A letter to my sister

My little sis called me today. Left a voicemail about TrumpFuckery, and in particular mentioned Ukraine.

I just didn't feel like spending half an hour moaning and pissing about all that, so I wrote her this email:

 "The reality is that we’re screwed for at LEAST the next two years, and that assumes that these fucksticks’ idiot rampage fucks things up bad enough that even the idiot public gets pissed enough to vote Democratic. Which is far from a given; it’s just as likely that there’s a third party nonsense (which means the GOP wins) or they just don’t vote at all (…so GOP wins…).

 

The Trumpenscum has it all; all three branches, the press licking their taint…all we can do is try and delay and go to court - and that’s a weak reed given the SCOTUS Furious Five - or the streets, and that’s both risky and dangerous, because Fatso WILL invoke the Insurrection Act and become a Fuhrer in fact as opposed to in practice.

 

So everything and everyone we non-scum humans care about - parks, public spaces in general, social safety nets, modern medicine..? All we will have is what they don’t want or just don't want to trash because they’re fucking trash people who are stealing perfectly good oxygen and that's what fucking oxygen-thieves do.

 

Ukraine? Fuck. If the EU doesn’t step up they’re doomed. Palestine? Doomed. Taiwan? If Xi is willing to pay off Fatso? Doomed.

 

I’ll see if I can find the link, but Amanda Marcotte has a piece interviewing someone who’s deep-dived into the wingnut bible-bangers. (It's here).

 

The bottom line? It’s a cult, they’re fanatics, and there’s no reaching them; it’s culture war as ACTUAL war. There’s no going back any more than there was for the Hitler Youth dying in the streets of Berlin or the kamikaze taking off from Kyushu in August 1945. 

 

I’m not exaggerating; we cannot “beat” these people using democracy. They see that as race and religious suicide. They must be destroyed…and that means real, actual, no-shit Civil War. And I don’t see “our side” as ready and willing to do that. I don’t blame them! That’s horrendous!

 

But that’s where we are.

 

I'm reminded of the passage in Tolkien where Frodo is pissing and moaning about how fucked it is that this whole “ring” shit has to happen on HIS watch.

 

Gandalf replies, no shit, Sherlock, really? Word up Frodo, he says; that’s what EVERYONE in this situation thinks. It sucks. It just sucks. 

 

But it is what it is and all you and I and everyone else can do is suck it up. 

 

And so we do. 

 

I'm not saying "Stop fighting". Even if you're doomed to lose, you have to fight. Even if it means you die, if what you're fighting for is worth it, you fight - and die - as hard as you can. Every Nazi you kill in Poland before you die is one Nazi that can't invade France, can't invade Russia, can't defend Normandy or Italy or Berlin.

 

But that doesn't make the dying any easier. 

As we used to say over at Intel Dump:

 

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF!

Ukraine, one year on

I'll admit freely that I was one of those who assumed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be, if not a walkover, over quickly and in Russia's favor.

"The fighting continues in Ukraine, with the Russian forces doing surprisingly poorly (relative to the preponderance of weight-of-metal on the Russian side...). I still doubt the outcome is in play - poor or not, quantity has a quality all it's own (just hard on the people in the "quantity"...)."

Well.

I'm a well-known Eeyore in Portland soccer circles and that carries over into geopolitics, as well. I still don't see how this ends well for Ukraine. Largely, though, not so much because of Russian battlefield performance but because of Western and especially United States political attention span.

It's difficult for the Western democracies, driven by the short electoral cycle, to keep eyes on the prize - in this case, ensuring that a rapacious kleptocracy isn't rewarded for its neighborhood aggressions - and this problem is made even more difficult because the EU/US Right is openly Russiaphilic. 

This isn't just Trump, either. He's obviously either 1) just a stooge, 2) deeply in hock to the Russian oligarchs/Deutschbank execs who are propping up his "wealth", or 3) compromised in some truly vile way (old saying: "dead girl or live boy" because nothing short would genuinely shame Trump...) by Russian intelligence. Throw in his visible man-crush on Shirtless Vlad, and his stanning the Russians is utterly unsurprising.

But the remainder of the Western Right is all-in on Putinism because it clearly fits into the jigsaw puzzle weirdness of their worldview, where transgender teens and moms-against-assault-rifles are existential threats while rapacious plutocrats and anthropogenic global warming aren't.

Unfortunately for Ukraine these people are either close to or holding the levers of power. Watch this U.S. Congress - the nutbars in the House WILL strip out support for Ukraine. Empty G and her fellow Nazis have a Molitov-Ribbentrop Pact that ensures their constant attacks on Ukrainian aid in hopes of ensuring a Russian victory.

