A depressing read Phillips. I’d be curious to know what you make of Elliot Cohen’s “facts are stubborn things” argument that may mean Trump is not as bad on Ukraine as we fear (personally, I think he will be worse)?
Also, there doesn’t seem to have been much analysis of the recent uptick in Russian targeting of commercial shipping entering/exiting Ukrainian ports. For months, there had appeared to be a level of mutual deterrence but the Russian calculus appears to have changed. Presumably, the Ukrainians could start attacking shipping coming out of Novorossiysk, including oil tankers, but aren’t?
Anyway, good to see you being quoted in The Economist. I like their analysis but feel sometimes they have been guilty of fuelling the overly pessimistic narrative. Their most recent piece on the problems Russia is facing is excellent.
Ive work very well with him as you know--all I will say is that I am much more pessimistic about Trump. I fear Trump will do what he wants--and what he wants is not good for Ukraine
Trump has never cared about facts. He creates his own reality. For crying out loud, he skipped numbers 21-30 for floors in the Trump Tower and called it a 69-floor building when the stubborn fact is that it has 59 floors.
My understanding of Cohen’s argument is that whatever Trump might say his administration would ultimately end up inheriting the Ukraine situation and that the inherent reality of this could act as a moderating influence. As previously stated, I’m sceptical of this (as is Cohen’s co-host on ‘Shield of the Republic’ Eric Edelman).
That inherent reality won't be a problem for Trump's financial or legal situation, or for his power. Therefore he will ignore it and do whatever he wants.
That’s fair Andrew, however, I posed the question because ultimately none of us know and the likes of Cohen and Lawrence Freedman, who has also urged caution against overly doom laden predictions, are serious commentators whose analysis I respect.
Thanks again for your sobering analysis. I guess that's what happens when two old geezers rule the Ukraine debate in the US. They're still stuck in geopolitical Cold War thinking when it comes to the allmight of Russia. They've clearly missed the paradigm shift. Russia is not the USSR. In a way, the modern day Russia is more like its czarist counterpart of the nineteenth century. A new sick man of Europe.
I think the Cold War thinking is still very powerful for Biden (might write more about that)--Trump is different. Hes all about self-interest. Not sure hes even aware of a Cold War paradigm
My personal opinion based on nothing but my impressions seeing and hearing about Trump is that he still has Daddy Issues and since the death of Roy Cohn, he is still looking for a strongman replacement. Viewing objectively, a lot of Trump's behavior can seem childish - name calling, etc.
It is not childish, I wish it were, No it is the dictators' strategy:
Demonize your political opponent,
Make them look incompetent and ridiculous.
It is often attributed to Paul Manafort the political advisor of Nixon, Reagan, Trump, Putin's puppet in Ukraine and of course working with Putin to discredit Hilary Clinton. The other half of the advice is not engage in policy discussion before an election. But it's has been around the the 1930'S.
Too many people ignore Trump's 4 decade advocacy for isolationism and protectionism. He supports extreme versions of both. The canard that Trump believes in nothing is misleading. He's mostly about self-promotion, but he's zealous about his few principles.
While I don't think the chance of Russia using nuclear weapons in late 2022 was anywhere near 50%, it was nonzero. There was a chance of Russian army collapse (especially if Ukraine had been helped much more), and we simply don't know what Putin might do in a panic and under a tight deadline to react. We know that he's very bad at crisis management, and a precipitous defeat in 2022 could have really threatened his power and even his life. So I can actually imagine him nuking Ukrainian troops pouring through the Perekop Isthmus into Crimea back in 2022. In 2026 such reaction in the same circumstances is incomparably less likely because by then the Russian population will have fully internalized the idea that Russia's not going to win the war. But in 2022 a much quicker revelation that Russia is a lot less powerful than people had believed would have shocked the population much more.
My own view, fwiw, is that it was never going to happen because the Chinese were making it very clear to the Russians that they wanted no nuclear weapons use. The deterrence that the Chinese have over the Russians is much stronger than our own
The recent push for the Chinese to have a worldwide No first use pledge is probably to protect their invasion of Taiwan. Therefore, they do not want the threshold lowered by Putin using nukes. This pledge plays well Politically but I think is for their advantage in Taiwan. China wants to deter Putin because they don't want the US to find a lower barrier for using nukes against China over Taiwan.
Yes, it's a very strong deterrence. But we don't know how much Putin can be deterred in a panic. That's why I say there was nonzero chance. Of course, we also don't know how Russian elites and the population would have reacted to Russian army collapsing in the field. Basically, Putin might have had a terrible choice between angering the Chinese and angering people with guns in the next room, so to say. He might have perceived showing strength as his own chance of immediate survival. Of course, an important question is whether the military would have gone along with that. We need to remember that we have no idea what the US intelligence was getting from inside the Kremlin. And again, it is also possible that Putin was deliberately feeding them something scary.
I don't think the election is a coin flip. Polls have a limited utility in the current situation because they are simply not accurate enough. Just take the latest Quinnipiac polls showing Trump up 3% in Michigan and down 3% in Pennsylvania. They can't both be true. Taken at face value, they mean that Trump is doing 6% better in MI than in PA. That's just not believable. The last Republican who did better in MI than in PA was George H.W. Bush a third of century ago. The last one to do that by at least 6 points was Ronald Reagan. The new polls mean a roughly 7 point swing in MI vs PA for Trump from his past two elections, and there are not anywhere near enough Arab and Muslim voter in Michigan to explain that. This 7% swing is basically the same as if Quinnipiac released a pair of polls showing Trump doing better in Minnesota than in Florida!
