The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Jeff Carter]

1 hour ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

This has become rather boring and repetitive. I don't begrudge anybody who doesn't think the U.S. or Nato should be contributing weapons to this war. But there's been an unmistakable trend of excusing leaders for their actions that's started with Trump being helpless before  the U.S. "deep state' and now it's being done with Putin who was "left no choice" by the American Exceptionalist  deep state.

Now we have Jeff, who was repeatedly assuring us during the Russia military build that there was no way Putin would invade and this was all for show  as if he was our forum "inside man " to Putin. I thought at the time, maybe Jeff know something and I was hoping to God he was right.

Of course he wasn't  and typically the  phase where Putin is condemned for the invasion is skipped altogether and then the American Exceptional deep state made  poor Vlad do it.

Early on, every one here seemed pretty moderate in the prospect of U.S. involvement in the war, except I did find Ben's persistent warmongering toward U.S. escalation rather off putting.

It would be interesting for you to see the reaction that I've seen recently in Easter Europe. There's absolutely no trust for Putin. There is fear of further invasion, and an expression that they are just glad they're not being invaded. This fear wasn't as prevalent in Western Europe, as there's been quite a buffer zone for a long time and fears were always discounted just as we were all in disbelief when Putin finally invaded.

Of course historically Europe can never build lasting peaceful relations, and have always messed things up requiring the U.S. to get involved and become the balance of power and  contrary to what anyone says, they were never relishing that role, but by default became the Western superpower.

The present world situation for the last 50 years is the one major world superpower spends way too much on defense. In that country, there are 2 parties. One party is aggressively expansionist and has waged 3 major costly wars in the Middle East with great cost of lives and human displacement and the other party has  mopped up 2 of the wars,but rather slowly so as not to appear soft, which politically is an obsessional American no no.

Currently the Democrat's base will not allow the party  to get in a prolonged war where Americans are brought home in body bags unless there's a great justification and there's only  been one such a justification in 50 years as the Democrats voted against both the Bush wars but voted for the invasion of Afghanistan after 911, because there's no way the  U.S. would have just let that happen without retaliating.

Guess what, the world you live in isn't perfect. you can sit on the sidelines and criticize, like you've probably always done. So you want world peace? World peace lovers in  America, Canada, Europe and the world at large.  At this time, what singular party in the world is your best shot for world peace?

 

In my opinion, the continuity of neoconservative apparatchiks running U.S. foreign policy across both Republican and Democratic administrations points to the existence of a "Deep State".

[Benjamin Cole]

59 minutes ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

Re: Gabbard, Ben  I wasn't aware you've recently become "born again" and  were pro police from your compassionate stance toward the police on 1/6?  Do you know she also said  the Democrat Party is anti police and anti religion??

Early on in her career she was a gay hater but she found,......  whatever it is religious gay haters find and moderated her stance, though that might not mean much to you.  She actually ran for President  in 2020. The conspiracy community thought they could make her their candidate, but she'd have none of that.

She's very limited as a candidate but she would have been ok on some fronts.

I'm reminded in a Dem 2020 debate when there was 15 Dem candidates and 6 women among them and it had to wind down to fewer candidates, and the pundits beforehand said what I thought was a rather sexist comment, that 2 of these weak dem women candidates , like Gabbard and Kirsten Gillebrand (who I never forgave for running Al Franken from Congress!) are going to have to eliminate the other to survive the next round.

The debate started and sure enough, Gabbard interrupts Gildebrand and starts ripping her. It looked so contrived and forced, and it was like she took a page from these pundits, and I was sickened because I never want a pundit to run any debate!

And sure enough, they ended up destroying the paltry 2% rating they each had coming into the debate.

 

Kirk:

 

Well, no candidate or pol is perfect. 

I thought Gabbard's commentary, explaining her departure from the Donks, was an interesting statement, and worth pondering. 

 

 

[Benjamin Cole]

7 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

"Setting aside partisan politics..."   Posted without intentional irony, eh, Ben?

Trump's "diplomacy?"

Are you referring to Trump's embarrassing press conference in Helsinki, after Putin dressed him down behind closed doors?

Certainly, our EU allies had no illusions about the fact that Trump was, obviously, a compromised Kremlin asset.

The only people on the planet who still haven't figured that out are the Republicans in the Trump cult.

My hunch is that Putin didn't want to undermine his Orange Asset by annexing Ukraine while Trump was POTUS.

