75 days

He doesn’t have balls. The mob needs him. He needs them. When Joe Kennedy made a deal with the mob to give his son swing states, Kennedy won. Then, Kennedy and his brother attacked the mob visciously when they got into office. A promise was made, and the kennedys broke that promise. Bad form for mob code. That was the end of those two brothers.

Now here’s the deal, trump NEVER went against the mob. Trump is not a Kennedy. To say trump has balls is laughable.

If the orange man refuses to concede we will take the White House by farce.

Until then we’re just biden our time.

(‘biden’ our time)

How far will this go?

nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/p … e=Homepage

[b]President Trump’s refusal to concede the election to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has already affected Mr. Biden’s transition, particularly on national security issues.

Mr. Biden has yet to receive a presidential daily briefing, and it was unclear whether his team would have access to classified information, the most important pipeline for them to learn about the threats facing the United States.

Like previous presidents-elect, Mr. Biden is receiving Secret Service protection, and a no-fly zone has been established over his home in Delaware. But if Mr. Trump’s administration continues its refusal to recognize Mr. Biden as the winner, it could complicate his security until his inauguration.[/b]

How many days must pass before whoever can do something about it does something about it? Days? Weeks? All the way up to the swearing in ceremony in January?

Uh, if there is one?

Actually, it appears that Trump is not required to pass along the PDB to Biden:

Mr. Trump can prevent Mr. Biden and his aides from receiving the presidential daily briefing, the compendium of the government’s latest secrets and best intelligence insights, for the entire transition. No law states that Mr. Biden must receive it, though under previous administrations dating to at least 1968, presidents have authorized their elected successors to be given the briefing after clinching victory.

Will some “behind the curtain” begin to worry that this really could be detrimental to “national security” if Biden is left out of the loop?

Again, with Trump it’s all new territory.

Note this:

In the aftermath of the contested 2000 election, while votes in Florida were being recounted, President Bill Clinton authorized George W. Bush to receive the President’s Daily Brief. As vice president, Al Gore already had access to the intelligence.

You know iambiguous…

I’ve now stated this 5 times on this board:

Donald Trump is the very first post-modern president, he is the very first post-structuralist president, he is the very first moral nihilist president and he is the very first psychopathic president. He is also the very first president in debt. Lots of firsts for Donald Trump.

ILP (from what I can gather) is split down the middle (just like the country at large).

So far like a dozen of his lawsuits have failed because unlike on the internet or fox or brietbart or the daily caller in a courtroom you have to bring evidence and your assertions have to be based on facts. His people don’t look past the headlines.

Consider this headline:

“How to cover a coup — or whatever it is Trump is attempting”

And, yes, in the MSM.

So, is it just scare-mongering to sell more newspaper subscriptions or, among other things, do the moves he is making at the Pentagon, actually signal an attempt on his part to refuse to leave the White House?

What I always come back to is the “for all practical purposes” reality of what can be done by those in the government to get him out of there.

washingtonpost.com/lifestyl … story.html

[b]President Trump lost. The nation knows it. The world knows it. And, although he won’t admit it, he certainly knows it, too.

But because he is claiming otherwise — with his Republican enablers joining the chorus — this past week has presented the reality-based press with a strange and extremely important challenge.

How do you cover something that, at worst, lays the groundwork for a coup attempt and, at best, represents a brazen lie that could be deeply damaging to American democracy?

“You don’t want to fearmonger. You don’t want to underplay something this dangerous, either,” Noah Shachtman, editor of the Daily Beast, told me.

The trickiest part: “Figuring out whether these bogus accusations are actually dangerous to the republic or just the last, lame gasps of a doomed administration.”

I’d argue that they’re both. Not because they pose more than a sliver of a chance of overturning the reality that Joe Biden will take office in January. Rather, because the constant drumbeat that the election was somehow illegitimate does harm all by itself.

In general, the press has covered this madness reasonably well. Even Fox News, Trump’s longtime cheerleader, quickly started using the term “president-elect” to refer to Biden. (Whether the network may have been shamed into this, early on, by a CNN story about its decision-making is a possibility, though Fox vehemently denies it.) And the mainstream press has given Trump’s mewling a lot of attention without giving it much credence.

Still, some of the worst tendencies of the media are on display, even if in muted form.

The two I’ve seen most frequently are the endless infatuation with dramatic conflict and the tendency to give equal treatment to both sides of any equation. Thus we get chyrons and headlines such as this one in Axios: “As Trump fights the transition in D.C., the world moves on to Biden.”