And without Western help the Russians will win; if not the complete subjugation of Ukraine - occupying the Ruthenian heartland will be no easier in 2025 - worse, if anything - than it was in 1946 - then the effective "Finlandization" of Ukraine or worse.

Even with that help, it's going to be damn near impossible for a true Ukrainian "victory". Russia is still immensely larger and can keep hammering at the Ukraine so long as the Ukrainians can't effectively hammer back. They can't; Russia has the geographic strategic depth that no Ukrainian weapons can threaten short of risking Putin throwing a nuke.

And if he does...

So I think we're still stuck with the "lessons learned" we learned a year ago:

1. Thucydides is still correct: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

No real explication needed; we're still here.

I still agree with Point #4. But that doesn't mean that everyone else does, so being capable of giving a bloody response to those who, like Putin, believe that they can just take what they want by force is still, sadly, a necessity.

But.

Anyone who's familiar with the U.S. procurement and doctrine processes knows that neither one is particularly well suited for ensuring that We the People get a most our of our tax dollars. The "conservatives" love to blabber on about how there's SO much "waste, fraud, and abuse" in the federal government, yet are unwilling to look for it where it lives; in the "defense" budget.

2. When someone tells you what they are, believe them.

This applies both to Putin - who told us he was going to put the USSR back together repeatedly - and to the Western Right, which has told us over and over that they want what Putin has; the ability to harm, jail, and kill those he/they hate and the power to bind and loose regardless of the democratic norms and opinions of others who disagree. And are fine with him doing what he wants if he helps them with what they want.

3. The Russian military is proving what a bad fucking idea personal autocracy is.

As if we hadn't seen enough of that from the reign of Dick Cheney, who intended to reverse the Decline of the Imperial Presidency, and Donald Trump. There's a reason that old imperialist Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government...except all the others. And the worst form - both for those who live within it and for those who outside who are the targets of it - is autocracy, whether in the sort of kleptocracy currently in Russia or the theocracy dreamed of by Western Christopaths or the Dictatorship of the GOProletariat that lives inside Lauren Bobert's head.

4. Smedley Butler is still right, too; war was a racket and still is.

The "leaders" - in Russia and here in the US - will never pay and never have paid the price for their war crimes. Dubya isn't in jail in the Hague, Cheney is still a bloated remainder of the stupidity of the Iraq Misadventure, and Putin won't be the one who falls out of the window.

So here we are; a year on, with more dying and more killing to come, and with no real hope for a "good" outcome, merely bad and worse.

And if there's a more powerful statement about how war is all hell, I can't think of one.

America Worst

Long before Orange Foolius and his gang of GQP nitwits adopted it, the slogan "America First" was the boast of another gang of fascist-fluffing traitors.

That would be Charles "Lucky Lindy" Lindbergh and the original, isolationist version.

The Wiki entry at the link cited claims that most of the Forties Firsters were genuine isolationists who didn't want the nation to get involved in "foreign wars".

That's fine. I'm all for not getting involved in other people's wars, or wars, period, if it comes to that.

On the other hand, there are some people who have some ideas or goals rotten enough that only killing enough of them will stop them, and those people will force wars on you whether that's a good idea or not.

The bulk of the original Firsters recognized that; the outfit killed itself on December 11, 1941 when it became brutally obvious who those really rotten people were. 

That brings us to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

I'm not going to make a case for war. Or that war. Or for Americans to fight, kill, and die in that, or any war not forced upon us.

If I was going to make that argument I'd be learning Ukrainian on my way to volunteer to run a battery fire direction center for Сухопу́тні військá Збрóйних сил Украї́ни. 

I'm not, and so I refuse to be a hypocrite and cheer for other people's sons and daughters to go and fight.

But.

There doesn't seem to be any gray area on which side as Americans we should be fighting for if it comes to fighting, and it sure as fuck isn't Vlad Putin and his gang. My compa the Rude Pundit pretty much sums it up:

"Here's the thing: I've been watching the United States fund bullshit fascists and totalitarians my entire fucking life. In Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, this country has provided arms and money to the worst goddamn people and the most worthless causes. We've funded mercenaries and weapons manufacturers. We've funded crazed terrorists by calling them "insurgents" and funded evil militaries crushing freedom-fighting insurgents. 

What Zelensky did was say to us, to we who live in this goddamned ludicrously powerful country in this goddamned ludicrously debased age, that we're supposed to represent some fucking ideals to the rest of the world. Look, Zelensky said, your mythology is based on real shit that happened, real battles with real lives and real consequences. Now we have this battle against this enemy. The consequences for failure would be genocide and expanded aggression by the lunatic Putin. For the US to walk away would be shameful. It would make us an accessory to mass murder, even more than we usually are."

Yes. Ohhellyes.

