President Donald Trump would be best served to simply ignore the provocations of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, a former acting director of the CIA said Friday, and is “making it worse” by replying with a show of force.
.. “We have a new president and Kim Jong Un is trying to challenge him, is trying to get him back to the negotiating table,” former CIA acting Director Mike Morell said Friday on “CBS This Morning,” praising former President Barack Obama for largely ignoring the North Korean regime’s efforts at saber rattling. “Kim Jong Un wants to get back to a situation where we give them gifts when they do something bad. And then we are also making it worse, right? With our bluster and by sending aircraft carriers in there, we’re raising the crisis.”
.. “It’s best to just ignore this guy and to deter him from ever using these weapons or selling them and to build our defenses,” said Morell
Sean Spicer is very Sorry about his Holocaust Comments
Spicer gets in the most trouble when he follows his boss’s thinking most closely—and things just get worse when he tries to pull in history, or facts, to justify the route that Trump has taken him on.
.. Indeed, before Spicer began comparing Assad to Hitler, it sounded as if he might be coming dangerously close to comparing footage of sarin-gas-attack victims to the cell-phone video, at which he had earlier expressed horror, of a passenger being removed from a United flight.
.. Then someone asked why Spicer thought any of that would lead Vladimir Putin to abandon Syria, Russia’s longtime ally, and that’s when Spicer’s difficulties really escalated. Looking for clarity, he turned to Hitler.
.. For Spicer to revert, as a default, to such terms in explaining why Assad is worse than Hitler suggests that he—and, it is a safe guess, others in the White House—are either not registering the implications of what their boss is saying or are doing so all too well.
.. President Trump has given an important job to a person not competent to carry it out. This is not a problem confined to Spicer; Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has also been entrusted with crucial tasks far beyond his experience. They are all playing with fire. Then again, in the Trump Administration, what would competent communications looks like?
.. President Trump has given an important job to a person not competent to carry it out. This is not a problem confined to Spicer; Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has also been entrusted with crucial tasks far beyond his experience. They are all playing with fire. Then again, in the Trump Administration, what would competent communications looks like?
.. Trump had been tweeting belligerently, and the South Korean government had had to reassure its citizens that war wasn’t imminent. Spicer made a serious face. “We have a shared interest with China of making sure that we don’t have a nuclear North Korea,” he said.
“We do have a nuclear North Korea,” Van Susteren interrupted.
“No . . .”
“I mean, we do,” Van Susteren said, and began reeling off facts about that nation’s arsenal.
“They have, they have short- and medium-term miss—again, I’m not going to get into their nuclear capability,” Spicer said. Wasn’t that just what he’d done?
President Trump’s Most Important Meeting
Most experts believe that the North will not abandon its nuclear program unless the leadership at the top changes. China opposes this because it fears a surge of refugees into its territory and wants to keep North Korea as a buffer against a potentially unified Korean Peninsula dominated by the American military.
The United States and China may have a long-shot chance at an achievable solution if they agree to increase sanctions on North Korea and pursue more modest goals — halting North Korean missile tests and curbing the production of additional nuclear weapons — but there has been no serious sign of interest from the Trump administration.
.. The risk in this meeting is that Mr. Trump knows little about diplomacy with China and does not have a team of China experts in place. He has already had to correct one major error; after calling into question America’s longstanding one-China policy
.. The meeting is also a test for Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, who, while also lacking foreign policy and government experience, has played a dominant role as the primary interlocutor with the Chinese, thus eclipsing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
No, Hillary Clinton did not “give Russia 20 percent of the uranium” in the US
Trump is referring to Russia’s nuclear power agency purchasing a majority stake in a Toronto-based energy company between 2009 and 2013. The company had mines and land in a number of US states with huge uranium production capacity — a move the US State Department signed off on.
- The mines, mills, and land the company holds in the US account for 20 percent of the US’s uranium production capacity, not actual produced uranium.
- The State Department was one of nine federal agencies and a number of additional independent federal and state regulators that signed off on the deal.
- President Obama, not Secretary Clinton, was the only person who could’ve vetoed the deal.
- Since Russia doesn’t have the legal right to export uranium out of the US, its main goal was likely to gain access to the company’s uranium assets in Kazakhstan.
.. the US only makes about 20 percent of the uranium it needs. An advantage in making nuclear weapons wasn’t the main issue because, as PolitiFact notes, “the United States and Russia had for years cooperated on that front, with Russia sending enriched fuel from decommissioned warheads to be used in American nuclear power plants in return for raw uranium.”
.. Trump has constantly pushed back against the intelligence community’s claims about Russia’s interference with the US election, and said that even if they’re true, he doesn’t understand all the fuss about it