Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts

Thursday, October 17, 2019

Snapshots from Amerika . . . or Syria. One of the two

I'm told this is a snapshot sent home to Saint Petersburg by a Russian diplomat at a consulate somewhere in the United States.
The guy who mailed it to me said, "Sir, this is what the Russians think of us right now. We're in a bad way, and they're just yukking it up, sir!"
Believe me! True story!
I wonder whether the Kremlin still will be laughing when their asset in the Oval Office starts pulling the wallpaper off the walls to replace the lettuce on his Big Macs, then starts playing with the nuclear codes as he jumps up and down yelling "KILL! KILL! KILLLL!"

Monday, July 16, 2018

A dispatch from somewhere near the end of America

A Facebook missive from a congressman for our times

Rep. Don Bacon
Nebraska 2nd Congressional District
c/o Den of National Disrepute
Washington, D.C.
Amerikan Soviet Kleptocratic Republic

RE: Your equivocating Facebook missive



Dear Rep. Bacon:


Congressman, the president has done squat that he wasn't effectively forced to do by a veto-proof majority of both houses. His words will never match his middling actions . . . which definitely were not his own idea to begin with.

What Donald Trump will willingly do is aid and abet a country that has attacked the United States via cyber- and psychological warfare. He is a traitor. He is a clear and present danger to the physical security and the philosophical underpinnings of this creedal nation.

Let me repeat: He is a traitor. He is on a path to make Julius and Ethel Rosenberg look like milquetoasts. In a non-deranged country, you damned well know what this tangerine Benedict Arnold's fate would be.

The. President. Is. A. Traitor. And he was a fascist before that.

Now let's see your words and actions rise to the level required by what now only can be characterized as indisputable fact.

There is a word for those who go along with traitors and tyrants -- collaborators.




Sic semper nocendi perfido,







M. Favog 

Saturday, July 14, 2018

This is a thing on Facebook. Probably Russian.


This is called "How We Lose Sure-Thing Elections." And November hardly is a sure thing.

This also is called "How We Start a Civil War." South of the Mason-Dixon Line, it's called "What Got Us to Fight to the Death . . . and Finally Win."

I despise Trump and what he stands for with every fiber of my being, but I'd join the fascists and fight to the death with 'em if this was the sort of revenge his removal would visit upon whole swaths of the country, entire religious denominations and entire demographic groups . . . including the region I live in and the religious demographic I belong to.


It wouldn't be a matter of me being a fascist; it would be a matter of simple, calculated self-preservation for myself and on behalf of people I know and love.
 

THIS IS stereotyping and demonization worthy of Donald Trump himself . . . and of his idiot followers. It is goddamned madness, and this sort of thinking will lead to a bloodbath like this country never has seen once it gets out of hand.

Which I expect it to do.


Madness is upon us, and we're all eating it up like a hog does slop.

Come to think of it, how much do you want to bet "Renee Torres" is really Renata
Torchinovich, hard at work in a cubicle at the Troll Factory in St. Petersburg. As psy-ops, this stuff is golden -- the dog whistle is blowing, and "progressives" are howling at the moon.

Saturday, March 17, 2018

3 Chords & the Truth: Never trust a Trumplator


The president is said to be branching out from Fox & Friends, and that means all media -- for easy comprehension -- are being required to employ Trumplators. This program is no exception.

We at 3 Chords & the Truth have learned, and learned the hard way, that Trumplation can be a fraught affair. And during the course of this rather jazz-centric edition of the show, some quick conclusions may be drawn about Trumplators and their inherent biases, ideologies and -- alas -- not-so-benign agendas.

To wit:

1. Never trust a Trumplator.

2. Never trust a Trumplator.

3. The Trumplator is not worthy of your trust.

4. Bad things will happen if you trust the Trumplator.

5. Do not assume that the Trumplator is translating for the president what you actually are saying.

6. Something ain't right in this whole deal.

7. I do not believe that Trumplators particularly like America or "decadent" American music.

8. Everybody in this whole Trumplation thing is up to something.

9. It is possible to do an excellent edition of the Big Showsky . . . uh . . . Big Show despite the mandated Trumplator causing all hell to break loose.

10. DO NOT trust the Trumplator, comrade.

That's about it.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.