We now have the same choice that We the People faced in 1939. Do we help out the dictator whose people will - who are - cheerfully butchering anyone in their conquests they can catch? Or do we help the people fighting those sonsofbitches?

It's not really a hard choice.

The Ukrainians don't have to be great. And they aren't; there's a lot of post-Soviet fuckery there.

But they sure as Hell are better than the actual Putin-led post-Soviets.

And that brings me to the Latter-Day America Firsters.

That's a couple of them there; January 6th traitors; Matt Gaetz and Lauren "I luv gunz" Boebert during the speech that the ;leader of Ukraine gave to the joint session of Congress. The Wordle of that day must have been a real toughie; both the little rascals are still glued to their phones during the applause lines. 

But that's just another day at the shop for the New Firsters. It's part of their job as the Putin Wing of the GQP, to stan for a criminal fascist.

Well, hell; if you're gonna rep for Donald Trump, how is Putin a stretch?

Look. There's no such thing as a "good war". I can certainly understand being on the fence about, say, the war in Yemen. There's a lot of bad and no real good options there. Most wars are a choice between worse and even worse.

But here?

Fuck that noise.

We shipped millions of tanks and trucks to that rotten bastard Stalin to beat that rotten-er bastard, Hitler because it was in our national interest.

To send arms and ammo to Zelensky - who is not anywhere near as rotten as Stalin - to beat that rotten bastard Putin is a no-brainer.

Unless you're a MAGAt-loving, QAnon-huffing, Putin-fluffing GOP shitweasel.

Like these two and the other Firsters, the Cosplay Mossy Oak Militia (thanks, Jim Wright!) and all the other Putin Fanbois?

You know how I keep saying these people are traitors?

Well, if you were an original Firster and you still had your Adolf poster up on the wall on December 12?

Yeah. You were a traitor.

Who's gonna tell these people about that?

Their domestic policies, such as they are, are enough to make me loathe them. But to prefer a brutal foreign dictator over a flawed but still-better polity that dictator is invading?

The new Firsters are...what their Adolf-loving predecessors were. 

I'll let the Rude One see me out here:

"That's why the conservatives who dangle from Putin's taint hair went crazy. It's because they say constantly that the United States is the greatest country in the history of everything. They say all the time that we are something special. And we're saying, and Zelensky is imploring, that we fucking well act like it once in a while. Sometimes even a superpower has to put the fuck up or shut the fuck up."

Naval makeover! (cruiser-to-submarine edition)

 The cruiser Москва has passed on.

He is no more. 

(Russian naval vessels are by tradition "he's" rather than the "she's" of English or American sailor tradition) 

He has ceased to be, expired and gone to meet his maker. Bereft of life, he rests in peace, has shuffled off his mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

Okay.

Rule #1 of war is "Shit happens", and the fact that this vessel is now full of water is not in itself either shocking or particularly interesting. 

If one was in a snarky mood one might make the same sort of observation Bismarck might have made about continental powers like Germany or Russia wanting (let alone "needing") large capital ships: "...the fuck?" (only in the original German, of course...). 

If one was in a snarky mood.

To me there are two interesting parts about this, though.

The first is that the Russian official line is that the cruiser was lost "under tow in heavy seas after an internal ammunition explosion". 

Not because nasty enemy missiles turned him into a flaming pyre, no, no! Just your basic head-on-collision-twenty-car pileup of fucked-up munitions handling and/or storage, piss-poor damage control, and incompetent seamanship.

I kind of get the dictator-grade level of "not wanting to admit that your enemy hurt you" propaganda. But to want to make the story "our sailors are lethally incompetent" seems...a bit louche' at best. Tell me...how does that make things in your navy sound...better?

Now, that said; damage control at sea is goddamn hard. It requires constant, repetitive, realistic training led by good petty officers and planned and overseen by competent and demanding officers.

Even the best navies have their bad days; we saw that back in 2015 when we talked about the loss of HIJMS Taiho during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. 

The 日本海軍 Nippon Kaigun - the Imperial Japanese Navy - was one of the best-led (at the tactical level, at least...) and best-trained in the world in 1944. But that didn't prevent the sinking of one of their newest carriers because of poor damage control after a single torpedo strike.

On the other end of the military scale, though? Damage control is one of those massive-training-fail issues that seems to be endemic in "gangster" military organizations. Think Idi Amin's or Saddam's "armies" if you want a model. 

If nothing else this Russo-Ukrainian War has done a pretty good job of throwing a nastily bright light on exactly how fucking brutally bad the Russian armed services are. As bad as the Ugandans or the Iraqis.

Turns out that when your national model is "kleptocracy" your national military is just about as good as you'd expect based on that. 

