Ted Rall for July 13, 2022

I guess some things are more important than not dealing with a murdering psychopath.

Trump’s first visit as president.

But, you know:

It’s OKAY If A Republican Does It!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/09/joe-biden-saudi-arabia-israel-visit/

Nothing special. Trump did it, Oabama did it. It’s normall that a US president goes to visit his master.

Dependent as we presently all are upon Saudi oil and good political relations, a Sword Of Damocles will eventually drop on the Saudi elite.

I wonder if tough guy biden will call MBS a murderer to his face or call SA a pariah state. Probably not a good idea when you’re there to beg for more oil production. Somebody needs to tell biden that SA is already at or very near peak production. BS Biden will probably make up some BS story about how he used to work on an oil rig in the gulf. Then he’ll come home having accomplished nothing other than to further weaken the US/SA relationship, pushing them closer to China.

It’s still to be determined whether any Saudi leader will meet with Slo Joe. So far, no one’s taken his phone calls. Hey, I hear that Brunei has some oil…

Bush and rump were after the $$$$$, honey! Oil! Bush kissed the ring of the “king” and then, we have Sir Lies A Lot who kissed his A$$! Hoping he could build a hotel there.

President Biden is interacting with all world leaders on the global chessboard, as is his responsibility as President, in contrast to Trump who spent his four years playing with himself.

Nixon met with Mao, several Presidents have met with Putin. Sometimes you have to deal with bad leaders.

Biden is meeting with the Saudis to try and get them to relent on the oil price increase they announced and made in February of 2021 to make up for their 40% loss in profit to COVID-19 in 2020. That caused the current world-wide inflation and gas prices as other industries followed their lead.

The Saudis admitted to murdering Khashoggi but it is only Turkish speculation as to how they disposed of the body. No evidence has been found.

Overall, Democrats have better domestic policy than Republicans, but not good enough. Democrats are rarely willing to take the radical steps that we need to solve our problems—they are content with just good enough. And both parties have supported truly criminal foreign policies. I don’t say there’s no difference between the parties, but we should not pretend that the Democrats offer real solutions. When it comes time to vote, I will vote for the best candidate on the ballot, but in between elections I work to change the political landscape so that we might someday have someone really worth voting for.

lotta blood on our hands

Biden deserves criticism for dealing with the Saudis. The problem is he can’t afford not to deal with the Saudis. I see plenty of conservative commentators here criticizing Biden when I have no doubt they didn’t have an issue with Trump doing the same. I’m not referring to the cartoonist either as Rall is quick to criticize both sides. I will point out that Trump’s Middle East policy was quite a bit worse than Obama’s was, and I was seriously disappointed with how Obama handled this region. All I need to do is ask my cousins in Palestine what they think of us over here. They have first hand experience.

Oh dear me, we wouldn’t want that to happens. We would then be stuck with President Kamala.

If MBS does that to someone for something they wrote I would be worried were I Jared with the billions he was given against the Saudi economic pros advice.

America, decide which you want — slightly cheaper gas or the moral high ground.

and Ted remains unrealistic

Given the details of the Afghan War, the last few American presidents have killed a lot more innocents by proxy than Bin Salman.

What’s a little bone sawing annoying dissidents between strong allies after all.

The US State Dept. has dealt with unseemly foreign rulers for decades; unfortunately, we need to deal with MBS simply because he controls so much of OPEC’s oil, regardless of his murderous megalomania. Figuratively, we hold our noses while shaking his hand.