Tuesday, October 31, 2017

3C&T: Always first with products for today

Click for full-size version

From Vox:
Mueller’s team describes Papadopoulos as a “proactive cooperator.” That’s a big deal.

Here’s why: Mueller purposely sealed the indictment and kept the arrest secret so that others wouldn’t know Papadopoulos was working with his team — because the probe might be using Papadopoulos to obtain even more information on possible Trump-Russia collusion.

The Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale reports that when prosecutors consider someone to be a “proactive cooperator,” it could signal that that person was wearing a wire. And if that’s true, that means Papadopoulos might’ve talked to Trump campaign officials with a wire on. That’s still speculative, of course, but it could pose a serious problem for Trump if officials with secrets to keep unknowingly divulged information to a wired-up Papadopoulos.

Tuesday, June 06, 2017

Much to remember

Pardon me if I'm a little bit offended by the traitor-in-chief invoking the memory of D-Day to seem vaguely "presidential."

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

The death of us

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.
The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Pray with me, Henry!

"Henry, you are not a very orthodox Jew, and I am not an orthodox humanoid, but we need to pray."

Monday, March 20, 2017

There was this today


We cannot make any judgments on whether or not the campaign of the man elected president of the United States of America was in cahoots with a hostile government to rig the election in Donald Trump's favor. We just don't have all the facts yet.

We don't know for sure whether there indeed is a fire or where it is, exactly. We do know there's a hell of a lot of smoke, and it's blowing in from that direction.


And we also know this: That we're even suspecting what we suspect means the republic is in mortal danger. That Trump is governing how he has thus far -- via a weird mix of basic incompetence, a fundamental skepticism of the American narrative and a vindictiveness toward his political enemies, the poor, the Other and even some of his own supporters -- only adds to our peril.

Can the United States survive this? No one knows, not really. We have no experience in this; the closest analogy would be an investigation into Leonid Brezhnev ordering the KGB to break into the Watergate on behalf of Richard Nixon . . . who was allegedly in on the plot.

Facing South. Courthouse, Denison, Iowa.
This crisis comes to a nation as divided as it's been since the South seceded in defense of slavery. The Union was preserved at the cost of the Civil War and nearly 700,000 corpses. Robert E. Lee couldn't even have dreamed of the kind of weaponry your average, solitary American gun nut possesses today.

Or, as newsman Dan Rather said today on Facebook:
If you are a praying person, today is a day to pray for the future of your country. I have seen a lot in my decades in the press, but I have never seen a day like this. This is a stress test for our democratic institutions and one can only hope that the system of checks and balances we hold so dear, can indeed hold.

The statements by FBI Director James Comey in testimony today about Russian interference in the 2016 election were jaw dropping. It should be also noted that both he and NSA director, Adm. Mike Rogers, categorically denied that there was any evidence to support Mr. Trump's repeated allegations that Trump Tower was wiretapped by President Obama. That we do know. But it must be noted how much we do not know. We cannot afford to back off on investigating, fully, completely, and openly, allegations that are anathema to the spirit of our republic. But we cannot also afford to jump to conclusions. We want answers. We want to know more. That is natural. But patience will be required. It is better that this plays out in a systematic way. It is for all these reasons that I think a careful bipartisan investigation is essential.
RATHER, who covered Watergate as tenaciously as anyone at the time . . . and has more than 60 years of journalism under his belt, said that as The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza was writing this in the newspaper's The Fix blog:
Given Comey's flat denial of any evidence of Trump Tower being wiretapped, there will be increased pressure on both Trump and Republican members of Congress to back off that position and apologize for it. Reps. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Will Hurd (R-Tex.) have already called on Trump to apologize to Obama. It's hard to imagine that other GOPers won't follow that lead in light of Comey's testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee on Monday.

Trump is another matter. His offhand remark at a joint news appearance Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that perhaps he and she had both been wiretapped by the Obama administration suggests he isn't planning to leave the issue alone — much less apologize for it.

And we know that for 35 to 40 percent of the public, that will be enough; they simply trust Trump more than they trust any intelligence official or media outlet.

But that's sort of beside the point. Trump is the president of the United States. There is now ample evidence that a very serious accusation he made about a former president is simply not true. Standing by it now is simply irresponsible.
TO ME, the most frightening thing is that 35- to 40 percent of the public thing. Those folks, at this point, are either delusional, white supremacist dead-enders or stone-cold fascists -- even if they're too self-unaware to recognize that fact.

