Sunday School 7/22/18

Three classrooms today - ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Fox News Sunday with Brett Baier sitting in for Chris Wallace and Face The Nation with Margaret Brennan on CBS, which is where we'll start.

Brennan aired a recent interview with former Secretary of State John Kerry; he was not so impressed with the current president's performance, which should come as no surprise.

I found it shocking. I found it to be one of the most disgraceful, remarkable moments of kowtowing to a foreign leader by an American president that anyone has ever witnessed... The president stood there and did not defend our country. He stood there and did not defend the truth, he did not defend the facts... and the danger, it's dangerous -- because it sends a message to President Putin and to the rest of the world that the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, really doesn't have a handle on what he's doing, and that he doesn't, you know, know either what the facts are or he won't accept the facts. 

He was equally not impressed with the walkback, wondering how anyone can buy into the walkback when there are so many of them and the positions change all the time, causing a need for more walking back.

Brennan noted that Trump tells us the meddling all happened under President Obama's watch, and that Obama also didn't confront Putin publicly. Kerry pointed out  that Obama sent the unbiased experts out - DNI, CIA - to talk about it what we knew and stayed out of the fray himself. But there was that time in China when Obama pulled Putin aside.

Finally, in choosing not to comment on Trump's recent comments about Joe Biden (from his CBS News interview) Kerry noted something that we all should remember:

What he does is, he's always looking for the diversion, always moving away from the real business of our country because he doesn't know how to do the real business of our country.

Moving to Fox and Brett Baier's conversation with the ethically challenged Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) about Trump/Putin, about Brett Kavanaugh, and about the progressives in the Democratic Party. We'll take a look at his comments in that order.

On Russia:

You can speak to adversaries, but at the end of the day you have to do it in a way in which you challenge them. The president seems to want to be chummy with Putin instead of challenging him...

Trump should be challenging Putin on international law violations, on Syria, on Crimea... And, while he may have done that behind closed doors, he should have done it after their meeting - as in

...when you had an opportunity to show the world, all of our allies, show NATO, show the free world that you would in fact were not supplicant to Vladimir Putin, but a challenge to him, you failed to do so. 

On Kavanaugh, and specifically the simple majority requirement for Supremes initiated by Mitch McConnell

There will come a moment in which they'll regret that and, you know, if this continues, we are going to have a Senate not as the Founders of the Constitution and the Framers of the Constitution imagined, it will just be a majority vote institution like the House of Representatives and that will dramatically change the country.

And on the progressives within the Dem's gang, specifically Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's been hanging with fake Democrat Bernie Sanders, selling an agenda that apparently includes the end of capitalism and references an Israeli occupation of Palestine. I'm with Menendez on this.

Look, that's their agenda. And, you know, under our democracy, everybody has their agenda. I've seen extreme right wing agendas that I disagree with equally as well. 

Finally, to This Week and and Susan Rice, former National Security Advisor to President Obama. She too reminded us that Trump's initial sanctions against Russia came after a 98-2 vote in the Senate pretty much shaming him into them. And that Trump's policies are service Putin's interests, not so much the interests of the US and our allies. And, in reference to the private meeting, she was pretty clear.

It was a historic mistake to allow the president of the United States -- not just Donald Trump, but any president, frankly -- to sit for two hours without any note-takers, without any aides present, with one of the most adversarial leaders of the world relative to the United States. 

And on how Trump blames Obama and other Presidents for the current state of relations with Russia, she pulled no punches.

So, you know, president Trump can throw all kinds of epithets around. It seems that's how he likes to govern, but the facts are the facts and the reality is, the United States, on a bipartisan basis, needs to be unified in its opposition to Russia's policies, to its efforts to undermine our democracy and our domestic political discourse, and we shouldn't be casting aspersions on one's predecessors, we should be looking Putin squarely in the eye and delivering the message that supports United States interests, not Russian interests.

See you around campus.