So the polls basically show the race tied with very slight advantage for Harris. We need to look at history and the fundamentals to gain more insight than the polls can provide. We know from polls that some 3-4% of voters support nobody in this election (not even some minor candidate). We also know that most of them are at least theoretically open to voting for Harris, as her unfavorable rating is 46.6% on 538 (and virtually all Kamala haters presumably support Trump, currently at 46% on 538, or Stein, or West). So she has room to grow. Trump - much less so. Each and every election of Trump era is a referendum on him, since he's such a polarizing figure, plus his ego demands him being the center of attention. Everybody knows who Trump is. Everybody has an opinion of him, usually a strong one. And there's nothing he can (or will!) do to shift it. Those 3-4% of voters are not simply waiting to learn more about Trump. They just don't want to vote for him, period. A small fraction of them may still eventually judge him the lesser of two evils and vote accordingly. But most won't. Many will vote for Harris. We know from history that in a referendum election the undecided voters usually break heavily for the challenger (as long as they don't find the challenger unacceptable).
Thus we can expect Kamala to increase her current national 2.5% margin by at least 1%, perhaps 2%. And then there's the issue of abortion. Democrats generally overpefrormed polls after Dobbs. Chances are that the pollsters underestimate the likelihood of young women voting in their likely voter models. Plus there are important abortion referenda in some important states, especially Arizona and Florida, while the aftermath of two hurricanes may depress turnout in heavily Republican areas of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. Between the abortion turnout and the undecided voters likely breaking for Harris, the election is probably more like two coin flips (going the same way) for Trump. Basically, he needs there to be a significant polling error in Kamala's favor (like the one in 2020 in Biden's favor - although even at that magnitude it might just become a coin flip rather than a sure Trump victory).
Long story short--I dont believe any individual polls, but I think the balance of all the polls (non-partisan, which I disregard) show most of the swing states within the margin of error. For me thats enough to say 50-50
In four out of seven Trump's support on 538 is between 47% and 47.5%. Even if he picks another 0.5% and 3% vote third party (less than 2% did in 2020), Harris will get between 48.5% and 49% vs. his 47.5% to 48%. And that's without even higher turnout of young women. That's why I say he needs most polls to overestimate Harris. If they accurate on average, he's toast. Unless he can somehow quickly boost Kamala's unfavorability by several points.
That’s not really what margin of error means. It’s sampling error, which applies to one study. With 20 or 50 studies showing MOL the same thing it’s unlikely they all have the same sampling problem.
Following on from your quotations from Mike Johnson, I have a question. If the Republicans are on course to win the Senate and the house, then if she becomes President will Kamala Harris actually be able to help Ukraine as much as we wish?
When I read Harris‘s comments about Ukraine and NATO, I wonder why the hell I’m sending money to their campaign. I know I know to stop Trump. But
Well, at a minimum, she will be better than Trump--and that really matters (for Ukraine and everything else). As you say, though, unless both houses of Congress are willing to approve aid, she would be restrained in how much she can give. Im not hopeful about the GOP in the short term
The only point of Hope I can think of considering a republican Senate and house, but a Democrat president, i.e. Kamala Harris, is that at this point Trump may have less influence on Congress after losing election
There are enough members in the house and senate to pass Ukraine aid: almost all democrats and a substantial minority of Republicans. That's the way the aid bill passed.
But whether such a Bill gets brought up for a vote will be up to leadership in the House (with luck Hakeem Jeffries) and Senate (a republican, nobody knows which one).
It’s quite a lot of money that’s already been approved. With Harris at least that money will be allocated. If Trump wins, Biden will have to allocate it all in a hurry. Ukraine will not get what would have been optimal, and I imagine a Trump administration will find someway to not send all of it.
Trump is a Putin puppet. His Russian ties are known but the MSM has not fully acknowledged them. Why? Those of us who support Ukraine are still here. We’re not going away.
I agree. Thanks Ben. This is really the only positive in this most depressing post. I, along with everyone else, have been waiting for so long for something, ANYTHING, to deter these seemingly-unstoppable glide bombs. Now let’s see Ukraine launch their own glide bombs back at the Russians.
The glide bombs have been brutally effective. If true this really is an interesting development.
Whilst the Ukrainians have been successful in striking some of the depots storing these weapons the ability to shoot down the aircraft firing them has the potential to be very significant.
The Russian Air Force has been generally quite risk averse throughout the conflict. If they assess they are likely to lose a considerable number of aircraft this may impact their willingness to conduct these strikes.
Important not to jump to conclusions but one to watch for sure.
❝Chief of General Staff Raimund Andrzejcza❞ Is he really Chief of General Staff? I checked his shoulder pads and they are of a mere Major-General. Also it is easy to announce that Poland will do this or that but its only speech and pledges. There is no guarantee that NATO would actually work.
Thanks Phillips for this well reasoned if somewhat bleak analysis. It maps well with what I am reading from Ukrainian sources.
When I think back to the rhetoric President Biden used just before and shortly after the full scale invasion: the “limited incursion” gaffe - which appeared to signal to Putin that if he did a small scale incursion that might be okay; or the speech he made in Madrid in April 2022, where he promised to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes for them to, mumble mumble, “not lose”. I can’t quite quote him verbatim but that is the gist of what he said and this rhetoric shaped the policy he was comfortable with.
Likewise Trump is a loose cannon and we just cannot be sure what he will be like, but we also cannot act surprised if he does what he has signalled he would do if he gets his orange hands back on the keys to the White House.
Harris - again we don’t really know what she will bring.
Oh for a presidential figure of the stature of FDR, and while we’re at it can we get a Churchill like figure into number ten Downing Street?
I'm not sure what part of Phillips rant was well reasoned but Biden stood down the 70 years long doctrine of meeting Russian aggression with strength intentionally he claimed in order to, in Biden's words, "not provoke Putin".
My learned translation of beltway politics and military policy reads those words as we wanted this war.
