Baby

Who’s Your Daddy?

Cjones08292021

I have put plenty of blame for the withdrawal of U.S. forces and refugees from Afghanistan on President Joe Biden. There is a lot of blame to go around, but the one thing I hate is when Democrats place all the blame on previous administrations as a way to deflect blame from President Biden. Yes, President Biden was handed a really bad deal, but he’s president. All presidents get bad deals from the previous administration.

Donald Trump walked into office hating basically everything the Obama administration left him that he couldn’t put his name on. He loved taking credit for the economy President Obama left him. He always boasted about how he made us energy independent even though President Obama had accomplished that in 2015.

But Donald Trump ripped apart our nuclear treaty with Iran. This move wasn’t just a stick in the eye to Iran, but a betrayal to every nation that was a partner in the treaty. Now, if Iran gets a nuclear weapon in the future, will Republicans go back and blame Donald Trump? Highly doubtful.

Donald Trump tore up the Paris Climate Agreement. He tore up NAFTA, which was left by the Clinton presidency. He tore up several other treaties, trade deals, and even attacked agreements made with NATO. Funny thing with NATO: He was screaming about our partners increasing their defense spending, which they had already committed to doing from pressure by President Obama. Most the new deals by the “greatest dealmaker” ever were just tiny adjustments that didn’t change much of anything.

Donald Trump even tore apart the plan left by the Obama administration on dealing with a pandemic.

What Trump did in a lot of cases was to NOT honor agreements made by the United States of America. He taught the world that not only couldn’t they trust any deal made with the President (sic) of the United States, but that they couldn’t trust the United States. The world is not overly confident we won’t elect another racist xenophobic corrupt loose cannon like Trump, if not Trump himself, in the future.

Here’s a guarantee: If Donald Trump does become president again (shudder), all the shit he created in his first administration will be blamed on President Biden. This isn’t a hard prediction to make.

What President Biden did with Afghanistan did was honor Trump’s deal. He extended the deadline a bit, but he kept America’s promise which still disgusts me since it was a Trump promise.

Trump is one of the daddies to this huge failure in Afghanistan. He tried to own the evacuation and campaigned on getting our people out. He set the date. He negotiated with the Taliban instead of the Afghanistan government. He tried to stage a photo-op with the Taliban at Camp David on 9/11, which failed because the Taliban…the fucking Taliban…didn’t trust him. Mike Pompeo did have a photo-op with the head of the Taliban, a guy the Trump administration helped get released from an Afghanistan prison. The Trump administration did all it could to deny refugees from entering our nation which created the visa backlog we’re dealing with now. Now, the Republican Party has erased everything about Trump and Afghanistan from all their websites. AfghaniWhoNow?

Trust me. Donald owns this right along with George W. Bush. If nothing else, Bush should have had a plan in place before leaving office. He didn’t.

George W. Bush is the daddy for our being in Afghanistan and Donald Trump is the daddy of this withdrawal failure and refugee crisis. Donald Trump has his nasty orange DNA all over it.

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The New Detail

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Author Andrew Shvarts tweeted, “This election is like if your friends pick dinner and 3 vote pizza and 2 vote ‘kill and eat you.’ Even if pizza wins, there’s a big problem.” He tweeted that in 2016 but it applies more to the 2020 election.

That’s the question we have to ask ourselves: After four years of chaos, insanity, racism, and over 230,000 dead from an ignored virus and massive job loss, why did nearly half this country vote for the Nazi apologist? Why did half the country vote for the guy who’s lied to them over 20,000 times? Why did half the nation want four more years of this bullshit?

While we can celebrate that we’re getting rid of Trump, we still have his MAGAts. Yes, liberals got the White House, but didn’t win control of the Senate and actually lost seats in the House. There’s actually a member of Qanon heading to Congress. So if you’re thinking that you don’t have to flee the nation because Trump won’t be poisoning it up anymore, the damange may already be done.

As for the Secret Service, good for the guys who have been assigned to the Biden detail and too bad for the guys still protecting Trump’s ass. Even with Donald Trump out of the White House, he still qualifies for Secret Service protection for the rest of his life (along with the pension we’ll pay him. Let’s see if he donated that). A former president (sic) can decline Secret Service protection, which President Jimmy Carter has done.

The only times I am aware of an attempt on the life of a former president was when Saddam Hussein planned to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush and when someone shot former President Theodore Roosevelt. But in Roosevelt’s situation, he was once again a presidential candidate (and he delivered a speech after being shot and before going to the hospital).

Donald Trump is a supposed billionaire. He can afford his own security. But if he declines Secret Service protection, then he can’t bilk them (us) for rent, golf cart rentals to follow him around, and for shitty sandwiches and shitty rooms at his shitty resorts. Will his children decline Secret Service protection. I know from experience that children of a former president continue to receive protection, at least for a while. I went to high school with Amy Carter after her father lost to Ronald Reagan and the Secret Service was constantly present.

But then again, Donald Trump said he’d have to leave the country if he lost to the likes of Joe Biden. I’d like to hold him to that promise. Will Putin provide him a security detail?

Of course, he could always go to jail and then we don’t have to worry about any of it.

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Ice Ice Baby

cjones07112018

Donald Trump’s Zero-Tolerance policy of separating families and throwing children in detention centers has stirred a sentiment among many Democrats and liberals to abolish ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Trump and Republicans have used immigration as a divisive wedge to rile up his base. He’s even accusing those who call to abolish ICE as wanting MS-13 gangs to run wild in the streets. Any rational person (which describes fewer Republicans lately) knows that is preposterous. Just because you don’t want immigrants unjustly punished and families ripped apart doesn’t mean you want open borders or gangs killing Americans. But yelling and screaming about MS-13 has become the latest racist wolf whistle for Republicans.

I have been undecided about abolishing ICE, but now I’m starting to think we don’t need the agency. While ICE isn’t responsible for separating families at the border, it has become an abusive and needless program. It’s also interesting that for once, Republicans are the ones against decreasing the size of government.

ICE has only existed for 15 years. It spends over $2 billion a year on detention out of an annual budget that’s over $7 billion. Private contractors have been benefiting from detention centers, which gives them a huge financial incentive to holding immigrants indefinitely as if they’re al-Qaeda members in Guantanamo. There have been 1,448 allegations of sexual abuse between 2012 and March 2018 in ICE detention centers.

ICE’s job is to round-up illegal immigrants. They don’t patrol the border. That job is for Border Patrol, which can technically operate within 100 miles of the border. Since two-thirds of Americans live within 100 miles of the border, that makes ICE redundant.

Republicans argue we need ICE to catch violent criminals. But, we already have the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, the ATF, your local police department, Neighborhood Watch, John Walsh, McGruff the Crime Dog, and your nosy neighbor who calls the cops every time she sees a brown person at the public pool. Now, at least 19 ICE agents want their own agency dissolved, believing the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal migrants has limited their ability to pursue national security threats, child pornography, and transnational crime.

We need secure borders. We need to arrest violent criminals, whether they were born south of the border or in the United States. But we don’t need to harass and separate families just for seeking a better life for their children, attempting to escape violence in their home country, or even seeking asylum (which is legal). We don’t need to use the issue as a racist wolf whistle. And, we don’t need to hold brown babies and children hostage to fund a wall the president told us we wouldn’t have to pay for.

The greatest threat facing this nation does not come from immigrants. That distinction belongs to the current occupant of the Oval Office.

ICE is very much like the Vanilla Ice song, “Ice, Ice, Baby” (which was ripped off from Queen). It’s redundant, pointless, useless, and should be banished and never seen or heard again. Sorry if I put it in your head today.

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