Re: People shouldn't be talking about his experience....

Not near as much as kamala***

Kamala isn't making an a$$ of herself at meetings in Europe/***

Not near as much as kamala***

Re: JD Vance

Grew up in the 3rd world?****

Re: Zelenskyy is a failed comedian

gosmitty

Rival Killer [3043]

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People shouldn't be talking about his experience....

Feb 21, 2025, 7:26 AM

What they should be focused on is what he's actually up to. Here's a good take on his speech (see link below) from last week in the larger context of what Trump is trying to do in Europe. When you weigh Trump's disgraceful posture in the Ukraine/Russia "negotiations", Vance's speech makes more sense.

They are trying to create a Europe that is heavily influenced by far-right parties, and actors. Vance's speech was to move that project along. It had nothing to do with "free elections" and "shared values", as Vance doesn't care about any of that (look who he works for).

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/opinion/vance-munich-germany-afd.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yk4.qKT1.Xxj423iuc1cZ&smid=url-share

I gave a gift link but here's a few notable points:

But not, apparently, JD Vance. The vice president’s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference — in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe’s retreat from democratic values — combined with his meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, has caused a scandal because it is a scandal, a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy.

Why does the AfD dismay so many Germans, including traditional conservative voters? The party began in 2013 in protest of Germany’s fiscal policies in Europe. It gained a further boost through its opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-arms policy toward the uncontrolled immigration of more than a million Middle Eastern refugees.

But the party soon took a much darker turn. In 2017, Björn Höcke, a party leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, complained that Germans were “the only people in the world who’ve planted a monument of shame at the heart of their capital” — a reference to the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust — and that the country needed “nothing less than a 180-degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance.” In 2018, the party leader at the time, Alexander Gauland, dismissed “Hitler and the Nazis” as “just a speck of bird #### in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”

Last year, the German investigative news site Correctiv reported that in 2023 AfD politicians had met with other far-right extremists in a hotel in Potsdam, near Berlin, to discuss an “overall concept, in the sense of a master plan” for the “remigration” of “migrants” to their countries of ethnic origin — no matter whether those migrants were asylum seekers, permanent residents or German citizens. The star of the show was a 34-year-old Austrian named Martin Sellner, who as a teenager confessed to putting swastika stickers on a synagogue before going on to lead Austria’s so-called identitarian movement.

This record explains, in part, why all of Germany’s mainstream parties refuse to go into any sort of coalition government with the AfD, even as it is polling in second place in this month’s federal elections. Vance may seem to think it’s the responsibility of democracy to embrace any party or point of view; it’s worth wondering what he might have said if, instead of the AfD polling at around 20 percent, an antisemitic and anti-democratic Muslim Brotherhood-style party was drawing a similar percentage of voters.

There’s another reason to fear the AfD. Last year, The Times’s Erika Solomon reported on a secret session in the German Parliament in which lawmakers heard evidence of ties between AfD politicians and Kremlin-connected operatives. The AfD denies the allegations, but it’s no surprise that the AfD wants to end German military aid for Ukraine and restart the Nord Stream pipelines through which Russia used to supply Germany with natural gas.

In its first term, the Trump administration fought tooth-and-nail against Nord Stream, on the justified grounds that it made Germany dependent on an enemy of the West. Someone might ask Ric Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Berlin and now his special envoy, why the administration is now so fond of a party that effectively sides with that enemy?

There’s an argument to be made in a future column that some European governments go too far to curtail legitimate free speech. There’s another one to be written about the many ways that Europe’s supposedly mainstream right-of-center parties, particularly Germany’s Christian Democrats under Merkel, adopted left-leaning positions on migration, domestic security, fiscal policy, energy policy and other issues that drove conservative voters into the arms of the far right.

For now, the important point is this: Much like a certain British prime minister long ago, an American vice president went to Munich to carry on about his idealism while breaking bread with those who would obliterate democratic ideals. A disgrace.

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No, I did not make the same point when Obama elected.

There was no need to do so. Obama did not go to Europe and start mouthing off to seasoned respected European world leaders during his first 30 days in office.

But this is how Trump operates. He mouths off, threatens people, lies, threatens, people again, belittles people, talk, junk, lies again and generally acts like a fifth grader.

This is the quick easy score for Trump with the gullible Fox News viewers. Easy money. I could do it. You could do it.

But none of this provides for long-term stability and long-term relationships and long-term transatlantic relationships. But Trump doesn’t care. He just wants to score some points with Fox News viewers.

I’m #### glad Trump was not a world leader during or after World War II. The greatest generation would’ve told him to sit down and shut up. But if he had any say in the post World War II world, we would all be in a very different place now.

JD Vance

Not near as much as kamala***

Re: Not near as much as kamala***

Re: Not near as much as kamala***

Kamala isn't making an a$$ of herself at meetings in Europe/***

Re: Kamala isn't making an a$$ of herself at meetings in Europe/***

Re: JD Vance

Re: JD Vance

Re: JD Vance

Re: JD Vance

Re: JD Vance

Re: JD Vance

Re: JD Vance

Re: JD Vance

Re: JD Vance

Grew up in the 3rd world?****

Zelenskyy is a failed comedian

Re: Zelenskyy is a failed comedian

You're such a poor loser... Get a grip.***

Re: You're such a poor loser... Get a grip.***

Re: You're such a poor loser... Get a grip.***

I know, I know

People shouldn't be talking about his experience....

Re: I know, I know

Re: JD Vance

Re: JD Vance

Re: JD Vance

About 200x the experience HRC had

Re: About 200x the experience HRC had

Re: JD Vance

Re: JD Vance

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