One can only hope Harris is being coy and evasive on Ukraine as a political strategy to avoid alienating some voters and win. I guess if somehow she wins we might figure out her Ukraine position by who she appointments to advise on national security. But a vigorous plan to assist Ukraine will always be difficult due to the Mike Johnson's of the political world, post-election violence and controversy and Trump screaming from the rooftops
Exactly! Ukraine enjoys, or at least used to, broad and bipartisan support in the US, and helping Ukraine military makes us safer. Support for Israel is contentious and seems to, on balance, undermine our interests in every region on nearly every topic. But Israel gets air defense teams deployed preemptively while Ukraine, after 2.5 years of terrorism, does not?
—> Why is this happening? (I’m actually confused, not asking rhetorically. I’m sure there are other reasons besides Israel has nukes.)
I am on a sabbatical at a College where they give me a house to live. I think I might be able to geuss which of my predecessors fixed the TV so it goes directly to Fox News! It means whenever I turn on the TV I see Trump or Vance addressing an audience and I struggle with the remote to make it go to Amazon or Hulu. Trumps audience boo when Ukraine or Zelensky are mentioned. There’s no way his attitude to Ukraine is ‘unpredictable’, as Elliott Cohen put it. I like his podcast. Id like him to be right. But, especially after the choice of Vance as running mate, its not believable. At the debate the Host asked Trump several times if he would support Ukraine and the answer was negative.
Hi Martina, for a bit of a better picture, I suggest looking at what’s been allocated versus pledged to give a more apples to apples comparison. And wait the bilateral aid as much more valuable than the aid funneled through the EU, many countries were using to send junk in exchange for you subsidy.
Support in Australia may be high, but tangible actions have been not so great, from what I can tell.
(1) “2-3 months of explosives”…nonsense! Only if you translate it all, including the 2k pound glide bombs, etc, into artillery shells, and then specify that you’re talking about artillery-equivalent ammunition.
(2) Long range weapons from allies = good. Real sanctions = better. The political will
- for a variety of hard-to-comprehend or hard-to-accept/contemplate reasons, is not there. it has not been there for many many months, despite how clearly it would serve our self interest, despite the war crimes committed systematically and at scale. Our leaders today do not believe “never again” - it was apparently just lip service they paid. It seems only the Baltics and Poland are ready to do what it takes. Maybe Finland. Not even wealthy Norway, not even the UK.
(3) the above is true despite heavy popular support for the Ukrainian cause
(4) the above is true despite pathetic political leadership (speaking by and large, of course. there are surely a handful of exceptions) which has failed to compellingly and repeatedly articulate to domestic audiences why Ukraine’s interest is our interest.
(5) I’ve commented before and it still rings true - there seems to be no vision for victory beyond letting Ukraine bleed itself dry.
(6) what happened to the ranged campaign against anti-air assets? I wonder if it achieved its goals, or if not, why it was de-prioritized.
(7) it seems Ukraine has still not figured out how to remove the factors (the ones it reasonably can) which keep would be volunteers from signing up.
(8) with Russia attacking Ukraine commercial shipping, does the detente break? Will Ukraine begin using sea drones on known shipments of dual use goods?
(9) the nuclear analysis in this article is not so good, imo. The reports say Biden administration thought there was a 50% likelihood of tactical nukes based on intelligence. We do not have access to that intelligence, so not sure how one could completely dismiss the conclusion. However, this does stink a bit of some assholes trying to throw out a narrative to give cover to their failures.
where to begin... the notion the Trump loves Putin is beyond absurd, where is the evidence of this? Are we still (and by we I mean you) still believing the Steele Dossier even after it was proven in court that the Clinton campaign hired Christopher Steele to fabricate it out of thin air?
the modern, anti liberal Democrat Party's ability to swallow whatever the MSM narrative is hook line and sinker without the smallest shred of evidence is fascinating.
ain
I find it even more interesting that you have chosen to suddenly like Woodward again... his previous book was about how he found evidence that Biden blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline, when he presented his case for this he was suddenly "right wing" but I guess now that he has jumped back on the train of insanity making claims based on nothing that Trump loves Putin he can be claimed once again by the left.
Nice Party you have there guys... while The Republican Party has become an actual Big Tent party which has welcomed in notable former Democrats like RFK Junior and Tulsi Gabbard and Comedians like Russell Brand, the Non-Democratic Party, after installing their latest shill candidate without any democratic election process have welcomed in people like bonafide war criminal Dick Cheney responsible for lying us into a 7 trillion dollar, failed war with his lies of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' that killed some estimated 2 million Iraqis all told.
In this same article where you cite Woodward's factless innuendo you tout Trump's 34 felonies without mentioning that the Court of Appeals eviscerated the Democrat prosecuting lawyers and reportedly said that this looks like "nothing less than a wholly political motivated attempt at election interference" which anyone who was unbiased and with any awareness of the law could only agree that the litany of pretzel like legal acrobatics it took to get a past the statute of limitations misdemeanor and turn it into a fictional felony by instructing the jurors that they didn't have to ever learn the underlying law which was allegedly broken to form their verdict, neither did they all have to agree on which it might be.
The federal Appeals judge further noted that the prosecutors may very well find themselves censured by the courts to the point where the prosecutors closing remarks were not to make their case but to practically beg the court not to punish them.
Trump and Republicans and others like myself who do not want to fund Ukraine do not do so because we love Putin, but because unlike the Democrats we LOVE AMERICA.
Ukraine's problems are their own and we recognize that everywhere US foreign policy has tried to effect in the last 70 years has only blown up in our face. We want an end to the interventionist wars of US global Hegemony and guess what guys.... so does more than HALF THE WORLD.
More of the world is supporting Russia and not us. Whatever you think of this doesn't matter, as we are seeing the very real possibility of Turkey and it's huge military joining BRICS and subsequently leaving Nato, followed by Hungary we can see cracks in our own alliances while Russia continues to gain political, economic, and military strength.
