Mark Zaid, JFK and Trump

[Bob Ness]

44 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

I wasn't suggesting that we invade Putin's fascist police state.

In the context of this discussion, I was merely hoping that we can all stop pretending that Putin is some sort of benevolent world leader who wants to help the Ukrainian people, and hasn't been trying to sabotage liberal democracies in Western Europe and North America.

There is no sarcasm emoji for my previous comment. I wasn't suggesting that either.

As I've stated in other threads, I do understand that the Russians have been neighbors (and participants) in arguably the most violent area on earth and have a different set of calculations regarding the west's motives regarding Ukraine. IMO if we weren't there under NATO they'd probably be back at killing one another in droves, ad nauseum.

A brief look at the borders of Europe over the last 300 years or so can give anyone the idea what it would be like sharing borders and resources with them. Putin is no different than any of the strong men who have topped the Russian sphere over the years, if not by degree, at least by principle.

I guess what I'm saying is that if we don't counterbalance their tendencies it's likely another invasion/war will be in the offing (Baltic States anyone? How about Georgia?).

Edited November 14, 2019 by Bob Ness

[Kirk Gallaway]

Yes there are a lot of dirty waters under the bridge in Ukranian political history.  But what you never hear from Jim, or Putin (who currently houses Yanukovych in an exclusive Dacha) in his interviews with Ollie Stone, is of the corruption of the Yanukovych regime, and what he managed to acquire as a Kleptocrat in 5 years.

These films are stunning. Imagine after his ouster, the rank and file people visiting this estate for the first time.

https://youtu.be/_HN3yZVKP9g

Just keep clicking on the pictures depicting the opulence of his estate in this article.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10656023/In-pictures-Inside-the-palace-Yanukovych-didnt-want-Ukraine-to-see.html?frame=2834855

[James DiEugenio]

Kirk:

I will now imitate that fine actor, Claude Rains from Casablanca.

Do you mean to tell me that there is corruption in these states that broke away from the USSR in the nineties?

Disgraceful, I mean how dare you say such things.

 

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

Back to real life.

Bob, I cannot comprehend how you could make that argument about Crimea could only secede if Ukraine allowed it to.  In fact, I find it hard to type that sentence.

I mean, the Bandera neo Nazi thugs were already spilling over into Crimea.  There are films of them setting fire to buildings with people inside.

The majority of residents in Crimea were Russians not Ukrainians. And by a large margin. The Yanukovych overthrow was illegal.  It was done by violence, scores of innocent civilians were shot dead, and the legal process was subverted upon the urging of the EU.

And you really think that under those circumstances, Crimea and the RUssian governmnet should have let the Bandera neo nazis spill over into Crimea and terrorize and brutalize the Russian nationals there?  

I mean, really?

[Bob Ness]

35 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Kirk:

I will now imitate that fine actor, Claude Rains from Casablanca.

Do you mean to tell me that there is corruption in these states that broke away from the USSR in the nineties?

Disgraceful, I mean how dare you say such things.

Haha yes agreed but Kent's point today about a recovering judiciary being essential is absolutely correct, but probably too nuanced a point for most people.

The fact is that if any country's justice component is incapable of providing at least a modicum of legal restraint on excesses that country is doomed to continual Civic unrest. The single biggest reason the dollar is the currency of choice is the reasonable expectation that the US legal system maintains that restraint and provides as fair a legal recourse to manipulation, theft, fraud etc as can be expected. It's the reason BRICS didn't go anywhere IMO.

The United States encouraging corruption reforms in The Ukraine is the first step in reversing decades of Soviet and post collapse looting of resources. Few of the Oligarchs did anything for their respective countries and instead stashed money in every nook and cranny they could find and refused to husband the assets they seized for the betterment of their people. The only possible chance they have, being on the border of Russia, is a strong support network which can resist the natural inclination of Russia to insulate itself from liberalizing influences and European intransigence (although this is mostly historical experience as opposed to ongoing).