He miscalculated, because Trump would have rolled over for Putin on demand.

Meanwhile, Ben, did you and Mathew Koch watch the historic J6 Congressional hearing today?

WN-

You remind me of the old joke about a French economist. 

In debate, the Parisian allowed, "What you say may be true in fact. But more importantly!---is it true in theory?" 

Putin invaded Crimea when Obama was president, and then invaded Ukraine when Biden was president. No during the Trump Presidency. 

Even worse, Obama declared that Ukraine was not vital to US interests, but allowed that Ukraine was vital to Russian interests. Biden was the underling VP for Obama.   

Ok, the facts are the facts.

But in theory.....

 

[Benjamin Cole]

13 hours ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Highlight of the Jan 6th Committee hearing today was the committee members voting to subpoena Trump. One requirement is if he accepts, he must swear to tell the truth.

Other big highlight was that the FBI, including Director Wray (a Trump appointee), the Secret Service and Homeland Security all had advance knowledge 10 days before the insurrection that there would be a violent assault on the Capitol. None of these agencies alerted Congress or the Capitol Police.

 

Members of Congress stunned by Secret Service 'bombshell' at Jan. 6 hearing - Raw Story - Celebrating 18 Years of Independent Journalism

Other big highlight was that the FBI, including Director Wray (a Trump appointee), the Secret Service and Homeland Security all had advance knowledge 10 days before the insurrection that there would be a violent assault on the Capitol. None of these agencies alerted Congress or the Capitol Police.--DC

I advise reading this report: 

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HSGAC&RulesFullReport_ExaminingU.S.CapitolAttack.pdf

How on earth the Capitol Police were not ready on 1/6 defies the imagination. 

The commander of the Capitol Police Civil Disturbances Unit was home making meatloaf on 1/6. You can't make this stuff up. 

In truth, the CP probably should be up for dereliction of duty charges, if not investigated for some sort of complicity. 

But, after initially suggesting white racism was why CP stood down, the M$M decided on lionizing the CP, so those lines of inquiry were closed off. 

Interesting story...where was the Secret Service on 11/22? Where were the Capitol Police on 1/6? 

Not on duty....

 

 

[John Cotter]

Post deleted.

Edited October 14, 2022 by John Cotter

[John Cotter]

10 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

John,

    I don't view this Ukrainian invasion/annexation as a pissing contest between the U.S. and Russian imperialists-- i.e., as a transmuted version of the Cold War.  Everyone knows that Soviet communism is defunct.  Even Putin and his KGB associates anticipated its collapse in 1991.  (See Catherine Belton's Putin's People.)

    In my view, Putin's Ukrainian invasion seems more like another chapter in Putin's broader war on liberal Western democracy, and his goal of confiscating and controlling other people's lives and property.  It's about theft and control-- precisely what we experienced in the ROCOR when Putin and the FSB seized our churches in 2007.

    At the time, a Russian friend of mine said, "It's a shame the Kremlin took over our church."  The Russians here had no illusions about what Putin was doing!

    What does he resent about Ukrainian democracy and autonomy?  The Ukrainians had no offensive military agenda toward the Russian Federation.  Putin wanted their property, and control of their population.

    Putin has spent the past 20 years establishing his totalitarian police state in the Russian Federation.  He is openly contemptuous of liberal democracy. 

    That is why he has actively supported right wing fascist politicians in the U.S. and Europe-- including the Trump cult here in the U.S. 

     What amazes me are the illusions many people in the West still have about Putin's police state-- despite the daily atrocities we are hearing about in Ukraine, including the bombings of civilian targets.

     Many well-intentioned people have wanted to believe that Putin is some sort of enlightened autocrat.  In reality, he's the son of a man who served in Stalin's NKVD Destruction Brigades, and the apple didn't fall far from the tree.

William,

Despite the fact that I’ve pointed out the irrelevance of your last post, you’ve gone off on another “Gish gallop”, and you expect me to chase all your red herrings.

You have validated my argument by your failure to address it, let alone logically rebut it.

Do you understand the point I was making (following Mearsheimer) about the difference between being a great power and the greatest power in the context of this debate and the significance of that difference?

[John Cotter]

5 hours ago, Jeff Carter said:

In my opinion, the continuity of neoconservative apparatchiks running U.S. foreign policy across both Republican and Democratic administrations points to the existence of a "Deep State".