Feels about equal, right? With Trump getting the top billing.

And then there’s the straight-ahead repetition of dangerous rhetoric, as in this NPR headline about a startling statement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, one he may have meant as a joke: “Pompeo Promises a ‘Smooth Transition To A Second Trump Administration.’ ”[/b]

Could it all really be as simple and/or ominous as this:

nytimes.com/2020/11/14/opin … e=Homepage

[b]WASHINGTON — Many see a wannabe despot barricaded in the bunker, stubby fingers clinging to the levers of power as words that mean nothing to him — democracy, electoral integrity, peaceful transition, constitutionality — swirl above.

One presidential historian sees something different in Donald Trump’s swan song. Michael Beschloss has been tweeting pictures of Hollywood’s most famous divas, shut-ins and head cases.

Norma Desmond watching movies of herself, hour after hour, shrouded in her mansion on Sunset Boulevard as “the dream she had clung to so desperately enfolded her.” Howard Hughes, descending into germaphobia, madness and seclusion. Greta Garbo, sequestered behind her hat and sunglasses. Charles Foster Kane, missing the roar of the crowd as he spirals at Xanadu, his dilapidated pleasure palace.

The president and his cronies are likely to do real damage and major grifting in the next two months. But in other ways, the picture of the president as a pathetic, unraveling diva is apt.[/b]

How will it all play out with less than 70 days to go?

[b]Trump, who once wanted to be a Hollywood producer and considered attending U.S.C. film school, never made the pivot to being a politician. He got elected because he played a competent boss and wily megabillionaire on a reality TV show — pretty good acting now that we know he is neither — and he has stayed a performance artist and a ratings-obsessed showman.

As a growing number of Trump advisers and Republican Party leaders privately admitted the end was nigh…White House officials propped up Donald’s grand illusions. This, even as his lawyers deserted him and judges ruled against him.

“We are moving forward here at the White House under the assumption there will be a second Trump term,” Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser, said on Fox Business Friday.

Kayleigh McEnany chimed in that the president would “attend his own inauguration.”[/b]

Stay tuned.

Certainly no bias in that “news” report.

Huh? My whole point is that discussions and debates about things like this reflect the “political prejudices” of particular individuals who come to acquire their own biases in the manner in which I described mine here on this thread: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=194382

In other words, the part that an objectivist of your own ossified ilk does not have the intellectual honesty, integrity or depth to explore.

Otherwise you would take my challenge.

From an official source:

A more, uh, amusing take on Trump’s refusal to concede:

When a Leader Just Won’t Go
Wisdom from Shakespeare to Dickens to ‘Seinfeld’ on President Trump’s long non-goodbye.

nytimes.com/2020/11/15/us/p … e=Homepage

[b]In Nancy Mitford’s comic 1960 novel “Don’t Tell Alfred,” the wife of the new British ambassador to Paris arrives at the embassy to find that she has a vexing problem: Her predecessor has refused to move out.

Indeed, Pauline Leone, the wife of the previous ambassador, is so unhinged by the prospect of a status-free future that she has set up her own rival court, grandly receiving a stream of visitors as if for all the world she were still Madame L’Ambassadrice, the social arbiter of Paris.

“At the beginning one thought it was a lark — that in a day or two she’d get tired of it,” a British official says crossly. But no. “She’s having the time of her life,” he adds, “and quite honestly I don’t see how we shall ever induce her to go.”

As the nation ponders the awkward case of Donald J. Trump, a president who will not admit that he has been fired, it is helpful to consider him through the experiences of other people, fictional and otherwise, who have been unable to accept the arrival of unwelcome developments in their personal and professional lives.

Is Trump like King Lear, raging naked on the heath and desperately hanging on to the increasingly diminished trappings of power even as they are stripped from him? Or is he more like Bartleby the Scrivener, the inscrutable model of passive resistance who one day declines to do any more work or indeed leave the building, declaring: “I would prefer not to?”

Is he like Nellie, the character in “The Office” who installs herself at the desk of the regional manager when he is out of town and unilaterally appoints herself boss? Or how about George from “Seinfeld,” who quits one of his many jobs in a huff, unsuccessfully tries to get it back, and reports to work anyway, as if nothing had happened?

