No respectable leadership

Image: Nazanin Tabatabaee/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS (Via Business Insider)


No respectable leadership
 
... not in the UK, not in the US, certainly not in Canada.

Trudeau and his pals at the NATO reception can snigger [YouTube] all they like at Trump behind his back, where they stupidly imagine he won't hear of it, but they certainly appear to tread lightly around his person.

Like school kids who straighten up when the principal walks by because there is power vested in him even if he is a clumsy, nose-picking dork.

From today's Guardian:

• Trump is interested in markets, not morality. He holds no vision of the greater good, has no sense of a US global mission, other than putting America first.

The Star: Justin Trudeau Wants to Focus on Domestic Concerns But Trump Won't Let Him

• A few years ago — well, even a few days ago — very few people would have predicted that a plane crash in Tehran would force us to look at Canada’s relations with the United States. But this is life in Trump’s rough neighbourhood, where Canada keeps getting caught in the crossfire: this time, as the president would say, devastatingly.
• For a president who doesn’t travel often out of his country, Trump has a remarkable ability to stir things up outside U.S. borders, and Canada apparently cannot remain insulated or unimplicated, even inadvertently. 
• Whether Trudeau likes it or not, Canadians will be looking for blame — not just cause — in this large-scale tragedy, and Trump may well be in many sights. If Trump had not launched his drone strike in Baghdad last weekend to take out a top Iranian commander, would Iran have been launching missiles at planes this week?

Can you imagine Trudeau phoning up Trump and shouting "Are you out of your mind?".  He may or may not have actually won a boxing match [YouTube] prior to his first election, but he's no match for anything that requires straightforward action.

YYC'S impression of America, in the person of madman Trump [YouTube video]

Some extremely good questions are being asked at PennyForYourThoughts:

• Why was this plane in flight considering all that had occurred? 
• Why did the plane turn around, as has been reported? 
• Why deviate from planned course? 
• And who was jamming communications?  
• Because communications being jammed is very possible, very likely,  given the circumstances

"Why deviate from the planned course?" is a question I asked myself first thing this morning. There are standard routes set out for passenger planes. And one would expect that a radio inquiry would have occurred before action was taken.  So, as Penny suggested, communication appears to have been jammed.

Let's hope these questions get credibly answered - but the chances may be very slim.

Meanwhile, trust is waning in leaders almost everywhere, including here at home:

Macleans: Canada would like a government now, please (Paul Wells)

• The Trudeau 2.0 government is rattled, introspective and praying to God that nothing bad happens. But they happen anyway. 
• So far we’re seeing a less Trudeau-centric Trudeau government, as promised. But for ministers not named Freeland, we’re not seeing a more minister-visible government.

"Ministers not named Freeland" is a telling statement about the power that Soros-directed Freeland wields. She played a leadership role in the Venezuelan coup plot and, given that her roots go deep in Ukraine, she needs to stay entirely out of the Iran tragedy.

For whatever it may be worth, my sympathies are solely with the families and friends of those upon whom the madness of our current world has wreaked an unthinkable deprivation in the most bizarre of circumstances that will forever be recorded in ignominious history.

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