Trump to meet with Kim

Right. What could go wrong?

^ Dougster appears to be gone, why don't you just go back to posting as your random member moniker?

LOL! We haven't had a fight in quite some time @OSU. No, I have nothing whatsoever to do with @realDougster.

I wrote on another thread that Trump deserves a lot of credit if he can pull this off. Not because Trump is any sort of genius; rather because Jong-Un perceives Trump to be as dangerous, unstable, and childlike as he is. They understand each other.

"Jong-Un perceives Trump to be as dangerous, unstable, and childlike as he is. They understand each other."

^LOL !!

North Korea will never give up its nukes. No country that has achieved nuclear weaponry has ever given it up. Also, nuclear weapons are the only thing that allows North Korea to eat at the adults table, and key to preventing any sort of regine-changing invasion.

Some good things could result from these talks, but denuclearization isn't one of them.

Also, North Korea has made agreements and concessions in previous talks only to completely blow them off after the fact.

I remain highly skeptical.

This would be very interesting.

Is it like “hey Kim, nobody gives a fuck what you do over here in your country, but could you at least stop running around and saying you’re going to nuke the entire planet? Do that and we’ll drop some sanctions so your people can actually eat something other than leaves off trees and grass.”

He will probably be assassinated by someone if he needs in North Korea, then they will blame it on North Korea. No cameras, no CCTV anywhere to prove otherwise.

"No country that has achieved nuclear weaponry has ever given it up."

Caveat... several former Eastern Bloc countries wanted Russian nukes out of their borders when the Soviet Union collapsed. Those countries lacked the funding, staffing, infrastructure, and political will to maintain nukes. So, different motivations as compared to North Korea.

We’ll see what happens if he can pull it off I’ll say good job, and go right back to disagreeing with most of what he does.

Libya gave up its nuke program.

^^^If Libya is the example the NKs won’t be so willing.

Heads of state never meet unless the details of any agreement have already been determined. That means a plan has likely been agreed to that would remove the NK nuclear program plus allowing verification. Sanctions will remain in place until nukes are gone.

That’s the reverse of the Clinton agreement where NK got food and energy in return for an unverifiable promise to stop their nuke program. We see how that worked out.

“Heads of state never meet unless the details of any agreement have already been determined”

Right. You’re forgetting this is Trump we’re talking about.

CNN) US President Donald Trump's decision to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un "was not a surprise in any way," US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Friday, less than a day after the top US diplomat said conditions were not yet ripe for negotiations with North Korea.

Speaking to reporters in Djibouti, the latest stop on his week-long tour of Africa, Tillerson explained the sudden shift by saying it was "a decision the President took himself" after having the matter "on his mind for quite some time."

google.com

@Mark93 "Heads of state never meet unless the details of any agreement have already been determined."

I admit that I work full-time and have not been following every detail. But didn't Tillerson say, just a few hours ago, that a meeting with Jung Un wouldn't be realistic or prudent yet? You know, the same Tillerson who once called Trump a moron? This is the same Trump who announced a tariff with bothering to tell his chief economic adviser.

Trump does everything else in the most impetuous way without absorbing any details or doing any preparation. Why should this be any different?

I swear we posted at exactly the same time @realDougster. LOL!

It’s collusion!

The meeting should be epic, Two fat guys eating KFC with chopsticks, might even cause a shortage.

Mark94 said "Libya gave up its nuke program."

I said "No country that has achieved nuclear weaponry has ever given it up."

Libya had a program (half-assed and under funded). They had not fielded a functional nuke. North Korea has actually achieved nuclear weaponry. I'm sticking by my original assertion.

Mark94 said "Heads of state never meet unless the details of any agreement have already been determined."

Please... show me where that's written in stone. And then account for the personalities of both Trump and Kim.

"Libya had a program (half-assed and under funded). They had not fielded a functional nuke."

^That was my impression as well. If they had any weapons (WMDs) those were likely gifts from the USSR.

It's like going to all of the hard work to be an entrepreneur. Starting a business. Working with regulations and bureaucracy for years so you can turn a profit after years of diligent work. Then once you have the money. eh, I don't want it, I'd feel better if I didn't have it. I'll just give it all away. Job creation is its own reward.

The reason for analogy is most nations undertake a (supposed) peaceful nuclear energy program with the (unstated) goal that the industrial by-products energy generation are a weapons program. That's how you know the politicians are lying. Then they say they are only doing for peaceful energy. Sure 'ya are. I know because as a physics egghead myself I was once naive and bought into the lie too.