Timothy Naftali, a history professor at New York University, said that one way to view Mr. Trump would be as a version of Miss Havisham, the jilted bride from “Great Expectations” who lives forever in the past, never taking off her tattered wedding gown even as her house decays around her.

“He’s wearing the cloak of the presidency and he’s stuck in his room, getting dusty, while everyone else has moved on,” Mr. Naftali said.

No president in American history has ever before refused for so long to concede an election he has obviously lost. But when it comes to hanging on to an alternative version of reality, Mr. Trump has plenty of nonpresidential company.

There was Eteocles, a son of Oedipus in Greek mythology, who remained on the throne of Thebes, reneging on his promise to share it with his twin brother, leading to a battle in which they killed each other.

There was Gov. Edmund J. Davis of Texas, a Republican, who refused to leave office after losing the election of 1873, claiming that he had several months left in his term and barricading himself on the ground floor of the State Capitol. (The newly elected governor and his supporters installed themselves on the first floor, using ladders to enter through the windows.)

There was the Hiroo Onoda, the Imperial Japanese Army officer who would not surrender after the end of World War II, remaining in combat-readiness in the jungle for 29 years until his by-then elderly former commanding officer arrived and rescinded his no-surrender order.

And there was the entire government of Moldova, which in 2019 decided not to make way for a new government, leading to a bizarre situation in which both groups claimed for a time to be in charge of the country. The impasse finally ended when the former prime minister grudgingly stepped down in the face of growing national outrage and international pressure.

While American presidential transfers of power have traditionally been smooth, well-run affairs, world history is replete with examples of dictators and strongmen employing nefarious means to remain in office. Sometimes such rulers refuse to accept the results of honestly conducted elections. Sometimes they throw out term limits, and just keep on governing. Sometimes they jail, torture, kill or disappear their political opponents. (Sometimes they do all of those things.)

Mr. Trump has spoken admiringly about at least some of these practices, saying, for instance, that he was “probably entitled” to a third term “based on the way we were treated.” (That was before he lost the election.)

But given the news wafting like the occasional smoke signal from the White House, where some of the president’s advisers and relatives are reportedly attempting various psychological techniques to get Mr. Trump to accept the fact that he is now a lame-duck president, his behavior seems less like a putsch and more like an extended whiny tantrum. As Dan Rather, an elder statesman of American journalism, said on Twitter: “Dude. You lost.”

He cannot bear being the loser and so now is doing everything within his power to assault the reality he hates,” said Joseph Burgo, a clinical psychologist who has studied Mr. Trump and written about his appeal to voters.

“Once he has exhausted all possible avenues to challenge the election, he will spend the rest of his life insisting the system conspired to deprive him of his victory,” said Dr. Burgo, the author of “The Narcissist You Know: Defending Yourself Against Extreme Narcissists in an All-About-Me Age.” “He will take refuge in blame, self-pity and righteous indignation to shore up his sense of self, thereby warding off the humiliation of true defeat.”

Meanwhile, many Republican legislators, loath to upset Mr. Trump, are helping to prop up the illusion that he is still somehow in power, in a way reminiscent of the courtiers who flattered, lied and enabled their way through the final days of Emperor Haile Selasse’s reign in Ethiopia in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “The Emperor.”

Interestingly enough, there appears to be some precedent for this within the Trump family itself. When the president’s father, Fred, developed Alzheimer’s, the family reportedly conspired to help him believe that he still ran the Trump organization. According to Vanity Fair, the elder Mr. Trump would show up for work every day, signing blank papers and using an office phone connected only to his secretary’s line. “Fred pretended to work,” a family friend told the magazine.

With his vast coterie of enablers willing to believe his baseless assertions about the election, Mr. Naftali said, Trump might be better compared to the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz.”

“Many of us assumed that Trump’s behind-the-curtain moment — when Dorothy arrived and, thanks to Toto, found out that the Wizard was a humbug — would come because of his handling of the Covid emergency,” he said. “But one of the reasons the president is able to continue this fantasy that he won a second term is that 73 million people don’t agree that he was a humbug. Even though the Wizard is on his way out, Oz still exists.”

Of course, angry people can be very dangerous when backed into corners, and Mr. Trump’s belief in his own falsehoods has already had damaging, real-life consequences. Some sympathetic right-wing media outlets and many Republican officials are refusing to acknowledge that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the president-elect. Millions of people appear to believe Mr. Trump’s assertions that the election was stolen and that the coronavirus, now raging out of control, is not a serious problem. His supporters are marching in the streets to protest the election result, and it remains to be seen under what circumstances he will finally leave the White House.

