What do we want in 2024? Who do we want?

I’m with you 100% on that, including Johnson, Biden, whoever is not Trump/Biden in 2024.

I will never vote main party again, for any office, until one of the teams decides to behave like educated adults with a genuine desire to protect the constitution. Until then, I’m either 3rd party or anti incumbent from here on out.

 

Trump is the personification of the word "globalist"? How in the world do you figure that? He's the clearest thing we have to an America-first, America-centric nationalist that exists in this country! He has been very obnoxious about it at times, and he made most of our NATO allies quite upset with his tirades about it. When did Trump even say anything that makes you think he was in any way a "globalist"?

 

Yes, Trump is 100% America first. I can’t think of a president, or even a presidential candidate, who was more in that direction.

I don’t want Trump to run again, and have no respect or use at all for Biden. Biden did not have what it took to be president in 1988, and he had far less now.

 

So who should end up President?

 

We will never agree. I was a strong DeSantis supporter, but he has taken a strong right turn in recent months. I don’t agree with his abortion policies, and I have strong concerns about his unregistered concealed carry gun laws. We do need to have gun background checks to strive toward keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and mentally unstable people. The system can never be perfect, but banning guns is not the solution, and neither is going back to the “Wild West.”

Other people I would consider are South Carolina senator Tim Scott, South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, although she does not appear to be a candidate, and on the outside, Nikki Haley. I’m am not strongly committed to anyone right now.

 

We may be overcome by the weight of developments on the international scene. Today it was announced that the official "mouthpiece" for the ruling elite of the U. S. and Europe, Henry Kissinger, has declared that Ukraine should be admitted into NATO after all. He (and the ruling faction he represents) have opposed it, until today.

This will pose what Vladimir Putin sees as a very stark, clear threat to Russia's existence, especially at this point in NATO's proxy-war against them. If a real war, complete with "boots on the ground" and missiles in the air, gets started with Russia then anything could happen, even the indefinite postponement of the 2024 election in this country.

Go to https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/da...backs-ukraine-s-nato-bid-TEbEBq5ulGr0dBS9sPTZ

 

Putin would not have to worry about Russia’s existence if he would leave his neighbors alone. Instead, he wants to be the next Stalin in Russian history. Like Stalin, there are those in Russia who fear him, and few like him. As for most of the world, it’s mostly despise or hate him, except for the Chinese Communists. “Birds of a feather” you might say.

As for postponing the 2024 election, not even the Democrats would have the balls to try that. Lincoln held the 1864 election in the middle of the Civil War under the expectation that he would lose it. FDR, the ultimate presidential egotist, went ahead with the 1944 election. No, I don’t think the Democrats could get away with it.

 

I would like no progressives or MAGA/Fake Patriot Caucus twits to be in the White House. Beyond that, it'd be nice if steak was cheaper.

 

I'd be just fine with that. I even started a poll months back asking whether people would vote for Manchin over Biden and Trump. It seemed to be an idea that has some merit.

 

The political power structure would never allow that ticket. Both of them are unacceptable to both parties.

After Mansion caved on the spending after saying he wouldn’t, I am not one of his fans. Synema is still a Democrat, it’s just that the woke party leadership has left her behind. I was in the same position in 1980.

Those two would better than we have now, but that’s not saying much. My in-laws’ dog and cat would be better than what we have now. At least the two animals are honest and trustworthy as two creatures can be, especially the dog.

 

I'm no Putin fan, but if you look at the situation from where he sits, it's a very threatening scenario, and he knows he cannot back down. Remember, Finland became a new NATO member last month, greatly extending NATO's "reach" along Russia's very sensitive northern border.

Now, if Ukraine were to become a NATO member also, Russia could very easily lose access to the only warm-water port it has through the Bosporus Straits, and its Black Sea Fleet base at Sevastopol in Crimea could be lost. This would be intolerable to Russia, and China wouldn't like it either because if Russia loses all its power, then China wouldn't have a partner and ally to use against us and NATO, in Asia, Africa, South America, or anywhere else.

No, it looks now like Kissinger's insiders are getting ready for a real war, and practically speaking, maybe the time is right. Russia would lose a conventional war with NATO, but the overall question is, who would "win" if it were a nuclear war instead?

 

I heard these arguments when I studied history in college. I have not heard any rumors that the NATO countries are going to invade Russia and cut it off from its warm weather ports unless Russia attacks its neighbors.