@Ish I have been telling Mark to look shit up but he gets his information first hand from the voices in his head. He never fails to be wrong, whether it’s market prediction or anything else. He must be a retired weatherman.

Anti-Trumpers: He’s an incompetent idiot. Trump defeats ISIS AT: He’s an incompetent idiot. Trump passes tax reform, wages and jobs grow AT: He’s an incompetent idiot Trump gets rocketman to agree to end Nukes AT: He’s an incompetent idiot.

I predict we have 7 more years of this pattern.

Maybe they’ll bond over their love of military parades

"Maybe they’ll bond over their love of military parades"

^The rockets in those parades always look like empty Pringles cans turned sideways to me. So now we know where all those potato chips went.

Two questions:

A) Can someone please explain to me why it should matter to us whether or not NK has nukes? Russia has over a thousand of them and so do we. What's one more nuclear missile in the world, more or less? Especially since it's thousands of miles away from us.

B) How would this deal be any different from the Iran nuclear deal which, if you believe Trump, might as well have been written on LegalZoom because it's so amateur-hour? Any thoughts?

Any chance of Trump smuggling Stormy Daniels on AF1 and using her bombs to disarm the NK nukes?

NK doesn’t have any whores to compete with her! It’s worth a try. Just tell her that her hush money is in a designer handbag on AF1.

Mark94 said "Trump gets rocketman to agree to end Nukes. AT: He’s an incompetent idiot."

Except for one critical detail... he hasn't convinced Kim to do anything. I mean, we'll see (a) what comes out of the talks and (b) if Kim actually follows through on any agreement (he hasn't in the past). But there's more reason to believe that this is another dead end.

I don't say that because I don't like Trump. I say it because the survival of the Kim regime in North Korea hinges on the credible threat of a nuclear strike.

Kim looks like a muppet, but he's not stupid. He saw what happened to both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. The surest way to not repeat those bits of history is to keep his nukes.

New statement in today’s presser SHS says >no talks till NK provides concrete and verifiable actions< this is far from a done deal.

Maddow's meltdown on the issue is epic hilarity. She is such a hypocritical wench.

newsbusters.org

For extra laughs, read the comments below the article. The roasts are brutal.

^^^I was wondering when the Imperial Wizard of Klan Klavern Trump was going to weigh in. LOL

We are lucky Libya gave up their nukes because they were essentially take over by Isis and nukes wouldn't have helped them at all against that type of foe. Rachel Maddow is an idiot. I know that really doesn't differentiate her among Progressives, but wow if she stupid. If Obama had provided a tax cut; lowest unemployment in 50 years; killer stock market and was meeting with North Korea, he'd be considered a genius. The fact people are bashing Trump proves that those who cry bigotry, racism, homophobia, misogynist and on and on are the true bigots. Look at all the dirty fuck democrats kissing Louis Farrakhan's ass. Then again being jew haters is ok for progressives. By the way the survival of North Korea doesn't rely on nukes it relies on brutality repressing 17 million people that the hypocritical assholes on the left ignore.

Let's give credit and blame where they are each due. The Bush Doctrine of aggressively destroying the exporters of international terror worked in Libya. Shortly after W announced the doctrine as part of his official foreign policy, Ghaddafi publicly renounced international terror and withdrew to being a one-country tin-pot dictator.

The US should have never gotten involved in Libya's civil war. There were no good guys, it was ISIS and the Islamic brotherhood against Ghaddafi. But our dipshit SecState and her dipshit boss spent the better part of two terms being the Islamic Brotherhood's cockholsters, so they aided the worse guys against the bad guy. The worse guys thanked us by attacking our destroying our Mission in Benghazi.

Gramma nut got back to where you came from. I think Ft Meyers is missing a village idiot.

If anyone wants the correct information regarding Libya and Dubya here it is from no less an authority than the Brookings institute

Why Libya Gave Up on the Bomb - Brookings Institution Brookings Institution › opinions

Let’s also not forget that we facilitated a huge transfer of weapons from post-Ghaddafi Libya to the “moderates” in Syria, who later became ISIS. What a double clusterfuck that was.

What keeps the Kim regime in power internally is brutal repression. What protects them from a regime-change doctrine (i.e. invasion) externally is viable nuclear weapons.

Trump won't get North Korea to denuclearize. Honestly, I'd like to be wrong about that.

The BBC summed it pretty well in this article:

bbc.com

To the naysayers, the end result remains to be seen but the meeting is happening ATM.

And my first sentence in my OP, Dennis Rodman is live on CNN from Singapore, no Elton John sightings yet. :D

I thought he met with Kim last week about some pardon request.

