell in an instant whether I can do business with the other guy. Just as I could when negotiating the bankruptcies of several of my businesses. Which is why the State Department doesn’t need experts that just cost a lot of money to brief me on stuff I don’t need to know in order to come out of a meeting and say I won. If there are some facts that are important, I’ll pick them up on Fox and Friends.Keep one thing in mind—every country has been ripping us off and now is the time to end that. Actually, not every country: Just our allies. Which is why we need a wall. Especially on our northern border. For one thing, a wall would keep out all the stuff Americans want to buy from Canada. For another, it would prevent Americans from going to Canada. Suppose I do decide to start a war, maybe with Germany to shut up that bossy Angela Merkel and let her peddle her cars somewhere else. Last time we had a war lots of Americans fled to Canada to avoid the draft, which I didn’t have to do because a doctor said I had bone spurs in my heels and “gave me a letter, a very strong letter on the heels.” [Ed: This is a direct quote, from the New York Times on August 1, 2016. The letter has never been produced.] Unless we build a wall on our northern border, those draft dodgers will do it again. Besides, if we had a wall that back-stabbing prime minister wouldn’t be able to come here and make annoying remarks about all the services Canadians buy from us to more than offset the goods we buy from them. Trudeau can’t con me. If we sell so much to Canada, why don’t I see any factories that turn out software, whatever that is, and use coal to run their boilers?An important part of our foreign policy is to distinguish friends from enemies, something my predecessors never got right, especially Harry Truman, who poured billions into European countries that now steal our jobs. Mexico refuses to pay for a wall and to stop all those illegals carrying drugs and babies from coming into our country. The Canadians won’t let our farmers sell to them. The Europeans are trying to tax our companies and fine them because they are monopolies, and American monopolies at that, and won’t pay their share of the cost of defending themselves from my soon-to-be friend Vladimir, who exports valuable poisons free of charge. The South Koreans won’t take our cars and cost us a fortune when we engage in war games that threaten our friends in North Korea. And Shinzo Abe is a lousy golfer.We need friends like Kim Jong-un. But he has to be handled carefully, like none of my predecessors could figure out how to do. According to the North Korean press Kim’s father shot a 38-under-par 34 on the 7,700-yard Pyongyang golf course the first time he picked up a set of clubs—not the kind used on dissidents, but the golf clubs that made their way through the embargo. And this on a course where most golfers struggle to break 90! That’s not fake news like we get from the bankrupt New York Times—it’s from the official North Korean newspaper.Kim has those genes so although I am being criticized for a summit performance at which I shrewdly traded away every position my weak-kneed diplomatic team insisted on for a photo op, I didn’t (yet) invite him to Mar-a-Lago for a round of golf. Because I know that the president of the United States is never supposed to lose. I’ll just play another round with Abe.
The key to the success of my foreign policy has been a clever selection of allies. My friend Rodrigo can teach us a thing or two about how to handle drug dealers—shoot any suspected dealers, no trial or even proof necessary. Vladimir Putin, who knows a thing or two about how to win elections, and how to influence ours, and how to acquire real estate from his neighbors, will come around after he is exposed to my personal charm. Kim is already a friend—if you doubt that then take a look at the buddy movie our security people made and Ia waved when I got back from Singapore, saying it assured denuked peace in our time.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++And China’s Xi has been a buddy from Day One, and will stop stealing our intellectual property (whatever that is) when he sees that America means business when we say we want him to cut back exports to us and send that stuff to ruin the economies of other countries.And if I am looking for a role model, which I don’t really need and none of my predecessors can provide, Xi, president-for-life, is the guy.