Trust me on this; I'm in my 50s, and I'm from the South. Back in the day, probably half of the biggest flag wavers in Dixie would pick Brand B in a blind taste test where Brand A was the United States of America and Brand B was Nazi Germany.

Whether Trump stays or goes, we're going to have to deal with that 35- to 40 percent of Americans who are every bit as un-American and subversive as unreconstructed white Southerners were in the 1950s and '60s.


It will get ugly, and our country may not survive it. Assuming it survives Trump.

I'm with Dan Rather. Today is a fine day to pray for the future of America.

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Signing off



The United States of America comes to the end of another broadcast day. The United States of America is wholly owned and operated by the Russian Federation, and operates on a frequency determined by President Vladimir Putin, with the explicit backing of Junior President Donald J. Trump, because sex, lies and videotape.

The United States of America invites you to join us at 6 a.m. tomorrow for the alternative news by Russia Today, and for another day of the best in oligarchy and a hot bowl of borscht.

On behalf of President Putin, Junior President Trump and the Russian Federation, the United States of America bids you good night and an obedient tomorrow.

Now, our national anthem.

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Iowa uber alles


Iowa's crackpot congressman, Steve King, always has marched to the beat of a right-wing drummer.

He now apparently is goosestepping to an Anschluss beat, hobnobbing with a far-right leader of a political party founded by ex-Nazis in old Österreich. The candidate of the ironically named Freedom Party lost Austria's presidential runoff, but apparently its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, still ist Nummer Eins in the heart of the Hawkeye State's korncob kommandant.

Strache, you see, will be attending the inauguration of Donald Trump as the guest of King. Let that sink in for a moment.
Rep. Steve King
Various media had reported that Hofer and Strache had been invited by Washington's conservative republican deputy, Steve King. King, who had already supported Trump in the election campaign, visited Vienna last October, where he met the then-Presidential candidate, Hofer. Now the confirmation.
Facebook knows about Strache:
"I was invited to Washington this week. As usual, I am accompanied by a Freedom Delegation on this trip.
On the margins of the US presidential election, a series of talks with interesting US political representatives is on our tight schedule."
(Translation by Google)
A STORY on an English-language Austrian news site is here.

Of course, this isn't the 4th District representative's first flirtation with the outrageous.

In 2010, King said he could "empathize" with a domestic terrorist who flew his small plane into an Internal Revenue Service field office in Austin, Texas, killing himself as well as an IRS manager and injuring 13 others.

That same year, during the final House battle to enact Obamacare, The New York Times quoted him as saying this:

“Let’s beat the other side to a pulp!” Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, shouted to the last stand of Tea Partiers on Sunday night. “Let’s chase them down! There’s going to be a reckoning.”
In 2016, King attracted attention when a television report showed a small Confederate flag on his desk in Washington. Earlier, he had defended the Rebel flag as a "symbol" of Southern pride and decried efforts to ban the banner from official display:
“A huge price has been paid. It’s been paid primarily by Caucasian Christians. There are many who stepped up because they profoundly believed they needed to put an end to slavery,” said King. “This country has put this behind us.”
And less than a week later, on TV at the Republican National Convention, der Kongressabgeordnete went all master race on an MSNBC panel when someone mentioned the last gasp of "old white people" in the GOP.
This 'old white people' business does get a little tired, Charlie," King said. "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"

"Than white people?" Hayes asked, clearly amazed.

"Than, than Western civilization itself," King replied. "It's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That's all of Western civilization."

The other panelists objected, with Hayes trying to keep the peace. Panelist April Ryan, who is black, asked, "What about Asia? What about Africa?"

"We're not going to argue the history of Western civilization," Hayes said. "Let me note for the record that if you're looking at the ledger of Western civilization, for every flourishing democracy, you have Hitler and Stalin as well."
WHEN IT comes to Steve King, I haven't even scratched the surface of the lowlights here. Believe me.

And now this.

Let me summarize "this": A congressman who can do nothing outrageous enough to alienate his constituents in Bumf***, Iowa, happens to be an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump, who could do nothing outrageous enough not to become the 45th president of the United States.

Then, the outrageous right-wing congressman invites an outrageous right-wing politico of a Nazi-birthed Austrian party (who late last year signed a cooperation pact with Vladimir Putin's United Russia party) to the swearing in of Trump, who has his own thing going with the Russians, whose geopolitical aim is to blow the Western alliance to hell and achieve complete Eurasian dominance.

