TWGB: Citizen Krasnov?

 

I'm just a simple, mostly reality-based blogger, and I have to admit, the "Krasnov" story about Trump being recruited by KGB in the 1980s both interests and concerns me. On one hand, I'm skeptical, because I remember the "Steele Dossier" dropping shortly before Trump's first term and well-enough after the election and coloring all investigation into the Trump/Russia ties in the public opinion with a hint of scurrility. 

In the public mind, everything regarding the connection between Trump and Russia was supposedly a little bit fake, because despite every nugget of fact that Trump did seem oh so very partial to Russia and enamored with Putin, we were supposed to not connect the dots and fail to acknowledge the evidence of our eyes.  The Republican US Senators who wrote the intelligence report on Russia's connection to Trump concluded they most certainly did help him in 2016. 

So, I get the game by now--let's call this a "limited hangout". Maybe there was an attempt at a KGB recruitment of Trump--after all, he subsequently did publicly downgrade NATO--what is up with that? 

Maybe Trump is just a dipshit who misunderstands NATO as, not a defense against Russian aggression, but a kind of protection racket. He is kind of stupid.  Is that so wrong? (For someone in the office of the presidency--it is so much wrong it is like a mirror universe, an "opposite day", an abortion of reality.) 

And what of Trump's business connections--oh, shit, well, here's the thing. Trump's good friend Rudy Guiliani oversaw the transition from the Italian to the Russian mob SOME PEOPLE SAY. Anyway, there's a good book about Trump business and mafia and mafiya connections from Craig Unger. Is it persuasive? Folks don't want to say--but me, I think probably.

Went Over Like a Lead Turd

 

You know, taking your weird-ass conspiracy-theorist Pizzagate asshole friend along with you on serious European business all by itself is a whole kind of offensive fuckup.  Oh, wait, maybe that was a Hegseth team fuck up.  The down with America, up with Russia dipshit horror shows were so boldly evident at this flea circus display from the supposed America First crowd I guess I got confused. Hegseth was the one who told everyone we ain't got no navy to speak of so don't count on us and we can bug out our military presence in Europe so don't get too comfortable. 

I say wild ass shit when I'm hungover too, so I guess the Fox News veteran's words aren't all that surprising to me. 

But JD Vance being a condescending and unpleasant pro-Putin scold with no sense of irony is also not surprising to me. He chided Europe for lack of freedom of speech while at home, AP was being barred from the White House and Air Force One because their style guide stays with the more (for 400+ years) appropriate "Gulf of Mexico". And while Tom Homan hates on people who want to use the First Amendment to tell undocumented people about the other rights they have under the Constitution. 

Canadian Bacon and Trump Ham

 

Honestly, right-wing forces have been working at Trudeau since well before Trump started on this 51st-state nonsense.  This appears to be an appeal to turn out conservative Canadians. It's only part delusional. But along with his renewed Greenland interest--and the observed meddling Elon Musk has been engaging in in Europe, that we seem to have a very disturbing case of two megalomaniac viruses swapping DNA. 

I'm still working on the big picture about this

Rays of Hope for Democracy

 

Le Pen: "The policies I represent are the policies represented by Mr. Trump... They're represented by Mr. Putin."

And today, the French people rejected them.

Based. 🇫🇷 pic.twitter.com/Rk3P4IyBRR

— Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 (@JoshEakle) July 7, 2024

Between yesterday's pushback against the far-right in France and the Labour Party win in the UK, I guess at least there are some things to feel good about, even while US politics is giving me the agita. Evil never rests though. Le Pen (and Salvini's La Lega) has some kind of Patriots for Europe thing cooking with Orban who had just gone sleazing off to visit Putin (not in a way that represents the EU).

Not sure how patriots of any stripe mooch up to Putin.

I have thoughts about that, and about how CPAC and Heritage seem to love, love, love Orban, too. But I think I will just be happy about the elections for a little while, first. 

