A wise observer once cautioned about the danger of overthinking matters. That is, sometimes per Occam’s Razor the right answer is the most direct, obvious and simple one; and that certainly applies in spades to the unfathomable mystery of how Washington got itself to the brink of war with the world’s only nuclear power with an arsenal equivalent to America’s.
The answer is 37% favorables versus 55% unfavorables!
That’s the worst presidential approval score for this stage of the game in modern history, and it is also the approximate reason why the world is on the brink of WWIII.
Indeed, nothing has plunged like Biden’s approval line above since Tricky Dick’s sky-dive during the course of 1973 as the ugly details of Watergate made their way into the public domain.
So, yes, this is Wag the Dog 2.0, but it’s not a movie: These fools are conducting a live fire drill and pushing the world closer to the brink of nuclear Armageddon than it’s been since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
Moreover, the comparison is about as apt as it gets. President John Kennedy rightly said no Soviet missiles in our backyard 90-miles away. Yet the prospect of American missiles hard upon a prospective NATO-Ukraine/Russian border is self-evidently what led to Putin’s desperate attack.
So now comes the great distraction of Joe Biden’s War Games, and the stench-ridden hypocrisy of his inner circle’s attempt to explain the mayhem being inflicted on the people of Ukraine and the global economy as 100% Vlad Putin’s doing.
The fact is, Cool Hand Vlad gave them first years, after his 2008 Munich Security Conference warning about the eastward extension of NATO, and then weeks and days, after his sensible December 15 plan for security guarantees for all parties concerned.
So let us reprise. The safety and security of the American homeland would have not been jeopardized by an iota had Washington agreed to the following:
- Permanent neutrality and non-membership in NATO for Ukraine;
- Removal of NATO’s forward anti-missile batteries from near the Russian border;
- The re-stationing of US and other western troops to the old NATO territories (i.e. Germany rather than Poland and Rumania).
What response did these utterly harmless requests receive from Sleepy’s Joe’s arrogant beltway lifers and Swamp Creatures?
Why, nothing more than an unending and utterly sanctimonious lecture on the rule of law, the sanctity of borders and NATO’s “open door” policy, as if 72 US post-war attempts to topple foreign governments – often violently as in the case of Iraq and Vietnam – had never happened. Or that legitimate “sphere-of-influence” things like the Monroe Doctrine and the Cuban Missile Crisis had been airbrushed from the history books.
Indeed, a security guarantee deal with Russia was so easily available until the very 11th hour of the invasion that you can only conclude one thing: The neocon criminals and beltway lifers alike who surround Sleepy Joe truly did opt for Wag the Dog 2.0 to save his catastrophically failing presidency.
But look where it has gotten us now. Things have become so desperate on the ground in Ukraine – contrary to MSM prattle about the heroic resistance of Ukraine’s unarmed civilian population – that Ukraine’s clown-car president has publicly requested Washington to establish a “no fly zone” over most of Ukraine.
That is to say, this crackpot is calling for the guaranteed start of WWIII because he has dithered away his presidency since being elected in 2019, paddling around Washington in kneepads with his pro-NATO talking points pasted to his forehead, when he should have been implementing the Minsk Accords and dismantling the Azov Battalion and other Neo-Nazi militias that were raining death upon the Russian speaking populations of the breakaway republics in the Donbas.
That’s right. Once the tolerable political balance between the east and west in Ukraine was upended in the Maidan Coup of February 2014, the utterly artificial and ahistorical polity of the Ukraine was destined to be partitioned. And since the margin of Zelensky’s unlikely victory over the oligarch thug and incumbent, Petro Poroshenko, had occurred in the Russian speaking east, it should have been a task suited to someone who had something between their ears except a vacuum.
But Zelensky didn’t get it in the slightest. As a native and Russian speaking son of southeastern Ukraine, Zelensky actually grew up in a part of modern Ukraine that had been Russian for 370 years!
That’s right. The guy was not only a Ruuskie but his famous career as a TV actor in the show called “Servant of the People”, in which he played a school teacher who accidentally became president of Ukraine (yes, life not only imitates art, but apparently duplicates it, as well), was actually initially broadcast in Russian and dubbed into Ukrainian.
Indeed, prior to that he had starred in a movie called Love in the Big City 2, which were actually banned by the Maidan coup for the sin of being produced in the hated Russian language. So if by background and experience, anyone should have been prepared to mid-wife the amicable partition of the artificial state created by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev, he would have been the man.
Alas, he was too stupid and unschooled, apparently, (he dropped out of high school at age 17 to become a comedian) to even realize that the purple area in this hypothetical future map of a partitioned Ukraine had always been Russian, never Ukrainian.
So here we are being braced with calls for America and Europe to commit hari kari from a nincompoop who still doesn’t understand what he job is; and who recklessly calls for his own countryman to commit suicide keeping the purple area inside the border of Ukraine, when, at best, the green rump on the map is all Ukraine ever amounted to during its best days prior to the Soviet Union.
In any event, a TV actor who has no script other than that handed to him by his Washington/NATO overseers is one thing. And at the end of the day, it small potatoes compared to the grotesque negligence and misdirection of Sleepy Joe’s own keepers.
That is to say, Secy Blinkey and Snake Sullivan should be bent over the above map in earnest conversation with their Russian counterparts as to the fine points of the partition, and the meaning of “neutrality”, “de-nazification” and “demilitarization” of the green area of the map, which is to become the future “Ukraine’, if there is to be anything left at all.
Needless to say, they are not even talking to the Russians. They are, in fact, so red in tooth and claw with the blood of economic warfare that they would drive the global economy to collapse rather than acknowledge that they – and they alone – brought this horrendous situation to the doorstep of the world.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
