Background Briefing: July 22, 2019
Trump Sells Out the Afghan People to the Perfidious Pakistan Army’s Puppet PM
We begin with the extraordinary remark today by President Trump sitting beside Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan claiming he could win the war in Afghanistan in a week, but “I don’t want to kill ten million people. Afghanistan could be wiped off the face of the earth. I don’t want to go that route.” Christine Fair a Professor in the Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service who served as a political officer with the U.N. Assistance Mission in Kabul and as a senior fellow at West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center and is the author of “Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War”, joins us. We will discuss the cynical truth behind Trump’s absurd bombast and that is the sad fact that Trump is selling out the Afghan people to the Taliban in a deal with the perfidious Pakistan Army’s puppet Prime Minister Khan. They should be held responsible for every American life and limb sacrificed in Afghanistan instead of being being rewarded by Trump for stabbing us in the back. But this is all about Trump fulfilling a campaign promise while again trashing an Obama policy of working with Iran to connect landlocked Afghanistan to the outside world without having to rely on access through Pakistan. And to top things off, Trump told a bald-faced lie claiming India’s Prime Minister Modi had asked him to mediate with Pakistan over Kashmir which is the last thing the rabid Hindu nationalist Modi would ever contemplate
How Trump’s Manipulation of the Media Overwhelms Damaging Stories
Then we examine the ease with which Trump manipulates the media by his calculated outrages which overwhelm and disguise otherwise damaging stories the media is being distracted from covering. Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and the co-host of the Politics and Polls podcast joins us to discuss his article at CNN “Trump is a Dangerous Media Mastermind”. By hurling racist insults at the four minority congresswomen, Trump succeeded in dominating a week of coverage while important stories like revelations of Julian Assange’s ties to Russian Intelligence and how A.G. Barr shut down the SDNY’s investigation into “Individual 1” (Trump) got buried under the noise.
One Third of Puerto Ricans Protest Their Corrupt Governor
Then finally, with a million people taking to the streets in Puerto Rico to protest Governor Rossello demanding his resignation, we speak with Charles Venator-Santiago, a Professor of Latino Politics at the Institute of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at the University of Connecticut. He joins us to discuss how a third of the island’s citizens which is half of its voting population, are in the street protesting the rampant corruption which has infested Puerto Rico’s politics with the governor such a flagrant crook it is hard to understand how he was elected in the first place.