W. Niederhut

Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election (justice.gov) Senate Intelligence Committee issues final report on Russian interference (rollcall.com) Russiagate Was Not a Hoax - The Atlantic

Mathew, If you ever get around to finally reading the Mueller Report, you will learn that Trump fired James Comey in 2017 because Comey refused to shut down the FBI investigation of Michael Flynn's efforts in December of 2016 to sabotage U.S. sanctions against Russia, imposed in response to Russian interference in our 2016 U.S. election. Next, read the belated, Republican-controlled U.S. Senate Intelligence Report on Russian interference in our 2016 election, on behalf of Trump. The Chairman of that committee was Trumpster Richard Burr (R-NC.) I do agree with Mark Twain that convincing you and Ben that you have been fooled about Trump's ties to Russia has been a very difficult task.

Jim, Your custard pie metaphor is a good one, but, just to clarify, I don't believe that "Putin is worse than Stalin." I do believe that Putin is an erstwhile Stalinist, like his father-- and a graduate of the Yuri Andropov Institute. (You probably know that Putin's grandfather, Spiridon Putin, was Stalin's personal chef.) Vlad ascended to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel during his 16-year KGB career in Dresden. Catherine Belton argues that the KGB had anticipated the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and had conspired to re-establish the Soviet police state in the guise of a nascent democracy.* Putin was their man. The pie-throwing contest on this thread seems to be based on two conflicting hypotheses; 1) The Jeff Carter/Mearsheimer Hypothesis-- that NATO, the Neocons, and the N-a-z-i-e-s are largely to blame for Putin's decision to invade and annex Ukraine, and 2) The Kotkin/Belton Neo-Soviet Imperialist Hypothesis-- that Putin's invasion of Ukraine (and 2014 annexation of the Crimea) is part of a longstanding Putin/KGB agenda of re-establishing the former Soviet empire. Of course, the two theories are not mutually exclusive. Aspects of both are probably accurate, but my own opinion is that Putin's neo-Soviet imperialist agenda is primarily responsibility for Putin's decision to invade and annex Ukraine. To Jeff Carter's counter argument, my response is... "Jeff, you ignorant slut!" 🤥 * Putin's People: Belton, Catherine: 9781250787323: Amazon.com: Books

You're wasting your time, Matt. I have posted those same facts and references for Ben on several occasions, including the definitive Atlantic review article outlining why "the Russia Hoax Was No Hoax." Ben is keeping a closed mind on the subject.

Ben, There's good news and bad news this week. The good news is that you have a new fan from the MAGA-verse who thinks you're "the voice of reason." 😬 You and Mathew Koch are no longer alone. The bad news is that your fixed delusion about Trump being a victim of the Deep State has taken another major hit.

Ron, Removing a statesman like Schiff, in particular, is a travesty. Non sequitur. I finally fled the snow and ice in Denver and came to Texas this week to visit my in-laws. Now it's snowing in Texas. WTF? 🤥

Paul, Has Jeff Carter ever criticized anything Putin has done? How about Trump? Tucker Carlson? When Putin invaded Ukraine last year, Donald Trump even declared that Putin was a genius.

Anonymous FBI official(s) in New York were a continuous source of alleged "leaks" to the M$M about Hillary's Emails during the weeks leading up to the 2016 election. The NYT ran weekly, pre-election headline news stories about Hillary's Email-gate nothing burger-- as documented retrospectively by Harvard's Berman Center and the Columbia Journalism Review. Simultaneously, Dean Baquet explicitly put the kibosh on any pre-election NYT stories about Trump's ties to Russia, as we learned in 2017. Trump also received Russian funds in 2016 through the NRA, and probably other sources. ($30 million from the NRA alone for Donald that year.) Kevin McCarthy was caught on open mic joking with Paul Ryan in (?) 2017 about the fact that Russia had funded Trump's 2016 Presidential campaign. (It's not surprising, especially since Russian oligarchs had been bankrolling the Trump Organization since the early 1990s, according to Belton,* and Felix Sater bragged in 2015 that Putin was going to put Trump in the White House.) Russian military intelligence (GRU) also hacked multiple U.S. state voter registration databases in 2016, and Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had shared sensitive polling data with Russian GRU agent Konstantin Kilimnik before the election. The GRU, certainly, knew in 2016 which U.S. swing states could be swung with the fewest invalidated votes. * https://www.amazon.com/Putins-People-Took-Back-Russia/dp/0374238715

