On December 15 less than a month ago Secretary of State Tillerson announced at the United Nations, three days after he said the US would talk to North Korea “without precondition” that “A sustained cessation of North Korea’s threatening behavior must occur before talks can begin.” Tillerson echoed Trump’s position “North Korea must earn its way back to the table. The pressure campaign must and will continue until denuclearization is achieved.”
On December 18 National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster stated: “The President has made very clear that on North Korea for example, now is not the time to talk. And what he means is, there can’t be negotiations under these current conditions … The problem is now that their programs have advanced so far we don’t have time to do that again and so we can’t repeat the failed pattern of the past.”
It was clear then. Trump’s position is that North Korea must give up its nukes before we will talk to them. Trump although still keeping his threats alive is pining his hope on the new boycott of North Korea that neither Russia nor China are abiding by. The idea that North Korea must give up its nukes before talks begin is a position everyone knows is a non starter. It is just not going to happen.
On Thursday, January 3 Trump tweeted:
“With all of the failed ‘experts’ weighing in, does anybody really believe that talks and dialogue would be going on between North and South Korea right now if I wasn’t firm, strong and willing to commit our total “might” against the North. Fools. but talks are a good thing!”
What do you think of that in light of what I just wrote? Are you baffled by Trump’s assertion “talks are a good thing” when he refused to have talks? Do you think it was Trump’s threats and childish comments that made North Korea open the door for dialogue with South Korea? Or is there something else afoot that is way over Trump’s head?
I suggest Trump has been playing into Kim Jong-un’s hands for a year. Kim knew he needed time to reach his goal of being able to threaten America. Trump gave him that time. Kim also knew that he had the upper hand because Trump’s threats to go to war with him were empty. China and Russia would also be involved something Trump could not afford. Mostly he knew that any war would result in the massacre of millions of South Koreans aside from his own people. That made him recognized war was out of the question and he could bait Trump without any blow back.
He also knew he could benefit by baiting Trump. Trump’s response was to continue to threaten war. Those threats became highly unsettling and frightening to South Koreans who lived next door to the people being threatened. They began to see Trump and the United States not as a protector but as a malevolent force over which they had no control. Few in South Korea felt comfortable in putting their lives in the hands of Trump and letting this erratic foreigner control their fate.
A Newsweek article on the day before Christmas noted “South Koreans Fear Trump More Than Kim Jong Un.” An author, Barbara Demick, who lived there for four years writing her book about North Korea stated: “I think almost any South Korean you talk to would say they’re much more frightened of Donald Trump than they are of Kim Jung Un.” She went on “There is very much the view among many South Koreans that we are the problem, that our whole presence there is counterproductive.”
Demick added that Trump has given North Korea: “the greatest gift ever [b]ecause anti-Americanism is the force that gives them meaning. It’s their raison d’être.” It is also the force that can bring the Korean people together.
Kim having seen how Trump had alienated and unsettled the South Korean people is taking the opportunity to bring about a rapprochement. Both countries have agreed to enter into open dialogue. There are no preconditions to their talks. South Korea’s president is Moon Jae-in described as being “of a progressive faction called the Minjoo Party of Korea.”
Under the heading “Are We About To Lose South Korea” the article on March 30, 2017, in the NY Post noted, “Moon’s plan . . . is to start with “economic unification” and move tot he goal of “political and military unification.” The United States has been shuffled to the side.
Where the talks between these nations may lead is difficult to predict just as Kim’s request for the talks proved a complete surprise. A big question is whether Kim will suspend his nuclear or nuclear tests. Already ,I assume under pressure from Moon, the US and South Korea agreed to suspend joint military exercises until after the Olympics.
Here’s where we stand. Trump’s war mongering threats have naturally shaken the South Korean people. Their desire for safety has turned them away from America. No longer will their leader Moon Jae-in who is desirous of dealing with North Korea face strong opposition at home. Trump has put Moon in the best position of any South Korean leader to come to a deal with Kim Jong-Un.
