Month: October 2017

Philippine Trumpieby digby
President Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in his initial phone call that he thought he’d handled the drug war “the right way” (by killing everyone in sight.)Duterte obviously thinks Trump is fantastic too. He’s taking Trumpism international:

President Duterte said he has been “demonized” by “fake news” about the alleged extrajudicial killings linked to his war on illegal drugs.

The President accused his political opponents of spreading such false information about the suspected drug-related killings, insisting he has never ordered any policeman to kill people.

“I have been demonized. And well, of course, I will assure you upon my oath as a lawyer and before God that some are true, some are not. And the extrajudicial tag that has been placed on me is simply not true,” Duterte said during a gathering of ASEAN Law Association Governing Council in Malacañang.

“According to the bright guys of this country, the political opposition, the guys who cannot accept defeat, they invented the fake news and concocted figures,” he added.

Duterte explained that he merely authorized policemen to shoot drug suspects if they violently resist arrest. “I do not deny that there were people killed in that campaign. But what they say is, why are they here? Because a shabu user or a lieutenant of the shabu syndicate has always a gun,” he said.

Duterte said he did not order the cops to murder people who willingly surrender to authorities.

“I did not tell any policeman, for the life of me, to kill just everybody perhaps sitting down or kneeling in front of the police with his hands outstretched in surrender. That is really murder,” he said.

“I have always stressed that the only time that you can kill a criminal is when your life is also in danger, or you’re about — self-preservation,” he said.

The President challenged his critics to file a case against him before the international criminal court, saying there was “no problem” about it.

Duterte defended that he is merely enforcing the law amid the intensified campaign against illegal drugs. He however, saw nothing wrong with his oft-repeated threat to kill those who would destroy the nation through the illegal drug trade.

Pass the popcornby digby
I doubt this will be much of an effort but it will be fun to watch the Republicans fight among themselves anyway. They’re already either petrified of their crazed voters or they agree with them so it’s hard to see how this changes anything. But let the games begin!

Allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared open warfare on Wednesday against Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and leader of an insurrection aimed at defeating mainstream Republican candidates in next year’s midterm elections.

More than a year ahead of the 2018 congressional contests, a ­super PAC aligned with McConnell (R-Ky.) revealed plans to attack Bannon personally as it works to protect GOP incumbents facing uphill primary fights. The effort reflects the growing concern of Republican lawmakers over the rise of anti-establishment forces and comes amid escalating frustration over President Trump’s conduct, which has prompted a handful of lawmakers to publicly criticize the president.

Yet the retaliatory crusade does not aim to target Trump, whose popularity remains high among Republican voters. Instead, the McConnell-allied Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) will highlight Bannon’s hard-line populism and attempt to link him to white nationalism to discredit him and the candidates he will support. It will also boost candidates with traditional GOP profiles and excoriate those tied to Bannon, with plans to spend millions and launch a heavy social media presence in some states.

The turbulence presents a danger to Republicans’ narrow 52-seat majority in the Senate, with seasoned GOP lawmakers deciding against seeking reelection amid the political storm — and with many GOP voters cheering the rancor that Bannon has stoked from his perch at his website, Breitbart.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), in an emotional plea Tuesday, said that he would not run in 2018, after Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) had done the same in late September. Both men, no longer accountable to Republican primary voters, have taken on higher-profile roles as critics of the president, with Corker calling for a “day care” to step in and control him and Flake calling Trump’s behavior “unacceptable.”

Some Republican lawmakers have privately fretted that simply speaking out against Trump’s incendiary statements or the ­Bannon-aligned candidates that are rousing anger in their states will not be enough — and could backfire — as they try to survive the surge of grievance-driven politics that has gripped the GOP’s base.

“It’s tough,” Flake told CNN on Wednesday. “I’m competitive. I like to fight these battles. But I also knew that I couldn’t run the kind of race that I would be proud of and win in a Republican primary at this time. The politics in that way have changed.”

In the wake of Flake’s announcement, the SLF called Arizona state Sen. Kelli Ward, Bannon’s pick to replace Flake, a “conspiracy theorist” and promised to ensure her defeat.

