Russian "grandmothers" may need to feel "pain" the way their counterparts in the Ukraine are being treated to before Putin is ready for "peace"

 

It never ceases to amaze the level of hypocrisy by the right in this country, and its failure of recognize the truth when locked in their alternate-reality world. Politicians and media from the demented side of the spectrum portray Joe Biden as “what weakness looks like” as he walked away from a podium after announcing new sanctions against Russia. But why are many people so reluctant to remember who was “reluctant” to sign off on even limited sanctions against Russian, thus emboldening Putin? Yes, let’s keep giving a pass to the man who preferred to sanction German companies in regard to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and this past January claimed that the Ukraine was “Europe’s problem.” For those who were among the 62 percent in a recent poll who think that Putin would not have invaded the Ukraine if Donald “Peace in our Time” Trump was still president, the evidence provided here…

 

 

…suggests that Trump was so afraid of being a "loser" that he was more like this man…

 

 

…rather than this one:

 

 

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was convinced that Hitler would be “satisfied” with just absorbing the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia and “peace” was at hand. Instead, Hitler’s signature wasn’t worth the paper that Chamberlain waved before the crowd. So too is any claims of Putin wanting “peace,” unless it is letting him “peacefully” invade a country that is only a “threat” to Russia because Putin desired it for his own nefarious purposes. It was Trump’s blind “friendship” with Putin, and admiration of Putin’s unchecked authoritarianism that laid the groundwork for Putin’s actions now. That being said, what we've seen so far is that Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has more guts in his pinky finger than what's in Trump's bloated carcass--or in Putin's, although with him, "guts" has less to do with his actions than delusion.

Trump would have initiated no actions on his own to stop Putin’s forces from invading the Ukraine—and he would have had support from Russian sympathizers in his Ministry of Propaganda, Fox News; unlike Chamberlain, who recognized his error and would still be in office long enough to declare war on Germany in 1939, Trump still would believe that his “personal magnetism” was sufficient, when behind closed doors Putin would just be seeing him as a politically naïve fool who could be taken advantage of. Furthermore, no one should take seriously any after-the-fact “tough talk” from Trump now, or the hypocrisies of the right-wing media or politicians, who are essentially behaving anti-American, if not treasonous.

In the meantime, there had been great reluctance to implement blocking Russian access to The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) payments system, which makes it easy for banks, business and individuals to make financial transfers internationally. Last week Germany’s foreign minister Annabelle Baerbock insisted that there were no plans to implement SWIFT sanctions against Russia, even though the current sanctions seem to have little effect on Putin, except to excite more off-the-rails commentary from him, such as readying Russia’s “nuclear option”—as if he hasn’t already used it in a fashion. It appears that after Russian troops occupied the Chernobyl nuclear plant facilities, they deliberately caused further damage to it, which then released higher levels of radiation, according to Ukraine sources.

Thus we don’t have to “imagine” what Putin is capable of doing, because he is already doing it. So while Putin's actions have dredged up old memories for what Germany once did that I suspect Germans would prefer to leave buried in the past, Baerbock insisted that implementing SWIFT sanctions would “hurt” Russian “grandmothers” living abroad. Huh? What about grandmothers in the Ukraine, whose homes are being shelled by Russian missiles? You think Ukrainians don't really hate Russia now?

 

 

So only “targeted” Russians should feel any pain, according to some. We might see more anti-war protesting in Russia if the people there—instead of being safe from the horrors that Putin and the Russian military is inflicting on Ukrainian grandmothers, feel a little “pain” too. It seems that the U.S. and the EU have gotten the “message,” since it is now reported that limited SWIFT sanctions have been visited upon certain Russian entities; their effect is already being felt as Putin has supposedly agreed to “discussions” with Ukrainian representatives to be held in Belarus (although you still have to depend on Putin's unreliable "word" on that), and Russian forces are facing “surprising” resistance in the Ukraine at the moment.

Too many points to belabor in "analyzing" what is going on in the head of a sociopath like Putin

 

There are no points to belabor about Russia’s now full scale invasion of the Ukraine, because there are just too many to make sense of any of it. From the Ukraine perspective, at “best” Vladimir Putin intends to turn the country into a defenseless puppet like Belarus; remember that the Crimean invasion was a response to the impeachment of Russia-puppet president Viktor Yanukovych, who angered many with his “promise” to essentially hand over the Crimea to the Russians to base its Black Sea fleet, and was a thoroughly corrupt authoritarian who left the country in near financial ruin with his subservience to Putin and personal greed.