Trump stepping in to molest The Eukraine (literally) is a disgusting symptom of his narcissism which concludes with his lying over and over about what is without a doubt analogous to a coach telling a player he's not going to play him without the player doing something for him (use your imagination from there).

The difference between Russia and the US is that Trump is being called onto the carpet where as the whistle blower would disappear if it were Putin.

That's non-negotiable.

[Bob Ness]

44 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Back to real life.

Bob, I cannot comprehend how you could make that argument about Crimea could only secede if Ukraine allowed it to.  In fact, I find it hard to type that sentence.

I mean, the Bandera neo Nazi thugs were already spilling over into Crimea.  There are films of them setting fire to buildings with people inside.

The majority of residents in Crimea were Russians not Ukrainians. And by a large margin. The Yanukovych overthrow was illegal.  It was done by violence, scores of innocent civilians were shot dead, and the legal process was subverted upon the urging of the EU.

And you really think that under those circumstances, Crimea and the RUssian governmnet should have let the Bandera neo nazis spill over into Crimea and terrorize and brutalize the Russian nationals there?  

I mean, really?

Jim this is all RT news. If you can't find neutral sources, that you don't have a relationship with (ie Robert Parry), how do you expect me to take what you say at face value? I have to prostitute myself from time to time to pay rent. If I have to check sources I don't mind taking the time but the sources I've checked on these claims don't agree. At the time this was happening I remember specifically the rifles on the roof shooting protesters were NOT Bandera (you know he died in 1950 right?) Nazi's. This was a pure Putinism and yet I have to go back there again?

Crimea is NOT Russian! It's a part of Eukraine! They didn't allow observers. The UN documented it and the only sources to confirm the bus bombing were Russian iirc.

Canada isn't a part of the US even though Americans live there. We don't get to invade Canada based on that. The referendum was extra constitutional controlled by Russia. Why do you legitimize that?

Invoking Bandera to justify a Stalinist takeover of Tartar land?

[W. Niederhut]

55 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Kirk:

I will now imitate that fine actor, Claude Rains from Casablanca.

Do you mean to tell me that there is corruption in these states that broke away from the USSR in the nineties?

Disgraceful, I mean how dare you say such things.

 

 

 

Huh?  Terror in Ukraine?

How about the 1933-33 Holodomor, in which Putin's hero, Joseph Stalin, and the Soviet government murdered an estimated 7-10 million ethnic Ukrainians?

As for the 2014 Russian military occupation of the Ukraine's sovereign territory in the Crimea, you will not find a legal scholar outside of the RF who considers it (or the subsequent plebiscite) legal.  It was sovereign Ukrainian territory.

What Putin did in the Crimea is similar to Hitler's occupation of the Sudetanland in 1938.  He probably used disinformazia and false flag agents provocateurs as well.

[James DiEugenio]

Are you guys deliberately trying to make me giggle?

First Bob makes like he does not know that those Bandera groups began to surface in the nineties.

Bob, is the BBC part of RT?  I really do not think so, do you?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27173857

Note how they mention Bandera.  I mean we mention Thomas Jefferson today do we not?  Well, that is what he is to the RIght Sektor.  

[James DiEugenio]

OMG, what Putin did in Crimea is what Hitler did to the Sudetenland?

I will just try and make like you did not say that OK William.  

The legal grounds upon which Putin held the referendum  are:

The fact that the overthrow of the original Ukraine government constituted a coup, therefore the bilateral treaty was negated.

Did this occur in 1938?

 It is a canon of international law that one can protect nationals  living abroad from military or paramilitary forces. 

Were the Germans in Sudetenland being attacked by the Czechs?

 

 

Edited November 14, 2019 by James DiEugenio

[Paul Brancato]

Jim - I at least for one acknowledge that fascist forces were in the rise in Ukraine. I don’t recall reading that ethnic Russians in Ukraine were being treated like Jews in Nazi Germany. Please provide a source that you think justifies a Russian invasion. 

[James DiEugenio]

Now are both Forbes and Gallup part of the RT network also.

That is who Parry reports on in this article.  He also notes that Russia had three times the pension amounts that Ukraine offered.  And since the overthrow those Ukraine pensions had been cut further.  Note what Nuland said:  well work harder.  How hard do you think she and her hubby work?