In recent weeks, Bannon has held court as dozens of candidates have streamed through his Capitol Hill townhouse, including Ward last week, urging them to pledge to vote against McConnell for majority leader. Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R) is close to making a decision on a bid against Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and has won Bannon’s blessing, according to a person close to him.

Hedge fund executive Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah — Bannon’s wealthy allies — have pledged millions to the cause, said people briefed on their plans.

Bannon’s critics argue that he is causing unnecessary internal divisions that could make it harder to pass tax legislation — and to win general elections next fall. They also point to Sen. Luther Strange’s defeat in last month’s Republican primary in a special Senate election in Alabama as an example of a dynamic they worry could repeat itself across the next year if left unchecked. The SLF spent more than $10 million to help Strange.

Trump’s big opioid planby digby
Trump’s big plan to fix the opioid crisis: “Really tough, really big, really great advertising so we get to people before they start. If we can teach young people not to take drugs … it’s really, really easy not to take them.”
Nancy Reagan just called from the grave: “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.”

Trump takes credit for fake fake newsby digby
You really can’t make this up. Trump is bragging that he has successfully convinced the American people that the media is “fake news” in order to cover for his bad press

Via:

Trump said during an interview with Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs that he takes credit for branding the media as “fake” and that he “really started this whole fake news thing.”

“I know a good story from a bad story. But when you have a really good story and they make it bad, I’ll say to my wife, ‘Oh, tonight, I’m going to enjoy watching television because I did great, and wait until you see this,’ ” Trump said.
“And then, they put it on and it’s like — oh, that’s not so good. They are fake news,” he continued.

Trump has repeatedly attacked the media as “fake news” since his presidential campaign.

“If you look at it from the day I started running to now, I’m so proud that I have been able to convince people how fake it is — because it has taken a nosedive,” Trump said.

He added that he would “rather not” tweet but that he has to to show Americans “the truth.”

“It’s not that I want to do that. I’d rather not do it. I would love to not do it at all,” Trump said about tweeting.

“But at least I can put out the truth. And I can put out the real word. And people agree,” he said.

Trump also took credit for popularizing the word “fake” during an interview earlier this month.

“I think one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with is ‘fake,’ ” Trump told former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) during an interview. “I guess other people have used it, perhaps over the years, but I’ve never noticed it.”

Where do they draw the line? Is there a line?by digby

I honestly don’t know what they wouldn’t do. What would it take for John Cornyn and the tens of millions of Americans who still support this inept, imbecilic, racist, violent demagogue to abandon him? I’m becoming afraid that by the time we find out it will be too late.

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Remember: The king of the harassers is also the leader of the free worldby digby
I am glad to see many women feeling safe enough to come forward about  lasting sexual harassment on the job. But I admit that while I would be thrilled to be wrong, I’m cynical about whether any lasting change will occur. And there is one overriding reason why I am pessimistic: President Donald Trump.
Anna North and Ezra Klein at Vox took on the task of looking at the two cases of Weinstein and Trump and asking why in the course of just 12 months one of them became a pariah and the other became president of the United States.

I urge you to read the beginning of the article — it’s a very thorough examination of the facts in both cases which are astonishingly similar. It concludes with this:

While an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted just after the Access Hollywoodtape’s release found Clinton with an 11-point lead over Trump, a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted around the same time gave her just a 4-point lead. In that poll, almost 70 percent of respondents said Trump had probably made unwanted sexual advances on women. But 64 percent of respondents — and 84 percent of Republicans — said the tape would make no difference in how they voted.

“It’s not only the Republicans in Congress” who were willing to give Trump a pass, said Lawless. “It’s also the country. People think this behavior is unacceptable, but when push comes to shove, there are circumstances under which they’ll tolerate it because there are other things that matter more to them.”

Those things surely varied, to some degree, from voter to voter. Trump won 53 percent of white women and 61 percent of white women without college degrees. The latter group, as Tara Golshan reported for Vox, has been growing more conservative in recent years, and tends to have more conservative views on gender issues. In a Washington Post/ABC polllast year, about four in 10 women (and four in 10 men) said that Trump’s comments on the Access Hollywood tape were typical “locker room talk” — his excuse at the time.