We believe that maybe after our disastrous meddling in Viet Nam, Iran, Iraq, Afganistan, Libya and El Salvador we might want to cool the jets a little and take care of our own country.
That is what you ilk have chosen to turn into "love for Putin". We need to take care of ourselves and stop trying to police the world. After WW2 it has simply just not done us nor anyone really any good and only caused the world to hate us.
Somehow you group of lemmings believe that we should keep going with the decades long failed string of policies until we have nothing left and anyone who simply says it might be time to fix our own problems instead of trying to fix everyones else's is somehow a 'Putin Apologist'.
Allow me as a former Democrat to speak for the entirety of the Republican Party to which I have found myself more and more in alignment with these days when I say that we do not love Putin, we just don't care about protecting Europe any more... 100 years was enough, it was good for WW1 I guess and WW2 for sure but after that it has been diminishing returns. Even fighting the cold war may not have been wholly necessary for America as communism was doomed to implode anyway like it always seems to do.
Anyway, we, at least 50 % of the country and likely a much higher percent just don't give a single fuck about Ukraine, its highly corrupt leadership, or perpetuating a failed strategy of creating more and more enemies and hate for America across the whole world.
The general stance of the Modern Republican Party is NO WAR
While the blood thirty Democrats want to send everyone else's sons to teir death to fight a war we can't win over something which in no way benefits us at all.
Nice Party you got there guys, I'm embarrassed to say that I used to be part of it.
> While the blood thirty Democrats want to send everyone else's sons to teir death to fight a war we can't win over something which in no way benefits us at all.
There’s no evidence that Democrats want to send Americans to fight in this war. Or are you talking about sending Ukrainians to war? American Democrats have no power to send Ukrainians to war. Likewise, American Democrats have no power to send Europeans to war.
What you wrote here seems to be a wild exaggeration or misunderstanding. I can’t tell which.
What does this mean? We mostly send supply surplus equipment to Ukraine, with some exceptions like artillery shells. What better purpose could those shells have than killing invading Russian soldiers?
Interesting post. To use a turn of phrase, it is always troublesome when passions turn to politics and politics turn to passions. But that is where we are now in this country.
War is just politics. Are there good wars? I don't know. All wars seem to point to our limited imaginations in solving problems. To my mind, not all wars mean bloodshed. You mentioned one form - the cold war. There are several cold wars now in which we are all entrenched.
1) The treatment of facts and the information we receive about facts is a cold war.
2) The treatment of women's rights is a cold war. Abortion has been weaponized.
3) Immigration is a key weapon of the new cold war. But that has its bloody elements.
4) Race and ethnicity continue their claim as political weapons.
5) "Whataboutism" as seen in your examples above is rampant. If you only look back one misses where they are now.
There is a book I recently read you might like: << This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality>> by Peter Pomerantsev.
"War is politics by other means" is the famous quote you're looking for, it's often said that war is what happens when diplomacy doesn't work.
with due respect however, your comment comes from a place of absolute privilege. None of the "wars" you mentioned are actual wars. If you ever lived through an actual you'd never equate the things on your 5 point list there with actual war.
Like many on Phillips's threads you have chosen to use the topic of a violent, deadly and bloody war that didn't need to happen with whatever your grievances are with modern American politics and to be honest, as I mentioned already, I feel that it speaks to your privilege... the privilege of living in a country brought specifically to you by people who were forced to kill and/or die in actual wars so that you can sit here and make these exaggerated and not at all apt comparisons.
They also unfortunately died so grifting war mongers like Phillips who gets paid indirectly by the war machine to propagate more war can feel self righteous about as he virtue signals from his place of privilege while he advocates for sending Ukrainian men to their deaths for the profit.
in answer to your 5 grievances:
1) "The treatment of facts and the information we receive about facts is a cold war."
... do you have any facts to share?
2) "The treatment of women's rights is a cold war. Abortion has been weaponized."
... it's the left who has weaponized abortion. Trump and the courts correctly decided it was a states right as the constitution outlines. No where in the constitution is there a right to kill an unborn baby,
there should however be a law where if you equate this generally sick practice of as "women's health care" you yourself could then also be subject to being pulled apart limb from limb and sucked up a vacuum
3) Immigration is a key weapon of the new cold war. But that has its bloody elements.
Dems are using immigration as a war for sure, as you are bringing in illegals and allowing them to vote in federal elections and making it illegal to ask for ID somehow claiming that it's racist to require it, when the real racism is the presumption by Democrats that black people are somehow too dumb to figure out how to go to the DMV and get an ID or they don't have $35 to do it.
4) Race and ethnicity continue their claim as political weapons.
(see above comment on how the new racism in modern America is all from the Democrats)
5) "Whataboutism" as seen in your examples above is rampant. If you only look back one misses where they are now.
(not sure where whataboutism is in my comment??)
I appreciate the book recommendation, looking at the author took me 30 seconds to google that he himself is spreading total and pure propaganda.
Your recommendation seems to me to be more of an implication that I may somehow be impressionable and need to reform to the herd mentality you seem to subscribe to, when really I've got 50 plus IQ points on virtually most everyone I've encountered in this thread of factless, sycophantic, mis-educated and propagandized, intellectual dishonest morons. Phillips being the biggest one so far!
Hopefully that is not too unkind, it's not my intention to be cruel but you guys make it so easy :)
Read up on Nixon’s southern strategy and how the parties changed. All the southern racists felt abandoned by the Democrats, and they found a new home in the Republican Party.
> making it illegal to ask for ID somehow claiming that it's racist to require it
The reason Democrats oppose requiring ID to vote is that some American citizens do not have any government ID, because they don’t drive. Typically, this happens with senior citizens. You may be surprised to learn that some American citizens do not even have a birth certificate. It happens.