I don't know about that but CNN just interviewed Rodman live from Singapore, maybe he's a groupie.

I'm surprised, CNN's Chris Cuomo is actually somewhat in awe and speaking highly of the meeting.

"No country that has achieved nuclear weaponry has ever given it up."

South Africa.

Back when Obama announced that he would be willing to meet with any of our enemies with no preconditions, lots of people criticized him for it... the exact same people who are now praising Trump for meeting with one of our enemies with no preconditions. Can someone please explain this to me?

"Can someone please explain this to me?"

I think it means that we've legitimized a dictator who murders his own people without getting anything in return.

...but I just had sex with a 21-yr-old blonde, so who cares?

@RandomMember,

Well, at least you've recognized that there are more important things in life than this kabuki theater. Anyway, inconsistency in politics sure is a funny thing. It reminds me of our brief debate about whether Jerome Powell is qualified to run the Federal Reserve, no?

No pre conditions ? You mean, except for the hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes negotiation that took place over the last couple months. You mean, other than the pledge to de-nuclearize that Trump had as a pre-condition. Except for that. Sure.

I thought we were going to get fake TV economist and grad school dropout Kudlow as fed chair. So Powell wasn't such a bad choice in comparison. Still Yellen was far more qualified.

I thought they said nobody else was in the room except translators?

@mark94,

Kim promised to de-nuclearize? I must have missed this news. In general, this meeting seems similar to A) Obama's meeting with Castro, B) Bill Clinton's announcement of a deal being reached with Kim's father in 1994, and C) the Iran nuclear deal... all of which Trump himself has criticized as basically the worst things to happen to our country ever.

@RandomMember,

What I meant was that it was Obama who first appointed Powell to the Board in 2012. Did you have any complaints about Obama's choice at the time? Does it seem to you that Obama made an unwise choice?

We're talking about fed chair. Bush made a sensational choice with Bernanke and Obama reappointed Bernanke in 2009. Yellen is a better choice (as a PhD economist) in comparison to Powell who's a lawyer. However Powell is not such a bad choice.

I don't see any terrible hypocrisy in what I'm saying.

@RandomMember,

Fair enough. I happen to think that Powell's six years serving on the Board is a perfectly acceptable credential, if all one cares about is experience. It beats the three years that Bernanke served prior to his being nominated as Chairman. Plus Powell worked in the financial industry for decades, which is every bit as applicable to the role of Chairman of the Federal Reserve as Bernanke's academic career was. Still, you're right, Powell did not study economics in school. But hey, you know who did study economics in school? Donald Trump. And I'm sure you wouldn't want him running the Federal Reserve, would you? LOL ;)

Anyway, no, this ranks pretty low on the hypocrisy scale. And for the record, I personally think Bernanke, Yellin, and Powell are all terrible choices.

Just watched Trumps news conference, I was favorably impressed, it was much less combative than his usual soiree’s. I had a question that was never addressed, I wonder how these events In Singapore will affect what is going on in Iran, specifically does this make it more or less likely that some improvement will be made in that situation. My thinking was always that WW111 would start in the Middle East not the Far East.

Life ain't easy for a boy named Kim.

youtube.com

Is it possible to have threads that degenerate into a virtual 69 between two pseudo-intellectuals flagged so they don't show up in the list of active discussions, similar to how you flag email as SPAM?

Maybe it's just a generation gap, @Flag. As an enfeebled, geriatric, emasculated elf, maybe you have trouble following the discussion because your cognitive abilities are in decline. It's okay though. We accept all types on TUSCL.

Larry Kudlow had a heart attack last night. Guess he didn't like my comments, above

Call.Me.Ishmael,

As I was scrolling down, I see jester beat me to it. Check your facts FIRST!

Anybody else here follow Steve Schmidt? He's a GOP strategist who worked on the campaigns of GW Bush and and McCain. He's one of the few guys I follow on Twitter. Here's his take:

"TRUMP got taken to the cleaners because he is ignorant and monumentally unprepared. What did Kim Jong Un give up with regard to training his million man army ? 12,000 North Korean artillery pieces are locked , loaded and trained on Seoul. He learned Trump is a stupendous fool"

@twentyfive,

You mean because Trump acted like a grown-up? This is kind of the soft bigotry of low expectations, isn't it LOL? At least you're mature enough to admit when someone you don't like does something that you nonetheless approve of. But I remain extremely skeptical. Even if this deal happens and even if it works the way it's supposed to, I fail to see why it should even matter to us whether North Korea has a nuke.