Chris Hedges has written an eloquently scathing article about this:

Chris Hedges: The Pimps of War

The unaccountable coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East are now stoking a suicidal war with Russia.

The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.

They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institute. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including that of the U.S., leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.

I spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent reporting on the suffering, misery, and murderous rampages these shills for war engineered and funded. My first encounter with them was in Central America. Elliot Abrams — convicted of providing misleading testimony to Congress on the Iran-Contra Affair and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush so he could return to government to sell us the Iraq War — and Robert Kagan, director of the State Department’s public diplomacy office for Latin America — were propagandists for the brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as the rapists and homicidal thugs that made up the rogue Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which they illegally funded. Their job was to discredit our reporting…

They once railed against liberal weakness and appeasement. But they swiftly migrated to the Democratic Party rather than support Donald Trump, who showed no desire to start a conflict with Russia and who called the invasion of Iraq a “big, fat mistake.” Besides, as they correctly pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a fellow neocon. And liberals wonder why nearly half the electorate, who revile these arrogant unelected power brokers, as they should, voted for Trump.

These ideologues did not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every dead body I stood over in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gaza, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, their intellectual dishonesty and their sick bloodlust. 

They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military. But they eagerly ship young American men and women off to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of empire and American hegemony. Or, as in Ukraine, they provide hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry and logistical support to sustain long and bloody proxy wars…

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/11/chris-hedges-the-pimps-of-war/

[Steve Thomas]

Lawrence Tribe said that Donald Trump didn't have a very good day yesterday.

Trump had a double header, and lost 18-0.

The J6 Committee voted 9-0 to subpoena him and the Supreme Court voted 9-0 against him in the Mar-A-Lago documents case.

Not a good day.

Steve Thomas

[Matthew Koch]

10 hours ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Elon Musk is under federal investigations, Twitter says in court filing (yahoo.com)

 

 

[Mark Knight]

Ben:

IMHO, Tulsi Gabbard is about as "representative" of the Democratic Party as AOC. 

Both are on opposite fringes.

The loss of Gabbard to the Republicans is not unexpected. Her voting record, IMHO leans more toward Republican goals than Democrat goals. Her "defection" is more a case of going where she should have been in the beginning, if she was completely honest with her voters. I don't see that as a bad sign for either party. It's a realignment that everyone with more than 10 brain cells saw coming.

Trump spent his entire presidency aligned with a "whatever Putin does is fine with me" position. I cannot recall ONE TIME that Trump objected to Putin's action during his time in office. If you think that a second term of a Trump presidency would have kept Putin out of Ukraine, I see that as willful blindness on your part. While Putin didn't invade Ukraine during the original Trump presidency, Trump's "whatever Putin wants is OK with me" position is inconsistent with the thought that Trump would have opposed Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

And that's just how I see it. Not "Donks" and "Phants" policies weighing in, but I believe Putin miscalculated on what he saw as "weakness" of democracies, including those in Europe, no matter what parties are in charge.

 

[Ron Bulman]

George Conway reveals ‘the shortest distance between Donald Trump and an orange jumpsuit’ (msn.com)

[Joe Bauer]

4 hours ago, John Cotter said:

Chris Hedges has written an eloquently scathing article about this:

Chris Hedges: The Pimps of War

The unaccountable coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East are now stoking a suicidal war with Russia.

The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.

They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institute. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including that of the U.S., leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.

I spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent reporting on the suffering, misery, and murderous rampages these shills for war engineered and funded. My first encounter with them was in Central America. Elliot Abrams — convicted of providing misleading testimony to Congress on the Iran-Contra Affair and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush so he could return to government to sell us the Iraq War — and Robert Kagan, director of the State Department’s public diplomacy office for Latin America — were propagandists for the brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as the rapists and homicidal thugs that made up the rogue Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which they illegally funded. Their job was to discredit our reporting…

They once railed against liberal weakness and appeasement. But they swiftly migrated to the Democratic Party rather than support Donald Trump, who showed no desire to start a conflict with Russia and who called the invasion of Iraq a “big, fat mistake.” Besides, as they correctly pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a fellow neocon. And liberals wonder why nearly half the electorate, who revile these arrogant unelected power brokers, as they should, voted for Trump.

These ideologues did not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every dead body I stood over in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gaza, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, their intellectual dishonesty and their sick bloodlust. 