All these things raise the question (asking for a friend): How do you get someone to face reality and get out of the White House?

For clients who have lost their jobs during this unsettling time, said Megan Walls, an executive coach and career adviser in Chicago, she works to help them accept what has happened and move on. “The reality is that we can’t control Covid or jobs or business — we can only control ourselves,” she said.

However, she added, Mr. Trump would not be a good candidate for the kind of coaching she offers.

“I won’t work with people who are avoiding the situation or acting like a victim,” she said. “Anyone who is digging their heels in — I can’t help him until they help themselves. Maybe they don’t need a coach; they need a psychotherapist.”

How about flattery?

On Twitter, the Trump-admiring journalist Geraldo Rivera compared the president to a heavyweight champion who knows he has lost but grittily fights on in case he can eke out a victory. His lyrical description — “Still, he’s going to answer the final bell, looking for the knockout he knows is a long shot”— inadvertently brings to mind the delusional Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who won’t surrender even after his arms and legs have been hacked off. (“Tis but a scratch,” the knight declares. “What are you going to do, bleed on me?” King Arthur responds.)

As for the former ambassador’s wife who overstays her welcome in “Don’t Tell Alfred,” embassy officials decide that the best way to evict her is to deprive her of the attention she craves. “We must bore her out,” an official says.

Finally, reluctantly, she leaves, taking on a diva-ish air of wounded glamour as she encounters a crowd of guests arriving for a party to which she has not been invited.

“She shook hands, like a royal person,” Mitford writes, “as she sailed out of the house forever.”[/b]

But then this part:

Of course, angry people can be very dangerous when backed into corners, and Mr. Trump’s belief in his own falsehoods has already had damaging, real-life consequences.

Trump still has “65 DAYS 18 HOURS and 34 minutes” to go down that route.

The football.

bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-54972269

Who knows what Trump is capable of with or without access to the codes?

But how far might he go before the folks in the military and the rest of the government refuse to obey the orders of the “commander in chief”?

I sometimes imagine a scenario where someone like Trump is in the White House, a lame duck. And, for whatever personal reason – or because he goes nuts – he decides to take all the rest of us with him. He launches a military strike on some important target around the globe resulting in, well, who the hell knows what it will result in.

Think General Buck Turgidson or General Jack Ripper or Dr. Strangelove. Only as Trump in his own rendition of the same frames of mind.

Would You think a technologically sophisticated country like the US would allow some scenario like the one You describe, go down? If he really goes bizerk, would it be conceivable that someone directly next in command wouldn’t report it and use the Constitutional remedy to inactivate his command?

This was raised, I believe during the impeachment hearings.

Truth be told, I don’t know. What would be allowed or not be allowed to go down? I’m sure given my own rendition of the Deep State there are some sort of contingencies in place. The federal government’s more “spontaneous” version of the 25th Amendment.

Here’s a letter to the editor at the Los Angeles Times 2 days ago:

[b]To the editor: Our Constitution has a mechanism in the 25th Amendment for removing the president if he becomes incapacitated. Is this not the perfect example of a time to invoke it?

President Trump has gone from narcissism to a state of delusion so bad that he is now installing loyalists in strategic positions as if he is planning some kind of coup or military action. If he was a member of your family you would not ignore this failure to accept reality.

Why wait to see what he is going to do next?

Vice President Mike Pence and the White House Cabinet members need to remove Trump from power. Pence can pardon Trump if he likes and let the transition to President-elect Joe Biden begin. How can the Republicans argue with that? Or are they afraid “the base” will object when it’s obvious that the president is not accepting reality?

This calls for an intervention. It’s not time just to “wait and see” if Trump descends further into delusion and endangers all our lives.

Virginia Roth, North Hills[/b]

Okay, but how much of this can actually happen? How would it all unfold?

And of course the bottom line is the military leadership. If they go along with Trump, what can Pence and the Cabinet do?

So, where does the good news end here and the bad news begin? Is it more or less in the same place where bad news ends here and the good news begins?

Consider:

nytimes.com/2020/11/21/us/p … e=Homepage

Trump Using Last Days to Lock in Policies and Make Biden’s Task More Difficult

So, given that your own particular political prejudices [rooted subjectively in dasein] are in the general vicinity of mine, the possible good news:

Mr. Trump has spent the last two weeks hunkered down in the White House, raging about a “stolen” election and refusing to accept the reality of his loss. But in other ways he is acting as if he knows he will be departing soon, and showing none of the deference that presidents traditionally give their successors in their final days in office.

