International Forecaster Weekly

Random Thoughts

Either Trump is every bit the uneducated, uncouth, ill-prepared, bumbling idiot that the left suggests, OR, he’s playing a sophisticated game here.

Bob Rinear | July 17, 2018

This letter is going to bounce around to some random thoughts that I’m having today. I’m going to start with our own mortality.

On Tuesday morning at about 8:30 things were going pretty normally. I had driven my wife to her BNI meeting, and headed to her office to work. I don’t normally go to her office on Tuesdays, but because she was to be flying out of Ft. Myers airport Tuesday night, it just made sense that I went in with her.

At about 8:33 am I got a call. My mom’s last remaining sister had passed away. That one took me by surprise, as “Barbara’s” husband, my Uncle Bob had just passed two weeks ago. Barb was actually doing pretty well, and that blindsided me a bit. But I knew it was going to really hit my mom hard. They were best buddies, and got together often.

So, I got our office girl to take my wife to the airport, and I headed to mom’s house to break the news. Well, my mom’s 90, and she didn’t get there by being a wimp. While visibly shaken, she took it better than I feared. But of course it opened the “memory floodgates” and her and I did a lot of reflecting.

Things like this are like a proverbial smack in the memory head. How many times did my wife and our two kids fly from NJ to Florida to visit with my mom and dad, only to spend at least one day at Barb and Bob’s having BBQ and playing in the pool? At least once a year from the time my kids were 1 - about 17. How many good laughs, and good food, and fun times? Hundreds. How many times did my Aunt and Uncle dote over my kids when they were toddlers, taking them for walks and playing with them? Many. And now they’re gone. Poof.

Many times when I’ve met people older than me, they’ll get around to asking “How old are you?” when I reply that I’m 61, they invariably say “Oh you’re still young!” Well that might be to an 80 year old. But pray-tell, why have I lost so many people if I’m so young? At “just” 61, I’ve lost 6 out of 12 cousins, and 13 Aunts and Uncles.

It’s been said that youth is wasted on the young. No truer words were ever spoken. Sometimes, by the time you’re old enough to realize what’s important in life, you’re no longer young, and often times struggling with the question “Did I do enough?” I like to think that Barb and Bob both knew how much the wife and I loved them and enjoyed them. We will miss them.

Trump/Russia

The hysteria over Trumps meeting with Putin is really pushing the boundary of sanity. I have never seen so many people lash out with the wildest claims about Treason and sedition, than I’ve heard Monday and Tuesday. There’s a big difference between collusion, and vote influencing.

Don’t the most rabid of these protestors understand what the US has done around the world? Have they no clue about the US actually fomenting the “coup” in the Ukraine? Have they no clue about how we turned Libya into a cesspool, after it was the most progressive and rich nation on the African continent? Saddam Hussein was not a nice man. But he kept the peace between the warring factions in the region. But we said “He’s gotta go.” Talk about influencing a vote! We killed him.

Of course Russia’s spooks poke around our elections. They also poke around our infrastructure, our electric grid, our congress, etc. And our spooks poke around theirs. But we don’t just stop at influencing elections, we flat out declare that “this guy” or “that guy” has to go. We nation build. So, it’s okay for us to do that?

To this day, the protestors continue to declare that Russia ‘annexed” Crimea. They did nothing of the sort. Our own Victorial Nuland said flat out that we spent over 5 million dollars fomenting the uprisings in Ukraine, and then the citizens of Crimea were allowed to vote on staying with Ukraine or rejoining Russia ( which owned Crimea for 400 years). They chose Russia by 80%. That is NOT Russia annexing Ukraine. But hey, why expect anyone to look at the facts or the truth, right?

But in typical Trump fashion, he got them all fired up over this meeting. However, what they are missing, and will always miss, is that this guy loves this game. His responses to whether he trusted the intelligence community or Putin in regards to meddling in the election wasn’t off the cuff. It was scripted. It’s how he plays.

Consider this; The very FBI people involved with investigating him, have been raked over the coals for the most outrageous bias one could ever imagine. The emails between peter strzok and Lisa page were as blatant as you could produce. He said it was his job to “stop” Trump from becoming President.

Do you think that Trump doesn’t know all that? Of course he does. Now, he could have tried to defend himself and said “ya know, I want to believe in my intelligence community, but look at the corruption and bias I got from the FBI”. However, he didn’t do that. Instead he said things in a way, that would infuriate the left, and get all the never-Trumpers in an uproar. Why would he do that?

Let me put on a tin foil hat for a minute. I think that Trump wants all the left and Never-Trumpers to put their full faith in our intelligence and justice system. He wants the likes of Schummer and Hillary and the rest of them to be 100% behind them. Why? Well, let’s just say that Rosenstein’s/Mueller/Huber investigations reveal no collusion between Russia and Trump, but do find some real swamp dirt on High ranking democrats.

Do you see where I’m going here? The louder the left screams that Mueller and Rosenstein MUST be left alone to do their job, and that they’re tremendous at their jobs, etc. then the minute these investigations uncover dirt on THEM, they can’t scream about it being a Trump set up. They insisted on these investigations!

And that’s just what I think we’re going to see happen. Trump has/had every right to fire Mueller. He didn’t. If he was terribly concerned about him finding dirt on him, he could have done the dirty and got rid of him. He hasn’t. Could it be that Trump knows that more Strzok’s and Page’s are going to get sniffed out of this? I think so.

By the way, how many main stream Media outlets said anything about this comment from Putin, when he was asked about “investigations” Check this:

For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder, in this particular case. Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia and never paid any taxes neither in Russia or the United States and yet the money escaped the country. They were transferred to the United States. They sent [a] huge amount of money, $400,000,000, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Well that’s their personal case.

It might have been legal, the contribution itself but the way the money was earned was illegal. So we have solid reason to believe that some [US] intelligence officers accompanied and guided these transactions. So we have an interest in questioning them.

400 million to Hillary, probably via the Clinton Foundation. Money that was obtained Illegally. I didn’t hear one leftist snowflake, calling on Hillary to explain that one, and you NEVER will. The left is blind to its own crimes.

Either Trump is every bit the uneducated, uncouth, ill-prepared, bumbling idiot that the left suggests, OR, he’s playing a sophisticated game here. I might end up dead wrong, but I’m betting on the later. This is certainly the “show that keeps on giving!”