We are in an age of personality cults. Maybe we always have been to one extent or another. Regardless, we are in one, big time.
The decline in religiosity could be a partial explanation for people who need something to look up to after they have relegated heaven to myth. It’s easier to replace God with a human being. It’s evident across the political spectrum. The Left has theirs in the many academic offshoots of Karl Marx. On the Right, icons have arisen in the person of people from Jordan Peterson to Donald Trump. They may be correct in much that they say, but being human, they occasionally step on a rake. Then, the followers parrot the mistake while jettisoning their brain, the same brain that God gave them, that they don’t recognize that it was God who gave it to them.
Today’s brain is ill-informed of history. The schools have failed. We study history for what it says about human nature. And, yes, there is such a thing as human nature. Many won’t recognize the errors of the present because they are unaware that we’ve committed the blunders many times before. For instance, some of what today’s Right seems to be saying about the Ukraine War is an imitation of the rhetoric of the 60’s radical Left. Jean Kirkpatrick, a longtime Democrat and a defector from the looming socialistic, neo-Marxist takeover of her party, spoke to the 1984 Republican Convention nominating Ronald Reagan for a second term (see below). Her speech was a bold rejection of the “San Francisco Democrats” (Sound familiar?) and the Left’s “blame America First”.
Today, you’ll hear echoes of the same condemnable language of the 60’s radical Left coming from the likes of Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, and their media apologists.
Trump introduced the Left’s oratory to the Right when he morphed the Left’s “blame America First” into “American First”. His 2015-2016 bombast against the Bushes led to a harangue about “endless wars”, i.e., the War on Terror, almost identical to the Left’s complaint about the Vietnam War. Trump made the chant of “America First” and its cousin “MAGA” into a reflex for isolationism, something ever-present in the GOP going back to 1940 and Lindbergh’s America First. Don’t’ forget, implicit in “Make America Great Again” is the claim that we aren’t great, which for the Right is due to our decadence. For the Left, we are censured as “exploiters”. As decadent or “exploiters”, the Right has made common cause with Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.
Seemingly taking their cue from Trump in his odd admiration for Putin, some on the Right chide our support for Ukraine. The culture war is used as the excuse to criticize support for Ukraine. Tucker Carlson is scornful of the Zelenskyy government for its alleged autocratic tendencies; Laura Ingraham complains of our aid lost in purported Ukrainian corruption; and Jordan Peterson provides an alibi for Putin’s invasion as Putin fending of western decadence, a decadence resplendent in transgenderism. He comes close to aligning with Putin and when confronted backs off. The quote that got him into trouble was as follows:
“The culture war is now truly part of why we have a war [in Ukraine]. It is certainly the case that we do not therefore have all the moral high ground…. In fact, how much of it we have at all is something rightly subject to the most serious debate.”
In my view, transgenderism is a civilizational catastrophe, but to mingle it with Ukraine is sophistry. That puts Putin as a defender of goodness and light. If so, where does that put the CCP’s Xi? After all, Xi is leading a campaign to stop the feminization of men. Have you seen those PLA recruitment ads? They’re nothing like those gushing rainbow LGBTQ+ ads by our Marine Corps. Carlson, Ingraham, and Peterson would find themselves boxed into the corner of opposing US support for Taiwan against a Red Chinese invasion just to remain consistent. What kind of world would we have if our decadence or any other domestic policy failing is a straitjacket on our ability to stop this generation’s fascist and communist aggressors? Look to history for the answer.
Jean Kirkpatrick in 1984 outlines the stakes of a Trump/Carlson/Ingraham/Peterson foreign policy. It’s the same one advanced by the “San Francisco Democrats”. If you have 21 minutes, please listen to her riveting speech. It’s the antidote to the bile in this new era of personality cults.
The normally sensible Brit Hume on Bret Baier’s Special Report on Wednesday (3/16/22) asked the salient question on Ukraine: What is our national interest in Ukraine? It’s the same question every government has to ask when facing an international dilemma such as this one. For Hume, his inflection and posture inferred skepticism about a major US national interest in support of Ukraine. Take a tour around much of the Fox News primetime lineup and you’ll get commentary heavily dowsed in doubt with some bordering on complete rejection of any. Are they right? No, a hundred times “No”.
In addressing the query, one factor corrupts the popular media that influences much public opinion. A competent answer rarely lends itself to cable show compression – i.e., soundbites. The setting favors the cynic and hampers proponents. It’s much easier for a detractor to ask the question and force proponents to contrive a response to fit 10 seconds. Is that how we want overriding issues to be treated? Hardly.
Any intelligent consideration of the national interest in Ukraine begs particular questions. What would Europe and the world be like after a Russian conquest of Ukraine? Would it be a friendlier world for the US? An additional and related question: What would Russia under a reenergized Putin be like after a Ukraine conquest? Is a cooperative, agreeable, and contented Putin a likelihood? Oh, what will the CCP be left to think?
We study history for its clues on human nature.
As such, one could be excused for having a dim view of our prospects in this return to a world of contending hyper-powers. History is not encouraging. It’s rhyming in the cadences of the 1930’s. Once again, we have revanchist powers in Europe and Asia, and they have the additional liability of having nuclear arsenals. Their actions should focus the mind in a sterner way than a border dispute between two small satraps. A bear leaves more evidence of its passage than a mouse. Watch for the bear, not the mouse.