When your soldiers and sailors are "led" by people - from petty officers and NCOs through general officers to their political masters - whose whole mode of thought is "steal what you can, neglect what you can't, and lie about everything to everyone both above and below you"  and those troops are either not trained for shit (or completely untrained) and their "leaders" are often incompetent, either because the system is designed to ensure the leaders are piss-poor, or unable to demand they aren't, to find that the entire organization those soldiers and sailors are part of ends up being criminally incompetent at the difficult business of war, including the difficult task of naval damage control, should hardly be shocking.

If you choose shitty crooks to "lead" you, you shouldn't be shocked when they "lead" you into shitty crookedness. 

Which leads me back from the shores of Ukraine to the shores of North America.

Because you'd think that this sort of military clusterfuckery would be a cautionary tale for those of us here on the sidelines in the United States about the whole business of being all enthusiastic for dictators because, say, they hate homosexuals and you do, too. That getting your dream of "leaders" hating on liberal soy-boys and darkies and uppity women isn't worth the sort of incompetent "leadership" that ends up getting your sailors killed and their capital ships sunk. 

Even for the most foaming-mouthed-rabid MAGAt groupies of Tubby and his crooked little weasel pals.

But, no.

They won't believe that.

Ever.

And that's a problem, a problem deeper than the bottom of the Black Sea, where the Москва now rests.

Lessons learned from Ukraine

I've been kicking this around for a while, and wanted to get it down before I wander away from it.

What have we learned from what's been happening in Eastern Europe over the past month or so?

 
1. Thucydides is still correct: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

We like to think, we pampered wealthy white Americans, that there is a "justice" that transcends simple brute force. If we're Christian we like to think that there's a "God" (and his kid) who cares about people and sort of wants them to do justly and love mercy.

And then comes something like Ukraine, where the ugly reality is impossible to hide.

So no. There's no arc of history that bends towards justice. If people want justice, they need to defend it, by force at times, with their lives if they must.

That lesson is bolded by the actions of Russia in Ukraine. But it should resonate with us here, since we have steadfastly refused to take action against those who have already attempted once to use force to "do what they can" thinking that they were the strong and we are the weak. If we do not, then we ARE the weak, and they will do with us what they can.

Putin isn't the only leader of authoritarian goons in the northern hemisphere.

2. When someone tells you what they are, believe them.

Vladimir Putin has said one thing consistently since loooong before he was Donald Trump's mancrush; that the devolution of the USSR was the Worst Thing EVAH and that if he could he would get the band back together.

Well, because the successor state to the Soviet Union looked like a shitshow and its' dictator seemed full of shit like many other dictators, a lot of us got complacent about how serious he was.

Ask the resident of Kyiv how serious.

If I was a Latvian or and Estonian right now I'd be hugging everyone who insisted that the Baltics scurry into NATO as soon as the Сове́тский флаг came down.

Now the NATO countries - including the U.S. - need to accept that those former Soviet republics are all on Putin's list. That means taking Article 5 seriously. Is Riga worth Manhattan? We might find out sooner than we like, because...

 
3. The Russian military is proving what a bad fucking idea personal autocracy is.

We in the Western militaries listened to and, often, believed the tales the Russian media and government told about the modernization and professionalization they'd done with the successor to the old Soviet Red Army.

I'm not sure if they were fooling us, or themselves, or both, but boy fucking howdy were they full of shit.

Turns out that the Russian conventional forces are bad. Reeeeally bad. "Iraqi Army" bad.

It's hard to imagine that Putin kicked off this war knowing that Saddam's Republican Guard made his regulars look like an anime goon squad. So I suspect he's been fed the diet of bullshit and flattery that people who can kill you whenever they please tend to get. His military advisors told him what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to hear.

"Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy." ~ Jorge Luis Borges

But the bottom line is that modern warfare is goddamned hard to do, and the Russians are no better at it than you'd think given the open kleptocracy and brutal autocracy that permeates Russia the country.

That's...actually kind of a Bad Thing for us as well as for them.

Because if the Russian armed forces would get waxed in the first 48 hours of combat with a Western military?

All Putin has to swing is his nukes.

And that should worry all of us at least a little bit.

4. Smedley Butler is still right, too; war was a racket and still is.

No matter the outcome in Ukraine, everyone involved is likely to be the worse for it. Obviously the dead, but those wounded, or homeless, the refugees, the prisoners, those impoverished by war or sanctions or economic collapse. Those who have lost family, friends. The citizens of Russia's "near abroad", who must now fear that success in Ukraine will make them next in line for death and mayhem.

Of course, the Russian leadership is likely to be insulated from all that. War "leaders"  -unless they make the mistake of losing war and being captured by the victors - are seldom punished, no more than the "leaders" here that committed the identical war crime of waging aggressive war in 2003 were punished. 