Yes, fortunately, Donald Trump, hasn't been in office for two years now, Jake. (Not three. 2023-2021= 2.) The bad news is that he also hasn't been in jail. Something is terribly wrong with our justice system in the U.S. if wealthy felonious skunks like Trump can accept massive bribes (foreign and domestic) while serving in public office, and even attempt to overturn U.S. elections with impunity.

"Nuanced," and "informed" dialogue, Jeff? "Contextual information?" Sounds pretty high-falutin'-- like most of your misleading pettifoggery. Didn't you tell us last year that Putin was not going to invade Ukraine, before later arguing that his decision was NATO's fault? Have you not consistently downplayed the efforts of Putin and his FSB-aligned oligarchs to interfere in our 2016 U.S. election on behalf of Trump? What do you make of Oleg Deripaska's 2016 relationship with FBI agent Charles McGonigal? Do you understand the context of that information? Can you engage in an informed dialogue about the nuances? 🤥

Ouch... Jeff Carter takes another one on the chin... 🤥 Jeff has been denying for the past five years that Putin, his oligarchs, and the GRU interfered in our 2016 election to install their compromised Kremlin puppet, Donald Trump, in the White House-- two years after Putin had abruptly seized and annexed the Crimea. We Putin critics were, obviously, being "childish," and "emotional" at the time -- falsely depicting Jeff's enlightened autocrat, Vlad Putin, as a silly "caricature of a comic book villain." (Such notions of geopolitical good and evil are irrelevant in the world of Realpolitik, as Henry Kissinger clearly proved.) Then, one year ago, Jeff-the-Realist assured us that his Realpolitik-al hero, Putin, did not really intend to invade Ukraine (as part of an apparent long-term goal of stamping out untenable Western-style democracy and re-establishing the totalitarian Soviet empire.) But Putin's invasion of Ukraine shocked everyone in March of 2022-- including Jeff Carter, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi-- and his apologists had to undertake the awkward task of convincing us that Putin's adversaries were Yahtzees-- unlike Orban, Le Pen, Trump, and other right wing, Kremlin-backed politicians in Europe and the U.S.-- and that his invasion of Ukraine was really the U.S. and NATO's fault.

Chris, I, certainly, wish that more could have been done to prevent this terrible tragedy in Ukraine. No argument from me on that account. As for Putin, it is true that I have harbored a personal grudge against the man since his FSB goons seized the ROCOR in 2007, (including my own local parish.) He confiscated the last remnant of the Russian Orthodox Church that had not been corrupted and controlled by the KGB, and told ITASS at the time that, "religion is one of Russia's most important weapons of self defense." In other words, like his KGB predecessors, he cynically viewed the Church as a mere tool of the state.