No, nothing to see here. Move along to the showers for delousing.


IT WOULD SEEM to this schlub sitting at his computer in Omaha, by God, Nebraska, that the problem isn't that Steve King and Donald Trump are going to turn America fascist. It seems to me instead that the reason we have public disgraces like Steve King and Donald Trump at the forefront of American public life is because large swaths of our land already have gone fascist.

Folks hereabouts would deny that till the cows come home, and they'd probably want to sock me "in the goddamn face" for saying it. Of course, the other plausible explanation is that an electoral majority in Iowa's 4th and a winning electoral-college coalition nationally elected these two little Hitlers because they were too effing stupid and racist to manage otherwise.

If I were an King voter in western Iowa or a Trump enthusiast nationwide, I'd just cop to fascist.

For the rest of us, the Resistance begins Friday.

Friday, January 13, 2017

'I, for one, welcome our new Kremlin overlords'


Donald Trump’s national security adviser has been in regular contact with Russia’s ambassador to the US, it emerged on Friday, as the controversy around Trump’s ties to Russia showed no signs of abating. 
The White House is aware of phone calls between retired lieutenant-general Michael Flynn and ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a senior US official told the Associated Press. 
It is not clear how the current administration learned of the contacts, although the AP noted that US monitoring of Russian officials’ communication within America is known to be common. 
The disclosure came after a week dominated by the release of a dossier, prepared by a former British intelligence officer, alleging that Russia collected compromising information about Trump and that there had been secret communications between them. The president-elect fired off a fresh round of tweets about the Russian connection that continues to overshadow the buildup to his inauguration a week from now. 
Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak reportedly included several calls on 29 December, the day on which Barack Obama announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials, as well as other measures in retaliation for Russian interference in the election. The official said Flynn and Kislyak have also been in contact at other times, according to the AP. 
Sean Spicer, spokesman for the Trump transition, said Flynn and Kislyak spoke on the phone around the time of the sanctions announcement, although he claimed the conversation happened a day earlier, on 28 December. 
“The call centred around the logistics of setting up a call with the president of Russia and the president-elect after he was sworn in, and they exchanged logistical information on how to initiate and schedule that call,” Spicer told reporters on Friday. “That was it, plain and simple.” 
The call followed text message exchanges initiated by Flynn on Christmas Day, in which he wished the ambassador a merry Christmas and said he looked forward to “touching base with you and working with you”, Spicer added. 
Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak, who has served as Russia’s ambassador since 2008, were first reported by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the US sanctions?” he wrote.
-- The Guardian


Wednesday, January 11, 2017

It's not that he's a Cheeto horndog . . .

  . . . it's that he's a f***ing moron.

When in Russia, you have only one job. Don't grab anybody's pu**y.

And Donald Trump couldn't do it. Allegedly. According to a dossier compiled by a former British intelligence operative who specialized in Russian affairs. From information provided by Russian sources.

Americans, including the media, haven't nailed down the information yet, but U.S. intelligence takes it seriously enough to brief the president -- and the president-elect -- on it.

ACCORDING to the man who will lead this country and literally hold your life in his pu**y-grabbing mitts (cough, nuclear codes, cough), the media reports on this are "FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!" But in your heart, you know it's probably true, right?

Because that's who Donald Trump really is, right?

Donald Trump, it seems to me, is something else, too -- the purest expression today of American popular culture and its core values. He was a "reality-TV" star, a best-selling "author," the subject of constant attention, fascination and emulation.


Then we elected him president because he's Donald F***ing Trump, who Tells It Like It Is and will Make America Great Again.

The only thing Trump will make America is Amerika.

In doing so, he and our new Russian overlords will have hung us with out own immoral, dysfunctional rope.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Comrade Trump


If you're not the kind of person who believes in divine judgment, or that nations can fall under divine judgment for their collective sins, maybe now would be a good time to start.