Trundling to the way-back machine, fascist Germany and Italy weren’t satisfied with the Rhineland and Abyssinia. Japan wasn’t made sanguine with Manchuria. League of Nations protests and sanctions didn’t halt Imperial Japan’s behavior and the Munich appeasement of forcing Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland didn’t whet Hitler’s appetite. The West had dug itself into such a deep hole by 1939 that it took six years and 75-80 million deaths, 3% of the world’s population, to bring the malefactors to heel.
Signing ceremony for the Axis Powers Tripartite Pact, January 1940; seated at front left (left to right) are Japan’s Ambassador Saburō Kurusu (leaning forward), Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Galeazzo Ciano and Germany’s Führer Adolf Hitler (slumping in his chair).Putin and Xi meet in June of 2018.
A new axis has taken shape reminding us of that old one. The 1930’s edition began in 1936 with treaties of cooperation among the serial aggressors and ended with the full-blown military Tripartite Pact in 1940. Acting in historical lockstep, Putin and Xi met on February 4 to announced a bipartite pact with world-hogging spheres of influence. The joint statement reads as follows:
“The new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation . . . . Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions, intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose colour [sic] revolutions, and will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.”
They are angling for a resuscitated Soviet Empire for Putin and Xi’s rendition of Japan’s old Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – “Asia for the Asians”, er CCP, so to speak.
And, simultaneously, as in that bygone era, we have a recurrence of an anti-war Right. We are quite familiar with the Left’s aversion for anything nationally muscular. They have a habitual zeal for opposition to the military and for the peddling of facile “peace” – of the better-red-than-dead variety – and the accompanying disparagement of any nation deserving of our sympathies. Such was evident on the 1930’s Right – Lindbergh’s America First Committee and leading congressional figures like Sen. Robert Taft (R, Ohio) – and increasingly appears to be true today. Scan the Right’s media offerings (Fox News primetime, Newsmax, and a host of other digital offerings) and you’ll see the smearing of Ukraine, fears of a military-industrial complex, the dangers of spilt American blood on foreign soil, and the hyperbole of a new World War III at every turn. At the end of the day, it’s a repackaged 1930’s playbook that calls for unilateral abandonment of a national interest if a foreign thug threatens.
The now-worn playbook shows in a diminished military capacity, both then and now. Today’s defense doctrine went from simultaneously fighting two wars to one. In order to fulfill the “pivot to Asia”, we had relegated ourselves to abandoning Afghanistan. Defense spending as a share of GDP gradually declined from 9% in the 1960s to under 4% today. We are doing our best to recreate the circumstances that led to Pearl Harbor. This time, we may not have the time to build up. As Congress begins the debate of a new draft law, the nukes had already left their silos and advanced divisions of the People’s Liberation Army have landed on the shores of Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands.
So, how will a disquisition like this one be shoehorned into a Laura Ingraham or Joy Reid segment? Hmmm.
Something lurks behind the paralyzing alarms of our celebrities on the Right (and maybe the Left). One thing might be the hankering for the type of international dealings of the sailing-ship era. It was a time when oceans blocked anyone but the most capable and determined assailant. The 21 miles of the English Channel’s Dover Strait proved to be insurmountable even for Napoleon at his height of power. Today, an airborne division can be dropped on Albany in a matter of hours; 30 minutes is the time from an ICBM launch from its Aleysk silo to Chicago (faster for sub-launched and hyper-sonics); WMD can come in a suitcase; and cyber invasions to bollix our grid are nearly instantaneous from Beijing keystroke to PG&E. Someone tell Tucker Carlson.
Russia’s new mach 9 Tsirkon hypersonic missile
Secondly, in a display of obeisance to simple-minded Trump-talk, they have a 1950’s template for America. It was a time when the U.S. was riding high, alone in the world, as Europe and much of Asia were in rubble. In a way, they are right to admire the time because those were the halcyon days before environmentalist triumphalism and the regnant belief that federal spending can cure deep-seated personal problems, alongside its attendant and economy-dragging trillion-dollar deficits. But, by clinging to Trump’s rhetorical apron strings, they take it much further in bashing a trade deficit that neither he nor they understand. In a clear example of foot-shooting, their targets include trading relationships with our allies and the ones that we’ll need to counter China’s latest edition of Asia for the Asians. It’s as if they chucked Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Statecraft for Dummies out the window and are winging it.
It won’t end well after the rampages and the torching of 12% of US GDP (US exports’ contribution to GDP). Gazing back into the history, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Great Depression share the same womb.
Mothballed US Navy ships in Suisun Bay, Ca.
The doom of repeating history, in Descartes famous words, looms large. Don’t expect expansionistic predators-with-nukes to be impressed by an economic and military retreat to fortress America. We will quickly learn that the world as a playground for powerful rogues will not be to our liking. We’ve seen it before, déjà vu all over again. Thus, we have a national interest in keeping Putin and the CCP at bay, if for no other reason than to avoid the accusation of flunking high school History. The sooner we discredit the anti-war Right and Left and its incipient isolationism, the sooner our national interest will come into focus.
Let’s hope at this momentous hour that we don’t shrug our shoulders and say under our breath, c’est la vie. We will live to regret it if we do.