TWGB: All the Bad Guys

 

Convicted Felon Trump bragging about colluding with Russia in front of all our faces because his supporters are rubes that will support him no matter how treasonous. pic.twitter.com/TKaQfkcZpG

— Tim Hannan (@TimHannan) June 4, 2024

It is fitting that convicted felon Trump chose to once again advise us that he was colluding with Russia just as we hear President Biden make a very clear statement regarding Trump: "All the bad guys are rooting for Trump, man." Putin is a bad guy who has taken a prisoner--effectively a hostage. He's a terrorist. And Trump says, basically, that his terrorist friend will release the hostage if he wins the election. 

Imagine that kind of friendship. "My hostage is your hostage." It sounds like...Trump is a goddamn terrorist too. A hostage taker. 

This is something people need to understand about Trump--in fact, it's something that our foreign allies already do. David Rothkopf, writing for The New Republic, describes the fear of a Trump presidency folks in the former eastern bloc countries experience, knowing he's willing to bargain away their freedom. McKay Coppins in the Atlantic reports in a similar vein: allies are worried that we do not appreciate the threat of a transactional and authoritarian leader inimical to the concept of democracy. 

Knowing Truth from a Lie

 

BREAKING:

Alexei Navalny’s wife @yulia_navalnaya releases a video announces she will continue her murdered husband’s work.

She says it’s clear Putin murdered Alexei.

“ Iwill continue to fight for our country. And I call on you to stand beside me” pic.twitter.com/evgIGHqBym

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) February 20, 2024

Yulia Navalnaya has been by her husband's side while Putin's government poisoned him, lied about him, arrested him, imprisoned and tortured him, and finally, murdered him. She knows truth from a lie. Her mother-in-law has gone to collect to body of her son--the authorities would not like to release it, because a body can tell a story. Alexei Navalny's brother is now threatened with new charges. 

The truth is, Putin cannot bear opposition. The flowers left for the martyr are swept away from sight, and so are the protesters. And the flowers return, and sometimes, the protesters will. This is the country Tucker Carlson extolled because of its supermarkets, one where a dual citizen is accused of treason for sending $51 to a humanitarian aid fund for Ukraine. 

This is a country that commits heinous acts against humanity. 

And they are responsible for actual election interference here in the United States with respects to our presidential elections, especially. We know this is actually true about the 2016 election, despite all the right-wing foofaraw. And it's starting to look like there was definite election interference in the 2020 election by Russians just as many former intelligence officials believed. Because now we know from an indicted witness that they had contacts with Russian intelligence who passed on "dirt" on Hunter Biden. Which snowballed into the fucking up of his plea deal, but also was pimped by GOP congresscritters as ammo against Biden. 

Falling for Fakery on Ukraine

 

Zelensky has no right to presume that our sons and daughters will fight his war. Shame on him. We’ve somehow sent the message that we work for him. Shame on us! https://t.co/l84guBiIsk

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) March 1, 2023

Here are both Senator Mike Lee and a former Trump Administration employee falling for a truncated video that appears to show Volodomyr Zelenskyy suggesting that US troops would defend Ukraine. The expanded version is Zelenskyy's opinion that if Russia is not stopped at Ukraine, then they will encroach NATO space and once NATO Article 5 is in effect, the conflict we've been dreading will come to pass. The lack of context is significant, and that these two individuals went with the outrage instead of exploring the context first, tells me a lot about what I dread from social media-oriented foreign policy.

It's bad enough that US foreign policy has become subject to the election cycle, partisanship, and the willingness of ambitious tools to subordinate the long-term interests of this country to their own short-term desire to be seen as standing up to the Administration of the opposite party. If people--responsible people with actual jobs making decisions about our foreign policy, can so easily fall for an outrage-farming post, I'm just sick inside. 

America First...Is Definitely Not That

 

I'm not ever not going to hammer home that the various iterations of MAGA hat mentality often display racist and actually anti-American (or at least, anti-Constitutional) vibes. Of the slogans that I've had the least use for, the worst is "America First". The America First movement I always think of was the Hearst/Lindbergh pro-Nazi wanks. And that is not auspicious at all.  And of course, I also think about the Klan. 

The funny thing about America First is that it never represents the actual America that we have, but the America certain people want. It isn't about the vibrant, culturally diverse nation united under the rule of law. It's white bozos wrapping themselves in a flag and casting shade on the Constitution. It's overtly hostile to what is best in us in favor of a kind of white, Christian identity politics and vastly decreased empathy and morality in favor of militant social control. 