From Vox:
On Wednesday, Donald Trump did something extraordinary even for him: He called on a foreign power to launch an espionage operation against his chief political opponent, hacking into Hillary Clinton’s email server to find 30,000 emails she allegedly deleted. 
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

When Trump said it, it didn’t sound like a joke — especially in light of recent events. Over the weekend, Wikileaks released about 19,000 emails that were stolen from the DNC servers by hackers who were almost certainly linked to the Russian state. These emails included talk of a (never-realized) plot to attack Bernie Sanders on his religion, a revelation that exacerbated divisions inside the Democratic party and thus seemingly helped Trump’s political chances.
 
All of this has raised one big question: What the hell is going on with Trump and Russia? 
The answer appears to be twofold. First, the Kremlin appears to be interfering in the US election in a way likely to help Trump become president. Whether or not that’s the intent of the meddling, that is the result. 
Second, Trump is deeply, weirdly pro-Russian.
I RECOMMEND reading the whole thing. Apart from saying that, I am too gobsmacked to comment.

Except for this: The only people crazier and more dangerous than Donald J. Trump are those Americans who would like to see him anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Why is that? Because when -- God willing -- Donald Trump is long gone after a resounding defeat in November, the aggrieved fools who voted for him will still be around, ripe to be exploited by the next dictator-in-waiting.

If on the other hand -- God forbid -- Trump wins, we will have no recourse but to again learn what Abraham Lincoln well knew when he gave his second inaugural address March 4, 1865:


The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
THE WISDOM remains the same, only this country's sins have changed.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

And that's the way it @#$%*&!!! is . . . .


Alrighty, folks. This is your NSFW video of the day.

Here, at wits' end dealing with a producer back at the station, British reporter Jonathan Pie gives us the real news. Which is a lot closer to the truth than the "official" news.

"Jonathan Pie," alas, is really comedian Tom Walker, as reported by the Russian-government website Sputnik News. Which is just as well, I suppose. Pity the real TV journalist who gets fed up and tells the unvarnished truth . . . and then has the outtake go viral.

Now, what I'd like to see is a real newscast by American and Russian anchors who get good and cranky, then cut the official propaganda of each superpower to shreds . . . thereby arriving at something like the truth.

Friday, September 05, 2014

Why are we mad at these people, again?


We're told by our fearless leaders -- who rarely face the consequences of their political actions and tough-guy acts -- that Russia is a menace to Europe, democracy and, apparently, all things we deem holy and dear.

But can you really hate a country where Mickey Mouse and SpongeBob rough up a road rager?


TO BE HONEST,  I really wouldn't give a mouse's patootie if the Russian Army went marching into Kiev tomorrow, just so long as they did it to the SpongeBob SquarePants song.

But that's just me.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Beavisovich and Buttheadinsky build a death ray


There is a geopolitical moral to this story where two Russian kids build a death ray out of a microwave oven by attaching the magnetron tube to a long cable and focusing the radiation with a "cantenna."

This allows them to do neat -- and deadly dangerous -- tricks like lighting up unwired light bulbs and blowing up a boomboxky by aiming the tin-can antenna at it.

(Music.) Bbbrrrrrrraaaaaaaappppppp . . . BOOMSKY! (Ding!)


As Gizmodo said in its post on Beavisovich and Buttheadinsky Meet the Geek Squad:

So don't take a microwave apart. Don't. Take. A microwave. Apart. Don't do it. Don't! But if you were curious about what would happen if you did, these idiots have you covered. It's as awesome as it is stupid! It is very awesome and very stupid.
NOW, to the geopolitical moral of this story. Don't think the Russian armed forces haven't thought of the same thing as a couple of kids in Bumf**kinsky, Russia. Only bigger. Much, much bigger.

This is why you trad carefully around the Russian bear. This is why you don't poke the Russian bear with a sharp stick just because you think you can. You know, like pushing NATO right up to its borders -- or like fomenting revolution in Ukraine.

That's the foreign-policy version of screwing around with a microwave oven for kicks and giggles. What could go wrong?

NO, the moral here isn't overly complicated or obtuse. Don't screw with the Russians. Don't. Screw. With. The Russians. 

Them people's crazy.


UPDATE: I knew there had to be some weaponized version of this out there. And there is. But imagine what the Russkies probably have done with the technology. Bet their anti-personnel version does more than cause "excruciating pain."

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Cue Don Henley . . . one more time



"You're a dumbass, aren't you?"

"Yes. Yes, I am. And the only side of an interview I really listen to is mine.

 "So . . . could you tell whether the missile came from Russia or Ukrainia?"

