Did Russia Pay a "Meaningful Fee?"

 

Russian Telegram channels reported that the interview with Carlson and Carlson himself was not to Putin's liking, and the interview itself was considered a failure:

"The Kovalchuk clan sharply criticizes the idea of an interview with the American journalist Carlson. They say… https://t.co/sCql6QuhkW pic.twitter.com/iyPZDTP2JW

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) February 9, 2024

Well, I'm just throwing this bit from twitter here without knowing anything more about it--would I believe Tucker Carlson accepted a fee for a friendly interview? Let me think about that; it would be very unethical, so I'm going to go ahead and say yes, I do believe Tucker Carlson would do that. I also think he would do it for free, but getting paid if you can is so much nicer, isn't it? 

It also appears that Putin wanted to just give one of his history lectures, about which he is weird and wrong. The idea that Poland was basically asking to be invaded by Germany (and I guess USSR was just standing innocently by like choirboys) is the kind of peculiar revisionism that goes so well with authoritarian states.  There's an analogy there for Ukraine, I guess (about which Putin has his own badly contorted self-justifications) but I just think, if I were Poland, I would like Putin not to be mentioning Poland so much.

I'm not sure who exactly is fooled enough to think Putin is stopping at part of Ukraine. I mean, people might vocally express their "doubts"--I just find it hard to think they are "fooled." 

TWGB: The "Raid" on Emperor Commodus

 

There's nothing like starting your damn dumb day out knowing you are going to have to post about your fucking Moby Dickless white supremacist whale, but when I cracked open yon internets this morn to finally unload about the weekend's vote-a-rama and how it demonstrates Republican fecklessness, I already knew I was committed to talking later about how the Trump presidency has gone down the toilet. Literally. 

It's been widely and accurately AFAIK reported that Trump tore up docs that were required to be preserved and may have even eaten docs he didn't care to be preserved, despite the presidential records act. For someone who derided and persecuted his 2016 opponent over records retention, it is astounding that this is the guy who presided over an entirely unaccountable wipe of DHS, DOD and Secret Service digital records. 

I mean, astounding for a value of being shocked when a chronic liar somehow does something the exact opposite of what he claims he finds important. 

What might get lost here is that today, the anniversary of Nixon's resignation announcement, Paul Manafort had admitted that yeah, he did give Trump Campaign polling data to someone he wants to pretend he didn't know full well was connected to GRU because why not? I mean, thanks, we have several volumes of Senate Intelligence Committee data on the various connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, but it's nice someone wants to skirt about copping to it in order to secret-boast about it. He's literally humble-bragging he does coups, you guys. Do you need an election fixer? Manafort is out here putting out feelers. He is broke and in need of the only work he knows-fuckery. Kilimnik, you guys, goes back to Ukraine shit, too. It all does.  Russia was always going to fuxxor Ukraine in Trump's second term, but they are fucked because they tried it in Joe Biden's first. 

I really wish MAGA so-called patriots tried to suss out where in their Daddy fixations they decided Trump or Putin were real men. They are baby-nard projectionists. 

Anyway, today we also got a glimpse of what an anti-democratic, pro-Nazi shit Trump is with respect to his relationship with the military and entire misunderstanding of the history of American service, which includes thinking Nazi generals were al loyal and this was somehow great (ok, Operation Valkyrie, and also, this dope heard of the idea of the "good Nazi" and thought it was a compliment?) and also there was a confirmation of Adam Serwer's most salient observation of the Trump presidency--that the cruelty was the point. We also learned Trump didn't want disabled vets at his military pride parade because he thought it would look bad. 

He thought heroes who showed physical valor in the line of duty was a problem, you guys. That their physical ordeal wasn't a visible reflection of sacrifice to a higher cause.

So how would I be shocked if Mar-a-lago was "raided"? (For a value of "raided" that means subject to a lawfully executed warrant based on probable cause because of due process.) This former president took 15 boxes of apparently classified shit out from the White House with him. 

We're supposed to give a shit that MAGAs are mad about it. Of course they are. They are conditioned to be mad because of a steady diet of mad-fuel. They believe a free and fair election was stolen with no proof at all--of course they are mad about their little God King. They literally don't know what due process is or appreciate that Trump is not inviolate but is still just a citizen subject to the same laws as anybody else. 