The bottom line is that Trump has increased the chances that we lose South Korea as an ally while North Korea continues to build its nuclear and missiles capabilities. No other president has been able to accomplish that.
in other newes
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2018/01/francis_cadillac_frank_salemme_prepping_for_spotlight_in_murder_trial
Francis ‘Cadillac Frank’ Salemme prepping for spotlight in murder trial
Laurel J. Sweet Thursday, January 11, 2018
Here is a article I posted in 2006 .
It is about Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn.
You can no longer find the article on the internet
and my link to it mysteriously dissappeared.
http://forums.sandiegouniontribune.com/showthread.php?t=59139&page=304
This article has been removed from the internet since I posted the article in 2006.
The link was also removed after I posted it along with story.
The 2 Faces Of J. Edgar Hoover
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday April 25, 1993
SHELLEY DEMPSEY
IF ONLY Charles Chaplin had lived to see a TV documentary tell the scandal of how the former FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover liked to party with his male friends, wearing a black frilly dress, lace stockings, curly wig and false eyelashes.
For Chaplin, one of Hoover’s many victims, the irony would undoubtedly have been most sweet. Punished by Hoover with forcible exile from America, Chaplin was publicly branded a communist who liked young girls. But Hoover himself got clean away with his own private weaknesses for young men, racetrack betting and cross-dressing.
And whereas Chaplin’s movie career died, Hoover’s own career in political blackmail shone for 48 years, from 1924, under eight presidents. Although, according to a new documentary screening on the ABC on Sunday, The Secret File on J. Edgar Hoover, he didn’t get away with it completely.
The Mafia knew his secrets and used them as blackmail to compromise him greatly in his public fight against crime. Or at least, this is the allegation in the American documentary.
Based on the book recently released by the British author Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential; The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, the program briefly interviews Summers (who is currently visiting Australia) and claims to have new evidence beyond his book.
In the well-researched and quite sober TV profile, Hoover is painted as a lifelong bachelor whose best friend was his handsome assistant in the FBI, Clyde Tolson.
We are told that Hoover would often pick up Tolson in the morning in one of his three official FBI limousines, lunch with him later in the day and use it to chauffeur them both to fashionable nightclubs.
But publicly, Hoover denounced homosexuals as “sex deviants” and homosexuals were officially banned from service in the FBI.
What the documentary does is make a fairly convincing case, with eyewitness evidence, that Hoover’s homosexuality spilt over into cross-dressing at all-male orgies, an indiscreet weakness not lost on the Mafia.
Susan Rosenstiel, the widow of the bisexual bootlegger turned liquor magnate, Lewis Solon Rosenstiel, said her husband had an affair, early in the marriage, with Roy Cohn, the assistant counsel to the infamous communist-hunter Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Cohn invited them to a room at the Plaza Hotel in New York. “We went in and there was this gentleman dressed as a woman and Roy introduced him. He said’I’d like you to meet Mary’.
“Well, I knew the name wasn’t Mary because he looked just like J. Edgar Hoover. In fact, he was very solid looking, he had like a little growth (as in three-day growth), he was dressed in a black chiffon dress, very short, with ruffles, and black lace stockings and high-heeled shoes and a black curly wig and black false eyelashes.
“It was clear to me (it was) J. Edgar Hoover,” she told the camera.
Then Hoover, then Cohn and Rosenstiel went into the bedroom and had sex with two blond, teenage boys.
“I heard Rosenstiel say that if Hoover ever brings pressure against Lansky(gangster boss Meyer Lansky) or any of us, we’ll use this as blackmail, we’ll expose him,” Susan Rosenstiel said.
According to the documentary on Hoover (who has been nicknamed Gay Edgar Hoover and J. Edna Hoover), the FBI boss mysteriously adopted a “hands-off”policy towards the rich and powerful Mafia after three raids he and Tolson carried out in 1937, because the Mafia learnt his shadowy sexual secrets and threatened to expose him if he touched the Mob.
It’s sad that Hoover’s sexuality had to be so repressed in those days. But it’s sadder still to see how he misused the sexual and non-sexual secrets of others with whom he politically disagreed to manipulate and destroy them.
