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Bob Woodward's New Book

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steve_bank

Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
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secular-skeptic

In his new book, legendary journalist Bob Woodward offers a remarkable look behind the scenes at President Joe Biden’s blunt, profanity-laced assessments and interactions with the world leaders who have shaped his presidency, from Benjamin Netanyahu to Vladimir Putin.

“That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad fucking guy!” Biden declared privately about the Israeli prime minister to one of his associates in the spring of 2024 as Israel’s war in Gaza intensified, Woodward writes.


“That fucking Putin,” Biden said to advisers in the Oval Office not long after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Woodward. “Putin is evil. We are dealing with the epitome of evil.”

The book, “War,” also reveals new details about Donald Trump’s private conversations with Putin – and a secret shipment of Covid-19 testing equipment Trump sent to the Russian president for his personal use during the height of the pandemic.
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Trump never does anything without getting something from it. What did he get from Putin?
 
I was about to start a thread on this. That book looks electric!
article said:
Woodward also writes about Trump’s decision to run for president again, including a series of conversations with his ally and golfing buddy, Sen. Lindsey Graham.

“Going to Mar-a-Lago is a little bit like going to North Korea,” Graham said. “Everybody stands up and claps every time Trump comes in.”
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I'd guess it'd be historical. England and France (and Prussia) were big players in keeping Russia in check back in the good ole days when Europe was war'ing like it was going our of fashion. In particular, the Crimean War, where Russia thought all would be well with another invasion of the Ottoman Empire (in defense of their brand of Christianity). But the powers to the West liked where the Ottoman Empire stood at that point (weak and manipulitable). So they scoffed... and defeated a behind the times Russia pretty badly. How badly? Russia still bitches about the Crimean War!
 
Trump secretly sent covid tests to Putin during 2020 shortage, new book says

As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, then-President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.

Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.

Putin, according to the book, told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”
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Aww, isn't their bromance sweet.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
the Crimean War, where Russia thought all would be well with another invasion of the Ottoman Empire (in defense of their brand of Christianity).
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Bugger Christianity. The Russians wanted control of the Bosphorus so they could freely access the Mediterranean from the Black Sea.

The Treaty of Paris simply rubber-stamped the 1852 & '53 firmans that pre-dated the war, and that protected the rights of Christians in Palestine - all of the relevant religious questions were resolved before the fighting started.

The religious questions were an excuse. The Tsar went to war because he wanted control of the straits, and believed that the Ottomans were too weak to prevent him from taking it; He was likely right, but the British and French couldn't stomach sharing the Med with Russian warships, and they had the ships, they had the men, and they had the money, too, by jingo!
 
starwater said:
Trump never does anything without getting something from it. What did he get from Putin?
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A friend he never had. Trump sees himself as a an authoritarian powerful global personality, that is obvious. For Putin Trump is a useful idiot', a term the NYT used to describe Assange's relfationship with Russia and RT.

It was not proven but it seems loans he got from a shady European bank connected to Russia. No one over here would givehim a loan any more. He was financially on the ropes.
 
bilby said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
the Crimean War, where Russia thought all would be well with another invasion of the Ottoman Empire (in defense of their brand of Christianity).
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Bugger Christianity. The Russians wanted control of the Bosphorus so they could freely access the Mediterranean from the Black Sea.

The Treaty of Paris simply rubber-stamped the 1852 & '53 firmans that pre-dated the war, and that protected the rights of Christians in Palestine - all of the relevant religious questions were resolved before the fighting started.
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I might have oversimplified things a bit, but religion was a factor. In fact, this whole Russia be the protector shit we see today was the mindset back then. Odd how some of the factors of the Crimean War lead up look similar to Russia's fucked up incursion into Ukraine. But that'd be tearing this thread well off-topic.
 
steve_bank said:
starwater said:
Trump never does anything without getting something from it. What did he get from Putin?
Click to expand...
A friend he never had. Trump sees himself as a an authoritarian powerful global personality, that is obvious. For Putin Trump is a useful idiot', a term the NYT used to describe Assange's relfationship with Russia and RT.
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Trump thinks he is sitting at the cool people table with the despots, but he is just being used by them. And he is too stupid to know it.
 
Elixir said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
Trump thinks he is sitting at the cool people table with the despots, but he is just being used by them. And he is too stupid to know it.
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That captures the situation perfectly in one sentence.
The question before us as a Nation is:
HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE WE?
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How informed are we in general? The MAGA base are terribly misinformed. The general public is uninformed.

How easily the lies on FEMA aid and Helene is what really scares me. I was seeing it in other boards of the web, before I even knew about it. I just keep thinking of the Quadrophenia concert and Jimmy is complaining about how everyone at the club is doing whatever dumb shit the Ace Face just created. The QAnon sort of fictional claims is spreading to a mainstream party and the cult-ish owner of a massive social media site.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
How informed are we in general?
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I fall back even further.
“Is our collective bullshit detector newly broken, or has it ever been thus?”
We don’t need analytic genius, we only need the visceral, instinctive ability to sense a trap and sidestep it. Something seems to have happened that has dulled that animal sense. My horse can tell a malevolent human from a distance. He feels their body language and derives their intent immediately and unerringly, without judgment or thought. I think we used to have a little of that ability, but we have excluded it from the inner narratives within which we live.
 
When you have a man on tape asking Georgia to "find" him the 11,780 votes he needs, and that man isn't instantly sent howling into the wastelands, then you know that his followers are impervious to logic and arguments that derive from democratic standards -- and that the country is headed for a dark future.
 
I will not be reading this book. In my opinion, Bob Woodward has declined considerably over the years and his writing has become tedious and repetitive. I read his book Peril, and found it to be less than enthralling due to repeatedly using the same dialogue over and over again.

What I find most objectionable though is that he withheld information that should have been made public long ago about supposed interactions between President Trump and Putin. He is supposed to be an investigative journalist who breaks news on a timely basis, not someone who hoards up tidbits here and there so he can make money on them. I have no doubt that any news agency would have been more than happy to have him write an article on those things if he could actually verify them, so I have my suspicions about the veracity of some of these stories.

This is a sad ending to what was a stellar career.

Ruth
 
I think part of the problem is the internet. It was supposed to lead us to a bright future where everyone had education at their fingertips. Instead it proved to be the best platform ever devised for spreading lies and disinformation to the masses of the gullible. In the same way TV, in its infancy, was touted as a tool to spread knowledge and education, Some people rhapsodized about the family huddling around televised science lectures and wonderful concerts. By 1963, Newton Minnow had branded TV “a vast wasteland.” So it goes.
 
This is the thing that concerns me the most:

abcnews.go.com

US scrambled to urge Putin not to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Woodward book says

Months into Russia’s war in Ukraine, the United States had intelligence pointing to “highly sensitive, credible conversations inside the Kremlin” that Russian President Vladimir Putin was seriously considering using nuclear weapons to avoid major battl...
abcnews.go.com abcnews.go.com

And we know that Trump said he would let Putin do whatever he wants... we very possibly narrowly avoided nuclear war.
 
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