Democrats as a general rule would like all Americans to participate in the democratic process, whereas Republicans continue to try to bring back aspects of Jim Crow, with its many obstacles to voting. They have to do this, because they have invited racists into their party and thus made people of color unwelcome.
GOP has done substantial research and this is completely false
the ONLY REASON why you treasonous bastards try to make this weak ass argument,(one which most black people find offensive), is because you are trying to steal an election you know you can't win
I'm VERY well versed on that topic and it's 100% bull shit...
I used to be one of you Mr Paul... I know all the things you know, I'm aware of all the syllogistic arguments that are all accepted as fact even despite the fact that almost none of them have had to withstand any scrutiny.
The concept of safe spaces in Universities created a petrie dish where most of leftist doctrine was not allowed to be challenged and thusly grew like a fungus to rot the brains of the youth ... I was one of them!
I'm highly educated on all things leftist politics, from the concept that a trans woman IS a woman back to the teachings of Marcuse and last but not least the extreme 'genius' of Karl Marx. I generally am more aware of leftists doctrine that most ardent leftists.
I won't bother debunking the Southern Strategy for you, but the bottom line is this:
Democrats are engaging in active censorship (authoritarian)
Democrats are twisting the law to prosecute their political enemies
Democrats are the real racists, it's really oddly come full circle
Democrats try to control all main stream media apparatus
these are all hallmark traits of authoritarianism
you guys kinda treat Trump like he's Goldstein from Orwell's 1894 complete with your 2 minutes of hate each day, except your two minutes of hate never end
Democrats are full of hate and it seems all the can do is hate
Suppressing voting... you mean like making sure that the machines in Republican districts all fail on election day like in Arizona in the midterms?
Like counting all the ballots in PA in the middle of the night after they kick out all the GOP observers and magically Biden surges over 800,000 votes, the exact amount needed to over take Trump's huge lead?
Like the 70 plus cases of Democrat election interference, ballot harvesting and the convictions for throwing out GOOP Ballots, like the mules illegally dropping off ballots.
Like the thousands of ballots found in trash heaps all of which were GOP votes?
there's only ONE reason why you guys are scared of ID for voting, is to be able to cheat.
You need ID to go into a bar, I guess black people don't go into bars, you need ID to get on a plane. I guess black people don't fly on planes? You need ID to buy a bus pass, I guess black people don't take the bus... only you authoritarian communists believe this total bullshit...
Time to wake up brother, Thump cares about people, about the working class, Trump is Anti War, Trump is for security of the border, and Trump is GREAT for the economy
Democrats are PRO WAR, PRO CENSORSHIP, pro corporate capture, pro big pharma.
I write to you as I talk to my elder son. He is a Libertarian and to be honest, in terms of politics, there is little we agree on. But, we listen to each other and we try to learn. The important part is that each individual is entitled to their truth and that we do not get lost from searching for it or being driven from it. To exercise that truth as an individual, we have a responsibility — to know what is going on about us and to look out for each other. Care is essential. I do not think you are impressionable at all and I am happy you seem to care.
We can point out things we find offensive or absurd in each and every political position offered by our main political parties and by those in this country with strong political pull.
Your point on privilege has been something I have been thinking about for weeks. We do not know war here. I wonder how attitudes would change should we experience the bloodshed firsthand. Unlike most of the world., war is something we read about. Thinking along the lines of other people's kids fighting our wars saddens me.
The other concern I have and that my son agrees with is the power a small number of people hold over information flows and informational technologies like satellites. How dependent are countries on Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos?
Thanks for sharing. I truly appreciate your views. I confess I probably make it too easy to refute but I write from the heart. ^^
you are a rare individual old lady Renner... If I may share something from my heart
There was a genocide in my home country during my lifetime. I was already here but members of my family were killed, villages they grew up in decimated, was is literally the worst.
My oldest friend Amy had a little brother I've known all my life, he was kind, smart, loved by pretty much everyone and was also on the team that developed noise cancelling headphones.
Drew lived in NYC and took the train to the WTC stop every morning.
Luckily Drew escaped through a tunnel but as it turns, tragically his lungs were full of asbestos and powderized glass and years later Drew died of severe painful lung cancer.
At his funeral a strange feeling came over me, I was sitting in the funeral and listening to some of Drew's electronic music beats his family decided to play for the procession, a severe sadness overtook me, for some reason I was more sad than any other death, even of my little brother who was only 1 at the time.
The reason why I was so sad was because it was not just a death, it was a murder, and not just any murder, but a murder by a man named Osama Bin Laden, who from some far away cave ordered the death of thousands, Drew being one of them.
I asked myself, why would anyone want to kill Drew?? Drew was so kind and giving and would have given his life for others.
Thus was the source of this new sadness, the sadness of senseless violence directly targeting the Drew Burrows of the world.
I cone on to this forum and talk about maybe not starting WW3 and suggest that it's possible that Putin while not a great guy by any means may not be the megalomaniac we are told to believe, that maybe we should try to make a deal to end the war before it spirals into WW3 or worse to nuclear war and the group think herd on here call me a Putin bot. They do so because they largely have no logic or fact to refute me other than unprovable narrative.
The history of America stirring the proverbial pot, enticing coups and provoking wars is vast, everything conflict is not WW2 / Hitler, but the people who make bombs, those who profit around them, and their mouth pieces like Lindsey Graham, would have us believe that the whole world is trying to kill Americans and the only way we can deal with it is to bomb them first.
Coming form the heart Miss Renner, do we not at least need to try to resolve issues inside ourselves before e go trying to fix the rest o the world?? What kind of psychopathy would that behavior be labeled on an individual level?
I posit that as a nation we are acting like psychopaths, looking to everyone else's faults while we ourselves are more divided than any time in history.
I believe we should allow Europe to deal with Europe (for a change) and work on ourselves for if we do not we will lose all.