Then there is the strange role elections play as validators of moral behavior in American politics. If then-FBI Director James Comey had never sent his infamous letter, and Hillary Clinton had held another 2 or 3 percentage points in the popular vote and decisively won the Electoral College, it is possible, perhaps even likely, that Trump would’ve been widely rejected in the aftermath as an abuser whose actions cost the Republican Party the election. But because he won — and with his win gained power over everything from the tax code to Supreme Court nominations to the nuclear armada — the incentive for the political system is to move on, and the tendency for the media is to suggest that the American people acted as Trump’s judge, and their verdict, such as it is, must be respected.

I’ll just interject here that regardless of his electoral college victory and the circumstances of his win, more than 63 million people in the country didn’t think his disgusting behavior was a deal breaker. Indeed, I would guess that for at least 50% of his voters it was a plus — his misogyny was central to his appeal in that election.

Anyway, she goes on to note that there has been an assumption that this issue would reignite the Trump scandal but it hasn’t happened. And it won’t. 

Rebecca Traister has argued at the Cut that perhaps Weinstein could only be ousted when his power in Hollywood was already on the wane. The same could be said of Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes — allegations against them began to stick when they were old men, no longer at the peak of their careers. As the accusations against Bill O’Reilly piled up, he remained valuable to Fox News — this February, the network’s parent company signed a four-year contract paying him $25 million a year, despite a fresh $32 million sexual harassment settlement between O’Reilly and a legal analyst, according to the New York Times. But as Jeff Guo noted at Vox, O’Reilly’s ratings were dipping — and an advertiser boycott meant it may have made business sense for Fox to let him go.

Meanwhile, Trump is president of the United States. What’s more, the sheer number of accusations against him, concerning everything from sexual misconduct to obstruction of justice, may actually work in his favor. Allegations of sexual harassment and assault are “just part of this much, much broader set of reasons that people think he’s not equipped to be president,” Lawless said. That allows his administration to dismiss the harassment and assault accusations as “just one more thing that Democrats are throwing at the wall” — and that argument works on voters “who feel like no matter what this guy does, there’s a new investigation.”

“We’ve gotten to a point now where there are so many concerns about so many facets of his presidency that it’s hard for any of them to be damning,” Lawless said.

That doesn’t mean the Weinstein allegations will have no impact. They have focused public attention on gender dynamics, said Lawless, which could benefit Democrats in 2018. They’re likely to campaign not just on the sexual misconduct allegations against Trump but also on the Education Department’s rollback of Obama-era sexual assault guidelines and on the administration’s ban on transgender recruits in the military. “Democrats are going to make the case that we need a government and public policies to ensure that we have not only an equal playing field but one that is just,” Lawless said.

The Weinstein revelations and the ensuing conversation could make voters take allegations of sexual assault or harassment by political candidates more seriously in the future, said Res, Trump’s former employee. The next time such allegations come out, “it will be worse for the candidate than it was for Trump.”

But Trump himself likely wields too much authority now to pay for his abuses — too many other interests and politicians and factions would find themselves damaged if he were to fall.

This is, perhaps, the depressing lesson of the Weinstein and Trump stories. The allegations are similar. The evidence is similar. But power still protects, and while Weinstein had lost enough power to imperil his protection, Trump has only amassed more.

“Trump has a lifetime of doing things that would be found to be unacceptable and reprehensible in other people and would have led to their downfall,” said Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal, “and he has consistently, since a very early age, been able to survive his own behavior.”

Let’s face it. There’s a lot of interest in this because the people involved are famous. I’m sure it will result in some changes, however temporary. But the election of that pig in the White House shows that when push comes to shove women’s rights and status in this society is simply not a primary issue for most people. Even many women. Until that changes, this sort of thing is going to continue.

Sexual harassment is a serious problem for working women everywhere not just in show business. My worst experiences didn’t happen when I worked Hollywood. And it takes on many different permutations, not just the sort of lurid assaults that characterize the Weinstein Trump behaviors.