IT'LL BE just our luck that the last thing we'll hear before the Apocalypse is some Howard Stern fan pranking some cable-news doofus about the shock jock farting H-bombs.

TV news is infamous for babbling idiots and their epic fails, but this has to be one of the epic-est of them all.

Saturday, March 01, 2014

U.S. to Putin: Do as we say, not as we do


"What?" people across the Western world are asking today. "Is Putin nuts? Has Russia gone mad?"

Well, when you've been pushed to the breaking point, you usually don't act in a rational manner. This is just as true for nations and presidents as it is for Joe Schmoe.

But I remain to be convinced that Vladimir Putin is acting irrationally. It depends on how far he takes it in Ukraine.

The United States, NATO and the European Union have pushed Putin and Russia up against the wall -- not in East Germany or Poland, but right on its own border -- twice in recent years, first in Georgia and now in Ukraine. But Ukraine is no far-flung Georgia; you can drive from Kiev to Moscow (530 miles) in a day. That's hitting close to home.

Then there's this from a remarkable piece in The Nation by Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University:
But the most crucial media omission is Moscow’s reasonable conviction that the struggle for Ukraine is yet another chapter in the West’s ongoing, US-led march toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the 1990s with NATO’s eastward expansion and continued with US-funded NGO political activities inside Russia, a US-NATO military outpost in Georgia and missile-defense installations near Russia. Whether this longstanding Washington-Brussels policy is wise or reckless, it—not Putin’s December financial offer to save Ukraine’s collapsing economy—is deceitful. The EU’s “civilizational” proposal, for example, includes “security policy” provisions, almost never reported, that would apparently subordinate Ukraine to NATO.

Any doubts about the Obama administration’s real intentions in Ukraine should have been dispelled by the recently revealed taped conversation between a top State Department official, Victoria Nuland, and the US ambassador in Kiev. The media predictably focused on the source of the “leak” and on Nuland’s verbal “gaffe”—“Fuck the EU.” But the essential revelation was that high-level US officials were plotting to “midwife” a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing its democratically elected president—that is, a coup.

WHO ARE the imperialists here again?

Under these circumstances, if I were Putin, I'd probably invade the historically Russian regions of Ukraine, too. Certainly, I'd forcibly repatriate the Crimea, which was "given" to Ukraine by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, when. But is it really "forcibly" if the inhabitants are happy as hell you're there?

That's what we kept pointing out when we rolled into Baghdad, after all. In Iraq, they were happy . . . until they weren't, because we were both foreigners and "infidels." In eastern Ukraine, it's not the Russians who are foreigners, it's the folks in western Ukraine.

Ukraine not only isn't our fight, hell, I don't even think we're necessarily right or that Putin is necessarily wrong. Check that. I think we're absolutely wrong for meddling in a sovereign country on the border of another nuclear-armed sovereign country that has every reason to be paranoid about our meddling.

The United States' "because freedom" act has grown old over the decades, mainly because it's always been more "because market capitalism." We've always been, globally, sort of like that fella who first gets religion and makes everybody's life miserable with all the ham-handed proselytizing, just like the old Soviets were in trying to spread their communist ideology.

MORE AND MORE, though, we look less like the sincere, overeager Bible-thumper and more like Elmer Gantry. Don't think Putin doesn't see that much more clearly than we do -- being a saint often is a hindrance in spotting hypocrites and con artists.

Or as one Russian legislator aptly put it:
But the parliamentary session roundly dismissed western criticism in advance. Senator Nikolai Ryzhkov said Russia should be prepared for the west to "unleash their dogs on us". "They ruined Yugoslavia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, all in the name of western democracy. It's not even double standards, it's political cynicism."
ALLOW ME to paint the broad canvas of American hypocrisy with a historical brush: If the Russians had their own Monroe Doctrine, we'd all be soooooo H-bomb vaporized right now.

Really, it would all just be so much more honest if President Obama would call regular press conferences to threaten the Rogue Nation of the Day with annihilation if they, for whatever reason, fail to do as we say, not as we do.

Because Cuba 1898.

Because Dominican Republic 1965.

Because Vietnam.

Because Grenada 1983.

Because Panama 1989.

Because Iraq 2003.

Play realpolitik if you must -- though I really wish you wouldn't play it while drinking . . . or with John McCain on your team -- just dispense with the moralistic bullshit.