Mr. Brim, your reply means a lot to me. I too have felt loss where grieving is less than a process and more like a glass shattering on the floor, over and over. My heart goes out to you. I pray you find comfort.
I agree with you on our need to resolve issues inside ourselves. I also agree with your assessment that it is duplicitous for the US to scream about election inference, land grabs, or slavery, for example. We are certainly not pure as a nation. The problem with looking back is that it swallows the present and hides the future. We can only move forward and remember what we did learn from the past.
Exactly for the reasons you state, we have a lot of work to do in this country. Our work is to come up with how to get this done. We need to make choices on how we move on. This is where we disagree on the who and the how.
Less generally and pie in the skyward, Europe is finally coming to terms that it needs to act differently from the past. One of the wars is on their doorsteps. They have been trodden upon before and should learn from the past.
I am currently reading a reporter's book on the war in Syria. She writes about individual stories. History lives in individual stories - like yours. your family's and Drew's. I have come to realize that every time we read the number of people killed in a conflict that number is about individuals and the untold numbers affected by each loss. I agree we are too casual about loss.
Thank you again for partaking something so rare in America today, discourse.
I would guess that the reason we disagree on as you say, the who and the how is largely because, and please forgive my directness, because the entirety of the liberal establishment has been taken over by globalists.
One of the key actors in this play is George Soros.
Soros's stated goal in his autobiography in his own words is clear... Soros believes that we need to do away with national sovereignty and that humanity can only function properly (whatever that means) if we all accept a single global government, he goes on to say that he feels that and I quote, ":the only way to get Americans to accept global governance is to create chaos so extreme they are forced to".
Soros is the largest single funder of the democratic party, specifically he funds DA elections because he states that he "get the best return on his dollar" by helping to elect District Attorneys. every one of the DA he funds are all very actively not prosecuting violent crimes, particularly ignoring crimes committed by illegal immigrants in all cases except the ones that are so public they demand a prosecution of some sort.
No matter how much he may feel we need to be governed by a one world government, to take on that mantle, an unelected person who no one voted for is using his wealth for a deception against Americans that directly corresponds to very much loss, pain, suffering and even murder, is the most cynical view of humanity, treating those people's lives like pawns in his game of global dominance.
The formerly liberal party of which I used to be a part of, has unwittingly taken up his cause and the cause of other unelected people like Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum where world leaders come to work shop their ideas for how the rest of us should live.
Their ideas which they speak out loud on camera for all to hear, are that and I quote "the era of human freedom is over", this from Yuval Noah Harrari who seems to be Schwabs side kick.
Here's a snippet of more of Harrari's compassionate wisdom for humanity...
#YuvalNoahHarari | "Most Legal Systems Are Based On a Belief In Human Rights. Human Rights,Just Like God In Heaven Are Just a Story That We've Invented. Take a Human Being, Cut Him Open, You Won't Find Any Rights."
The left is woefully ignorant about people like Schwab and Soros and if you talk about them they glaze over, or call is a conspiracy, but when a man talking in front of Joe Biden and XiZingPing in the same audience uses a phrase like "the useless eaters" when referring to the bulk of humanity we should pay very very close attention.
The liberal party has been co-opted by leftists who want to bring some form of communism to America. If that's what you want well then you have a right to vote for that, and that's pretty much what you would get with a Kamala Harris Presidency, she uses communistic language as does most of the higher ups in her party, her father was an avowed Marxist and her running mate is now alleged to have extreme tie to the CCP though on that note I've not seen any actual evidence of that charge yet.
I have a different view of communism, I have what when I was in the left we would have called "lived experience" with communism. Communism is a nice concept and I'm being sincere when I say this... yes it would be great if we all lived together sharing everything., however the reality of communism is simple, communism is the centralization of power, and the more centralized the power the more apt to corruption it becomes, which is what we've witnessed in literally ever instance communism has been tried, and like the adage goes, Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I have mountains of evidence that the real goal of the neoliberal order or what the global south is calling the "rules based order" (which partially means 'rules for thee but not for me') is to create a technocratic authoritarian state which will act with the intention of 'for the good of all people'.
That sentiment is what every dictator from Julius Caesar to Adolph Hitler said about their utopian dream. The modern Democratic party is exhibiting more and more of those same authoritarian's traits every day.
"The hallmark of fascism and dictators is censorship"
I don't see the GOP trying to censor anyone, but the Democratic Party has engaged in nothing less than Stalinesque levels of censorship.
I don't expect to change anyone's mind with this but just wanted to share why I left the left and became eventually a Republican...
no, I'm not at all concerned because it's all lies. What I am concerned with is that Biden and Harris have no relationship with a hugely powerful nation with a larger nuclear arsenal than ours who also happen to be creating a financial coalition that now is substantially larger than the G7 which is rapidly turning into a military coalition which looks like Turkey will be joining any time now. When the talking stops is usually when war happens.
I don't know what kind of person Putin is, probably pretty bad, but why the fuck should I care??
He doesn't run our country, he's not even on our continent, it would be 100 years before they could even think about projecting power to the western hemisphere and from all the evidence I've seen on Putin's alleged plans to retake Eastern Europe to rebuild the soviet union are at very best heavily exaggerated if not just plain untrue.
your comment makes my point exactly... anyone who doesn't want to be involved in a war that has nothing to do with us is a "Putin Apologist" because brain dead people like yourself are incapable of critical thinking or independent thought.
Personally I've lived through one war already and I suggest you go fight one and see if you still then want to tell others to go through that hell
Uh, I never equated those on the list as Hitler's. That's your "blah, blah".
Putin however is waging an unprovoked war of aggression. It also includes the war crimes of rape, murder of civilians, kidnapping children, destruction of cultural sites, etc.
Seems civilization generally considers that bad. Do you?