If Putin himself has any personal “credibility” left, it is that we can take as “credible” the worst things we can think of him. He has not merely revealed, but has confirmed, that he is an international thug attacking a country that was no threat to his own or to anyone else’s. Remember that almost right up to the last moment before sending “peace-keeping” troops into two separatist regions where Russia has been supplying arms to rebels for at least eight years at the cost of 16,000 lives, Putin was claiming the military build-up on Ukraine’s borders was a “military exercise” and even as late as last week was claiming that some units were returning to their bases—and on top of that continued to claim it had no plans to invade the Ukraine.

Thus nothing that Putin says should be taken at face value unless the “threat” at its tail end is taken as what he actually intends to do, like it or not. Ukrainians' rightly claim that current sanctions will have no real deterrent effect on Putin’s action, and that the most powerful economic weapon at the West’s disposal (short of a full-on boycott of Russian goods and services), the SWIFT international payments system, appears to be running with weak knees. Sanctions against Russia can’t merely “hurt,” they have to hurt badly enough to change Putin’s behavior, and that obviously has not happened yet.

And they won’t hurt if China has anything to say about it. Because of its refusal to condemn the Russian invasion and its de facto support of it by providing Russia with economic and financial aid to offset the impact of sanctions while still making absurd claims about the  usefulness of already pointless “dialogue,” China needs to be sanctioned in some way as well. The U.S. should at least limit the Chinese national presence in this country—both economically and access to technology—to the same limitations that Americans face in China; if China just kicks out all American businesses in response, then the U.S. should respond in kind as much as feasible. If it needs to, it can support the economies of other “low-cost” countries to provide the same goods China does.

One could argue that the West should have submitted to Russian blackmail and simply put in writing that Ukraine was off the NATO membership list to avoid all of this, and that would have given Putin a face-saving “out” of the situation who put himself in, which he either had to act or appear to be a saber-rattling buffoon. But then again, this power mad sociopath could have simply said that the “exercise” was over and made another less-that-subtle threat about what would be in store for the Ukraine if it did consider NATO membership, which wasn’t even in the “pipeline” at all to begin with, and was just used as a propaganda tool by Putin.

And speaking of propaganda, can there be anything more disgusting than Putin’s claim that he is fighting a “denazification” campaign in the Ukraine, which no one outside of Russia believes? Putin’s revisionist history ignores centuries old Ukrainian nationalism and periods of unrest seeking Ukrainian independence. His revisionist history forgets the Holodomor, what Ukrainians called the famine-induced genocide of nearly 4 million Ukrainians and the deporting of many others during the disastrous collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture that was made deliberately worse by Stalin to kill any Ukrainian independence movement. It is no wonder that many Ukrainians initially welcomed the German Army as “liberators” in World War II, only to become openly hostile when the Nazi intentions toward them became more clear.  

As I have pointed out recently, Putin has been playing by the Nazi playbook in setting the table for this invasion. Putin has a gruesome, murderous history of engaging in “false flag” operations, such as the one to justify the war in Chechnya; add to that the jailing or assassination of political and media opponents as well as dissidents and anti-corruption whistleblowers—and now the arrest of anti-war protesters—those who loath to see Putin operating on the same plane as Hitler or even Stalin only look like blind fools.

Can we imagine one moment if we put someone like Donald Trump through a time machine and landed him in the middle of Nazi Germany, where morality and ethics did not exist, and the laws and court system codified death as a sentence for “crimes” that countries that regarded themselves as “civilized” would simply see as the right to privacy and freedom of speech? Trump’s character lacks empathy, demands total loyalty, seeks to cause harm to his perceived "enemies," thrives on the cult of personality, employs white nationalist and racist dog whistles, and  utilizes propaganda techniques to twist misinformation and conspiracies into a “reality” that is shoe-horned into the paranoid fantasies of supporters and those who want “cover” for their own sociopathic tendencies. That's right, give someone like Trump power in a place like Nazi Germany and see what happens. Remember that Trump, when asked about the many murders of Putin's political and media opponents, just shrugged it off as something "everybody" does.

But while someone like Trump has a Goering-like personality and the radicalized “populist” appeal of a Hitler, Putin is all-in with the latter—or at least Stalin, as he has demonstrated in his most recent demented speeches justifying his actions. Why is it so hard to imagine what a sociopath like Putin would do in the “right” situation when he has already done so much to recall past Russian glad-handing with the Nazi regime, which allowed Germany to occupy most of continental Europe while giving Stalin the opportunity to absorb the Baltic States—which Putin may yet be planning to do so again, only deterred for the moment by the fact that they are members of NATO?

