Last Call For Disaster Diplomacy

Trump's now-cancelled Camp David talks with the Taliban are the latest example of Trump being in over his head, now it's the rest of the GOP's job to bail him out.  Luckily for him, the Taliban are pretty repugnant terrorist killers and are pretty bad at general PR.

President Donald Trump’s decision to cancel Afghan peace talks will cost more American lives, the Taliban said on Sunday while the United States promised to keep up military pressure on the militants, in a stunning reversal of efforts to forge a deal ending nearly 20 years of war in Afghanistan.

The Islamist group issued a statement after Trump unexpectedly canceled secret talks planned for Sunday with the Taliban’s major leaders at the presidential compound in Camp David, Maryland. He broke off the talks on Saturday after the Taliban claimed responsibility for an attack in Kabul last week that killed an American soldier and 11 others.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, criticized Trump for calling off the dialogue and said U.S. forces have been pounding Afghanistan with attacks at the same time.

“This will lead to more losses to the U.S.,” he said. “Its credibility will be affected, its anti-peace stance will be exposed to the world, losses to lives and assets will increase.”

In Washington, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that Afghan peace talks were on hold and Washington would not reduce U.S. military support for Afghan troops until it was convinced the Taliban could follow through on significant commitments.

The United States has recalled U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad to chart the path forward, Pompeo said in appearances on Sunday TV news shows. Asked on “Fox News Sunday” whether Afghan talks were dead, Pompeo said, “For the time being they are.”

My guess is somebody told Trump that having the Taliban over to Camp David on the week of September 11 probably wouldn't play well with, well, 99% of America, so Trump "bravely" canceled the talks.  Unlike Kim Jong Un, the Taliban don't have the diplomatic cover of statehood.

The story of how the peace deal fell apart this week though is pure Trumpian meltdown.

Mr. Trump made no decision on the spot, but at some point during the meeting the idea was floated to finalize the negotiations in Washington, a prospect that appealed to the president’s penchant for dramatic spectacle. Mr. Trump suggested that he would even invite President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, whose government has not been party to the talks, and get him to sign on.

In the days that followed, Mr. Trump embraced an even more remarkable idea — he would not only bring the Taliban to Washington, but to Camp David, the crown jewel of the American presidency. The leaders of a rugged militant organization deemed terrorists by the United States would be hosted in the mountain getaway used for presidents, prime ministers and kings just three days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that led to the Afghan war.

Thus began an extraordinary few days of ad hoc diplomatic wrangling that upended the talks in a weekend Twitter storm. On display were all of the characteristic traits of the Trump presidency — the yearning ambition for the grand prize, the endless quest to achieve what no other president has achieved, the willingness to defy convention, the volatile mood swings and the tribal infighting.

What would have been one of the biggest headline-grabbing moments of his tenure was put together on the spur of the moment and then canceled on the spur of the moment. The usual National Security Council process was dispensed with; only a small circle of advisers was even clued in.

Trump thought he was better than he was and the result, once again, is an America that looks foolish and stupid.  His narcissism blinded him to reality, and the result is, as every other American ally and foe has learned at various stages of peril, that Donald Trump and the United States of America cannot be trusted under any circumstances.

Even if Trump, Pence, and the entire GOP Senate left tomorrow, it would still take the rest of my lifetime before anyone considered America to be anything more than a giant, flatulent joke.

I expect diplomacy for the next several decades will be the EU, China, India, and the UN "containing the only nation-state that has used nuclear weapons in anger" and preventing us from doing anything as harmful again.

We're not a global leader, we're a global cancer.  And all this happened in a space of 32 months.

The Empire Of The Orange

Trump's 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has managed to keep his job for so long despite Trump drowning in the polls because he knows exactly what his boss wants to hear.

President Donald Trump’s campaign manager predicted Saturday that the president and his family will become “a dynasty that will last for decades,” transforming the Republican Party while hewing to conservative values.

Speaking to a convention of Republican Party delegates in Indian Wells, California, Brad Parscale also said the campaign’s goal is to build a national army of 2 million trained volunteers, far beyond the president’s 2016 organization, that in California could help the GOP retake a string of U.S. House seats captured by Democrats last year.

“The Trumps will be a dynasty that will last for decades, propelling the Republican Party into a new party,” he said. “One that will adapt to changing cultures. One must continue to adapt while keeping the conservative values that we believe in.”

Parscale later declined to elaborate on his prediction of a coming Trump “dynasty,” or whether the president’s children could become candidates for public office.

He told reporters after the speech, “I just think they are a dynasty. I think they are all amazing people with ... amazing capabilities.”

Parscale’s speech was a highlight of the weekend GOP conclave, in which party delegates sought to map out an election strategy in an increasingly Democratic state that Trump lost by over 4 million votes in 2016. Polls show the president remains widely unpopular outside California’s depleted GOP ranks.

