And of course…
But Paul Ryan supports the sanctions! Well… sort of.
I’m curious if Trump has ever been asked his opinion of hacking into US concerns (whether governmental or private industry) by China.
If so, was he so quick to say we should disregard it and “get on with our lives”…?
A search brings up:
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/259693-trump-pledges-zero-tolerance-for-chinese-hackers
Hmmm…
Obama seems to be making a lot of big moves in the waning days of his administration. non-veto of anti-Israel UN resolution, creating huge new national monument in Utah, expelling Russian diplomats.
Kicking out intelligence officials masquerading as diplomats isn’t exactly “unprecedented” or huge. It’s just been a while. Compared to the still existing economic sanctions it’s small potatoes in the current state of the relationship. We caught the intelligence officials masquerading as diplomats and are sending the home after publicly clucking our tongue. Soon they’ll be home and their replacements will be in the US. Rinse. Repeat.
Certainly the sanctions against Russia are appropriate whether or not you agree with the other two?
It’s a matter of national security. I don’t understand how any American can be comfortable with Putin interfering in any way with our elections.
Rigging elections is like spying: a lot countries do it.
The US certainly does.
Russia’s not going to get the message, whatever message Obama was trying to send. This won’t discourage Russia from trying to hack elections or otherwise push back against what they perceive as American encroachment on Russian political and economic interests. This is just a case of Obama and Kerry trying to grow a pair.
Oh, asahi, you’re so predictable. If Obama doesn’t act like Putin, he’s weak. If he acts just a little bit like Putin, he should be less like Putin.
This attitude flabbergasts me. “Every country does it, so why should we worry”
I can confidently say that if, say, China had hacked the RNC and used the information provided to influence the election we would go deaf from the hue and cries of the GOP.
The senate would be falling over itself to investigate every single thing. And so they should. Because it happened to benefit them though, eh, that’s fine.
Party before country, indeed.
Well, the important message to get here is that Obama is wrong. That has been the refrain from the right for the past 8 years no matter what he did. Why should they change their tune now?
Stay tuned for the next 4 years, wherein every single bad thing that happens will be Obama’s fault, and every good thing that happens will be Trump’s triumph. Trump is already taking credit for business decisions that were made over a year ago.
Maybe if Obama had acted like Putin with more than 3 weeks to go in his term, you might have yourself an argument. Unfortunately, he’s too much of a pussy to confront Putin until now, when it really just doesn’t fucking matter at all what he does.
Honestly, Obama’s foreign policy re: Putin (and Israel for that matter) reminds me of the little punk he sticks his tongue out and flips the bird at people while hiding behind his older brother or dad’s back before going inside his house for dinner time. We all had a kid like that in the neighborhood, eh?
FTR, I’m not a right winger. I voted Obama 2X and I voted for Hillary (not a Bernie Bro though). I’ve earned the right to criticize Barry O, and I call it like I see it.
Over the last couple years a fair amount of the right have admired Putin’s strong leadership. When certain news outlets started promulgating Obama conspiracy theories he should have poisoned their journalists with polonium tipped umbrellas. That’s tough.
You need to do a search on my Russian position. I’m not a republican – pretty much a die-hard democrat these days. But I defy the center-right and center-left foreign policy orthodoxy regarding Russia.
We know what will happen. Trump will tweet “bad move from President O. Will undo on day one. Sad.”
More importantly, they already have brains. For an issue that requires intelligence, your focus on their testicles is baffling.
The sanctions put Trump in an impossible position. He can’t roll them back to satisfy his BFF without a whole lot of political blowback from Congress, both Democrats and Republicans who also don’t care for a foreign autocrat influencing an election. Trump’s going to have a tough time normalizing that abomination. You might be able to see that if you got your mind off testicles.
Every GOOD THING that happens will be Obamas fault …
If there’s one thing Obama loves, it’s shooting the messenger. Clinton was advocating a course of action she knew would involve bombing Syrian cities and killing Syrian civilians. We know she knew because of the whistleblower or whistleblowers that told us what was in those secret Goldman-Sachs speeches Clinton was hiding.
Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot, and it was Putin who was planning on bombing Turkish cities and killing Turkish civilians in the name of humanitarian intervention. Would any of you still be arguing that Obama had an obligation to keep Putin’s secrets for him rather than risk sabotaging his efforts to put that plan into action?
So what’s the objective here? Is it to create difficulty for an incoming president, or is it to reduce tensions between Russia and the US alliance? Obama might have succeeded in making Trump’s bromance with Putin more complicated, but if the objective is to reduce tensions with Putin, it fails. More pressure on Russia won’t work. Russia will probably wait and see how Trump behaves before retaliating.
(all bolding mine)
The objective here, IMO, is to place Mr. Trump into a corner from which he cannot escape. It’s almost a certainty that he will roll back the sanctions almost immediately upon taking office. At that point, anything that happens is his fault, good or bad. Mr. Trump will be unable to credibly lay blame on anyone else’s lap. President Obama is setting him up so that there can be no denying that Mr. Trump’s actions are responsible for whatever happens regarding Russia during the next 4 years.
This is baiting a trap and playing the long game, IMO.
The objective is to punish Russia without giving Putin an excuse to retaliate forcefully against American allies in Europe, that is, by the U.S. not using force to begin with. If Trump is caught in the middle because he aligned himself with Russia, that’s his problem, not America’s.
Why you and all Americans aren’t enraged at Trump’s casual dismissal of Russia’s hacking the election is mystifying to those of us who value things like democracy, civil rights, little stuff like that. In the name of global stability, there’s absolutely no reason for the U.S. to abandon its European allies for a psychopathic murderer. If that happens, you can flush Europe down the toilet. Putin will be all over it like flies on a corpse because, as ordained by God Hisself, [del]Putin’s[/del] Russia’s destiny is to rule the world, just like other psychopaths before him.
In the name of personal enrichment with no regard for little folk like you and me, though, it makes perfect sense for the man who acts on behalf of oligarchs in Russia to join forces with the man who acts on behalf of wannabe oligarchs in the U.S. You should be thankful that Obama has the requisite testosterone and brains to do something about it while he still can.