It's always the "ordinary" people who suffer when the Great and the Good amongst us choose to use force to get - or try and get - what they want.

So, like most rackets, it's the bosses that profit and the footsoldiers - military and civilian - that die.

I wish I had a happier conclusion.

But, just like Ukraine today, there is no lightness; only ruin and hatred, the strong doing what they can and the weak, well, suffering.

The lights are going out...

 I'm reading that Russian maneuver forces have crossed into the southeastern oblasts of Ukraine and are moving towards Donetsk.

Assuming that the Ukranian forces around that city do not retreat we may be seeing war in Eastern Europe for the first time since the early 1950s (if you count the UPA guerilla resistance) or 1944 (if you only count conventional inter-state warfare).

The real question at this point is whether Putin will push his forces into the old Ruthenian heartland of the western Ukraine. The distance from the southern border of Belarus to Kyiv is relatively short, and the temptation for Putin and the Russian Army leadership to try to roll the dice of a "decapitation strike" seems almost too vast to resist.

If in case you were wondering why the Trumpkin reaction to all this Russian invading seems so weird and peculiar, consider that while Putin polls at around 75% negative with self-identified Republicans, Biden polls somewhere around minus-90%.

At least you can't say the treasonous sonsofbitches don't walk their walk...

Update 2/24: It now appears that Putin's goal is full-on subjugation of Ukraine. I'm not sure if this will involve prolonged Russian occupation; if Putin doesn't, I'll bet his military chiefs remember both the Chechen and Afghan nightmares as well as the post-WW2 Ukrainian resistance. But the actual conquest is pretty much guaranteed; the relative strengths of the two militaries all but ensures that T-90s will be parked in the Maidan fairly soon.

My guess is that after a brief occupation and ratissage of Ukrainian nationalists the Russians will leave behind a Quisling government including a mini-KGB/FSB and antipartisan militia to hunt the resistance. How well this will work in Ruthenia is anyone's guess.

Now...my further, and more worried, question is whether the success of this move will embolden Putin to go after his other lust-objects, the pieces of the former USSR. The Baltics? Georgia? One of the lessons of the fascist 1930s is that once a fascist dictator is on a roll he's often unwilling or unable to stop himself. For a long time I thought that Putin was too canny to go full-on Hitler.

Now? I'm not convinced he has. 

But I'm not so sure he hasn't, either.

Update 2, 2/24: Thomas Zimmer has a nice breakdown of the weird Putin-fapping we're seeing from the American Right. Here's the bottom line (but the whole thread is worth reading...):

"Take note: Reactionaries and far-right movements across the “West” are siding with Putin. They see him as an ally in the struggle to uphold white Christian patriarchal rule – the kind of authoritarian strongman that can turn the tide against the forces of “woke” pluralism."

Zimmer had been on this beat for a long time, and his conclusion - one that I can't help but agree with completely - is that the rise of the Trumpkin Right (which long predates Trump and is largely the result of absorbing the Birchers and fundie religious zealots in the GOP) means that "conservatives" will choose to protect their status as ubermensch rather than accept becoming one among many.

Update 2/25: Juan Cole observes that Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraqi Adventure "enabled" the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Over at Milpub our reilable commentor Sven makes pretty much the same point.

I have a fair amount of respect for Cole's opinions on the Middle East, and Sven's opinions overall, but I think they overstate the case.

Reassembling the old Soviet Union has been an obsession of Putin's for as long as I've known about Putin. I can't believe that some sort of move to re-absorb Ukraine wasn't on his bucket list for a loooong time; the recent Ukrainian move to try and become more closely integrated with its western neighbors rather than Russia probably moved it up the list as well as making armed force more plausible.

(and, while we're on the subject, who the hell would WANT to be a "Russian" given the current conditions in Russia? Life as an American wage-slave sucks pretty big ass. Throw in open kleptocracy for the discreet American version along with shittier living conditions? Ugh. Our return-to-the-Gilded-Age economy may make life pretty grinding for the 99%, but I can't see voluntarily wanting to swap that for life in the post-Soviet Russia. There's frying pans and there's fires.)

Anyway, I agree with Cole that American foreign policy makes it harder for the U.S. to oppose other's military fucktardry. I agree with Sven that the U.S. and the West has done badly, both in general and in Eastern Europe.

But I disagree that Putin needed any help to decide to kill Ukrainians, or that anyone else deserves to go directly to Hell for that decision.

The U.S. was wrong in Iraq, just as it's been wrong all over the world in places like Nicaragua and Vietnam. Iraq is and was a war crime, making aggressive war, the crime for which the victorious Allies hung Nazi leaders. Dick and Dubya should be in jail, not enjoying a comfy elder statesmen's retirement.

