John Hudson and Josh Dawsey at The Washington Post report:
As the president’s top aides prepared for a high-stakes meeting on the future of Afghanistan earlier this month, one senior official was not on the original invite list: national security adviser John Bolton.
The attendance of the top security aide would normally be critical, but the omission was no mistake, senior U.S. officials said. Bolton, who has long advocated an expansive military presence around the world, has become a staunch internal foe of an emerging peace deal aimed at ending America’s longest war, the officials said.
His opposition to the diplomatic effort in Afghanistan has irritated President Trump, these officials said, and led aides to leave the National Security Council out of sensitive discussions about the agreement. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.” ~~Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia (2006)
(What-could-possibly-go-wrong) TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—Katrina:
The last four days I was in an isolated cabin in Clinton, Montana, with only tenuous links to the outside world. Today was the first time I was able to truly get a handle on the New Orleans disaster, and it's almost too staggering to comprehend. It's downright biblical.
This is the greatest disaster to hit our nation in most of our lifetimes. Worse than 9-11. New Orleans is underwater. Biloxi is 90 percent destroyed. Who knows how many dead. Who knows how many homeless. Who knows how many jobless. We have a bona fide refugee crisis on our hands.
There will be a time for a full accounting of what went wrong, both preparing for this thing and relief efforts afterward. I don't know if the time is now or later. Honestly, I don't much care. I'm too horrified by what I'm seeing today. It's overwhelming.
I just wish that the president gave a damn about what's happenend. Unfortunately, he's too busy playing 'country rock star".
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Trump forgets Poland, plans to cash in, while the big hurricane looms. Meanwhile, his personal assistant at the WH is fired, and intel types can't believe his G7 stunts, nor his surrender/extortion of Ukraine. White nationalists plot media infiltration.