But, as @Crashproof notes, we also back the Saudis. So, we’re sort of playing off both sides here. We are most certainly anti-Assad, if nothing else, in part because of his strong Iranian ties. while we backed the shia led government in Iraq, we certainly did not want to see the backlash against sunnis as a result. We wanted a modern, secular government. But we’ve also spent years cultivating religiously-oriented parties across the region as a bulwark against the more secular, yet socialist leaning pan Arab movement of the 1960s.
I think the millions of refugees beg to differ there. Someone is at war with someone, because there is an actual war happening. The complicated nature of the alliances doesn’t mean that no one’s at war, but that the entanglements go deep and are very hard to parse.
I find that unlikely or if he attempted such he’d get MAJOR pushback. Again, the Iranian connections Assad has would make it pretty hard to switch. Israel sure as hell wouldn’t stand for that, and that’s the center of our policy in the region and has been for decades.
What @LearnedCoward said… and 20+ years of non stop hate machine propaganda against the person the other party ran.
Seriously there were a lot of peeps that were upset enough at a black man being president and it would just be worse if a woman was much less a woman carrying the rightwing hate propaganda Hillary did.
The right-wing hatred for Clinton was more practiced than Obama Dementia Syndrome, but not much different in character or number of people afflicted. The difference was a little more voter suppression in a few more states and nearly zero effort by Clinton to credibly generate enthusiasm for herself. Instead, she fell back to focusing on the personal stupidity of Rump. She really let the policy and criminality fall by the wayside, thinking that would cost her the class-warfare support of the criminal rich. At least, that’s my assumption.
I’d rather give her the benefit of the doubt that it was strategy rather than incompetence. But I don’t care much either way right now.
It is odd that there is so much fuss about the Russians and so little about AIPAC.
Reincarnation should be made possible so Balfour could be brought back to apologise for his Declaration. (We were discussing this sort of thing the other day - is the truth that politicians in the past have in fact been just as borderline demented as Trump, but that without Twitter and the like it had been possible for civil servants to conceal the fact? What would Churchill, Nixon or Stalin have done with Twitter?)
There was a book about AIPAC and it’s influence, though. And israel isn’t the only country who has a lobbying group in the US. Both Turkey and Armenia have one, for example, as I’m sure do many other countries, especially those who aren’t developed countries and need to get US backing in some way.
A lot of people also agree with AIPAC’s general aims, which is a strong, militarily fortified Jewish state (some would take that at the expense of a democratic state, too), as our key ally in the region. Plus, worrying over AIPAC in a public manner smacks a bit too much of antisemitism for many - the whole idea of a secret cabel of Jews running the world.
The Russians have a long history of not really being our allies in the past 100 years (except during the second world war, and in that case, they wouldn’t have been had Hitler not turned on Stalin - he would have happily sat out the war, if he’d gotten his buffer zone).
Now I really hope that someone has a Stalin twitter feed, that talks about what was happening in Soviet history, but on the twitters. That’s a pardoy that needs to happen!
the democrats still believe that because the republicans are literally crazy they can tilt starboard on economic policy to please donors.
the problem is that actual voters - including the whites who side with trump - believe corporate interests are killing them.
so, clinton lost. and the democrats have every chance of losing again. it’s a high stakes gamble, but that’s where we’re at.
the only way it could be different is if in every interview about health care the d’s were saying “single payer”, education reform, prison reform, and every issue that the actually left cares about.
folks like the clintons are decent well-meaning people, but they just don’t see the world the way it actually is.
To me that’s an example of suppression by false equivalence - equating something real (AIPAC) to something nonexistent which is generally known to be an example of far right anti-Semitism.
The fact that other countries like Turkey do it too doesn’t alter the fact that different standards are applied.
I also happen to think you are wrong about WW2. Stalin made a pact with Hitler to buy time. He knew at some level that his purges had destroyed the effectiveness of his armies and that it would take a long time to rebuild it. And he knew that Hitler would eventually attack. What went badly wrong was that Hitler attacked before Stalin was ready - and might have succeeded.
2017 Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union. It was US interference in Russia - like its meddling in the Middle East - between 1990 and 2000 that caused the present standoff. You can hardly be surprised that the RF is not a US ally; they’ve seen what happened when they tried being one. Basically, looting.
Edit - I feel strongly about this because the US/NATO electoral interference in Ukraine was so blatant, and because US interference in the UK, for similar reasons (opportunity to asset strip) over the last years is one of the key factors behind the result of the EU referendum. The US wanted to peel Ukraine away from the RF and ended up with a nasty little civil war; the Republican interest wanted to peel the UK away from the EU. It’s classical divide and rule. And then the US starts getting uptight about Russian interference in US elections, and I’m afraid all you can hear is my extremely tiny and out of tune violin. The biggest group of people in the world interfering in the politics of other countries live in the US.
But they voted for corporate interests.
The nearest parallel in history I can find is Germany prior to 1848 - and that eventually resulted in a revolution of sorts. It’s a period that may be instructive as there are, in fact, quite a lot of parallels including the hollowing out of the lower middle class, increasing inequality and out of touch politicians.
The couple conversations I had with Trumpists right after the election (people I knew were fiscally conservative but who I never would have guessed would support someone like him) really brought this home for me.
They basically said Trump would bring the corporate types to heel because he was different. He was a maverick. He wasn’t a corporate drone, but a smart businessman.
I think they read his series of failures in business tied with his nouveau riche/gauche image as “innovative”.