While ruminating on the latest thought-fad emanating from the Left, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), I was reminded of the tendency of people to hide their real intentions behind a flurry of academic jargon. Thus, the convoluted and incoherent MMT. Economists – left, right and center – have dubbed it “Calvinball” (Paul Krugman), “not ready for primetime” (Scott Summer), “sounded like lunacy” (Michael Strain), and “a political [not economic] manifesto” (report for France’s central bank). Frankly, MMT boils down to this: if the government wants to do something, go ahead and print the money and do it. No problem, the MMT priesthood would sing in chorus. Everything will be hunky-dory.
But what are they really after? Pure and simple, they want a humongous government with the power to tax, regulate, and spend at will; no restraints; socialism. MMT is just another tangled oratorical path to get there. Please, fans of socialism, cut the crap.
The same mental gymnastics are at work on the right. Events in Ukraine have exposed a segment of the right’s own rhetorical curtain. Tucker Carlson babbles on about “just asking questions”, “neocons”, “Ukrainian corruption”, “World War III”, “Americans dying”, and “America first”. Laura Ingraham joins the chorus. What are they really after?
The normally sensible Mollie Hemingway also seems to practice this form of mental subterfuge when talking about Ukraine. In a recent interview on the Hugh Hewitt show, she incessantly rambled about “knowing the risks” of US support for Ukraine, as if the thought was original to her; nobody but her is aware of it. But everybody intuitively does it when doing simple things like deciding to go to an ATM in crime-ridden LA under DA Gascon or proposing to prick the nose of the CCP with tariffs (they’ve got nukes too).
What’s up? Two motivations lie buried in the verbiage: they are paralyzed in fear of Russia and have a hankering for a “fortress America” national defense strategy. Goatherders with boxcutters (9/11) proved the latter to be foolish. On the former, I fail to understand the gripping dread of Putin’s nukes over, say, those of Chairman Xi. Tucker, Laura, and Mollie are gung-ho in respect to China and have said so ad nauseam, but can’t bring themselves to support actions to forestall a mauling by a power wishing to resuscitate the Soviet empire on a continent historically beset by world-shattering aggressors. Speaking of spent blood and treasure to put thugs back in the box, recall WWI and WWII?
Hardly does an episode go by without two straw-man choices to bolster the cognitive inanity. Tucker presents the choices as either staying out, completely out, or body bags/nuked American cities. What happened to simply arming our friends? Putin and Xi do it regularly, and American soldiers have paid the price in such disparate places as Syria, Fellujah, and the Hindu-Kush. The Tucker-to-Laura axis’s response would be “no more forever-wars” or run and hide after, as Mollie would have it, tortuously “assessing the risks”.
The thinking boggles the mind. They are quick to “assess the risks” of a bungled Afghan bugout but have no desire to “assess the risks” of a bludgeoned Ukraine, and possible defeat, as we sit idly by, safe in our “fortress America”.
Which brings to mind another hidden motive: pure cult-of-personality politics. Trump-love could be clouding their eyesight and mind. Biden, who defeated their master, did the Afghan bugout and is at the helm when Putin unleashed his doddering Wehrmacht on the Ukraine. They’re quick to blame Biden’s Afghanistan-appeasement for Putin’s invasion – and they’d be right – while at the same time they hawk appeasement in regards to Ukraine. Putin saw Kabul airport and Xi is watching Ukraine. A failure to stop Putin at the borders of the Ukraine could lead to a failure to stop Xi at the shores of Taiwan. If so, we’ll be really forced into “fortress America”. A self-fulfilled prophecy anyone, one not likely to be satisfying to most Americans?
I wish that they’d get their appeasement angles straight before they blather to us.
The modern punditry class is a disgrace. Previously, most of the sensible among us had no recourse in legacy media. The networks, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, AP are mostly lefty propaganda organs. Now, it turns out, the primetime lineup on Fox News can’t be trusted. All of them prove that human fallibility is evident everywhere and academic degrees, party registration, ideology, race, gender, age, and telegenic qualities accord no fix. Fact.
Really, Tucker, Laura, and Mollie, tell us what actually lurks behind your wordiness. If it’s abject fear of Putin, say it. If it’s a sincere belief in the veracity of Russian propaganda, say it. If it’s a derivative of knee-jerk Trump-love, say it. If it’s an undying faith in oceans as our best defense, say it. If it’s a secret admiration of Putin as a fellow nationalist-populist, say it. If it’s the fright of “forever wars” trumping all other thoughts, say it. And, by all means, cut the crap.
In 2001, upon meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the first time in Slovenia, Pres. George W. Bush famously said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Apparently, Bush was bromanced by a heartrending Putin tale from his youth of his mother giving him a cross that survived a fire at the family dacha. Later, Vice-President Cheney chortled that when he saw Putin, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB”. Bush’s outpourings of sympathy were corrected by Cheney’s blunt realism.
We need more of Cheney’s therapeutic realism regarding all sorts of misguided beliefs that are eviscerating our country. One such assemblage of mind-junk running amok is environmentalism. This thing is an “ism” and not to be confused with its root, the environment. It’s a vast social engineering project that rivals anything bursting forth from the mind of Karl Marx, for whom it is related. After decades of persistent persuasion throughout the culture, it has settled into our myopic but comfortable middle class. We are willing our own demise, and the historical corrective in the form of a sober middle class has checked out of prudence and into folly, or so it seems.
Though, be mindful of the universal caveat: to be certain, not all of the middle class, but a sizeable chunk in varying degrees. One must avoid the sophistry of the woke in assuming a homogeneity of thought in a group arbitrarily defined by some external, physical factor (income, race, ethnicity, gender, etc., etc.).