They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military. But they eagerly ship young American men and women off to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of empire and American hegemony. Or, as in Ukraine, they provide hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry and logistical support to sustain long and bloody proxy wars…

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/11/chris-hedges-the-pimps-of-war/

Have you written a book or books chronicling your incredibly extensive on the ground, first hand eyewitness war experiences and your contemplative war generating world order thoughts such as those shared above?

I share many of your views and sentiments.

 

[Andrew Prutsok]

Gabbard's a shameless opportunist. Her spiritual leader taught her that "fags f&$^%ING each other in the ass" caused the AIDS epidemic. Wanting to run for office in blue Hawaii, she had to walk that back. In office, her best bud was Dana Rohrabacher. She was a chaos agent in the 2020 election.

[W. Niederhut]

5 hours ago, John Cotter said:

William,

Despite the fact that I’ve pointed out the irrelevance of your last post, you’ve gone off on another “Gish gallop”, and you expect me to chase all your red herrings.

You have validated my argument by your failure to address it, let alone logically rebut it.

Do you understand the point I was making (following Mearsheimer) about the difference between being a great power and the greatest power in the context of this debate and the significance of that difference?

John,

   I can't fix your reading comprehension problems, or your limited knowledge of Russian history.

   At best, I would suggest that you re-read my commentary about Kotkin and Putin's neo-Soviet agenda more slowly.

   Beyond Mearsheimer and Jeff Carter's punditry, I'd be curious to see a list of Russian history books that you and Chris Barnard have studied.  My hunch is that it's a very short list.

   As for Ben Cole extolling Trump's diplomatic skills in comparison with Obama and Biden... 🤥

   Like most Trumplicons, Ben still hasn't figured out that Putin's Orange Asset was always an international laughingstock, as Colin Powell said in 2016. 

    I'm guessing that Ben also missed the J6 Committee evidence yesterday about Trump's precipitous December 2020 order to rapidly withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by January 15, 2021.

 

Edited October 14, 2022 by W. Niederhut

[W. Niederhut]

12 hours ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

This has become rather boring and repetitive. I don't begrudge anybody who doesn't think the U.S. or Nato should be contributing weapons to this war. But there's been an unmistakable trend of excusing leaders for their actions that's started with Trump being helpless before  the U.S. "deep state' and now it's being done with Putin who was "left no choice" by the American Exceptionalist  deep state.

Now we have Jeff, who was repeatedly assuring us during the Russia military build that there was no way Putin would invade and this was all for show  as if he was our forum "inside man " to Putin. I thought at the time, maybe Jeff know something and I was hoping to God he was right.

Of course he wasn't  and typically the  phase where Putin is condemned for the invasion is skipped altogether and then the American Exceptional deep state made  poor Vlad do it.

Early on, every one here seemed pretty moderate in the prospect of U.S. involvement in the war, except I did find Ben's persistent warmongering toward U.S. escalation rather off putting.

It would be interesting for you to see the reaction that I've seen recently in Easter Europe. There's absolutely no trust for Putin. There is fear of further invasion, and an expression that they are just glad they're not being invaded. This fear wasn't as prevalent in Western Europe, as there's been quite a buffer zone for a long time and fears were always discounted just as we were all in disbelief when Putin finally invaded.

Of course historically Europe can never build lasting peaceful relations, and have always messed things up requiring the U.S. to get involved and become the balance of power and  contrary to what anyone says, they were never relishing that role, but by default became the Western superpower.

The present world situation for the last 50 years is the one major world superpower spends way too much on defense. In that country, there are 2 parties. One party is aggressively expansionist and has waged 3 major costly wars in the Middle East with great cost of lives and human displacement and the other party has  mopped up 2 of the wars,but rather slowly so as not to appear soft, which politically is an obsessional American no no.

Currently the Democrat's base will not allow the party  to get in a prolonged war where Americans are brought home in body bags unless there's a great justification and there's only  been one such a justification in 50 years as the Democrats voted against both the Bush wars but voted for the invasion of Afghanistan after 911, because there's no way the  U.S. would have just let that happen without retaliating.

Guess what, the world you live in isn't perfect. you can sit on the sidelines and criticize, like you've probably always done. So you want world peace? World peace lovers in  America, Canada, Europe and the world at large.  At this time, what singular party in the world is your best shot for world peace?

 

Bravo, Kirk.  Can't be said any better.