Just because sociopaths like Trump (when he was president) and Putin are not operating in conditions that would give them the freedom to act on their worst impulses without any restrictions, they are still sociopaths who are capable of repeating the mistakes of the past that apparently are too far in the past for most people to remember what was “wrong” with them. Those mistakes are being repeated here and abroad, and if Putin and his allies are to be stopped, sanctions against them—China included—actually have to “hurt.” If that means jail time for Trump, then this country and the world at least will be the better for it.

By the way, we can’t allow people in this country to forget what the Nazis were all about. Today I was sitting on the bus absorbed in my own business when I became aware that a white male was talking in an agitated manner to the black bus driver, apparently expecting to receive empathy for his complaint, which included the words “Jobs,” “illegal” and “Hispanics.” 50 million Hispanics in this country are U.S. citizens, and there is no doubt in my mind that this is a distinction without a difference in the mind of bigots who need scapegoats to explain their pathetic lives. I called out, loud enough for the rest of the bus to hear, “Oh shut up, you damn Nazi!” which surprisingly actually did cause the man to shut up, because he at least understood the social meaning of the word. He went to a seat before almost immediately getting up and telling the driver he didn’t feel “comfortable” on this bus, being trailed by me loudly telling him to “get off the damn bus” and “damn Trump Nazis.”

The only other response to this was by a Hispanic woman, who appeared to be of indigenous extraction, who turn around with a look of wonderment, as if she didn’t know that in this country you can actually confront racists like that without being arrested or killed—like you might, say, in Putin’s Russia,

John Durham's latest court brief like fireworks disappearing into nothingness

 

There is the rather strong suspicion by many, if they even bother themselves to think about it, that the John Durham investigation has been a colossal waste of taxpayer money that was solely a partisan whitewashing project for Donald Trump and William Barr—the latter, who we recall, doesn’t care about his “legacy” because he won’t be around to care what people think of him after he dies. Barr elevated Durham’s investigation to “special prosecutor” status near the end of Trump’s reign to prevent the Biden administration from immediately ending this travesty of an “investigation,” although the Justice Department is well within its rights of ending this expensive farce which has gone on far too long for Durham to find any legitimate “crimes.”

To recap, Durham thus far has indicted two people for what he calls “crimes,” one (Igor Danchenko) for not “disclosing” to the FBI that some of the information he gave them was from the supposedly “discredited” Steele Dossier (whose author has publicly defended as largely “factual”), and the other person, Michael Sussmann, for not disclosing who he was working for to the FBI, even though the information he provided was accurate. “That’s it???” you rightfully submit. Many believe that if the Durham investigation was shut down right now, the only people who would care are Fox News expectorators and thoroughly discredited politicians like Ted Cruz.

But wait…didn’t Durham just release “damaging” new charges earlier this month about spying on Trump? According to the right-wing media world (and of course Trump), his latest court documents provided just that. Right-wing commentator Kevin Brock exclaimed in The Hill that

Durham’s description of (Rodney) Joffe’s alleged activities does not paint him in a good light. According to Durham, Joffe exploited Neustar data and other friendly sources to help him “establish ... an inference and narrative” tying Trump to Russia — and that he allegedly did so to please “VIPs” within the Clinton campaign and its law firm. Sussmann happened to be Joffe’s attorney as well.

Joffe, in this scenario, isn’t an independent whistleblower; he’s a partisan whistle maker.  Durham could only know all this if either Joffe told him or the sources Joffe approached for help disclosed those conversations to Durham’s investigators. Neither reality can be comforting to those involved. Of all the points made in the Factual Background, Joffe’s alleged efforts and their disclosure are the most damaging to those who may have participated in a burgeoning conspiracy.

It is particularly damaging because, if true, Joffe appears to have unethically and possibly illegally turned over proprietary government data to a civilian third party. Plus, Durham makes a compelling argument that the data Joffe allegedly gave Sussmann for delivery to the FBI is incomplete and made to look more sinister than it really is. In addition, Sussmann and Joffe allegedly withheld from the FBI important context that would have placed the sinister overtones in a more innocuous light. 

Thanks to a routine court filing, the nation now knows the Durham investigation is no joke. He has set a ladder against a formidable wall and is climbing it rung by rung, apparently gaining cooperators and locking in testimony before a federal grand jury. There will be more squirming to come in powerful circles, but John Durham must be allowed to continue his important work.  

