So innocent?
Even some Republicans are a little bit skeeved by Trump’s flattery of Putin.
President Trump has long been effusive in his praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.
In an interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, which will air ahead of the Super Bowl on Sunday, Trump doubled down on his “respect” for Putin — even in the face of accusations that Putin and his associates have murdered journalists and dissidents in Russia.
“I do respect him. Well, I respect a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean I’ll get along with them,” Trump told O’Reilly.
O’Reilly pressed on, declaring to the president that “Putin is a killer.”
Unfazed, Trump didn’t back away, but rather compared Putin’s reputation for extrajudicial killings with the United States’.
“There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers,” Trump said. “Well, you think our country is so innocent?”
Hmmmmm. But yesterday he was Twitter-shouting about keeping “evil” [scare-quotes his] out of our glorious nation.
This isn’t a new line with him.
In a 2015 interview on “Morning Joe,” Trump was pressed on the same issue and gave a similar answer.
“He kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” the show’s host, Joe Scarborough, pointed out.
“Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe,” Trump said.
Hmmmm. Really? Bush and Obama put polonium in activists’ tea? Bush and Obama sent hit men to machine gun journalists in their own apartment buildings? I wonder why we haven’t heard anything about that.
This is getting beyond bizarre. Even Bill-O is giving Trump side-eye over being cozy with foreign thugs, and Trump’s defense is “We’re thugs too”? Which is true to some extent — but the US is generally less obvious about it, and *conservatives* generally don’t like to admit to it, let alone say that it’s a good thing.
Well, now Trump has to catch up. He’s got to start his own body count, or else he won’t be taken seriously. He’s thinking maybe he should have shot someone on Fifth Avenue. He’s probably chafing at his newly discovered constraints.
I know we’ve made a cottage industry of asking, “Can you imagine if Hillary had said X?” but can you imagine if Hillary Clinton (or Barack Obama!) had said, “Sure, Putin’s Russia is bad, but we’re a shitty country, too”?
I’m glad to see Trump telling the truth for a change. The US does do “plenty of killing,” and has done so from the nation’s founding.
It may not be as surgical about it as putting polonium in activists’ tea, but just the other day, the US again murdered a member of the al-Awalki family in Yemen. This time, American special forces shot the 8-year-old daughter of US-born Anwar al-Awalki in the neck. In 2011, Obama ordered several drone strike to kill her father, and a separate drone-strike to kill her 16-year-old brother. All three al-Awalkis are US citizens who have never been charged with any crime. At least the victims of polonium poisoning were all adults.