But that simply makes Putin just as guilty. 

They all should be sharing a cell in SuperMax, and We the People of the United States should be ashamed for letting them do otherwise.

To those Russians who are trying to stop Putin...I have no words, and doubt I have that kind of bravery. I wish I thought you could succeed. I hate what I know will happen to you

And I'm just sorry, sorry for this sorry world that has so much wrong in it.

Update 2/26: The fighting continues in Ukraine, with the Russian forces doing surprisingly poorly (relative to the preponderance of weight-of-metal on the Russian side...). I still doubt the outcome is in play - poor or not, quantity has a quality all it's own (just hard on the people in the "quantity"...).

My opinion remains unchanged. As much as the U.S. has been a bad actor globally that doesn't excuse this. In the last words of the guys on Snake Island, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself."

Krugman has a column that makes a good point, though; for all that fingers are pointing at Putin and Russia right now, there's a mote/beam problem related to our own plutocratic/kleptocratic economies and the malefactors of great wealth therein that emphasizes the degree to which We the People have casually let the very sort of corruption endemic in Putin's Russia become less blatant but almost as endemic all over the West. 

That makes even economic war problematic.

"There are two uncomfortable facts here. First, a number of influential people, both in business and in politics, are deeply financially enmeshed with Russian kleptocrats. This is especially true in Britain. Second, it will be hard to go after laundered Russian money without making life harder for all money launderers, wherever they come from — and while Russian plutocrats may be the world champions in that sport, they’re hardly unique: Ultrawealthy people all over the world have money hidden in offshore accounts.

What this means is that taking effective action against Putin’s greatest vulnerability will require facing up to and overcoming the West’s own corruption.

Can the democratic world rise to this challenge? We’ll find out over the next few months."

Remember the "Panama Papers"? The revelation of the vast coterie of Western vulture capitalists that were thieving and cheating right alongside the cartoon Latin caudillos, African "strongmen", and Russian oligarchs? Remember how many of them we prosecuted, convicted, mulcted of their stolen lucre, and sent to the Crossbar Hotel?

Yeah, me neither.

I'm not saying "Oh, we're just as bad as Russia, so we can't point fingers."  Sure we can - we just need to be willing to point fingers at our own when they go wrong. We haven't done that. The fact that people like Dubya and Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and a gajillion Wall Street thieves and, yes, Trump are still walking around free is living testimony to the degree we've failed.

Putin is still a sonofabitch.

We really need to use this occasion of naked kleptocratic criminality, though, to think hard about how much rope we want to give our own oligarchs.

Wars and rumors of wars. And stupidity. And Trump

One of the multifarious issues with electing a total idiot who predictably stocked his administration with a coterie of simply-flaming-assholes, dangerously incompetent sycophants who are also flagrantly authoritarian-curious (at least), corporate whores, grifters, and outright clowns is that when problems turn up it's extremely difficult to feel confident that these gomers will be able to do something that ranges from "not actively stupid" to potentially useful.

While the bulk of the corporate media organizations circle the drain that is Trump's Twitter feed repeating his nonsense about hordes of invading brownskins, several parts of the globe are getting...interesting, and not in a particularly good way.

One of them is along the Pakistan-India border, where the subcontinental quasi-Trumper Indian PM Narendra Modi has played to his deplorable-Hindu-supremacist base by hammering Kashmiri Muslims. This, unsurprising to anyone who has more than one brain cell, has provoked some nasty posturing from the other subcontinental nuclear power. Trump's contribution was to shove his enormous orange oar (what? You say it's NOT enormous? FAKE NEWS!!!) in back in July blabbering about U.S. stumbling into the dispute and forcing a hasty denial from Modi's people that, no, they hadn't asked the buffoon to do anything.

It's hard to tell whether this will lead to anything more than posturing, but it's already obvious that the Trumpkins' geopolitical shrewdity has effectively neutered much of the U.S. ability to help defuse tensions in this nasty little dispute between two putative allies.

Meanwhile, in the Ukraine the political mess is getting messier, with a stand-up comic/president, fascist Ruthenians, Putin-fondlers, and all-around whackjobs all getting involved in a political imbroglio that would make Machiavelli throw his hands in the air.

If Niccolo himself would despair of this twelve-monkeys-fucking-a-football disaster, what hope is there for this Administration, that is, apparently, managed by tweet and whatever bats are looping around whatever is inside the tangerine-hued Tiberius' combover that functions in place of an actual brain? Certainly this would seem to be a place for a judicious consideration of the actual stakes involved and whether there is an actual dog for the United States' foreign policy in this fight and, if so, to what extent.

But, again...who outside of the MAGAt fever-swamps actually believes this congeries of fools and damned fools can do that?