Tucker Carlson is the Father Coughlin of Neville Chamberlains

 

Tucker Carlson is broadcasting absolutely in-your-face Russian propaganda tonight. Even for Tucker, this is pretty brazen. pic.twitter.com/qtX70gfjYY

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) December 8, 2021

Ok, this is more of a riff than a proper take, and Carlson isn't Mr. Foreign Policy I guess? But anyway, saying things like "Putin just wants to protect his western border" (like Putin is expecting an invasion?!?!?) is not too far off in my ears from someone suggesting "So, Hitler can have a little bit of Poland--he just needs elbow room!"

NATO's business is protecting democracy. What is so hard for Tucker Carlson to understand about thaaaaa....

Oh.

The Fall of Icarus

 

I've been thinking about one of my favorite poems, lately:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree....

 because suffering in the sense of grave and unmistakable tragedy has struck with alarming regularity. Of course, there's COVID-19, which has become the fatal backdrop, our mise en scene. But recently, a small town in Canada suffered a heat dome for several days, enduring temperatures wildly uncommon to that area, and basically spontaneously combusted. In Europe, massive flooding events have occurred, causing the loss of lives and previously unimaginable damage. In Florida, we have witnessed a residential building fall in the night, where residents went to sleep never suspecting the terrible changes to come.  (Sinkholes are so common to this area that I tend to assume either dramatic subsidence or building that didn't meet the requirements of the environment the building was sitting in.)

Our world is changing, and tragedy related to climate is becoming a norm,  And yet it stays, in some peculiar sense, a tragedy taking place as if always elsewhere and elsewhen. Faith might be part of the reason why--whether to laugh or cry about that, I can not say.  

I think the ancients knew the better part of the cause--hubris. Like the fall of  Icarus, tragedy befalls people when the protagonist (all of us) can not take the good advice of others and do sensible things, can not hear the warnings and portents of our Daedalus, but fall prey to a fatal flaw. We soar on technological wings, but can't moderate and bristle at the idea of accepting nature's limits. We are fucked and fall, hard, limbs thrashing into the drink. 

But it needn't be that way. Daedalus understood the dangers and as he flew, he did not fall. Also, I think of another case so similar--that of Phaethon driving the fiery chariot of Helios across the sky, and losing control (a metaphor for climate change if I ever heard one). His father had warned him, but this was because he was all too familiar with the rigors of the diurnal journey.

It's not that living with technology and doing it well and without further harm to environment can't be done, it's just that it has to be done skillfully and mindfully. We can survive as a species, but only if we pull our heads out of our asses. We need to grow up and be responsible and ever so careful. In the Anthropocene, we need to become the fathers and mothers, the good stewards, of the planet. 

Otherwise, we fail.

We Speak English Here?

That Tweet is probably not ok and definitely not English and it's pretty late on the East Coast and he might still have a travel hang-over. After all, he did need a cart to schlep around Saudi Arabia and Europe. I'm not saying I'm worried about him but maybe a little.  I resent his entire maladministration, but if it's too much, I am altogether supportive of his seeking self care and giving us all a break, really.


My own contribution to this social milestone is:

El jefe's negative press covfefe makes his thumbs too hefe to tweet. https://t.co/up05kxQcCH

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) May 31, 2017

My preferred medium has long been poetry.

UPDATE: And with that I've apparently forgotten that he just wants world leaders to hit him up on his personal cellie. Because here's a bloke with social media discipline and the ability to ensure his phone isn't being spoofed by a million haxxors. Or, the right few when his WH cybersecurity guys aren't on it.

UPDATE 2: This Tweet was stupid, but it made the entire Twitter a beautiful thing. (The Cuervo Gold. The fine Covfefe! Make the Twitter a wonderful...)

"And just before you serve it, you hit it with a dash of #Covfefe" pic.twitter.com/fm9CAF4Iyz

— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) May 31, 2017

Moderator: Your word is #covfefe

Arvind: Use it in sentence

Moderator: Despite the constant negative press covfefe

Arvind: c-o-v-f-e-f-e pic.twitter.com/NNpAdoKG15

— Doug (@realDougWitt) May 31, 2017

maybe he's born with it
maybe it's #covfefe pic.twitter.com/MK0f3DcDLz

— Nana Manika (@olivia_vivienne) May 31, 2017

pic.twitter.com/uks8i6SBeb

— Danny Zuker (@DannyZuker) May 31, 2017

I love all you amazing bastards!