Whew, a lot to unpack there—meaning unpacking the garbage from anything meaningful, after which Durham’s investigation is still, well, a joke. Naturally the right-wing world was all over this, “proof” that the Clinton campaign was “spying” on the Trump campaign and digging up “dirt,” as if the Trump campaign wasn’t doing something even worse, with Roger Stone personally working with Wikileaks, and that infamous Trump Tower meeting—and of course later Trump trying to blackmail Ukraine’s president into providing “dirt” on Joe Biden. But you didn’t need to do much “digging” to find dirt on Trump, since it was coming out of his mouth every time he opened it.

But here, if you remove all the conspiratorial verbiage, all you are left with is some other guy (Joffe) who provided another guy (Sussmann) with information that possibly wasn’t “complete.” That’s it. We can only imagine if that information was “complete” it would probably be more damaging to Trump; but then again, the Durham investigation’s sole purpose was to throw shade on the investigations into Trump’s nefarious activities and crimes. Dan MacGuill in Snopes points out that to the embarrassment of various right-wing media outlets (Fox News), that “Durham did not write that the Clinton campaign had paid Joffe or Neustar (the company Joffe worked for), nor that anyone had ‘infiltrated’ Trump Tower or the Trump White House — despite attention-grabbing claims to that effect, by Fox News and the Daily Mail.”

It turns out that Durham also feels that the right-wing media is setting itself up for a massive dose of disappointment. While he insinuates that his investigation isn’t a complete waste of time and money, apparently in response to Fox News and Trump’s  blowing his “factual background” side notes out of proportion, he filed another court document, adding the comment

If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the Government’s Motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the Government’s inclusion of this information.

As has been pointed out, Durham is desperate to justify his investigation, and avoid being a laughingstock of history and merely seen as another tool of Trump’s fascist movement. Here we plainly see he is fearful that the right has blown the information in his recent filings so far out of proportion that when what he actually produces is far less than what was expected, he will look like an even bigger fool and fraudster. If Durham has any personal credibility left, he will shut this thing down now and admit his own investigation was simply a partisan politics exercise largely kept afloat by a belief in conspiracy theories. 

Adherents of the "earth is round" theory of the world are under siege all over

Can it possibly be true that U.S. intelligence was telling the truth all the time and Vladimir Putin was the one who has been lying right up to the last moment—even to the Chinese—about not intending to invade Ukrainian’s sovereign territory? Putin made French President Emmanuel Macron look like a fool to believe those lies, and he didn't even break a sweat doing it. He believes that since he got away with the Crimea, he can probably get away with this and a lot more through energy blackmail.  Putin’s most recent claim is that the Ukraine is a “fake” country that shouldn’t even be allowed to exist, and yet you still have some of Ukraine’s supposed allies in the EU for a few hours tiptoeing through the tulips trying to decide if this invasion was “real” or not. 

China, which continues to make the absurd claim that "dialogue" is the way to go despite the fact that Putin was never serious about "dialogue" and was going to do whatever he was going to do anyways, has had its claim of "respect" for Ukraine's sovereignty exposed as empty rhetoric as it apparently  has no influence on Putin's actions--and who knows, probably like Stalin who made a deal with the devil behind the scenes, China is looking the other way in exchange for Russian support of China getting a piece of the pie at some future date.

Meanwhile the likes of Fox News' Sean Hannity and Sen. Ted Cruz just won’t shut their stupid mouths, claiming that this is all Joe Biden’s “fault,” even though we all know that this is really Donald Trump’s doings for failing to take a hard line on Putin’s various nefarious activities; if he was still president, Trump would be rolling out the red carpet to grease Russian tanks' path all the way to Kyiv. You think this is a hyperbole? Trump is already praising Putin's move as "genius"--and there are people who still don't believe Trump and his "movement" is dangerous. 

At least in Germany, former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's continued bromance with Putin is seen as a national disgrace, and the current government is becoming "impatient" with his pro-Russia rhetoric and unhinged accusations about Ukrainian "aggression." Putin, of course, has paid off his "close friend" handsomely, with many lucrative posts on Russian energy boards; Schroeder was also the one who initiated the original Nord Stream pipeline project as a parting "gift" to Putin after his election loss.

Naturally, Fox News talks out of its ass-end when it first blames the Obama/Biden administrations for Putin's antics, but then turns around to become a Kremlin propaganda organ by telling us it isn’t any of our business what Putin does anyways, even if it means the U.S. would lose what shred of moral credibility it has left on the world stage, thanks to Trump’s “America First” policies which merely alienated allies and did not provide any evidence whatever of benefit—economic or politically—to this country. 

