Yep, both Bush II & Obama used it, but it looks like they used it for visits by various Heads of State and the Easter Egg Roll.
Trump getting ready to give a speech about Afghanistan.
So, what are gonna see? Reading a teleprompter, or gong of script and saying something crazy?
🎥 Why Not Both? - YouTube
He is terrible at reading teleprompters
It’d be a pretty boring, standard speech, but he manages to make it sound dumber by injecting extra words here and there.
I was hoping maybe he was blind and couldn’t see the teleprompter.
Has he blamed Democrats for anything yet? Lol, who am I kidding, how many TIMES has he blamed Democrats/Obama/the free press/the majority of voters who voted against him/Hillary so far?
(It’s The Onion, so it’s not real. I think. Probably. Right?)
Ok, so I read the C-Span transcript. That’s bad because it is often inaccurate. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter as Trump is often inarticulate. I think I got the gist of the speech, but please correct me if I’m wrong.
- The pussies that kept us from winning in Afghanistan thus far (16 years! Since NINE-ELEVEN!) will now stop stopping us from winning. We are going to win now.
- We didn’t win before because we wasted too much time and blood and treasure on building a stable nation, one that could perhaps serve its people or provide an ally to fight against the Taliban, ISIS, or Al-Qaeda. No more time for that shit. Forget that “winning hearts and minds” B.S. Our new strategy is to continue killing terrorists until there are no more terrorists. It’s a simple plan that will work because it is uncomplicated.
- We don’t give a fuck what kind of nation Afghanistan becomes, as long as it isn’t run by the Taliban. It’s none of our business. Oh, they have their work cut out for them. They’ll still be doing a ton of the fighting and building and whatever. And if we don’t like their government, we will help it collapse (Just like Obamacare!), so they better stay on our good side.
- NATO is going to start helping too. They are so far behind on paying the US the money NATO owes us, so instead they are going to send troops to help kill all the terrorists.
- Don’t worry about where the money for our troops is coming from. They’re good on the money front; Trump made sure to give them lots of money. We don’t even need to worry about a budget.
- Don’t ask how long we are going to be there, or how long this new enemy-killing mission will take. We have uncoupled those concerns from the problem. Those are stupid questions anyway. All our troops and NATO’s troops and Afghan’s troops have to do so they can go home are three simple things.
- They have to kill all the bad guys. All of them. Until there are none left.
- They have to make it so no one will ever attack the U.S. again like they did on 9/11.
- So it’s such a simple job, they could be done with it by, like, next week. Not that we are using a timetable.
- Now, the Taliban and ISIS and Al-Qaeda are tricky. Sometimes they go across the border into Pakistan, one of our allies and a nation that we have poured billions of taxpayer dollars into. This is especially dangerous because they are a nuclear power, and they are enemies with another one of our good friends, India. Any instability could trigger nuclear war between the two nations.
- SO FUCK YOU PAKISTAN! You’d better take out all of those terrorists because we’re coming for you next if you don’t shape up. India is our buddy, think of all the tech support we have there, so believe me we are giving them a lot of military aid.
- Brave troops, best troops, dead troops, courage, 9/11. Every generation is the greatest generation except the last one because they only died in Afghanistan instead of winning.
I wish we had a State Department.
Why even deploy troops? Send in the contractniki!
We used to have as many as 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, and we couldn’t get the job done then. We now have 8,500 soldiers, so increasing that number by 50% will surely get the job done, now.
If you want your argument to be heard by this administration, I would construct it without using any numbers. Preferably you wouldn’t use logic either.
If Russia is really Trump’s ally, then they should help fight in Afghanistan! I’m sure things will work out differently for them than last time!
You have it all wrong! The (NYT- edit, he’s WaPo’s bureau chief) is on the case:
In all seriousness, it never fucking fails. Years of being an epic douchebag, up to and including yesterday but now, suddenly, a new President Trump. What the ever living fuck is wrong with the MSM? Hell, maybe they can revisit BUT HER EMAILS again to restore balance to their bothsides narrative.
And the “new”, “presidential” Trump is always him just managing to read a speech someone wrote for him without going bananas, not saying something he came up with himself, or, you know, anything he actually does.
I thought Phillip Rucker was the Washington Post.
To be fair, his Tweet is pretty reasonable. It doesn’t praise Trump so much as make the observation that he wasn’t his usual buffoonish self during this announcement. I don’t think Rucker’s peddling the idea that Trump is somehow redeemed or reformed.
-Tom
Thanks for the correction on Rucker.
But I respectfully disagree. There’s nothing worthy of praise, there’s no new “President” trump. MSM’s normalization of trump is how we got here in the first place. Further, there’s not an ounce of critical questions on pursuing a never ending war. Even Justin Amash gets it right (see below). Anyway, sample twitter replies to Rucker, all of which I agree with.
I agree with the general idea that you can’t declare when you are planning on leaving a region like Afghanistan.