The ”ism” is an example of a belief system every bit as straitjacketing as anything found in The Communist Manifesto, a kind of theology without an afterlife. Instead, the surrogate afterlife is a materialist utopia, a pie in the sky. The grand scheme begins with the acolytes’ favorite diagnosis of what ails us in the form of human eco-disruptions that have allegedly damaged our entire existence, us personally, and all our surroundings. The prescription requires the true believers to take control of the state to engineer a better human being for a better world. Devastation, though, is history’s likeliest verdict.
Climate change doctrines are the latest infatuation which has been used, for instance, to wreck our domestic energy industry and begin the coercive reengineering of our existence. Fact: no reliable energy, welcome to the stone age. And solar panels and windmills won’t cut it, so don’t go there. The eco-fanatics’ dream, however, will translate into the reality of dependence on Saudi monarchs, Iran’s mullahs, Putin, and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Welcome to national subservience to imperial thugs and welcome to chronic retreat and defeat. President Biden is the latest figurehead trying to lead us into this new catastrophe.
Events in Eastern Europe – Ukraine in particular – have exposed the problem. We are in the midst of a massive federal, state, and local effort, led by the feds, to turn topsy-turvy our way of life in pursuit of almost anything labeled “sustainable” in 2,000-page Green New Deals (GND) while at the same time we are beset with the aggressions of Russia and Red China who are threatening to tear apart our alliances and trade relationships. We are pulled toward the amateurish visions of AOC as we are stretched in the opposite direction to stand up to tyrannical aggressions. It’s a two-fer for a beating. Lincoln’s “house divided against itself cannot stand” should ring in our ears.
The fact that the middle class, mostly white collar, has largely bought into this secular faith is evident everywhere. It can be heard from the pulpit to the classroom.
Groups who are the zealous spearhead of the movement notice their narrow demographic appeal in the white collar, urban/suburban/exurban, middle to super-rich cluster. The Sierra Club, Wisconsin chapter, admits it: “The lack of diversity and inclusion amongst staff and members of environmental organizations is a key component to their difficulty in effectively combating environmental justice issues.” In 2015, the group’s national governing body felt compelled to kneel before the cliché of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to paper over the obvious truth of the group’s cramped attractiveness (sierra club 2015 diversity equity and inclusion pdf).
Pew Research points to the same constricted demography. Using Dem/Rep breakdowns as the metric – since GNDs aren’t in the Republican playbook – we get a sense of who’s rallying to the flag of the firebrands. The Democratic Party is, after all, their institutional home. Democrat strength has been rising in the same demographic wherein eco-activists draw their legions: white, college educated, and urban/suburban. These aren’t any kind of Caucasoids; they are whites of the other two characteristics.
For blue collars to join, they must either be confused or suicidal.
This isn’t your grandpa’s middle class. For a sizeable portion of them, they see the world as an urban park due to their unfamiliarity with anything else. Ensconced in their suburban bungalow, or coastal dwelling, or exclusive condo, or gentrified brownstone, they are far removed from the kind of people who make the stuff of their life possible. Distance culturally, morally, socially, geographically, and economically, sometimes over multiple generations, colors both their perspectives and profound ignorance. It’s easy for them to complain of the high price of housing but then support environmental policies that jack up the price of construction materials and strangle the supply of homes. To them, the national forests are a park, not a possible source of 2X4 studs, and the more land under the control of the Nature Conservancy the better in their mind. The monumental incongruency is startling.
Environmental activists protest outside of the Harvard Club where Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was scheduled to speak, June 20, 2017 in New York City.
Do you think the nations who wish us harm – yes, we do have them – are oblivious to the presence of a demographic fifth column in our midst? As Biden would say, “Come on, man!” In the 1970s and 80s, we called Soviet morale-busting campaigns disinformation. They called it dezinformatsiya which The Great Soviet Dictionary of the era defined as “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.” The 1980’s Operation Infektion attempted to convince the world and us that our government invented HIV/AIDS in order to sap our will to resist them. President Reagan got a full blast of it when he countered a Soviet military buildup in Europe and resisted Soviet adventurism around the world.
Today’s Kremlin wouldn’t be continuing the practice if there wasn’t an audience for it, as there was for the Nuclear Freeze and peace movements 40 years ago. Former Soviet KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin would be very familiar with this staple of Soviet war-by-other-means and is evidently using it. One of the biggest foreign boosters of John Kerry’s climate change hucksterism is Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council. Patrushev goes further in hawking American woke capitalism. Is he doing it out of pure altruism? Quoting Biden again, “Come on, man!” He knows, and we should know, that climate-change apocalyptics and social justice flimflammery only cripples us. What better way to advance Putin’s national interests than to cheer John Kerry’s galivanting escapades and The Squad’s congressional agenda? Weaken your adversary and warm up the tanks is a well-worn tactic.
Nikolai Patrushev
The Kremlin gets traction with the hooey because many white collars are habitually open to the jive. When will these urbanistas realize that they can’t have a safe and prosperous country alongside blackouts and escalating utility bills? Electric cars, or electric anything, isn’t going to deliver 45,000 pounds of produce to their favorite Whole Foods outlet. Their Beemers and Subarus can’t be made without the liquid residue of primordial jungles. The stuff of fossil fuels surrounds them at a time when they are trying to kill it off. It’s one of the purest examples of economic self-negation imaginable.