The necessary cultural change will take a long time and this is a good start. But I’m afraid it’s going to be hard for me to see this as a major turning point as long as Donald “grab ’em by the pussy” Trump is the leader of the free world and maintains the support of the Republican party. Every time I see him on TV it’s a reminder that tens of millions of people voted for him less than a year ago knowing fully what he was.

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It’s Trump’s party now folks, might as well accept itby digby
My Salon column this morning is about the fact that for al the GOP handwringing, the party is now the Trump Party. Whether they like it or not.The reverberations of Sen. Jeff Flake’s speech on the Senate floor continued to be felt through the media on Wednesday as pundits and analysts spent much of the day writing the epitaph for Trumpism, killed in its infancy by a resurgent GOP establishment. Alex Isenstadt at Politico reported that Washington Republicans were nervous but also believed that ultimately the establishment would prevail. They told him that since Flake was polling very badly, they were now positioned “to field a more popular mainstream candidate who has a better chance of winning.”

But that would indicate that Jeff Flake is not a mainstream candidate — and that’s the crux of the problem. Jeff Flake is a rock-ribbed conservative, a Goldwater Republican who believes fervently in low taxes, low regulation, family values and gun rights. He has a lifetime 95 percent rating from FreedomWorks, 93 percent from the American Conservative Union and 97 percent from Americans for Prosperity. Even his supposed apostasy on immigration was a position held by a large number of Republicans as recently as 2013, when the “Gang of 8” almost passed a comprehensive immigration reform package, until future Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, sabotaged the effort. Indeed, the only way in which Jeff Flake isn’t a mainstream Republican is in his vocal antagonism toward Donald Trump.

As far as Trump is concerned, that doesn’t just make Flake a fringe member of the Republican Party, that makes him a Democrat.

“Long before he ever knew me, during the campaign, even before the campaign — I mean, he came out with this horrible book, and I said, ‘Who is this guy?’” Mr. Trump told reporters on Wednesday afternoon. “In fact, I remembered the first time I saw him on television I had not really been — nobody knew me in terms of politics. But the first time I saw him on television, I said, ‘I assume he’s a Democrat. Is he a Democrat?’” Mr. Trump said. “They said he’s a Republican. I said, ‘That’s impossible.’”

That’s as clear an indication of Flake’s status as an enemy of the GOP as you can get. It’s the Trump Party now. And here’s what its leader had to say on Wednesday:

We have, actually, great unity in the Republican Party. We have great unity. If you look at what happened yesterday in the meeting we had virtually every senator including John McCain, we had a great conversation yesterday, John McCain and myself, about the military. I called it a love fest, it was almost a love fest. It was a love fest. Standing ovation.There is great unity. If you look at the Democrats with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, now that’s a mess. There’s great unity in the Republican Party.

He’s right. According to both Trump and The New York Times, there were several standing ovations. Just hours later, all the Republicans voted as a bloc (except for South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and Louisiana’s John Kennedy) to gut an important consumer protection and give a very generous gift to banks and other financial institutions. Word was that Trump’s Treasury Department had leaned heavily on the Senate to pass it. Apparently, that’s what Trump and his unified party call “populism.” It’s interesting how much it resembles the same old plutocracy they’ve been working for all along.

Meanwhile, the allegedly fractious Democrats — including the Senate’s two independents, Sanders and Angus King of Maine — also voted together against that anti-consumer arbitration act. Their action might actually fit the definition of populism. Imagine that.

So both parties are unified. The question is, what unifies them? The answer, for the moment, is the same thing: Donald Trump.

We don’t know yet how united the Democrats will be behind a comprehensive populist agenda once election season kicks in, but so far they are in lockstep against Trump and his “movement” with nary a deviation. There was a time when you could always count on some Democratic “moderate” like Joe Lieberman of Connecticut or Ben Nelson of Nebraska to preen for the cameras at times like this. Both are now retired, and even the red-state Democrats up for re-election in 2018, who are clearly in a vulnerable position, have held the line.