Word is that the Kremlin's top propagandist in the U.S. media, Fox News' Tucker Carlson, is being used by Russian media to confirm its anti-American propaganda. In fact, Fox News in general is on a mission to undermine the U.S. position against Russian aggression. The earth, you see, is round, but Fox News insists that we live on a "flat" earth.

And while we are on the subject of “credibility,” we have been informed recently that the “number one” cable news host for self-proclaimed “Democrats” of the “prime” viewing age—at least for advertisers—in the 25-34 demographic range is Carlson. Can this possibly be true? We have been told by some on the media right-wing that this is due not to “hate watching,” but that this audience doesn’t believe everything they hear from “liberal” media, and just want to get the “straight facts.”

Oh really? While the so-called “liberal” media insists on calling the earth round, alleged young Democrats—those who want to get the “white” version of the news?—are rushing to hear the “news” channel that tells them that the earth is “flat,” and want to believe that merely because it is contrary and makes them feel “good” and not feel “guilty”? Why not? Just a week ago Carlson was regurgitating the debunked Seth Rich assassination conspiracy theory that Fox News was forced to pay a seven-figure settlement to the Rich family for defamation. And Carlson still has a job?

Apparently those young “Democrats” want to hear Carlson rave on about his favorite targets, the “border crisis” and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because Hispanics are the go-to group when someone needs one to beat on. Carlson now claims that his constant attacks on AOC are not racially-motivated because she is a “white” woman. AOC’s indigenous genes would like to differ about that; caller her “white” is like calling Barack Obama “white” because he has a white mother, when we know that the racist-right only thinks of him as black, as, frankly, so does the rest of America. The number one hypocrisy in this country is regarding Hispanics solely as an “ethnicity,” which permits people (regardless of color) to be racist against them and deny that they are.

Do these Democrats who watch Fox News for the “news” think that sarcasm is “funny,” because it certainly doesn’t qualify as an “argument”; it is just a juvenile reaction when liars are confronted with the reality that the earth really is round. It is Laura Ingraham’s stock-in-trade, and young Democratic viewers can’t see through that? When confronted with his flat-earth "truths," Carlson devolves into insults and expletives; this is not the behavioral pattern of a mature, mentally-balanced person. Even when Carlson fakes his “reasonable” tone, you get the impression that he is on medication. His long-distance bromance with Putin demonstrates that he has no moral values whatever; he is not a true American if he cares not for democratic values, and those who think he has a “point”—speaking to so-called “Democratic” viewers—then we can surmise that some people have their own moral compasses pointing “south” when they should be pointing “north.”

I can say for myself that I never watch Fox News because I want to; if someone had Fox News on the video screen in a break room at work, I could never get around the feeling that the only people who watch this willingly are those who don’t want their own ignorance, hate and utter lack of self-awareness questioned by reality.

Why do we need to belabor the point that Fox News just twists the “news” merely to be contrary, and disregard what thinking people can see plainly in front of them? Because of the suspicion that people who claim to be Democrats are easy pickings to be sucked into the Fox News rabbit hole? So that they can hear about how the “authoritarian” Canadian government’s “abuses” against truckers who are protesting COVID-19 restrictions by continuing to behave like children by blocking cross border traffic, frustrating residents and disrupting the economy of both Canada and the U.S.?

I mean, just how much hypocrisy is too much to stomach? Fox News has been attacking social justice protesters blocking traffic, and it has no problems with Florida and its Trumpist governor, Ron DeSantis, signing a law whose most nefarious tidbit is making it a felony if a protester has the “intent” to impede traffic, and allows law enforcement to interpret what a “riot” or a “rioter” is, and after an arrest would prevent someone from posting bail 24-48 hours. Interestingly, the restriction against carrying weapons would seem to be something that would target right-wing “protesters” more, but one suspects that they would be given a “pass” if they just happened to “be there,” like Kyle Rittenhouse. Of course the intent of the law is a deliberate effort to impede freedom of speech and assembly by left-wing protesters—which Fox News supports here, but not against right-wing truckers in Canada, some of whom were displaying pro-Trump banners.

Yes, the earth is round. It is a fact, and at least some young “Democrats” need to accept that fact instead getting their daily dose of misinformation and lies from Fox News just for something “different” that might be just deranged enough for them to be sucked into in time.