The possible bad news:

During the past four years Mr. Trump has not spent much time thinking about policy, but he has shown a penchant for striking back at his adversaries. And with his encouragement, top officials are racing against the clock to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, secure oil drilling leases in Alaska, punish China, carry out executions and thwart any plans Mr. Biden might have to reestablish the Iran nuclear deal.

On the other hand, if this is all he does with the remainder of his days in office, isn’t that really good news too?

Compared to all of the far, far worse things that he might do instead?

For example:

They are upping tension in Iran, which could lead to a confrontation.

On the other hand, if Trump actually does believe that either him or one of the kids will be in the 2024 presidential election, he knows he can’t go so far as to make that a bust.

Stay tuned.

And let’s not forget this:

The New York Times

Defying U.S., China and Iran Near Trade and Military Partnership
The investment and security pact would vastly extend China’s influence in the Middle East, throwing Iran an economic lifeline and creating new flash points with the United States.

The partnership was first proposed by President Xi Jinping of China during a visit to Iran where he
The partnership was first proposed by President Xi Jinping of China during a visit to Iran where he met his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, in 2016.Credit…Ebrahim Noroozi/Associated Press
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By Farnaz Fassihi and Steven Lee Myers

Published July 11, 2020
Updated July 22, 2020

Iran and China have quietly drafted a sweeping economic and security partnership that would clear the way for billions of dollars of Chinese investments in energy and other sectors, undercutting the Trump administration’s efforts to isolate the Iranian government because of its nuclear and military ambitions.

READ MOREU.S. orders China to close its Houston consulate.

The partnership, detailed in an 18-page proposed agreement obtained by The New York Times, would vastly expand Chinese presence in banking, telecommunications, ports, railways and dozens of other projects. In exchange, China would receive a regular — and, according to an Iranian official and an oil trader, heavily discounted — supply of Iranian oil over the next 25 years.

The document also describes deepening military cooperation, potentially giving China a foothold in a region that has been a strategic preoccupation of the United States for decades. It calls for joint training and exercises, joint research and weapons development and intelligence sharing — all to fight “the lopsided battle with terrorism, drug and human trafficking and cross-border crimes.”

The partnership — first proposed by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, during a visit to Iran in 2016 — was approved by President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet in June, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said last week.

Iranian officials have publicly stated that there is a pending agreement with China, and one Iranian official, as well as several people who have discussed it with the Iranian government, confirmed that it is the document obtained by The Times, which is labeled “final version” and dated June 2020.

It has not yet been submitted to Iran’s Parliament for approval or made public, stoking suspicions in Iran about how much the government is preparing to give away to China.

In Beijing, officials have not disclosed the terms of the agreement, and it is not clear whether Mr. Xi’s government has signed off or, if it has, when it might announce it.

If put into effect as detailed, the partnership would create new and potentially dangerous flash points in the deteriorating relationship between China and the United States.

It represents a major blow to the Trump administration’s aggressive policy toward Iran since abandoning the nuclear deal reached in 2015 by President Barack Obama and the leaders of six other nations after two years of grueling negotiations.

Renewed American sanctions, including the threat to cut off access to the international banking system for any company that does business in Iran, have succeeded in suffocating the Iranian economy by scaring away badly needed foreign trade and investment.

In Tehran in May. Renewed American sanctions have succeeded in suffocating the Iranian economy by scaring away badly needed foreign investment.Credit…Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

But Tehran’s desperation has pushed it into the arms of China, which has the technology and appetite for oil that Iran needs. Iran has been one of the world’s largest oil producers, but its exports, Tehran’s largest source of revenue, have plunged since the Trump administration began imposing sanctions in 2018; China gets about 75 percent of its oil from abroad and is the world’s largest importer, at more than 10 million barrels a day last year.

At a time when the United States is reeling from recession and the coronavirus, and increasingly isolated internationally, Beijing senses American weakness. The draft agreement with Iran shows that unlike most countries, China feels it is in a position to defy the United States, powerful enough to withstand American penalties, as it has in the trade war waged by President Trump.

“Two ancient Asian cultures, two partners in the sectors of trade, economy, politics, culture and security with a similar outlook and many mutual bilateral and multilateral interests will consider one another strategic partners,” the document says in its opening sentence.