We have more than a Left problem. We have a middle-class problem. The two intersect at environmentalism and ensure the atrophy of our economy, our national resolve, and compromise the defense of our national interests. No better word is available than “betrayal” . . . or maybe stupidity.
2/24/22 UPDATE: It has begun. Russia has initiated a full-scale assault on Ukraine from the east, south, and north. The following is my synopsis of the contributions of two Fox News celebrities to the broad sense of confusion and myopia in America regarding Russia and the Ukraine.
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If you haven’t noticed, Putin is at it again, and our hapless president is bewildered and stumbling toward appeasement, or maybe just plain impotence. Now, here’s the kicker: some on the right are also ambivalent and would be, quite honestly, content with the results of Biden’s passivity. Fox News’s Neville Carlson (alias Tucker Chamberlain) is exhibit #1. He’s Fox News’s #1 offering and it shows. If you turn at least a casual ear to talk radio you’ll hear the occasional caller spout the latest lines, almost word for word, from Carlson about “neocons”, Ukrainian corruption, our undefended southern border vetoing any efforts to assist our allies, Carlson’s adaptation of Code Pink’s “no blood for oil” chant, and other reformulations of old rhetorical handles.
Sadly, he’s not alone on my side of the political ledger, the right. On Tuesday (2/22/22), he was joined by Laura Ingraham in a tag-team revitalization of Lindbergh’s America First Committee, which by the way in its initial form died over the burning hulks of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. If you’re interested, here’s a good dose of Tucker-thought on Russia-Ukraine. It’s entertaining but incoherent bombast.
Carlson repeatedly asks, “. . . how does intervening in Ukraine help the core interests of the United States?” Honestly, substitute Ukraine for any number of different countries and you’ll probably get any number of answers to his query. And prevalent answers would be different depending on the era. One answer would prevail in a time when long-distance travel was a death-defying journey, and before the harnessing of electricity and artificial power and Adam Smith’s depiction of the glories of free trade. George Washington could understandably advise the young nation “to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” But two-month delivery times for a letter across the Atlantic is an alien experience for today. Things move quickly – sometimes instantaneously – and their impacts travel at the same speed. Missiles, hijacked airliners turned into missiles, cyber-attacks, blue-water navies, strategic bombers, and international supply chains make the point.
Let’s ask Tucker’s question in 1931 before Japan’s invasion of China; instead of the Donbas, it’s Manchuria. Oh, what about Mussolini’s 1935 “minor incursion” into Ethiopia? Lest I forget, we could level the question at the “little corporal’s” swallowing up of Czechoslovakia, and furthermore Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. That takes up the Axis connection to Tuckers’ question. 405,000 US deaths later (75-80 million worldwide), we had peace that didn’t last long. And then we’re back to mankind’s annoyingly familiar flawed nature.
Moving forward in time, what core interest did we have in Korea? Or, for that matter, West Berlin? Cuba? Nicaragua? Grenada? Kuwait? The profusion of instances answers the question. It’s an interrelated world of multifaceted interests and impacts. A leading statesman has to pick and choose, not ignore and hide.
To remind you of what a statesman sounds like, President Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech of 1983 provides an educational contrast. Tucker no doubt would refer to him as a “neocon”.
Regarding Ukraine, is it in America’s interest to stand pat as the Soviet Union is revived? Ukraine is the vital piece in Putin’s reconstruction project. It was the breadbasket for the empire yet also distinct, so much so that Russification, the policy of transplanting millions of Russians in the country, was active for a couple of centuries or more. For Russia, if they can’t make Ukrainians Russian, they’ll make Ukraine Russian. First-language Russian speakers (14% of the population) are a product of this ethnic imperialism. They’re also the leverage for Putin to use tanks to complete the task that was interrupted by the USSR’s implosion.
The CCP is taking a page out of this dog-eared book by injecting Han Chinese into Xinjiang.
You’ll notice that I didn’t mention Vietnam in the litany of US interventions. It’s a sore spot, or embarrassment, for most Americans since we are said to have lost. But losing was a choice, not inevitable. Many decisions were made to draw out the war, allow North Vietnam to stay in the fight, and prohibit US assistance to Saigon by Congressional order at the moment Hanoi’s tanks headed south. We saw similar choices throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama yanked US forces out of Iraq and we got ISIS. Biden yanked them out Afghanistan and we got Kabul airport and a descent into the 7th century and more terrorist sanctuaries. Choices, horrible choices, and not the only ones available.
ISIS mass executions in Syria, 2014.
Each time that we choose a new defeat, we’ll go through a period of national PTSD. It’s no different post-Iraq War (W’s edition) and Afghanistan. This time, it’s more than a revival of a McGovernite wing in the donkey party. The right has correspondingly rediscovered its inner-Robert Taft/Charles Lindbergh. Tucker and Ingraham speak in the manner of Lindbergh’s isolationism and Taft’s fear of internationalism. Lindbergh combined a retreat to fortress America and an extreme naivete about the character of the Reich Chancellery. Taft bristled at anything that smacked of a loss of US sovereignty, real or imagined. He found NATO troubling.
