RAMIN MAZAHERI—If Putin was a socialist – if he cared more about Ukrainians and was willing to risk Russia’s standing more – I believe he would have made more of a stink about the leaks. Unlike the leaders of the USSR, Putin does not really stand on moral-political grounds – he mainly gets vocal about sovereignty. Zuesse echoed this idea when I asked him how Russia can “win” in Ukraine, much as they have helped “win” in Syria: “In my personal opinion, Putin has done everything exactly correct, but with only one possible exception, which — because everything else has been SO correct that he’s probably right about that one too: my preference would have been for Putin publicly to challenge the lies from Obama and the rest of the West,” Zuesse told me. “That recording is a smoking gun on a coup in process, if ever there was one….”
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P. GREANVILLE—A disgrace by any elementary journalistic standard, this program is indeed soaked in deliberate manipulation. From the soothing, authoritative tone of the host, designed to impart credibility where there should be none, literally everything is upside down. A complete lie. The headline itself packs a major lie; it accuses Putin of invading Ukraine. This is what propaganda guys call “framing”, and it is literally so in this case, as they are framing Russia and Putin, who never invaded Ukraine, nor, for that matter, “took over” Crimea, whose inhabitants, 90% of whom speak Russian and regard themselves as part of the Russian cultural sphere, voted in 2014 in a democratic referendum to join the Russian Federation. Look up the history of this event in a reliable place, The Saker blog, Moon of Alabama, or The Greanville Post are good starting points. So, let’s parse this program and find what could be wrong.
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MATT TAIBBI—Which brings us back to Cheney. All those things Trump is rumored to be, Dick Cheney actually is. That’s why it’s so significant that he appeared on the floor of the House yesterday to be slobbered over by the Adam Schiffs and Nancy Pelosis of the world. Dick Cheney did more to destroy democracy in ten minutes of his Vice Presidency than Donald Trump did in four years.
Seeing leading Democrats nuzzling the man George W. Bush called “Iron Ass” summed up the essential problem of the ordinary person trying to find a political home in this landscape. Even if you find the Trump phenomenon troubling, his opposition is not only authoritarian, but organized and armed with the intellectual tools to understand and appreciate how the technological elimination of democracy might be achieved in the 21st century.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.
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MIKE MADDEN—NATO and U.S. officials said regular units of the Russian military crossed a few kilometers into Ukrainian territory on August 2014, which Russia denied, when the separatist forces had been pushed eastward toward the Russian border and hundreds of civilians had been killed. On Aug. 25, 2014, 10 Russian paratroopers were captured 20 km inside the Ukrainian border.
Nuland called this “Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine.” The incursion would be more properly characterized as Russia exercising the liberal interventionists’ favorite Responsibility to Protect doctrine.
As happened in Georgia in 2008, a government militarily attacked its own people and Russia intervened to drive the military forces back and protect the local population. In that 2008 case, a European Union investigation determined that Georgia, not Russia, was the aggressor.