Chris, I was psychoanalyzed 40 years ago so, yes, I'm fully aware of the multi-faceted dimensions of my own mind. And I learned early in my psychiatric training to be mindful of my emotional reactions to my patients, (and associates) and to use counter-transference as data about others. As for the Gulag Archipelago, one of Solzhenitsyn's most compelling observations, IMO, was that Stalin had, essentially, normalized sociopathy in the U.S.S.R., while criminalizing conscientious dissent. As you will recall, decorated artillery Captain Solzhenitsyn, himself, was arrested at the German front and sent to the Gulag for eight years for posting a joke about Stalin in a private letter! Meanwhile, thieves, murders, and various psychopaths were regarded as victims of class warfare, and often ascended to positions of authority in Stalin's police terror state. (Speaking of class warfare, the Russian kulaks were murdered on a grand scale in Stalin's Soviet Union, for the crime of being slightly more prosperous than their fellow peasants-- perhaps owning an extra cow or two, etc. Russian Orthodox priests were also systematically murdered and/or shipped to the Gulag, as were Baptists. Monasteries like Solovki were turned into forced labor concentration camps.) Soviet POWs in WWII were shipped directly to the Gulag from N-a-z-i prison camps, as were Estonians, Latvians, and any who had been in contact with the non-Soviet world. Ex-filtration of populations is an old Soviet practice. And Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin was one of the NKVD Destruction brigade officers implementing Stalin's reign of terror on the front. So, it should come as no surprise that his son, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, is currently bombing apartment buildings in Ukraine, executing Russian conscripts in Ukraine who disobey orders, and shipping Ukrainian civilians to Russian prisons.

What bunk. The simplistic, two-dimensional thinking about Russian history on this thread is coming from those who mistakenly believe that, because Hitler's reign of terror was evil-- and the CIA's post-WWII track record is evil-- Stalin's reign of terror (and Putin's neo-Stalinist reign of terror) wasn't/isn't. History is far more complex. Anyone has studied the horrors of Stalinism (and Putin-ism) in any depth will understand precisely what I'm talking about-- but much of that history has been relatively unknown in the West. Many Westerners have a concept of Soviet history based largely on 20th century Bolshevik propaganda. I have tried to direct Chris to some references on true Soviet and neo-Soviet history, without success. As for Chris, his modus operandi here is to falsely accuse those who rebut his erroneous posts of being "emotional."

Joe, I thought Senator Kamala Harris was fairly sharp in the 2020 Democratic Primary debates-- a far cry, intellectually, from a Dan Quayle. (Of course, I was more impressed with Elizabeth Warren, Bernie, and Buttigieg.) So, I have been surprised and puzzled by Harris's apparent timidity as VP. It seems like something about the office or, perhaps the media hostility, has undermined her former self confidence. VPs have often been the butt of jokes, and she has had the two-fold burden of dealing with racism and misogyny. In addition to Truman, other VPs have risen to the occasion in history, including Millard Fillmore, (underrated, IMO) Chester Arthur, and, of course, TR. I agree with your notion that Harris might surprise us.

Chris needs more than a geography lesson. He needs a lesson in the history of Russia during the past century. Based on his comments, I don't believe that Chris has really studied or understood Solzhenitsyn's work, including the Gulag Archipelago and the Red Wheel trilogy. One of Solzhenitsyn's observations was that Stalin normalized sociopathy and criminality while criminalizing dissent. Putin is a product of that sociopathic political culture. His father was an NKVD Destruction Brigade member. Our local Putin apologists seem naive and poorly informed about; 1) the horrific, genocidal history of Stalinism before, during, and after WWII, and 2) the 21st century transformation of the former Soviet Union into Putin's neo-Stalinist police state. I was told (by a Russian bishop) that our late Russian Orthodox Archbishop Anthony of San Francisco, and other Russian Orthodox Christians, actually hoped during WWII that the N-a-z-i Wehrmacht would liberate Russia from the bloody Stalinist yoke! Strange but true. And most Ukrainians did not want to be re-subjected to the horrors of Stalinism after 1942. Neither did the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. Does that make them Yahtzees? Who could blame them? In addition to the Gulag Archipelago, I would highly recommend I.M. Andreyev's carefully documented history of the Bolshevik persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church after 1917-- Russia's Catacomb Saints. (BTW, where are the Hollywood movies about the 20th century Soviet genocide of its own citizens?) As for the 21st century history of Putin's KGB-backed fascist police state, I'll reference, again, Catherine Belton's book, Putin's People. Putin is no enlightened autocrat. He's a neo-Stalinist graduate of the Yuri Andropov Institute.

