UPDATED - Donald Trump Draws Moral Equivalence Between Erdogan Purge and United States Vis a Vis Civil Liberties

ASININE STATEMENT FROM TRUMP.

He sounds like fucking Noam Chomsky.

What a fuckin' idiot.

From the NYT:

Mr. Trump’s discussion of the crisis in Turkey was telling, because it unfolded at a moment in which he could plainly imagine himself in the White House, handling an uprising that could threaten a crucial ally in the Middle East. The United States has a major air base at Incirlik in Turkey, where it carries out attacks on the Islamic State and keeps a force of drones and about 50 nuclear weapons. 

Mr. Trump had nothing but praise for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s increasingly authoritarian but democratically elected leader. “I give great credit to him for being able to turn that around,” Mr. Trump said of the coup attempt on Friday night. “Some people say that it was staged, you know that,” he said. “I don’t think so.” 

Asked if Mr. Erdogan was exploiting the coup attempt to purge his political enemies, Mr. Trump did not call for the Turkish leader to observe the rule of law, or Western standards of justice. “When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger,” he said.

GO READ THE WHOLE THING.

UPDATE -

NICO POINTS OUT THAT I SHOULD NOT HAVE TRUSTED THE NEW YORK TIMES TO GIVE THE FULL CONTEXT:

It's always good to read the whole transcript, rather than the careful editing of NYT to makeTrump sound bad at any cost.

"I think right now when it comes to civil liberties, our country has a lot of problems, and I think it’s very hard for us to get involved in other countries when we don’t know what we are doing and we can’t see straight in our own country. We have tremendous problems when you have policemen being shot in the streets, when you have riots, when you have Ferguson. When you have Baltimore. When you have all of the things that are happening in this country — we have other problems, and I think we have to focus on those problems. When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger. 

I don’t know that we have a right to lecture. Just look about what’s happening with our country. How are we going to lecture when people are shooting our policemen in cold blood. How are we going to lecture when you see the riots and the horror going on in our own country. We have so many difficulties in our country right now that I don’t think we should be, and there may be a time when we can get much more aggressive on that subject, and it will be a wonderful thing to be more aggressive. We’re not in a position to be more aggressive. We have to fix our own mess."

That is not different from anything he's said throughout his campaign. NYT tried to spin this, Trump isn't saying anything different.

FROM PASTORIUS - Still, I have to say, I don't give a fuck how the world sees us as a result of a bunch of bad people who formed an organization called Black Lives Matter.  They are the culprits, not the US government, or the US as a nation. They are criminals and they are being stoked by the same kinds of Islamists that Erdogan, himself, is aligned with an represents.

Erdogan is a bad guy.

Black Lives Matter is bad.

The US is not bad.