Left-wingers such as Chaplin, who had an FBI file 1,900 pages long, the former US President John F. Kennedy and the black leader Martin Luther King were all persecuted and hounded by the conservative and Calvinist Hoover during the Cold War years.
Since Hoover’s death in 1972, it has become clear that he amassed secret FBI files on the private lives of the highest figures in the land, files he used to control the presidents who were supposed to control him.
But now the documentary made by William Cran and Stephanie Tepper for Frontline, a consortium of US public TV stations, alleges that Hoover in turn was blackmailed by the Mafia because of his homosexuality and his addiction to racetrack betting.
In fact, Hoover denied the existence of the Mafia for more than 20 years, to the amazement of politicians and his own staff.
Producer William Cran: “There’s overwhelming evidence that the Mob knew it had nothing to fear from Hoover’s FBI. It’s also clear that Hoover’s homosexuality was well known among top Mafiosi.”
About a dozen former FBI agents, former Justice Department agents and police are interviewed on the program, as well as former US Vice-President Walter Mondale, John F. Kennedy’s former lover, Judith Campbell, and JFK’s devoted secretary, Evelyn Lincoln.
On the trivial side, a Federal Justice Department inquiry launched four years after Hoover’s death revealed the following gems about how Hoover squandered FBI resources to dress up his home.
Once he found animal droppings on his doorstep and had the offending brown material rushed to the FBI Headquarters crime laboratory, which diverted its resources to investigate what animal had done the dirty deed. The guilty party was identified as a racoon.
PART 1
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2018/01/10/south-korean-president-trump-deserves-big-credit-for-these-inter-korean-talks-n2432378?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=
WOW !
So it was Donald Trump , not Kim Jong Un , who has more artillery trained on Seoul than the barker at the carnival has trained on the duck’s ass in the shooting gallery , who was terrifying the South Koreans.
WHO KNEW ?
How do you argue with an absurd premise without forsaking the premises of your own sense of reason ?
YOU DON’T ARGUE !
YOU PRAY !
Yes , Kim Jong Un is , as you breathlessly describe , one smart dude . Trump is a bumbling idiot , a pawn on the World geopolitical board , a bounder , a boob , a blunderer , a rube , an American President who, if his name was Clinton and he had made the exact same decisions , you would actually be asphyxiated with the wind of her gloriousness in gasping out her foreign policy praises .
That … Is the Kim Jong and the short of it . Period .
Partisan screed , same old stuff .
Speaking of stuff (I needed a segue), I finished The Snake Stone with our effendi Yashim roaming around Istanbul getting into all sorts of trouble.
I have ordered another.
I did finally get a copy of Dispatches and started it last night. No report on that yet. Between this book and the next Yashim I will get a copy of The Ragman’s Son. I have a few fly fishing books to squeeze in before the ice melts.
Reading if fundamental!
Plunkitt Of Tammany Hall : a Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics . George W. Plunkitt
I’m about 70 pages into Dispatches. It is a must read.
“The bottom line is that Trump has increased the chances that we lose South Korea as an ally while North Korea continues to build its nuclear and missiles capabilities.” That does not make sense.
First North Korea has continued on a road that progressed the same as it did under previous presidents. Are you regretting that he did not intervene militarily?
Second South Korea has not been lost as an ally. Barbara Demick, an anti-Trump journalist based in NYC for the LA Times, is cited. She is part of the NYC restaurant scene nowadays and has been for some time. You further cite a 10 month old NYPost article. From these dated sources conclusions are drawn.
Fact: Have we been forced to withdraw from our positions since then? No.
Your evidence is a thin, watery gruel, selective and, given your certified standing as a pussymarcher, unconvincing.
Relax, enjoy the show. Trump is not a Roosevelt plotting to get us into a huge war. Nor is he an Obama stumbling into a couple of small wars. He is handling an ongoing problem in his unique style. Discount his mastery of modern communication means and it is same-old, same-old, that is, diplomacy. It is behind a curtain. We cannot see it. Situation – normal.