Trump on Putin and Bill Maher on Al Qaeda

“He’s a brave man, he’s hanging in,” Trump said of Zelensky in remarks at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, even as he declined to back away from complimenting Putin as “smart.”

“The problem is not that Putin is smart, which, of course, he’s smart,” Trump said. “The problem is that our leaders are dumb… and so far, allowed him to get away with this travesty and assault on humanity.”

“Putin is playing Biden like a drum and it’s not a pretty thing to watch,” he continued.

Trump is right, obviously, and it also reminds me when Bill Maher ran into some flag after September 11th when he argued that the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards. Maher has since emerged as about the only person still willing to criticize Islam within a industry platform and certainly is no Al-Qaeda sympathizer. The point he made and may have struck some people, including myself, at the time as having the wrong tone. But that didn’t mean it was wrong. The killers of thousands of Americans were not cowards in the traditional sense that we understand the term (they were cowards in the choice of their targets and tactics) and Putin is not stupid.

Certainly not nearly as stupid as Joe Biden.