Parscale also acknowledged the obvious — that California was not a target for Trump in the 2020 campaign. He declined to respond directly when asked by a reporter if Trump would campaign for candidates in the state known as the home of the so-called Trump resistance. He said that would be the president’s decision.

“This is not a swing state,” Parscale said to laughter from the capacity crowd.

However, he emphasized the campaign would invest heavily in the state as it builds a sprawling volunteer network that could help candidates across the ballot.

“Many of you are worried that we have written you guys off, that California doesn’t matter,” Parscale said. But “there’s a lot of work out here to be done.”

Still a good four or five million Trump voters and potential donors in California, even if Trump will lose by four million to the eventual Democratic nominee in the state. Parscale is playing the long game, even in the bluest state in the nation.

I sure wish Democrats spent more time in states like Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, and yeah, Kentucky.

Of course, Parscale is predicting a Trump, Donald or otherwise, will be in the White House for decades to come.  That's silly.

The country won't last that long.

Sunday Long Read: The Last Bloody Mile

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes to us from ProPublica's Patricia Callahan as she takes a look at Amazon's third-party delivery services. To get you your Prime Next Day gewgaw and doodad comes at a cost: drivers are worked within an inch of their lives and sometimes those lives are lost in traffic accidents and injuries.  As bad as things are in Amazon's warehouses across the country, it's just as bad on the roads.

WHEN SHE ADDED GABRIELLE’S NAME to the chart in her kitchen, Judy Kennedy could picture the annual ritual. At birthdays she would ask her newest grandchild to stand up straight, heels against the door frame, so she could mark Gabrielle’s height beside that of her other granddaughter in the Maine house the family has lived in since the 1800s.

But there are no lines for Gabrielle.

In January, the 9-month-old was killed when a driver delivering Amazon.com packages crashed a 26-foot rented box truck into the back of her mother’s Jeep. The baby was strapped into a car seat in the back.

The delivery driver, a subcontractor ferrying pallets of Amazon boxes from suburban Boston to five locations in Maine, said in an interview that he was running late and failed to spot the Jeep in time to avoid the crash.

If Gabrielle’s parents, who have hired lawyers, try to hold Amazon accountable, they will confront a company that shields itself from liability for accidents involving the drivers who deliver its billions of packages a year.

In its relentless push for e-commerce dominance, Amazon has built a huge logistics operation in recent years to get more goods to customers’ homes in less and less time. As it moves to reduce its reliance on legacy carriers like United Parcel Service, the retailer has created a network of contractors across the country that allows the company to expand and shrink the delivery force as needed, while avoiding the costs of taking on permanent employees.

But Amazon’s promise of speedy delivery has come at a price, one largely hidden from public view. An investigation by ProPublica identified more than 60 accidents since June 2015 involving Amazon delivery contractors that resulted in serious injuries, including 10 deaths. That tally is most likely a fraction of the accidents that have occurred: Many people don’t sue, and those who do can’t always tell when Amazon is involved, court records, police reports and news accounts show.

Even as Amazon argues that it bears no legal responsibility for the human toll, it maintains a tight grip on how the delivery drivers do their jobs.

Their paychecks are signed by hundreds of companies, but often Amazon directs, through an app, the order of the deliveries and the route to each destination. Amazon software tracks drivers’ progress, and a dispatcher in an Amazon warehouse can call them if they fall behind schedule. Amazon requires that 999 out of 1,000 deliveries arrive on time, according to work orders obtained from contractors with drivers in eight states.

Amazon has repeatedly said in court that it is not responsible for the actions of its contractors, citing agreements that require them, as one puts it, to “defend, indemnify and hold harmless Amazon.” Just last week, an operations manager for Amazon testified in Chicago that it signs such agreements with all its “delivery service partners,” who assume the liability and the responsibility for legal costs. The agreements cover “all loss or damage to personal property or bodily harm including death.”

Amazon vigilantly enforces the terms of those agreements. In New Jersey, when a contractor’s insurer failed to pay Amazon’s legal bills in a suit brought by a physician injured in a crash, Amazon sued to force the insurer to pick up the tab. In California, the company sued contractors, telling courts that any damages arising from crashes there should be billed to the delivery companies.

“I think anyone who thinks about Amazon has very conflicted feelings,” said Tim Hauck, whose sister, Stacey Hayes Curry, was killed last year by a driver delivering Amazon packages in a San Diego office park. “It’s sure nice to get something in two days for free. You’re always impressed with that side of it. But this idea that they’ve walled themselves off from responsibility is disturbing.”

“You’ve got this wonderful convenience with this technology,” he added, “but there’s a human cost to it.”

It gets much worse, as the article shows.  In just a few years, Amazon has created a new workhouse class of low wage workers, brutally exploited every second they are on the job.  I've talked about their warehouse and distribution centers before, but again, their delivery model to get you everything from groceries to laptops in mere hours comes at a horrific price.

And we're the ones created the demand for sacrifice.