As for the GOP, Steve Bannon recently told The New York Times that the traditional small-government approach “doesn’t move with urgency. It’s very nice. But it’s a theoretical exercise. It can’t win national elections.” What does win elections, in Bannon’s view, is what he calls “economic nationalism” but what, in practice, is simply loyalty to Donald Trump. After all, they are cutting the heart out of the national budget, rolling back regulations, slashing taxes for millionaires, building up the military and threatening war — which pretty well describes the traditional, “mainstream” GOP governing agenda.

What separates heretics like Flake, McCain and Bob Corker from the rest is simply the fact that they have spoken out against Trump’s erratic, obnoxious, unprofessional and frankly dangerous behavior. This is unacceptable in the “Trump movement.”

Some never-Trumpers like former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt continue to hold out hope that Trumpism has limited appeal within the party. On MSNBC Wednesday, Schmidt made the point that Trump’s coalition has been shrinking since the beginning of the year and that as political parties get smaller, they always get louder and more extreme. He used the rump California GOP, whose members apparently responded to Steve Bannon’s comments about John McCain in a recent speech by shouting “Hang him!” as an example of a party that’s completely lost relevance.

Trump’s coalition may be shrinking, but he still has the support of tens of millions of Republicans who have proven that they don’t really care about policy. They just want to “win,” by which they mean punish or destroy their perceived liberal enemies. Trump is their man, and the GOP establishment for the most part is happy to go along. Those taxes won’t cut themselves.

Of course, there’s also a decent chance that this alleged takeover of the party is another fraudulent Donald Trump enterprise that will end up destroying the lives and futures of many of these Republicans who are so eager to show their fealty. It’s kind of his specialty.

We could easily suffer a catastrophe or be handed some big news from the office of special counsel Robert Mueller over the next few months. But the best way to sort this all out is at the ballot box. The only way to know whether Trump’s election was a historical fluke, or whether a plurality of Americans really want to continue down this dark and dangerous path, is for the voters to make their wishes known.

If the nearly 60 percent of Americans who disapprove of President Trump and his “movement” don’t come out to vote after all this, then we probably deserve what we get.

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Morning navel-gazing
by Tom Sullivan

The survey on the site Political Compass offers people a chance to plot their place on the political “map” and maybe see who their neighbors are. The Guardian’s “long read” by Pete Davis today focuses on the sectors from left to leftier.

It’s a bit of navel-gazing, but lays out (more or less) the divide between the liberal (“establishment wing”) on the one hand and the leftwing (“populist wing”) of the Democratic Party. It’s descriptive more than prescriptive:

Loyalty to the party generally is often bound up in loyalty to party leaders. The party’s liberal wing tends to get excited about party leaders’ personalities, and is more likely to share, say, Obama or Hillary memes, watch West Wing fantasies about party staffers and follow the path of rising stars. This loyalty extends to the wider network tied to the party, too, such as liberal-leaning news anchors and commentators, and party-aligned Hollywood stars such as Meryl Streep.

Leftwingers think this level of loyalty is bizarre, especially when it comes to politicians they believe do not deserve it. Leftwingers are generally less likely to express loyalty to leaders, and more likely to pledge themselves to issue campaigns that bubble up from extra-party institutions, such as labour unions or racial justice and environmental groups. They respond to liberal attacks of “Why aren’t you knocking on doors in the general election?” with “Why aren’t you joining the Fight for $15?” (a national grassroots campaign for fairer wages led by fast-food workers). Leftwingers believe liberals cannot think for themselves on issues – that they wait to get the go-ahead from the party establishment before they offer any support. To leftwingers, the liberals’ shorter-term issues, such as the Russia investigation, are just distractions unless they are embedded in more fundamental issue campaigns.

What the leftwing sees:

A narrative has coalesced of a party that has been corrupted by corporate campaign donations; that is complicit in conservatism’s rise, through its capitulation to Reaganomics and Bush-era militarism; that has displaced its working-class base to make room for a professional, managerial class; and, most damningly, has replaced its democracy-enhancing New Deal ambitions with a minimalist grab-bag of meritocracy-enhancing, technocratic band-aids.