And skip the moral equivalency stuff. Here and now is an issue of a war of aggression and violation of previous accords between Russia and Ukraine by Russia.
There has not been a request from Ukraine for US or NATO boots on the ground. They are fighting and dying. They are asking for weapons only, dear comrade.
for people like yourself who are illiterate on all matters military...
Every single missile 'Ukraine fires' are actually fired by American troops on the ground, 'volunteer' units who are still on the US payroll.
The missiles are ours, the satellite system is ours, the Secure GPS is ours and by law the codes for it cannot be shared with foreign soldiers, the targeting, planing and flight paths are all determined by and executed by American, British or German military personel
> have welcomed in people like bonafide war criminal Dick Cheney
Do you have some evidence for this? Cheney made his statement. When did a democrats welcome him? Are you possibly confusing Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney?
from your own source... maybe you should read to the end next time pal...
"Ultimately, Mueller's investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"."
plus Wiki is not an un biased source for anything other than what albums a band released or the sort and from my point of view Wiki might as well be CCP controlled
If Kama-blah gets in you and I will all be virtually enslaved unelected, self appointed, technocratic globalist rulers who love to speak of 'Governance' rather than Government and tell us that we will "own nothing and be happy", Schwab, and say things like "the era of freedom of choice is over", Yuval Noah Harrair...
A depressing read Phillips. I’d be curious to know what you make of Elliot Cohen’s “facts are stubborn things” argument that may mean Trump is not as bad on Ukraine as we fear (personally, I think he will be worse)?
Also, there doesn’t seem to have been much analysis of the recent uptick in Russian targeting of commercial shipping entering/exiting Ukrainian ports. For months, there had appeared to be a level of mutual deterrence but the Russian calculus appears to have changed. Presumably, the Ukrainians could start attacking shipping coming out of Novorossiysk, including oil tankers, but aren’t?
Anyway, good to see you being quoted in The Economist. I like their analysis but feel sometimes they have been guilty of fuelling the overly pessimistic narrative. Their most recent piece on the problems Russia is facing is excellent.
Ive work very well with him as you know--all I will say is that I am much more pessimistic about Trump. I fear Trump will do what he wants--and what he wants is not good for Ukraine
I heard him give this argument on Shield of the Republic podcast and it’s just not convincing.
Trump has never cared about facts. He creates his own reality. For crying out loud, he skipped numbers 21-30 for floors in the Trump Tower and called it a 69-floor building when the stubborn fact is that it has 59 floors.
Well put Andrew
I’m inclined to agree with you Andrew.
My understanding of Cohen’s argument is that whatever Trump might say his administration would ultimately end up inheriting the Ukraine situation and that the inherent reality of this could act as a moderating influence. As previously stated, I’m sceptical of this (as is Cohen’s co-host on ‘Shield of the Republic’ Eric Edelman).
That inherent reality won't be a problem for Trump's financial or legal situation, or for his power. Therefore he will ignore it and do whatever he wants.
That’s fair Andrew, however, I posed the question because ultimately none of us know and the likes of Cohen and Lawrence Freedman, who has also urged caution against overly doom laden predictions, are serious commentators whose analysis I respect.
Thanks again for your sobering analysis. I guess that's what happens when two old geezers rule the Ukraine debate in the US. They're still stuck in geopolitical Cold War thinking when it comes to the allmight of Russia. They've clearly missed the paradigm shift. Russia is not the USSR. In a way, the modern day Russia is more like its czarist counterpart of the nineteenth century. A new sick man of Europe.
I think the Cold War thinking is still very powerful for Biden (might write more about that)--Trump is different. Hes all about self-interest. Not sure hes even aware of a Cold War paradigm
My personal opinion based on nothing but my impressions seeing and hearing about Trump is that he still has Daddy Issues and since the death of Roy Cohn, he is still looking for a strongman replacement. Viewing objectively, a lot of Trump's behavior can seem childish - name calling, etc.
It is not childish, I wish it were, No it is the dictators' strategy:
Demonize your political opponent,
Make them look incompetent and ridiculous.
It is often attributed to Paul Manafort the political advisor of Nixon, Reagan, Trump, Putin's puppet in Ukraine and of course working with Putin to discredit Hilary Clinton. The other half of the advice is not engage in policy discussion before an election. But it's has been around the the 1930'S.
Too many people ignore Trump's 4 decade advocacy for isolationism and protectionism. He supports extreme versions of both. The canard that Trump believes in nothing is misleading. He's mostly about self-promotion, but he's zealous about his few principles.
While I don't think the chance of Russia using nuclear weapons in late 2022 was anywhere near 50%, it was nonzero. There was a chance of Russian army collapse (especially if Ukraine had been helped much more), and we simply don't know what Putin might do in a panic and under a tight deadline to react. We know that he's very bad at crisis management, and a precipitous defeat in 2022 could have really threatened his power and even his life. So I can actually imagine him nuking Ukrainian troops pouring through the Perekop Isthmus into Crimea back in 2022. In 2026 such reaction in the same circumstances is incomparably less likely because by then the Russian population will have fully internalized the idea that Russia's not going to win the war. But in 2022 a much quicker revelation that Russia is a lot less powerful than people had believed would have shocked the population much more.
My own view, fwiw, is that it was never going to happen because the Chinese were making it very clear to the Russians that they wanted no nuclear weapons use. The deterrence that the Chinese have over the Russians is much stronger than our own
The recent push for the Chinese to have a worldwide No first use pledge is probably to protect their invasion of Taiwan. Therefore, they do not want the threshold lowered by Putin using nukes. This pledge plays well Politically but I think is for their advantage in Taiwan. China wants to deter Putin because they don't want the US to find a lower barrier for using nukes against China over Taiwan.