This is about the third or fourth time that Chris Barnard has posted the same Mearsheimer video, which I have responded to TWICE by posting Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin's diametrically opposite opinion about NATO and Putin's invasion of Ukraine. A Scholar of Stalin Discusses Putin, Russia, Ukraine, and the West | The New Yorker Kotkin is a Professor of History at Princeton who has published several scholarly books about Russian history, his area of expertise. Sometimes I get the impression that the Putin apologists around here haven't really studied Russian history-- including the gory details in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago-- not to mention the more recent gory revelations about the Wagner Group and Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Are people aware that many Ukrainians did not want to be re-subjected to Stalin's brutal yoke after 1942? Nor did most people in Poland and the Baltic states. Also, have any of our Putin apologists read Catherine Belton's recent history of Putin and his KGB-aligned oligarchs-- Putin's People? Putin's People: Belton, Catherine: 9781250787323: Amazon.com: Books

I used to own that vinyl 4 Way Street album in the 70s, but lost it or leant it to someone years ago. As I recall, David Crosby's terrific song, All Along the Lee Shore, is on that 4 Way Street live album. (In my next life, I would also like to own a yacht and spend time cruising the Caribbean... 🤥) Incidentally, David Crosby was, apparently, quite a Tweeter. Some of these are hilarious. David Crosby dead: Byrds, Crosby, Stills & Nash singer was also a Twitter legend. (slate.com)

Many thanks to Kirk, Matt, Ron, and Chris for posting those great David Crosby/Byrds clips. Sharing these songs and interviews is kind of like sitting shiva for David Crosby here on the forum. And, incidentally, along with David Crosby's interview clip about his relationship with Joni Mitchell, Crosby also talked to Howard Stern in June of 2021 about death and dying.

Tucker is on a roll lately. I almost laughed out loud recently when I heard that Tucker had publicly outed Bob Woodward's ONI background. We have all known about it for years, but no one has ever talked about it in the mainstream media, to my knowledge. And, not surprisingly, the M$M coverage I saw implied that Tucker Carlson had gone off the deep end by claiming that Watergate was a Deep State plot. 🤥 Tucker Carlson Has Some Weird Ideas About Watergate In Latest Fox News Rant Tucker Carlson Has Some Weird Ideas About Watergate In Latest Fox News Rant (yahoo.com)

So, this is, undoubtedly, one of my favorite rock albums of all time, featuring a number of masterpieces, including the post-apocalyptic song, Wooden Ships, written by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Jefferson Airplane founder Paul Kantner. During the past half century, I never got tired of listening to this great album, (or the subsequent CSN&Y album De Ja Vu.) I saw David Crosby in concert a couple of times about 50 years ago in Denver-- with CSN&Y at Mile High Stadium, and at the Denver Coliseum with Neil Young. Requiem aeternam.

Ben, You're still grasping at straws to maintain your denial of Trump's plot to disrupt the certification of Biden's election on January 6th. If you had listened to the sworn testimony of Trump's staff in the J6 Congressional hearings last year you wouldn't be harboring these fixed delusions. What do you imagine additional footage will show you that wasn't shown in the comprehensive NYT video reconstruction of the Trump mob attack on the Capitol? Do tell. As for suppressed evidence, what do you have to say about the fact that Trump's Secret Service and DHS staffers deleted their J6 texts? How about the fact that Trump's J6 coup co-conspirators all either dodged their subpoenas or plead the 5th? If you're looking for J6 clues, start there.

Oliver Stone's film, W., was also quite interesting, IMO. Perhaps he could make a Trump film, with Alec Baldwin in the starring role. 🤥

Ouch... 😢 David Crosby Dead: The Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash Founder Was 81 - Variety

The Koch War On American Democracy Documented | Rightwing Group Pours Millions in ‘Dark Money’ Into US… January 17, 2023