What the establishment sees:

A narrative has emerged to unify this wing as well: a story that casts the Democratic party as the entity that has overcome unprecedented Republican attacks to give voice to and fight for the interests of marginalised people in American politics.

Those prone to taking surveys like Political Compass will find themselves in there somewhere. Whatever his leanings, Davis tends to offer more advice to leftwingers than to the establishment Democrats. He recommends something he calls “vigorous critical loyalty”:

Vigorous critical loyalty would work by separating the times for vigorous party loyalty and the times for vigorous internal criticism. A Democrat practising vigorous critical loyalty would, near the general election or a critical vote in Congress, demonstrate vigorous loyalty to the party, mustering support for the Democratic candidate or bill while holding criticism for later. But during a primary campaign, and during ordinary legislative time, a vigorous critical loyalist would fight vigorously for her ideals, unafraid of criticising party leaders, supporting primary challengers, and advancing outside issue campaigns.

That mouthful will be a tough sell in certain quarters, but for the most part was what I observed here. A lot of activists get uncomfortable admitting it.

One problem with much of the post-election analysis is its focus on broad, national issues of parties, policies, ideologies, and on national campaigns. Not enough grassroots energy goes into local campaigns that build a bench that backstops a Democratic Congress and Oval Office. It doesn’t help that the DSCC, DCCC, and their state counterparts are more (self) interested in caucus building than in movement or party building. The focus for what Davis calls the leftwing tends to be too national, too global, when the fact that Republicans control 32 state legislatures is a much more granular problem. Fixing the Electoral College or the DNC won’t fix that.
That field of grass is growing between their toes.

Plus, the endless bickering has become, as Dieter might say, tiresome.

Given how the election shook out, I am convinced had Sanders won the nomination last year he would have lost (for a variety of reasons) just as Clinton did.

Then the accusation from the leftwing would be that the party establishment had stayed home in large numbers or voted for the reality show host to keep the presidency out of progressives’ hands. (The same stab-in-the-back narrative.) The corporate wing would claim if only Hillary had been the candidate, Democrats would have been victorious, then retrench and move further right.

Sanders fans would still be pointing fingers at the DNC and Clinton fans, and Clinton fans would point back, arguing Sanders turned off voters with which Clinton would have easily won if not for Sanders’ insurgency.

There would be just enough truth to their arguments for both sides to keep bickering endlessly and pointlessly.

And we’d still have The Donald.

Isn’t there work to do?

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Ok, this is just terrifyingby digby
It’s possible that this is what has Corker, Flake and McCain so agitated: “Diplomatic efforts between the United States and North Korea are in peril with Pyongyang shunning talks in response to President Donald Trump’s increased public attacks on Kim Jong Un, according to multiple U.S. government and congressional officials.” Someone has got to shut him up.NBC News reports:

Joseph Yun, a top American diplomat to North Korea, has been warning of the breakdown in meetings on Capitol Hill and seeking help to persuade the administration to prioritize diplomacy over the heated rhetoric that appears to be pushing the two nuclear powers closer toward conflict, sources familiar with the discussions told NBC News.

The warnings from Yun and Congressional officials come as the president prepares for his first official trip to Asia next month and as tensions between the two nations are near an all-time high. Officials throughout government worry that a lack of diplomacy increases the risks of military action in the region.

They also explain some of the alarmist comments that have been made by Republican and Democratic Senators in recent weeks, most notable Foreign Relations Committee chair Sen. Bob Corker who has said repeatedly that the president is undercutting diplomatic efforts.

While few think that Trump would order a pre-emptive strike, a lack of communication between the two countries or through China increases the chances of miscommunication, leading to a further escalation.

Yun’s diplomatic efforts are on their “last legs,” one U.S. official said, adding that Yun is frustrated by an inability to communicate the urgency of the diplomatic situation to the White House.

“It is not so much that North Korea is shutting down, it’s that the message from the U.S. government is, ‘surrender without a fight or surrender with a fight,’” a separate U.S. official told NBC News.

