{"id":9178,"date":"2019-03-01T09:55:37","date_gmt":"2019-03-01T08:55:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=9178"},"modified":"2019-03-01T09:57:43","modified_gmt":"2019-03-01T08:57:43","slug":"carp-diem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/9178\/","title":{"rendered":"Carp Diem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>They just can&#8217;t <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/McFaul\/status\/1101043683657281536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">help themselves<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/McFaul.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-9179\" src=\"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/McFaul.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"873\" height=\"391\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/McFaul.jpg 873w, http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/McFaul-300x134.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/McFaul-768x344.jpg 768w, http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/McFaul-500x224.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 873px) 100vw, 873px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Michael McFaul was the American Ambassador to Russia under Obama when US-Russian relations collapsed to new lows. According to <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Michael_McFaul\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Wikipedia<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As ambassador he was often controversial, meeting with Russian pro-democracy activists and commenting frequently on\u00a0Twitter\u00a0in English and Russian<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It doesn&#8217;t surprise me this idiot didn&#8217;t know the difference between diplomacy and activism. After all, his boss didn&#8217;t know the difference between politicking and governance. Nowadays McFaul spends his entire time carping from the sidelines about Trump, being fawningly retweeted by elitist tossers like Oliver Kamm.<\/p>\n<p>The fact is, the ruling classes can&#8217;t bear to see Trump even attempt something they failed at, let alone succeed. The BBC <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/av\/world-47407139\/trump-kim-summit-us-president-emerges-the-biggest-loser\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ran a headline yesterday<\/a> calling him &#8220;the biggest loser&#8221; from the collapse of the talks. The sneering is obscene. Nobody has managed to make any tangible progress on the North Korean problem since 1953, and everyone has either tried and failed or ignored it altogether (e.g. Obama). Trump is at least trying something new and, as Natalie Solent points out over at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.samizdata.net\/2019\/02\/the-art-of-no-deal\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Samizdata<\/a>, walking away from a bad deal is not a sign of weakness, let alone something to be sneered at.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I don&#8217;t like this at all:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">&#8220;I will take him at his word&#8221;: President Trump says he believes Kim Jong Un didn&#8217;t know what happened to Otto Warmbier, the American college student who was imprisoned in North Korea and died days after returning to the U.S. in a coma <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/aa0P609oE3\">https:\/\/t.co\/aa0P609oE3<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/5T0U5r0RIy\">pic.twitter.com\/5T0U5r0RIy<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 CBS News (@CBSNews) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/CBSNews\/status\/1101050958279258112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">February 28, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>\nI suspect &#8211; and fervently hope &#8211; Trump is using flattery as a negotiating tactic to try to achieve a breakthrough, and doesn&#8217;t actually believe this. While this may be worthy of criticism, his overall efforts are not. That they are subject to such scorn and contempt from establishment figures says much more about them than Trump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They just can&#8217;t help themselves: Michael McFaul was the American Ambassador to Russia under Obama when US-Russian relations collapsed to new lows. According to Wikipedia: As ambassador he was often controversial, meeting with Russian pro-democracy activists and commenting frequently on\u00a0Twitter\u00a0in &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/9178\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16,20,44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9178"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9178"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9187,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9178\/revisions\/9187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}