Do you think Melania Trump should be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her courageous act of sleeping with Donald each night?

@WalksWith It was a way out of a Slovenian village.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow

Yes, it was. And I hate the fact that a woman feels like she has to do that to escape. It's incredibly sad, that living with DT is better than what she lived in as a child and young adult. I feel bad for her, but, also, I understand why she did it, and at the same time she is letting money (greed) control her. It's sad that the lifestyle she is accustomed to now is worth her soul. Just my opinion.

@WalksWith Ironically decisions made by George Bush Sr and Bill Clinton lead to the lack of opportunity in her birth country.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow

Yeah, the US is a bully. We can't change the past, but, we can learn and change the future. Let's get leaders that don't pull this shit anymore.

@WalksWith She made the choice. She was making an OK living, "modeling" for New York's high earning men, when she met him, and decided to go for gold.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow I don’t think Bush or Clinton could have done all that much for Slovenia in the 90s. Ex-Yugoslav states were in a tough position, and Slovenia was probably the best off of all of them - and still is.

@WalksWith 🤭

@QuixoticSoul Actually it is because of the actions of those two men that Yugoslavia no longer exists. They are literally the reason they are ex Yugoslav republics. And being the best off rump republic of a destroyed nation is still worse off then where you started from. If the USA broke up Texas would do okay but they would still be at a lower point then when they started. One of the reasons Slovenia did better is because the US didn't succeed in dragging them into the civil war.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Yugoslavia doesn’t exist because it was another artificial composite of a country like Czechoslovakia. It was always doomed to fall apart without a strong centralizing force willing to run roughshod over history.

Today, Slovenia is a gem of a country and an EU member - they’re far better off than they were as part of Yugoslavia.

Also, they won their short little war, and Serbia didn’t have the will.

@QuixoticSoul That is a nice piece of propaganda that ignores the actual history and the blatant meddling. In fact it required active outside meddling to force the nation into crisis. Even George Bush Sr stated as much and is why he started actively sabotaging the country for ideological reasons.

There is literally no correlation between the two. And that is an opinion not a fact.

A yes blaming the Serbs for everything even though even 20 years later most Americans could not even tell you what a Serb is or find Serbia on a map.

And again this completely ignores what caused the break up of the country

@QuixoticSoul And if you look at pretty much the entire former socialist bloc the vast majority are actually worse off then they were in 89.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Yugoslavia was doomed the moment Tito died, even if Milocevic’s ineptitude and ongoing breakup of he USSR hastened the events. And Slovenia especially was never a comfortable fit.

I’m from said ex-socialist block, I’m more aware than most about how things went down, and how they turned out. But we aren’t talking about Tadzhikistan - we’re talking about Slovenia, which is doing really well - I visit regularly.

I’m not blaming the Serbs for everything. But they were the other side in the ten days war - and they didn’t have the will.

@QuixoticSoul That is the line that was fed to the media but even the US government at the time did not believe that.


Slovenia is the exception. And even the ones that are doing well have more debt then the entire national debt of Yugoslavia combined. Ironic since the US used debt relief as a tool to drive wedges between the republics. Slovenia had the dumb luck of being one of the more wealthy republics to start with. And I was not talking about Tajikistan. Even eastern Germany has gone down the toilet economically.

A friend of mine from Maribourg (I think that is how it is spelled) says he gets more flack from Croatians because they are still pissed Slovenia did not get involved in the broader conflict.

But if you want to see what really kicked things off I recommend looking into the 1990 foreign appropriations act to start with.