The Chinese investments in Iran, which two people who have been briefed on the deal said would total $400 billion over 25 years, could spur still more punitive actions against Chinese companies, which have already been targeted by the administration in recent months.

“The United States will continue to impose costs on Chinese companies that aid Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism,” a State Department spokeswoman wrote in response to questions about the draft agreement.

“By allowing or encouraging Chinese companies to conduct sanctionable activities with the Iranian regime, the Chinese government is undermining its own stated goal of promoting stability and peace.”

The expansion of military assistance, training and intelligence-sharing will also be viewed with alarm in Washington. American warships already tangle regularly with Iranian forces in the crowded waters of the Persian Gulf and challenge China’s internationally disputed claim to much of the South China Sea, and the Pentagon’s national security strategy has declared China an adversary.

When reports of a long-term investment agreement with Iran surfaced last September, China’s foreign ministry dismissed the question out of hand. Asked about it again last week, a spokesman, Zhao Lijian, left open the possibility that a deal was in the works.

A tanker carrying crude oil imported from Iran at the Port of Zhoushan, China, in 2018. Credit…Imaginechina, via Associated Press
“China and Iran enjoy traditional friendship, and the two sides have been in communication on the development of bilateral relations,” he said. “We stand ready to work with Iran to steadily advance practical cooperation.”

The projects — nearly 100 are cited in the draft agreement — are very much in keeping with Mr. Xi’s ambitions to extend its economic and strategic influence across Eurasia through the “Belt and Road Initiative,” a vast aid and investment program.

The projects, including airports, high-speed railways and subways, would touch the lives of millions of Iranians. China would develop free-trade zones in Maku, in northwestern Iran; in Abadan, where the Shatt al-Arab river flows into the Persian Gulf, and on the gulf island Qeshm.

The agreement also includes proposals for China to build the infrastructure for a 5G telecommunications network, to offer the new Chinese Global Positioning System, Beidou, and to help Iranian authorities assert greater control over what circulates in cyberspace, presumably as China’s Great Firewall does.

The American campaign against a major Chinese telecommunications company, Huawei, includes a criminal case against its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, for seeking to disguise investments in Iran in order to evade American sanctions. The Trump administration has barred Huawei from involvement in 5G development in the United States, and has tried, without great success, to persuade other countries to do the same.

Moving ahead with a broad investment program in Iran appears to signal Beijing’s growing impatience with the Trump administration after its abandonment of the nuclear agreement. China has repeatedly called on the administration to preserve the deal, which it was a party to, and has sharply denounced the American use of unilateral sanctions.

Iran has traditionally looked west toward Europe for trade and investment partners. Increasingly though, it has grown frustrated with European countries that have opposed Mr. Trump’s policy but quietly withdrawn from the kinds of deals that the nuclear agreement once promised.

President Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

“Iran and China both view this deal as a strategic partnership in not just expanding their own interests but confronting the U.S.,” said Ali Gholizadeh, an Iranian energy researcher at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. “It is the first of its kind for Iran keen on having a world power as an ally.”

The proposed partnership has nonetheless stoked a fierce debate within Iran. Mr. Zarif, the foreign minister, who traveled to Beijing last October to negotiate the agreement, faced hostile questioning about it in Parliament last week.

The document was provided to The Times by someone familiar with its drafting with the intention of showing the scope of the projects now under consideration.

Mr. Zarif said the agreement would be submitted to Parliament for final approval. It has the support of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, two Iranian officials said.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s top economic adviser, Ali Agha Mohammadi, appeared on state television recently to discuss the need for an economic lifeline. He said Iran needs to increase its oil production to at least 8.5 million barrels a day in order to remain a player in the energy market, and for that, it needs China.

Iranian supporters of the strategic partnership say that given the country’s limited economic options, the free-falling currency and the dim prospect of U.S. sanctions being lifted, the deal with China could provide a lifeline.

“Every road is closed to Iran,” said Fereydoun Majlesi, a former diplomat and a columnist for several Iranian newspapers on diplomacy. “The only path open is China. Whatever it is, until sanctions are lifted, this deal is the best option.”

But critics across the political spectrum in Iran have raised concerns that the government is secretly “selling off” the country to China in a moment of economic weakness and international isolation. In a speech in late June, a former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called it a suspicious secret deal that the people of Iran would never approve.