Ohio Senator Robert Taft speaks at Arlington National Cemetery in 1939. (Library of Congress)
Still, a catalyst was necessary to provoke a 180-degree turn for the mediagenic stars of Fox News who were past boosters of the War of Terror. To be fair, I’m not aware of Tucker’s stance at the time of Bush’s invasion of Iraq but we have Laura’s confession. She got a whiff of populism, Trump style, and was intoxicated. Trump had no statesmanlike competence to exhibit on the debate stage in 2016 so he resorted to insults and boilerplate attacks on Jeb Bush that drew from the worst of the Bush-lied-people-died period of Democrat demagoguery. Everyone pre-invasion assumed Saddam had WMD, including the dictator himself, or so he said. Trump refashioned the canard in the language of illicit “forever wars” as a campaign slogan and cudgel against Jeb Bush and his new bogeyman of “the establishment” (synonymous with anyone in opposition to Trump). It’s a familiar feature in the Trump Brigades’ talking points.
And the slogans thrived, going so far as to mutilate any original meaning. RHINO morphed from liberal Republican to anyone opposing Trump. Neocon changed from the architects of Reagan’s foreign policy to, again, anyone antagonistic to Trump. “Forever wars” came out of Trump’s mouth as easily as it did any Democrat sealing the doom of South Vietnam. A person’s stance on Trump became the arbiter of meaning in our political lingua franca.
From the time of Trump’s ascension, Trump and the Fox News primetime lineup trundled in unison into a fixation on getting out, and staying out. Trump, with Ingraham and Carlson in tow, tried a pullout in Iraq but he’s got an ISIS problem. The complication of ISIS extended into Syria so he’ll have to eradicate these blood-thirsty savages even as he tries to abandon the Kurds to Erdogan’s new Ottoman Empire. Trump detours and his fits and starts abound. Assad gasses his own people and Trump orders missile attacks. It’s a messy world, but he’s determined to get out of Afghanistan with nothing but cheerleading from Tucker and Laura.
Trump’s Doha Agreement (signed Feb. 29, 2020) was minted in the same manner as the previous negotiated sellouts: the victims were absent from the room. Chamberlain/Daladier cut a deal with Hitler on Czechoslovakia that excluded the Czechs. Nixon/Kissinger reached agreement with the North Vietnamese with only a perfunctory role for the South. The Kabul government was at most a wall flower to Pompeo and the Taliban. The kink in the grand diplomatic design was that Trump wouldn’t be around to see it through. Biden was elected and, true to form, he flubbed the flight out of the country.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Head of Taliban’s Political office in Qatar Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar on the sidelines of the opening ceremony of the Afghanistan Peace Negotiations in Doha, 2020.
Remember that Trump and Biden were united in their enthusiasm for getting out and not in the least worried about its return to terrorist sanctuary and the loss of a strategic asset.
Now it’s Ukraine’s turn. The same “forever wars” vitriol that our Fox News celebrities and Trump retroactively aimed at W and his people would be directed at anyone wanting to stop Putin. Epithets are summoned to smear the object of our sympathies. Ukraine is vilified as corrupt and not a democracy. Well, yes, Ukraine is corrupt, like the rest of the old USSR post-breakup, but is it more corrupt than, say, our politicians who enter office middle class but leave oligarch-rich? Pelosi, can we examine your account books?
Tucker is fond of saying that the country is an affront to democracy because it banned political parties and jails the opposition. He’s only half right. The other half is the existence of the country under the pall of Russian domination. After the fall of the Soviet empire, “Russian interference” was a recurring feature of the Ukrainian political scene; and before it, Stalin’s Holodomor (1932-3) was as much genocide as it was a byproduct of central planning. Ukrainian elections were continually beset by massive Russian intrusions. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004) was a popular uprising to throw out a Putin puppet in the presidency. It was followed in 2013 by the Euromaidan protests to force a realignment away from Russia and toward the West. All throughout, Putin’s operatives were active with money and guidance to contort elections. Russia’s $40,000 in Facebook ads in 2016 in our country pale in significance. The country has been in a near continuous struggle to be independent of Russia. Life under nonstop foreign pressure isn’t healthy for the fragile elements of democracy.
Combatants walk in a procession as they attend the memorial service and the funeral of Aleksey Mozgovoi, a militant leader of the separatist self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, and his subordinates in the town of Alchevsk in Luhansk region, Ukraine, May 27, 2015. (Photo: Reuters)
Anyway, Ukraine isn’t in the same league with Putin’s Russia when it comes to sheer political ghoulishness. Enterprising but critical journalists disappear at an amazing clip. Anna Politkovskaya (2006) and Natalia Estemirova (2009) are two of many of Putin’s victims. The list of the murdered for being so impetuous as to stand athwart Putin is so long that the Russian human rights group Memorial (now illegal) maintains a catalogue called “Last Address”. Political homicides aren’t limited to Russia as the spate of overseas poisonings illustrates. Exile is no refuge from the guy.
Do you think Carlson is cognizant of these realities? It’s hard to say. I certainly don’t hear any pushback on the torrent of claims coming out of the Kremlin. Putin believes that the Ukraine is an illegitimate country. Does Carlson? It has more legitimacy than Russia’s claim on it. Russia’s control over most if it didn’t happen till Peter the Great in the 18th century. Prior to that, the nation shape shifted under the control of the Duchy of Lithuania, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and the Golden Horde (Tartars), Russia arriving on the scene later. If not for Russia, the country might have joined the family of eastern European nations much earlier.