Literally any day could be the day when MAGAs decide to explode. They did on 1/6. It looks like for some reason some /Donald peeps thought 8/8 was some kind of big deal.  (88 stands for Heil Hitler in some Nazi iconography.) Who cares? Democracy isn't about the feelings of losers and bigots. 

And justice isn't about politics either. Sometimes, your boy is just guilty as fuck and you need to acknowledge it. The GOP is having problems with the basic idea of right and wrong. But the pursuit of the evidence and the facts matters. 

Rough Winds Do Shake the Darling Buds of May

 

Meanwhile on Russian state TV, military experts are concerned that Russia's current economy is unfit to meet the needs of its Armed Forces. One expert advocated the urgent need to move on to "military socialism" and a "wartime economy," with government in charge of everything. pic.twitter.com/vQf9uSV4Pr

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) May 7, 2022

There's a terrible thing to note, which is that everything old is a little bit new again in Russia, and "Zed" seems to stand for what once was deemed dead. It might be to encourage confidence in the Soviet surplus materiel being dispensed to the folks who have been deployed to what is starting to look like a meat-grinder for under-prepared and over-enthused youths. But the understanding that Putin's sockpuppets are now suggesting that people get onboard with a reality their grandparents/great-grandparents well understood suggests a kind of bottoming out. 

We seldom refer to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact I think in the US education system in high school history because our education system seldom advances US history students past the Gilded Age and laissez-faire economics (and never really talks about the labor movement except as a sidebar--the schools are full of the descendants of wage slavery and actual slavery, and we all know who doesn't want people to get ideas about that) and we like to think Yalta wasn't another cynical turkey-carving exercise. The detritus of colonialism, the fallout of fuckups. 

I believe, because I am not a dumbass, that people learning from history is an improvement because we are building upon what came before when we take these lessons to heart. However, strongmen, because they are dumbasses, try to use history as an exercise they would very much like to repeat because if it happened before it could work for them again, and they never learn from downfalls. Putin is living this lie. He thinks he can rectify Stalin. He can be the ultimate patriot if he makes Russia Great Again. 

He is destroying what is good, though. The Russia of Sakharov and Shostakovich should tell us that great Russian people were held back from what they might have been. And I tremble to think what Putin and his trembling hand has in store because it is easier to destroy than build anything. And Putin wants a legacy, and he has built so little. And there is so much he could destroy--just to make a mark, 

He won't prosper. But failures are also a kind of mark. And can be most terrible. 

An Apology Would Be Inappropriate 2

It's sort of hard for me to fathom the kind of steadfastness to a meme that conservatives have for the notion of an "apology tour". Admitting that former US administrations have done things that did not sit well with other nations, or even with populations within the US, is not to apologize for them, but to acknowledge the truths of the broad sweep of history. It is an adult thing that President Obama does in his speeches (which are intended not for a specific, home-based audience, but for the world, which is something the PEOTUS might want to learn is necessary), and an honest thing, but what it is not is a puling offering of apologies for things hat happened outside of the scope of his administration.

So it is even harder for me to see how even the conservative hindtitterati (is that pageview thingie in the upper right hand corner for real even?) or the 2008 GOP VP candidate's Twitter feed, can somehow imply that President Obama is apologizing for Pearl Harbor--which is, um, something the Japanese did and that Japan PM Shinzo Abe came as close as we'll get to an apology for (previous attempts by former Japanese governments having been denied the opportunity to apologize--as we deemed it inappropriate). Which I pointed out when I noted that Obama had not actually apologized for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.(In the comments.)

What seems to actually rankle is the idea that Obama had the audacity to note that "We must resist the urge to demonize those who are different." Because that, even for conservatives, has to be a reference to Trumpism, no?  After all, who else was on about Mexicans being rapists and Muslims being terrorists and African-Americans being violent and unemployed and living in ghettos, right?

Well, if you want to see it that way, okay--he was pointing out that a future Trump administration would probably be all about discrimination and that's really regrettable--thanks, conservatives for pointing it out! Why did you vote for the guy? (Ha ha! Kidding!)  But no, he was pointing out that FDR--our liberal hero, singled out totally innocent Japanese-Americans on the basis of what another nation did, and that that thing was pretty damn unfair. Preconceptions about whole peoples get in the way of treating them fairly. Dunno why it would be read some other way.

Anyway, this is just a reminder that Trump isn't some weird asteroid that crashed into the middle of the GOP and made everyone go all "pod people" in some 1950's B-movie fashion. He is the end result of viewing history through a very smudgy lens.