Who'd have thought that Obama's "elections have consequences" line would be repeated so soon as farce?

WASF.

(And let's not even think about the weather.)

Winter is coming?

My friend Ael had a nifty tagline for the latest anthropomorphic global warming report from the UN and the potential for some life-altering changes it describes:

"Summer is coming".

Any Song of Ice and Fire-themed political references are jake with me, and it has the added encomium of being terse and ominous at the same time.

That's the scary long-game.

In the short-term, however, some people are getting all sorts of up in the Big Whack about Eurasian politics:

"Nato's military commander in Europe has issued a warning about the build-up of Russian forces on Ukraine's border. Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen Philip Breedlove said Nato was in particular concerned about the threat to Moldova's Trans-Dniester region."

Wait, wait, I hear you say. Why is this whack, Chief? I hear you say.

After all, Putin is an Evil Emperor, right? Oligarch, Stalin-wannabe, all-around thug and blight on the landscape who wants to grab back all the bits of the old Soviet Union and reassemble the Evil Empire? Why is it whack to be concerned about him waving the Big Red Stick around his western borders?

OK, I'll put it this way; is NATO, and, by inference, the United States, ready to fight Russia over Moldova?

Because that's really the bottom line. Is the West willing to fight (since assuming that the only way to ensure that Putin's ambitions don't mean Russian troops back in Latvia, say, or eastern Ukraine) to contain Russia in its present borders and prevent the reassembly of the Soviet Union? Will we fight to preserve the independence of the Baltics, or the states on the Ruthenian plain?

We weren't in 1945, and that was before the Soviets had nuclear weapons.

We weren't for Hungary in 1956, or for Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Even beyond the question of open warfare, are we prepared for a new Cold War over eastern Europe?

We might need to be, as we were prepared to face off with the Soviets over Western Europe in the last half of the 20th Century.

But if that's the case we, We the People, should really have a serious talk.

Are we ready for another Cold War? What's our goal? What's our strategy? How much are we willing to spend in blood and treasure?

Where do we draw the line where we'll fight the Russians rather than let them cross?

The eastern border of Latvia?

The eastern border of Ukraine?

The eastern border of Poland?

Do we even know?

This isn't a spur-of-the-moment sort of decision, or one that is best made around one individual incident. And, no, I don't like what Putin has been doing in the Crimea and I don't trust his ambitions in the Near Abroad. But to mobilize for a new Cold War is committing ourselves to a winter that might last for generations as the previous one did.

I don't trust GEN Breedlove - or any other serving officer - to make that decision for me. There's a reason that Congress was given the authority to declare war and formalize peace, after all.

Into the Crimea again...

I've been fascinated and sort of apalled watching the southeastern Ukraine delaminate and the Russian Federation do...well...something. With marines. Or soldiers. Or both. Somewhere.

The whole thing reminds me of the sorts of bizarre wars the South American countries used to fight, where armies would just disappear into the Atacama or the Chaco or some other damn place and the New York Times would print some sort of vague description two months later full of errors and guesses and the whole business would eventually be described in histories as something completely different.

I honestly have no idea what the hell is going on in the Crimea, but whatever it is it does not appear to be a Good Thing. Another reminder of the immense pile of clusterfuck that was Russia and then the Soviet Union and then Russia again. Whatever else the place has or is - and it has been and is many wonderful and admirable human things - what is has never had and does not have now is a decent form of government. Neither does Ukraine, for that matter. Or a hell of a lot of the rest of the world. My country is no prize, but, fuck, we're better off at the moment that these poor bastards.

Mind you, Teabaggery could still change that.

Still. Troops are matching through the Crimea. Again. Some places seem to attract history like a pretty girl on a barstool late on Friday night.

Crimea seems to be one of them.

Russia Gets Pucked

I won't pretend that I wasn't quietly satisfied at the hockey "Winter War" when I got up this morning.

The 2014 Sochi Olympic Games as Putin's pet project always irked me. I know, I konw, the guy is no worse than many another politician, just another grifting thug, but he's a grifting thug in charge of a hell of a big country with pretensions of global power and seeing the Finns piss in his morning kvass was as satisfying as watching a Gingrich marriage fail or a Wall Street CEO perp-walked.

No matter how painful the failure, if the object of the pain is really loathsome you just can't help smiling when they get booted in the nuts.

I don't pretend that my country is a treasure. But Russia is, by all accounts, a goddamn mess.

That made me think about how many of the world's nations and governments are similarly completely screwed, at least for the people who have to live with them.

My friend Labrys mentions a couple of the more visible of these sorts of screw-jobs this morning: Ukraine. Syria. North Korea.

The amazing thing I come across is the number of people - largely on the Right but extending across the political spectrum to the "liberal interventionists" - who seem to think that the United States should use its Green Lantern powers of armed force to "straighten out" these fucked-up places.