Laura’s stance was obvious when she became euphoric from the fumes of Trump’s populism. Right now, another scent is in the air. It is the whiff of 1938 Czechoslovakia and later Poland. Both were creatures of the Versailles Treaty and thusly held in ill-repute by an ascending German leader in much the same manner as Putin holds Ukraine. The two eastern European countries were just stepping stones on the way to lebensraum. In like manner, the Ukraine is an important cog on the path to reassembling the USSR, or Russian Empire, or whatever label you wish to apply to Putin’s Slavic lebensraum. Laura, is lebensraum an appropriate tool for satisfying territorial appetites?
Seriously, are a country’s borders to be decided by the ambitions of dictators? If so, say goodbye to Taiwan and South Korea. Welcome to the Palestinian Caliphate, a gift of Iran’s mullahs. So, what’s our interest in the Ukraine? It’s to prevent the resuscitation of imperial ambitions in a region critical to our well-being, Europe. If we stood up to this thug, we might have more going for us in confronting Xi than a pell-mell run for the hills in Afghanistan and the Ukraine scalp for Putin.
The next shoe to drop: Taiwan. Partially, America’s fatigue in the Middle East gave us Trump, who gave us Doha. America’s fatigue with Trump gave us Biden which led to the Afghanistan bugout, and much else that plagues us. It didn’t take Putin long (5 months) to initiate the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II. Xi’s been watching, and has a checklist with Hong Kong marked and followed by the Senkaku Islands, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and worldwide hegemony. Debacles unleash tyrants, and so will a retreat into fortress America and a handwringing paralysis every time there’s talk of a venture beyond our shores.
Adams Schiff (D, Ca.), Chairman of the House Intelligence (?) Committee, and key champion of impeachment.
Are you as tired as I am of the endless incantation of “Russian attacked our democracy”? I was going to write about the Dems’ call for a takeover of healthcare or Romney’s Trump-bashing. Instead, I talked myself into this topic after running into the hackneyed charge for the zillionth time since before Trump placed his hand on the Bible, Jan. 20, 2017. I feel like the Peter Finch character in “Network” when he shouts, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”. Enough; please, enough! Put it to bed.
The reason is obvious. This is disinformation about a commonly-used disinformation campaign. The Russians have been at it for a long time, and so have we.
The ex-veep Dick Cheney fed the monster of overheated rhetoric by calling Russian campaign interference an “act of war”. But the monster had already been unleashed in the interregnum between the Obama and Trump presidencies (more about this is likely to come from the “investigation of the investigators”). It became the established Democrats’ tag line to explain Hillary’s loss. From the gitgo, it was a ruse to muddy the winner and exonerate the loser. Apparently, the Democrats aren’t supposed to lose elections.
Do I really have to recount the long roll call of Russian attempts to influence western electorates? The tactic was done through espionage by comrades in the various national chapters of the Communist Party (“Witness” by Whittaker Chambers) and “agents of influence” in the chancelleries of the West (Research our government’s Venona Project). It was done by financially feeding fellow-travelling activists in the anti-nuke, anti-war, and anti-capitalist movements west of the Iron Curtain.
Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts addresses pro-freeze demonstrators on Capitol Hill, 1981 or 1982 (?).
Reagan faced a full fusillade of these “acts of war” in the 1980’s when he moved to counter the Russian medium-range nuclear missile threat in Europe. Anti-war sympathizers went nuts in Congress, the media, and the streets. Thank God he stuck to his guns … er, missiles.
Shenanigans in western elections were, and are, a staple … and it includes us. Our interference in Israeli elections is less than unusual. Obama sent some of his campaign veterans to Tel Aviv to assist Labor. The smell of hypocrisy is rich in the air.
Jeremy Bird, a former Obama campaign organizer, who assisted the Left-leaning parties’ effort to oust Benjamin Netanyahu, 2015. (Melina Mara/Getty Images)
We could do much worse for humanity than doing more of this in places like Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
The Democrats are desperate to remain politically relevant by any means at hand. The means at hand, though, are patently ludicrous. The crazy plot requires a god-like omniscience on the part of the Russians. Russians are seemingly more adept at electioneering than Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign tsar. Maybe that’s true.
The scheme demands a Russian crystal ball to foresee how to precisely calibrate their phone bank of basement bots and Facebook ads to tilt the election to Trump. But there’s a fly in the ointment. They don’t need a crystal ball or time machine if their goal is to sow discord regardless of who wins. Their objective was to sully the winner, who everyone, including the Russians, expected to be Hillary.
They succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. The winner was falsely covered in mud. Shockingly, it happened to be Trump. If it had been Hillary, the story would end up in the same place as the Ark at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
The place of storage for the collusion plot if Hillary had won? (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”)
The only successful part of the subterfuge was the Hillary-Steele-Russians element. The product of the cabal – the Steele Dossier – was fed to the mandarins of the Obama administration, and used and leaked to soil the real electoral winner. For over two years, the country, the president, his family and helpers, were subjected to a drawn out nothingburger.
A lot of people have egg on the face from their nothingburger (sorry for the mixed metaphor). The “egg” is ruined reputations and more business for defense lawyers. The sorry affair was always a Dem disinformation campaign rooted in a Russian one.