Crimea did not want to be part of the fascist Ukraine state. And unless you think Gallup rigged its polls, that was proven out a year later.

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/22/crimeans-keep-saying-no-to-ukraine/

 

 

Edited November 14, 2019 by James DiEugenio

[Bob Ness]

27 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Are you guys deliberately trying to make me giggle?

First Bob makes like he does not know that those Bandera groups began to surface in the nineties.

Bob, is the BBC part of RT?  I really do not think so, do you?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27173857

Note how they mention Bandera.  I mean we mention Thomas Jefferson today do we not?  Well, that is what he is to the RIght Sektor.  

Okay Jim so we can just issue passports to Crimeans and then invade claiming the Proto-Stalinists are about to start enslaving Russian Crimeans? How can you explain the issuing of passports to Crimean's by Russia prior to the invasion? Maybe because they needed a pretext because Russia hadn't been attacked and didn't have consent of the Ukrainian government? Why shouldn't we go back to the Tatars, whom you seem to think have no standing there?

Edited November 14, 2019 by Bob Ness

[James DiEugenio]

1.Bob, you did not read that story i posted.  Gallup and Forbes admitted a year later that Crimea did not want to be part of Ukraine, they wanted to be part of Russia for a lot of different reasons.  For one, the economic mess that is Ukraine.   Also, Russia did not invade Crimea.   They already had a military force there.

2. Is Marvin Kalb part of RT? This is what he wrote about the neo Nazis in Ukraine under the Bandera influence:

Describing the neo-fascist flavor of the Maidan protests, Kalb writes that a number of far-right groups who were increasingly at the center of the action “would have made the Nazi-era Gestapo look like a happy band of bigots and bandits.”

Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine’s Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)

Kalb, unlike many of his peers in the think tank community (Kalb is a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution) also notes with distaste that a leader of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion was named chief of police in post-Maidan Kiev. “Instead of reining in far-right militias,” writes Kalb, Kiev “has actually been providing them with tanks and armored personnel carriers.”

Kalb is equally clear-eyed about the tactics that Ukraine’s new leaders employed to garner Western aid. “A number of unethical Ukrainian politicians” seem to have found the magic formula, which, according to Kalb, is this: “bedazzle the West into believing that Ukraine is a vital strategic asset in a continuing East-West struggle between democracy and autocracy, between freedom and oppression…”

 

 

Edited November 14, 2019 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Nice work if you can get it.  Hunter Biden was not getting 50 K per month.

http://www.stationgossip.com/2019/11/ukrainian-officials-release-records-of.html

 

 

Edited November 14, 2019 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Why are not the Dems screaming about this?

I sure would be.

Not long ago I read that a US Assistant Secretary of State, or perhaps it was a member of the National Security Council, said that now that Washington had reestablished control over Ecuador, it would not be long before the governments of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba would be overthrown.

Venezuela is proving to be hard for Washington to crack. Washington was banking on its NGO forces paid to stage protests, together with monetary bribes to the Venezuelan military, to chase Maduro out of office. But so far the Venezuelan military has refused to desert their country for Washington. Washington can, of course, raise the offer to the generals. Perhaps the generals are awaiting larger bribes.

However, the Bolivian military took the money and on the basis of protests organized by US-financed NGOs and the National Endowment for Overthrowing Democracy forced Evo Morales out of office. This is a huge loss for Bolivia.

Morales is the first president since the founding of Bolivia to come from the indigenous population. His seventy-nine predecessors were all members of the Spanish colonial elite allied with Washington. Together they plundered the country.

Washington considers Morales “leftist” because he focused on using Bolivian resources to reduce Bolivian poverty and to create a better life for Bolivians instead of for the profits of US corporations and banks and the Spanish elites who ruled Bolivia for Washington.

Self-determination in the southern hemisphere is simply not permitted by Washington or by its overthrow agent, the misnamed US “National Endowment for Democracy,” which is a well-financed organization for overthrowing real democracy.