In most of these people it seems to me that their "analysis" completely elides why these places are so damn fucked up right now. Which is, simply put, that they were always fucked up for one reason or another (or a cascade of multiple reasons..!) and are just showing the latest symptoms of that total fuckedupitude.

I mean, how the hell was, short of a massive sociopolitical and economic makeover, Ukraine every going to be a haven of social peace, economic dynamism, and political good-government? Ukraine is an internally divided pseudostate suffering from the usual post-Soviet hangover of thugokleptocracy and economic malaise. The conflict between the West-leaning “Ukranian” western part and the Soviet-leaning, “Russian” eastern and southern parts was almost inevitable and almost equally doomed to messy political breakdown.

How the fuck is anyone, let alone some helicopter foreign power, going to change that without an investment of blood and treasure that would make the Roman or British Empires look as brief and shallow as a Hollywood marriage?

Syria? Gee…autocratic rule by a Shiite minority over a Sunni majority in a part of the world where the lagacies of Ottoman and colonial rule range from dysfunctional to toxic and are constantly rubbed raw by the irritant of Israeli and U.S. (and Soviet) fucking-around? Who’d have thought that THAT would end up being fucked up and difficult to fix?

North Korea? What sane person even wants to stick a fist in THAT tar-baby? The best possible outcome from intervention – nearly immediate collapse of the Kim regime – still leaves the neighbors China and South Korea with an impoverished and desperate mess on their hands that makes the unification of Germany look like child’s play by comparison.

The worst possible outcome is so nightmarish to make anyone but a complete idiot shudder.

My Bride, lovely woman that she is, is perhaps a great example of this. She has recently become fascinated with North Korea, and was glued to her tablet as the U.N. laid out its case against the North Korean government. And what a case it is: Murders, judicial and otherwise. Rape, torture, infanticide, starvation, confinements that make the Cell of Little Ease look like a chaise lounge...

She was, as any decent person should be, appalled. But what appalled her more was my cynical response to her report of the U.N.'s call to action.

"Yeah. Sure." I said. "And who the hell is going to do that?" She asked what I meant.

"The Norks won't do anything, the people are beat-down and the Kimistas like things how they are. There's almost no economic or political leverage strong enough to make the Kim regime people chance making reforms that will end with them getting Ceaușescued.

The Chinese don't want to prod them in case the place falls apart and they get overrun with a gajillion starving Norks. The South Koreans want that even less plus with the possibility of nerve gas sauce on the side?

Not.

We, the U.S., already have too damn much on our plate to want a potential geopolitical disaster on the Pacific Rim. Nobody else has either the give-a-shit, the muscle, or both."

"Plus, frankly, what the hell could you do?

North Korea is a fucking black hole of bad governance and economic disaster that has intentionally cut itself off from the sane world. It's never had a moment of civil society or modern democracy, not a scintilla of economic sanity, or social normality since some time before the Japanese invaded a-way the fuck back near the turn of the 20th Century. North Korea is a complete fuckstory, and simply arriving with an M203 in one hand and an Ipad in the other? Ain't gonna change that."

"Regardless of what happens to the Kim regime, North Korea is destined to be fucked up for generations unless the North Korean people can manage a miracle AND some combination of foreign powers can help them and not fuck up somehow, which is more likely than not."

She desperately wanted to believe that there was something that the Good People of the World could do to change that. And in that she's no different than the other good people of my country who want the U.S. to "help" Syria, or Ukraine, or Egypt, or Nigeria, or Venezuela.

Or the assholes that just want to nuke 'em until they glow and then pick off the survivors in the dark.

Neither approach is an actual sane foreign policy.

Which needs to accept that a whole lot of the world is utterly screwed, politically, and pretty much all those of us in the relatively-unscrewed portions can do is stay the fuck out of their nuthouse and learn from them that good government is precious and not to be taken - or thrown away - lightly.

By, for example, electing idiots, grifters, and morons who will reject things like science and rationality in favor of religious nonsense and economic snake-oil. By pretending that economies are magic and not created by humans with human failings and, thus, liable to reward thieves and charlatans if not judiciously managed. By blundering about the globe expending blood and treasure trying to unfuck places that can only be unfucked by those living there with a critical stake in accomplishing and preserving the unfucking.

By ignoring that social and political divisions are far easier to create than repair, and that once the social, political, and economic cohesion of a polity is wrecked it may be impossible to reassemble.

Once we've figured that out then we might simply be able to sit back and just enjoy watching a gang of plucky Finns take an axe to their asshole neighbor's motti.

That and enjoy watching the Russian autocrat forced to listen to the organ in his hockey palace play him a sad, sad song.