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”
I know. I know. The title engages a noun that has entered cliché territory. Still, it applies to Mueller’s tome after an expedition of the likes of Alexander the Great’s invasion of Persia to the ends of the world. In the end, after $40 million and almost 2 years, all Mueller got was indictments of a bunch of foreigners who’ll never face an American judge and questionable actions against bit players for after-the-fact infractions/crimes. The whole rectal exam was about “collusion” – even the “obstruction” barking – and, in the end, there’s no there, there.
The brouhaha proved an old axiom that if you intensely look long enough, you’ll find something – even if that something amounts to … nothing. Turn a building inspector loose on my property for 2 years and he’ll find “something”. How many violations of law did you commit after waking up (maybe before), knowingly or unknowingly? We live in a world of a straightjacket of laws and regulations.
Bottom line: no collusion, and the charge of “obstruction” is silly – so says both Barr AND Rosenstein. The point raised by Barr before his elevation to AG is dispositive. If there’s no crime, for what reason could Trump be obstructing? Key to obstruction is evil intent, something deep within a person’s mind. If there’s no outward sign of it, and if there’s no reason for doing it, why put credence in it?
The reason for the Dem death grip on “obstruction” is politics. The Dems want Trump’s scalp at any price. They’ll pour over the encyclopedia-length full report to stitch together an impeachment indictment. They’ll hang onto any language in the report to keep the issue alive. “Do not exonerate” (in the Mueller summary) is an example. “Exonerate” is a measly word when an investigator does not exonerate. Either they recommend charges or they don’t. To pass the buck to Barr as if there’s a hint of a case, in spite of the lack of evidence and sound Constitutional reasons to reject it, will stoke the Dems’ impeachment fire.
Adam Schiff and Andy Kaufman. Any similarities?
In the end, we went to the Mueller café and got … nothing. It’s the equivalent of an air-burger on an empty plate.
Come on, let’s face it: “Russia attacked our democracy” is a hackneyed Dem chant to delegitimize the 2016 election. Yes, other culprits like the alleged red neck hatred for the “marginalized” have pride of place in lefty boilerplate. But the Russia mantra offers the unique opportunity to enlist the fabled objectivity of our intelligence agencies in the excuse-mongering. It only works, though, if the history of US meddling (aka “attack”) goes down the memory hole.
To be clear, much past US meddling was a response to Soviet/communist meddling. It is reassuring to know that Mosaddegh and Allende didn’t succeed in turning Iran and Chile into a part of Russia’s “near-abroad”.
Time magazine cover from 1996.
Still, one cannot say that political interference was invented by Putin. We have a well-documented history of “attacking” elections, and, yes, even in Russia. Just ask the ghost of Boris Yeltsin. Boat loads of cash were funneled to Yeltsin’s political clan, some of it laundered through the IMF, to ensure his victory in 1996. (4) Or maybe we should ask Benjamin Netanyahu. In 1999, Clinton sent James Carville over to advise the Labor candidate, Ehud Barak, against Bebe. (3)
Pres. Clinton with James Carville in 1999.
Obama’s meddling in Israeli elections mirrors the recent murky Russian activities. US money goes into one organization and then into another and then into assorted anti-Likud voter drives and electioneering. Obama wasn’t content with “hacking”, Twitter, and Facebook, like the Russians. He sent over to Israel part of his political brain trust – Jeremy Bird, fresh off of Obama’s 2012 field operations. (1)
Jeremy Bird, Obama/Democratic Party field operator, in the Israeli offices of V15, one of the anti-Likud/Netanyahu groups in 2015.
Obama’s hostility to Netanyahu was glaring in 2010 when he rudely left Netanyahu simmering with his aides in the Roosevelt for over an hour. (5)
Maybe comments from experienced intelligence community hands would calm excitable lefties. (4)
* Countering the charge that the Russian effort was exceptional is 30-year CIA veteran Steven Hall: “If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all”.
* Loch K. Johnson, American intelligence scholar and staffer on the Senate’s Church Committee from the 1970’s: “We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947. We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”
* Dov H. Levin, Carnegie-Mellon scholar, documents 81 US and 36 Russian instances of attempts to influence foreign elections from 1946 to 2000.
You might call this kind of thing a well-traveled approach to foreign policy. This isn’t an excuse, and when it happens to us, it is up to us to sanction the offenders and install additional safeguards. But, please, stop feigning shock and horror at something that is part of the toolkit to bend nations toward your preferred interests.
Grow up, or, better yet, read and listen a little more to sources outside the echo chamber.
RogerG
Footnotes and sources:
1. “The Obama Campaign Strategist Who Could Break the Israeli Elections Wide Open”, Roy Arad, Haaretz, 1/26/2015, https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-could-obama-s-strategist-break-elections-wide-open-1.5365391
2. “Blog claims U.S. funded anti-Netanyahu election effort in Israel”, Jon Greenberg, PunditFact, 3/25/2015, http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/25/blog-posting/blog-claims-us-funded-anti-netanyahu-election-effo/
3. “The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries”, Nina Agrawal, LA Times, 12/21/2016, http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-us-intervention-foreign-elections-20161213-story.html
4. “Russia Isn’t the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too.”, Scott Shane, NY Times, 2/17/2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html
5. “Obama snubbed Netanyahu for dinner with Michelle and the girls, Israelis claim”, Adrian Blomfield, The Telegraph, 3/25/2010, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/7521220/Obama-snubbed-Netanyahu-for-dinner-with-Michelle-and-the-girls-Israelis-claim.html