The critics have cited previous Chinese investment projects that have left countries in Africa and Asia indebted and ultimately beholden to the authorities in Beijing. A particular concern has been the proposed port facilities in Iran, including two along the coast of the Sea of Oman.

One at Jask, just outside of the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the Persian Gulf, would give the Chinese a strategic vantage point on the waters through which much of the world’s oil transits. The passage is of critical strategic importance to the United States, whose Navy’s Fifth Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain, in the gulf.

Jask, located at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, would give the Chinese a strategic vantage point on the waters through which much of the world’s oil transits.

China has already constructed a series of ports along the Indian Ocean, creating a necklace of refueling and resupply stations from the South China Sea to the Suez Canal. Ostensibly commercial in nature, the ports potentially have military value, too, allowing China’s rapidly growing navy to expand its reach.

Those include ports at Hambantota in Sri Lanka and Gwadar in Pakistan, which are widely criticized as footholds for a potential military presence, though no Chinese forces have officially been deployed at them.

China opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2015, ostensibly to support its forces participating in international antipiracy operations off the coast of Somalia. The outpost, which began as a logistics base but is now more heavily fortified, is within miles of the American base in that country.

China has also stepped up military cooperation with Iran. The People’s Liberation Army Navy has visited and participated in military exercises at least three times, beginning in 2014. The most recent was last December, when a Chinese missile destroyer, the Xining, joined a naval exercise with the Russian and Iranian navies in the Gulf of Oman.

China’s state-owned Xinhua news agency quoted the commander of Iran’s Navy, Rear Adm. Hossein Khanzadi, saying that the exercise showed “the era of American invasions in the region is over.”

David E. Sanger contributed reporting. Claire Fu in Beijing contributed research.

Farnaz Fassihi is a freelance reporter with the International Desk based in New York. Before contracting with the Times, she was a senior writer and war correspondent for the Wall Street Journal for 17 years based in the Middle East. @farnazfassihi

Steven Lee Myers is the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. He joined The Times in 1989 and has previously worked as a correspondent in Moscow, Baghdad and Washington. He is the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,” published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. @stevenleemyers • Facebook

Correction: July 16, 2020

An earlier version of this article misstated where an Iranian energy researcher is based. The researcher, Ali Gholizadeh, is at the University of Science and Technology of China

© 2020 The New York Times Company

So, some might be thinking: what about the Founding Fathers? Where did they weigh in on a lame duck who refuses to limp out of the Oval Office?

Apparently, in regard to that much revered “original intent”, they didn’t weigh in much at all:

washingtonpost.com/history/ … p-concede/

[b]President Trump continued Friday to deny the results of the election, pressuring state officials in Michigan and Georgia to overturn the will of voters and increasing fears that he might refuse to cede power to President-elect Joe Biden.

But those looking to the nation’s Founders, or the Constitution they framed, for answers to such a crisis will come up empty-handed. There is nothing in the Constitution about what to do if a president refuses to step down when his term expires, according to three historians and a constitutional law professor.

“No, the framers did not envisage a president refusing to step down or discuss what should be done in such a situation,” Princeton historian Sean Wilentz said. “There’s obviously nothing in the Constitution about it.”

“This is a contingency that no one would have actively contemplated until this fall,” said historian Jack Rakove, a professor emeritus at Stanford University.[/b]

Then this part:

During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Alexander Hamilton floated the idea of presidents serving for life, but when put to a vote, the proposal failed 4 to 6.

Imagine American history then had it been 6 to 4 in favor of the proposal.

So doing the math, such brazen behaviorist can only be improvised through bringing this potential hair razor to real action , forcing a no exit situation, to the politically adverse conflict until the added fuel results in necessary action.

Such will reignite the unfinished business of WW 1& 2, Korean & Vietnam stalemates & all within about 100 years.

After all the 100 years of European struggle may be just a reminder of a lesson unlearned, which need a refresher.

So doing the math, such brazen behaviorist can only be improvised through bringing this potential hair razor (hell-occham raiser) to real action , forcing a no exit situation, to the politically adverse conflict until the added fuel results in necessary action.

Such will reignite the unfinished business of WW 1& 2, Korean & Vietnam stalemates & all within about 100 years.

After all the 100 years of European struggle may be just a reminder of a lesson unlearned, which need a refresher.