A Congressional aide who has spoken with Yun directly says the diplomat is searching for a “hail Mary” attempt to restart any sort of talks, including perhaps a high-level envoy or dispatching Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Yun was not available for comment, but East Asian and Pacific Affairs Bureau spokesman Justin Higgins told NBC News: “We can’t comment on allegations from anonymous sources. What I can say is that Ambassador Yun has been faithfully executing the Trump administration’s North Korea policy since Jan. 20, including his trip to North Korea at the president’s direction to bring American citizen Otto Warmbier back to the United States after a year in captivity.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

“We are running out of time”
Yun, the deputy assistant secretary for Korea and Japan at the State Department, has told Congressional aides and government officials that the White House has “handicapped” diplomacy.

Corker used similar language when he said recently that tweets from Trump have raised tensions and undercut Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

“When you kneecap that effort you really move our country into a binary choice which could lead to a world war. So yes, I want him to support diplomatic efforts, not embarrass and really malign efforts that are underway,” Corker said on NBC’s TODAY on Tuesday.

Trump’s war of words with the North Korean leader have escalated in recent months. He warned that Kim will be met with “fire and fury” and in a speech at the United Nations, Trump named him “Little Rocket Man.”

The president departs Nov. 3 and will visit with U.S. allies in Japan and South Korea who are increasingly worried about escalating tensions in the region. Trump is also visiting China, which doesn’t want to see a collapsed North Korea on its border. China has been financially supporting the regime but is also a critical partner for the U.S. in dealing with North Korea.

It appears unlikely that Trump will visit the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, although the White House says a final decision has not been made. Most presidents since Ronald Reagan have visited the region during an Asia trip. Vice President Mike Pence went earlier this year as did Tillerson.

Tillerson, originally skeptical of diplomacy, has come around to believing that talks with the North Koreans are increasingly important, a Congressional source said, as the country has ramped up its testing of long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles with increasing success and progressing on his nuclear weapons program.

While in China last month, Tillerson said the U.S. is talking directly with North Korea. “We have lines of communications to Pyongyang,” he told reporters. “We’re not in a dark situation, a blackout. We have a couple, three channels open to Pyongyang. We can talk to them. We do talk to them.”

Indian Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj hosted Tillerson for talks on Wednesday and said India will keep its small embassy in North Korea open as a potential channel for diplomatic talks. “I told Secretary Tillerson that some of their friendly countries should maintain embassies there so that some channels of communication are kept open,” Swaraj told reporters.

Related: N. Korea Taught Him to Hate Americans. Now He’s Off to U.S.

Trump, however, seems to disagree with that approach. He told Tillerson on Twitter that he is “wasting his time” trying to talk to North Korea.

That exchange caused Corker to defend Tillerson and escalate a public feud with the president. Corker recently told the Washington Post that the president has “castrated” Tillerson.

While Corker wouldn’t directly respond to stalled diplomacy with North Korea, he told NBC News that “these are the kinds of thing that I’m speaking to.”

“Either we’re going to deal with this and deal with China (who is key to North Korea) in a serious way and appropriately use diplomacy as one of our levers or we’re going to end up with a binary choice. And that’s what I’ve been speaking to,” Corker said.

Read on.

It’s possible that Corker and the rest are walking a fine line trying to keep Trump from blowing up the world, afraid that if they push too hard he’ll push the button.

It’s this:

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He’ll be the first to tell you that no man in the world is more intelligent or more humble than he/p>
by digby

Q: Should you be more civil? Trump: I think the press makes me more uncivil than I am. You know, people don’t understand. I went to an Ivy League college. I was a nice student. I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person. You know the fact is, I really believe this, I think the press creates a different image of Donald Trump than the real person.”

Q: Should you be more civil?
Trump: Press makes me more uncivil than I am… I went to an Ivy League college. I'm a very intelligent person pic.twitter.com/x2sYu4tYV2— David Mack (@davidmackau) October 25, 2017

Notice he uses the third person to refer to himself when he talks about his image.

He also said he has the world’s greatest memory implying that Myeshia Johnson the widow of the slain soldier didn’t know what she was talking about. He just knows that he was very nice and very sympathetic and basically she lied.

He’s disturbed, seriously disturbed. But you knew that.

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