Interested in what foreigners think of Duterte.

I'm seeing a lot of foreign news agencies' reports on Duterte, and it's really made me wonder if there's a concerted effort to paint the man as worse than he really is.

Don't get me wrong. Duterte is a PR nightmare and there are a lot of policies he implemented that personally affected me (his TRAIN law made it harder for me to support my family, and I have had to make adjustments to our finances and way of life just to keep the lights on), but he's still miles above the previous administration and there are improvements that I see. He's definitely not the Hitler that foreign media is painting him to be.

Actually makes me wonder if all of those things I've read as a kid about Saddam Hussein and Gadaffi are true or they were just victims of hatchet jobs. Maybe they were harmful, but not harmful enough that their citizens actually wanted foreign countries to come in and muscle them out? I also fear that with the way things are going - foreign countries will come in and forcibly oust Duterte, leaving a power vacuum and turning us into another Libya.

I just see that he's buried in allegations of corruption.

But then...

So is Trump.
So is Putin.
So is Netanyahu.
So were Dilma and Lula, until Dilma was impeached.
Likewise Angela Merkel until she just got re-elected last week. I wonder how that is possible!

In the case of Duterte, I get the impression the allegations are unmistakeably true, and there is pressure for him to resign. But I don't get the impression from the news that there is any movement in the U.S. to militarily remove him.
There's plenty of other stuff on the table, a potential war with Kim Jong Un, a potential military action to invade or bomb Iran to keep them from nuclear weapons, by either the U.S., Israel, or both combined.
Less likely, a military conflict, or trade war, with China, or with Russia who intervened in our 2016 election, and has made moves toward doing the same in the Nov 2018 U.S. election. Not to mention Russia poisoning former Russian agents in the U.K.

So I'd say the plate is pretty full right now for the U.S.
And since the U.S. military is currently so crippled by 8 years of Obama "sequestration" slashing the military's budget, to the point that only 40% of our air force and navy are ready for combat, I have a feeling Trump would like to wait at least a year or two till our military is much more combat ready before taking any large-scale military intervention in the near future.

So with all of that going on, the Phillipines are pretty far down the list.

The sequestration was back when you pretended deficits mattered. Once you got the lump of shit in deficits were okay. As for Duterte, yeah he's not big news over here. I think I saw some reporting about him and it wasn't anything good.

Federal deficit concerns me.
Yes, it went up from 20 trillion to 21 trillion in the last 18 months. But Trump had to repair the damage done to our military by Obama. The economic surge from Trump's economic policy should increase the ability to pay down the debt as that rise occurs.

And I think I've been pretty clear, for YEARS, that it rising federal debt is not solely a Democrat problem, but of establishment Republicans as well, over the last 40 years.
But there is no denying that the debt rose an unprecedented 10 trillion to 20 trillion during cultural Marxist Obama's 8 years of crack-addict-level spending.

That said, I would like to see Republicans offer cuts to spending as well, and not just rely on "growing our way out". As I've said before, if any one of us is spending more than is coming in, we instantly cut out unnecessary spending. Under any president, I want a president who establishes THIS year, a policy that the government doesn't spend more annually that it gets in revenue. And where we start paying down the debt by 500 billion or so a year.

We've had this discussion before.

Yep we have. When it's a democrat you scream, now it's okay. I no longer see it as an actual principled stand for you but a partisan one. We've been through enough WH turnovers and I've seen the switch. You blamed Obama for the entire deficit, you won't for Trump.

There was a story mentioning Duterte last night on Tucker Carlson (about 25 minutes into the broadcast) where Carlson talked about CNN head Jeff Zucker accusing Fox News of being "state propaganda for dictators" but showing how CNN in business deals with governments like Turkey and the Phillipines is in truth the network that props up dictators and gives them exclusive broadcast access, while shutting out the message of their democratic opponents. In precisely the ruthless pursuit of money for government contracts that Zucker accuses Fox of. State run capitalism, as was on display under Obama's Reich, is the exclusive realm of Democrats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8PIQqQrBYc