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Boyatt Describes 20th Century as 100 Years War

Thomas BoyattThose who think about the 100 Years War all tend to think more of longbows and knights than submarines and machine guns. That’s not unreasonable if we’re talking about the conflicts between England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries, but U.S. Ambassador Thomas D. Boyatt would like to expand our historical thinking. Boyatt, Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow at Samford March 4-8, views the almost constant international conflicts of the 20th century not as separate wars, but as enormous battles in a modern 100 years war.

Boyatt’s diplomatic career included postings in Chile, Luxembourg and Cyprus, and ambassadorial service in Columbia and Burkina Faso. He served almost to the end of what he characterized as a century-long struggle for European freedom, characterized in each case by aggression from the east to the west, and shaped, in turn, by Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

In a March 7 lecture at Samford, Boyatt said the advent of industrialized militaries in the early 20th century coincided with, and drove, binding alliances between the world’s superpowers. England, France and Russia allied on one side and Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire allied on the other. Each party committed its vast imperial possessions, so a single act of terrorism in Sarajevo set the world aflame in August, 1914.

Although the U.S. was a minor power at the time of the first world war, its delayed entry onto the field proved to be decisive in breaking the aggressive “central powers.” But when a forward-looking U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, proposed a 14-point plan to rebuild Europe and prevent future wars, Europe’s victors preferred to cripple the vanquished economically and carve up their empires, virtually ensuring further conflict.

Hitler arose from the economic crisis that followed, and this time Germany took almost all the available spoils of the continent. Stopped at the English Channel by the British under Winston Churchill–a defiance Boyatt described as “the apogee of the English speaking peoples”–Hitler made the fatal error of turning against the Soviet Union. Once again, America entered the war and tipped the balance against a weakened enemy.

This time, the U.S. led the reconstruction efforts and ensured that those efforts included the defeated enemies whose economic success and political stability would set the tone for their respective regions. Then the Soviet Union dropped what Churchill described as “an iron curtain” and emerged as the new threat to Europe’s freedom.

Boyatt said centrist U.S. domestic politics in the postwar period solidified both an official U.S. posture—anti-communism—and a strategy—containment. The U.S. finally triumphed in the ensuing geopolitical chess games due to superior economic and political structure, military, intelligence and diplomacy as well as a more aggressive opposition to Soviet expansion after 1980, Boyatt said. He acknowledged that a new generation of Soviet leaders sought to modernize in order to better compete with the U.S., but by that time it was too late to save what Ronald Reagan famously called “the evil empire.”

Looking ahead to the next century, Boyatt foresees another long struggle, this time involving Asia and Islam. “We need to remember the lessons of the 20th century,” he said. “We need to remember the agonies and the length of that struggle and we need to remember why we were victorious.”

“I like the cards we’ve been dealt,” Boyatt concluded, “but we still have to be courageous, we still have to have stamina and we still have to see far.”

Sean Flynt
saflynt@samford.edu
205-726-4197

Samford University
800 Lakeshore Drive
Birmingham, AL 35229

Okay, Trump concedes or is escorted out of the White House by “government officials” in January. The country is still relatively intact.

What’s next for him?

washingtonpost.com/national … story.html

[b]NEW YORK — President Trump’s ongoing court battles are unlikely to pose significant legal jeopardy for him before he leaves office, but the swirl of criminal investigations and civil complaints stemming from his business activities and personal conduct could prove potentially more serious once he departs, experts say.

Among Democrats, there is a palpable desire to pursue the harsh accountability for Trump that many feel he has avoided by virtue of his office. But his successor, President-elect Joe Biden, reportedly has little appetite for doing so, having signaled to advisers that unleashing the federal government to settle scores would undermine his goal of unifying the country.

A spokesman for Biden’s transition team declined to comment but pointed to statements Biden made previously affirming that he would not interfere with a Justice Department investigation into Trump nor pardon his predecessor. “It is not something the president is entitled to do, to direct a prosecution or decide to drop a case,” Biden told MSNBC in an interview in May. “It’s a dereliction of duty.”[/b]

Okay, here its 1] the Democrats and 2] the law.

How will the two be intertwined or separated?

“Sleepy Joe” Biden clearly seems intent on channeling Gerald Ford here.

But: is he really foolish enough to imagine that Trumpworld will rally around his attempts to “unify the country”. Can he really be that naive?

Or, perhaps, there really is something embedded in his own past that he would prefer to keep secret. From my frame of mind, he is buried in the Deep State on the Democratic side of the aisle as are any number of Republicans. As the Bernie Sanders enthusiasts will soon find out once he is in office.