Trump’s right, America isn’t so innocent

The political and media establishments are going nuts over President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. isn’t “so innocent” when it comes to killing around the globe. He’s been called everything from un-presidential to Russian apologist. But for his remark, the only thing Trump should really be called is “honest.”

The president’s remark came during a pre-taped interview with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly which aired ahead of the Super Bowl on Sunday.

O’Reilly asked Trump: “Do you respect Putin?”

“I do respect him,” Trump said before being interrupted.

“Why?” O’Reilly asked.

“Well, I respect a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean I’ll get along with them,” Trump replied. “He is the leader of his country. I say it’s better to get along with Russia than not, and if Russia helps us in the fight against ISIS – which is a major fight – and the Islamic terrorism all over the world, that’s a good thing.”

“Will I get along with him? I have no idea,” added the president.

O’Reilly responded, “He’s a killer though, Putin’s a killer.”

Trump’s reply was one of the most honest statements uttered by an American president in years.

“There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump asked.

O’Reilly said he wasn’t aware of any U.S. government leaders who arte killers— but the president disagreed.

“Take a look at what we’ve done too, we’ve made a lot of mistakes,” Trump said.

This isn’t the first time Trump has suggested that the U.S. shouldn’t judge the actions of other nations without examining the mistakes of its leaders first.

Back in 2015, Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough similarly pushed Trump on the issue of Putin.

“He kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” Scarborough said when Trump failed to condemn Putin outright.

“Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe,” Trump responded.

Of course, Trump’s most recent remarks have gotten much more attention because they’re now coming from the commander-in-chief.

And the political and media establishments simply don’t know what to make of so much honest from a sitting president.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney called the president’s remarks “deeply troubling.”

“POTUS statement suggesting moral equivalence between Putin’s Russia and the United States of America is deeply troubling and wrong,” she wrote on Twitter.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also pushed back, saying: “When has a Democratic political activists been poisoned by the GOP, or vice versa? We are not the same as Putin.”

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) also sought to point out the very obvious differences between the U.S. and Russia.

“I’ll be honest, I don’t know what the president is trying to do with statements like these,” he said.

“There is no moral equivalency between the United States of America — the greatest freedom loving nation in the history of the world — and the murderous thugs that are in Putin’s defense of his cronyism,” Sasse added.

Democrats also lashed out.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi used the moment as an opportunity to again spread the narrative that the Russian government somehow meddled in the U.S. election.

“I want to know what the Russians have on Donald Trump. I think we have to have an investigation by the F.B.I. into his financial, personal and political connections to Russia,” she said.

Anyone who placed too much focus on how the U.S. compares to Russia seems to be missing the president’s point.

The U.S., by way of military adventurism, is responsible for thousands of lives lost.

In fact, the military still isn’t totally sure how many people the U.S. has killed throughout the Middle East with all of the freedom spreading we’ve don there over the past several years.

Consider this report from Military Times on Sunday:

The American military has failed to publicly disclose potentially thousands of lethal airstrikes conducted over several years in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, a Military Times investigation has revealed. The enormous data gap raises serious doubts about transparency in reported progress against the Islamic State, al-Qaida and the Taliban, and calls into question the accuracy of other Defense Department disclosures documenting everything from costs to casualty counts.

In 2016 alone, U.S. combat aircraft conducted at least 456 airstrikes in Afghanistan that were not recorded as part of an open-source database maintained by the U.S. Air Force, information relied on by Congress, American allies, military analysts, academic researchers, the media and independent watchdog groups to assess each war’s expense, manpower requirements and human toll. Those airstrikes were carried out by attack helicopters and armed drones operated by the U.S. Army, metrics quietly excluded from otherwise comprehensive monthly summaries, published online for years, detailing American military activity in all three theaters.

Most alarming is the prospect this data has been incomplete since the war on terrorism began in October 2001.

So to suggest that the U.S. hasn’t done its fair share of killing is simply dishonest. Truth is that we’ve done so much we’ve lost count.

Worse yet, it isn’t at all clear what the U.S. has gained from its Middle Eastern military misadventures.

Terror threats remain and the region is as unstable as ever.

Of course, neocons never complained much about any of that killing. And the left spent the past eight years ignoring it while their man in the White House polished his Nobel Peace medal between drone strikes.

The neocons want their undeclared wars to continue— and they need condemnation of Russia for that to happen. Without it, there’s no bombing campaign on Syria and no U.S.-led NATO provocation in Eastern Europe.

In order to foster anti-Russia sentiment, the neocon political establishment has done everything in its power to fuel bipartisan ire for Russia. All it took to get mainstream U.S. liberals on board with a warlike stance against Russia was creating the narrative that Putin meddled in the U.S. election to harm Hillary Clinton.

At least when it comes to Russia, Trump is really one of the only sane voices in the room.

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