A Presidential Trip Abroad 3: NATO Friends, Right?

The discussion of President Trump's by-now-notorious handshakes will be a study for future scholars, if there are any. French President Emmanuel Macron is not an especially tall man, but he has apparently worked on his grip so as to discomfit the American President, at least whilst seated. (Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, tall and rather fit, has done the best at blocking Trump's peculiar use of what should be a friendly greeting as a dominance display.) You can tell by the straightened state of Trump's grin that he feels this grip in the central vicinity of his man-spread.

Well done, Macron! I have to say, this particular silver-back primate thing Trump does annoys me because it is so transparently a dominance thing. It is without subtlety or chill. It is all brittle manhood and schoolyard bully. Shake hands like an adult, Trump! So embarrassing. (Was he raised indoors by people?)

But this is just a symbol of his general world-stage awkwardness. He also muscled Montenegro PM Dusko Markovic out of his way, lumbering to the front of a photo line-up. (Was this political or just how Trump usually treats other people when there are cameras? One can scarcely answer.) He belabored a point that hasn't actually got any ground regarding US taxpayers somehow being out of pocket regarding NATO allies not quite paying quite what they should on defense spending (2% of GDP). But the language he uses is way inexact and our allies think he's a tool for bringing it up, actually.

Trump seems to be aware he isn't greatly loved (I would say Brussels underscored that for him) in Europe and he has his weird talk about trade (Globalization from say, the late 1980's to present, seems to have missed him, huh? What he knows about manufacturing I could shove in my navel and still have room for a blue whale.) that seems about vengeance rather than economic realities (probably because former President Obama had a better crowd than him. That Vienna-sausage-fingered struggle is apparently all too real.)

I found him embarrassing and ill-suited to the world stage. But keep in mind, this is Trump just doing diplomatic pose-downs in a controlled environment that doesn't encourage his discomfiture. He isn't taking the kinds of questions we have for him right here in the US. And as he keeps right on tripping, I know questions continue to pile up.

Sacramento Stabbings Strike me as a Disturbing Sign of the Times

That a neo-Nazi rally turned into a melee where several people were stabbed strikes me as a very disturbing sign of the times. One of the spokescretins from the Traditionalist Workers Party, Matthew Heimbach, had previously made a stir by shoving a peaceful protester at a Trump rally, earning him a Washington Post profile calling him the "next David Duke".

This seems so superfluous to the Trump endorsement bona fides, which include the actual David Duke, as well as other "unwanted" white supremacist types. And yet it's kind of hard to divorce the upsurge in racially motivated violence from a campaign that has given so many jack-booted thugs hope.

It's also hard for me to separate "Trumpism" from the naked racism reported in the UK post-Brexit vote.

People act on what they see, and if they see it's "okay" (normalized in the media) to hate your neighbor, some simply will. They will act out. Leadership is understanding these forces, and not encouraging them. Violence like this is a sign of leadership abdicated, and loaded guns of rhetoric placed in the hands of emotional toddlers.

Anti-fascists were willing to take a blade today--think about this, anyone with any real power at all: what would you take to not have this kind of hateful idiocy be in your future? Because if it is permitted, it simply happens. If it is excused with words like "economic uncertainty" or "taking our sovereignty back"--it will engulf people who let it happen as well.

You are either anathema to racism, violence, and anti-intellectual thuggery, or you are taking part. There is no "sides". We have coexistence, or hate. "Mere tolerance" is just a thin grease of civility bound to erode or combust.

I am sick of how we ignore the real intolerance by trying to play "both sides" about it. It isn't a form of fascism to be "PC" and decry actual racists and Nazis. Calling racism what it is, or fascism what it is, and recognizing that both have a strong populist aspect, aren't  It isn't reverse racism when white supremicists are called what they are. It's just a descriptor, and racists crying about it are dripping with crocodile tears for their own guilty understanding that what they are about is despised, and yet here they are.

Is there a remedy for being called a hater when one actually hates?  Like, maybe not obviously hating?