Putin is a pig, and he deserves to be tried for war crimes. If he could be a good world citizen instead of an imperialist, he might find that life for him and his country would be better. But that's not his style and it seems it's not what the Russian people want either. They seem to have this extreme nationalist attitude that has them supporting leaders, like Putin, who is always threatening their neighbors.

 

You've studied the history in college, and so I won't go over all that. Suffice to say that Ukraine was given its independence within the Soviet Union by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. Then, that same Soviet Union imploded and disappeared at the end of 1991. Putin reacted to what happened in Ukraine much later in 2013 and 2014 when a Ukrainian president who was cooperative with Russia was run out of office during the "Maidan Revolution"... so, Putin seized Crimea, and you know the rest of all that story.

Everybody has different opinions about all of this and I am not trying to advance one over another, except to say that if this whole thing really boils out of control, we'll all look back and say, "how the hell did that happen?" and there really won't be a good answer. Like most Americans, I hate what Russia has done to the poor people of Ukraine, who have been murdered and run out of their destroyed homes. But at the same time it's realistically clear that Ukraine itself has never been of any kind of importance to the United States, so, I wonder why we are so involved up to our armpits.

 

The argument about how much Ukraine means to the U.S. is the same as what Vietnam met to the U.S. in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. The answer was nothing. Ukraine may be more important because if Putin takes it, he won’t be done. This more valid than the domino theory because Western Europe will be at stake. That’s why Vietnam was not important in the ‘70s. Western Europe was.

Putin will be after Poland and the rest of the old Soviet block after he gets Ukraine. His goal is to reconstruct the old Soviet Union and its satellites. He’s made that clear.

 

The Domino Theory is just a proposition, I'm not aware of any evidence that it can be applied to the Russian Federation.

 

I won't disagree about "what Ukraine means" to the U. S., because you're right... it was, and is, nothing to us. The conflict between Ukraine and Russia, however, is much different than anything we saw in our Vietnam adventure.

This Ukraine war is essentially a battle between two Slavic "cousins" who trace their common history back well over a thousand years, as I'm sure you know. Indeed, without Kiev, there never would have been a "Muscovy". Today, it's a geopolitical and economic battle between Russian oligarchs and Ukrainian oligarchs, and one bunch is just as autocratic and corrupt as the other.

But, Putin is less likely to have delusions about reassembling the Soviet Union than in harboring paranoia about NATO and all the central banks of the U. S. and Europe conspiring to destroy Russia's economy and thus, Russia itself. For a number of verifiable reasons, Russia is actually very vulnerable and Putin is smart enough to know it. His Achille's heel, though, may be too much faith and trust in China, which has its own grand-scale ambitions.

 

The Russians and the Chinese didn’t get along in the 1960s and’70s which was why Nixon got to go to China and meet Mao. None of the “evil three,” China, Iran and Russia are ready to get along if they ever got rid of the U.S. and most of the west. Iran would crush Russia if they could and China, under Xi, would like to dominate the whole mess.

Are the central banks in Europe really ready to ruin Russia? I thought that, without a war, the western world had gotten passed that sort of behavior.

 

Trump was Trump first... not America first

 

Western central banks, including the Fed, the ECB, the Bank of England, and the IMF have been working nonstop ever since the fall of the Soviet Union to transform the economies of all the former Soviet republics, and yes, that's surely a very good thing overall. Putin and his Russian oligarchs don't think so, however, and that's why they've tried so hard to promote alternative economic consortia in Eurasia, but these are still very light-weight when compared to the EU.

 

I'd pick world harmony but it seems too far fetched plus the closest we had to that in a long time was during Donald Trump. We had more verbal disharmony but less physical choas of violence death and mayhem on the world stage.

I know the left views words as violence so they would have a hard time understanding the difference.

 

His ego, legacy as president, is tied to Americas success. If I cannot get results with good intent, I'll take just good results. What the left has proven is they will take good intent regardless of results. They have put up an entirely incompetent president who 'appears' goodwilled. We obviously have different priorities. Mine is based on the fact that Biden's good intentions don't benefit my children and their future. Trump's good results do benefit them.

 

so true

 

It appears the media has told people that Donald Trump was childish and an egotist and that is worse than Joe Biden starting a particularly nasty war, and the public believes it.

 

Congress is funded by the lobbyists, including the weapons industry,
and because Congress is elected in tranches with overlapping terms,
Congress can not take the initiative in advocating peace.