Yes, it's a very strong deterrence. But we don't know how much Putin can be deterred in a panic. That's why I say there was nonzero chance. Of course, we also don't know how Russian elites and the population would have reacted to Russian army collapsing in the field. Basically, Putin might have had a terrible choice between angering the Chinese and angering people with guns in the next room, so to say. He might have perceived showing strength as his own chance of immediate survival. Of course, an important question is whether the military would have gone along with that. We need to remember that we have no idea what the US intelligence was getting from inside the Kremlin. And again, it is also possible that Putin was deliberately feeding them something scary.
Even in a total panic, Putin would never do anything to hurt Putin and his grab on power.
I don't think the election is a coin flip. Polls have a limited utility in the current situation because they are simply not accurate enough. Just take the latest Quinnipiac polls showing Trump up 3% in Michigan and down 3% in Pennsylvania. They can't both be true. Taken at face value, they mean that Trump is doing 6% better in MI than in PA. That's just not believable. The last Republican who did better in MI than in PA was George H.W. Bush a third of century ago. The last one to do that by at least 6 points was Ronald Reagan. The new polls mean a roughly 7 point swing in MI vs PA for Trump from his past two elections, and there are not anywhere near enough Arab and Muslim voter in Michigan to explain that. This 7% swing is basically the same as if Quinnipiac released a pair of polls showing Trump doing better in Minnesota than in Florida!
So the polls basically show the race tied with very slight advantage for Harris. We need to look at history and the fundamentals to gain more insight than the polls can provide. We know from polls that some 3-4% of voters support nobody in this election (not even some minor candidate). We also know that most of them are at least theoretically open to voting for Harris, as her unfavorable rating is 46.6% on 538 (and virtually all Kamala haters presumably support Trump, currently at 46% on 538, or Stein, or West). So she has room to grow. Trump - much less so. Each and every election of Trump era is a referendum on him, since he's such a polarizing figure, plus his ego demands him being the center of attention. Everybody knows who Trump is. Everybody has an opinion of him, usually a strong one. And there's nothing he can (or will!) do to shift it. Those 3-4% of voters are not simply waiting to learn more about Trump. They just don't want to vote for him, period. A small fraction of them may still eventually judge him the lesser of two evils and vote accordingly. But most won't. Many will vote for Harris. We know from history that in a referendum election the undecided voters usually break heavily for the challenger (as long as they don't find the challenger unacceptable).
Thus we can expect Kamala to increase her current national 2.5% margin by at least 1%, perhaps 2%. And then there's the issue of abortion. Democrats generally overpefrormed polls after Dobbs. Chances are that the pollsters underestimate the likelihood of young women voting in their likely voter models. Plus there are important abortion referenda in some important states, especially Arizona and Florida, while the aftermath of two hurricanes may depress turnout in heavily Republican areas of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. Between the abortion turnout and the undecided voters likely breaking for Harris, the election is probably more like two coin flips (going the same way) for Trump. Basically, he needs there to be a significant polling error in Kamala's favor (like the one in 2020 in Biden's favor - although even at that magnitude it might just become a coin flip rather than a sure Trump victory).
Long story short--I dont believe any individual polls, but I think the balance of all the polls (non-partisan, which I disregard) show most of the swing states within the margin of error. For me thats enough to say 50-50
In four out of seven Trump's support on 538 is between 47% and 47.5%. Even if he picks another 0.5% and 3% vote third party (less than 2% did in 2020), Harris will get between 48.5% and 49% vs. his 47.5% to 48%. And that's without even higher turnout of young women. That's why I say he needs most polls to overestimate Harris. If they accurate on average, he's toast. Unless he can somehow quickly boost Kamala's unfavorability by several points.
After today's reading, I will cling to your views which offer more hope. It still bothers me that votes in some states seem to count for more.
Yes, we need to get rid of Electoral College.
That is some excellent analysis. Thank you Andrew.
That’s not really what margin of error means. It’s sampling error, which applies to one study. With 20 or 50 studies showing MOL the same thing it’s unlikely they all have the same sampling problem.
Following on from your quotations from Mike Johnson, I have a question. If the Republicans are on course to win the Senate and the house, then if she becomes President will Kamala Harris actually be able to help Ukraine as much as we wish?
When I read Harris‘s comments about Ukraine and NATO, I wonder why the hell I’m sending money to their campaign. I know I know to stop Trump. But
Well, at a minimum, she will be better than Trump--and that really matters (for Ukraine and everything else). As you say, though, unless both houses of Congress are willing to approve aid, she would be restrained in how much she can give. Im not hopeful about the GOP in the short term
The only point of Hope I can think of considering a republican Senate and house, but a Democrat president, i.e. Kamala Harris, is that at this point Trump may have less influence on Congress after losing election
There are enough members in the house and senate to pass Ukraine aid: almost all democrats and a substantial minority of Republicans. That's the way the aid bill passed.
But whether such a Bill gets brought up for a vote will be up to leadership in the House (with luck Hakeem Jeffries) and Senate (a republican, nobody knows which one).
Yes--its most likely going to be the Senate--which will be tricky. At least Ukraine aid should have a better chance in the Senate than the House
It’s quite a lot of money that’s already been approved. With Harris at least that money will be allocated. If Trump wins, Biden will have to allocate it all in a hurry. Ukraine will not get what would have been optimal, and I imagine a Trump administration will find someway to not send all of it.
Trump is a Putin puppet. His Russian ties are known but the MSM has not fully acknowledged them. Why? Those of us who support Ukraine are still here. We’re not going away.
In a bid to find something positive to shout about. If true, this is a very interesting development…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2024/10/12/milbloggers-claiming-ukrainian-f-16-downed-russian-su-34-aircraft/
I agree. Thanks Ben. This is really the only positive in this most depressing post. I, along with everyone else, have been waiting for so long for something, ANYTHING, to deter these seemingly-unstoppable glide bombs. Now let’s see Ukraine launch their own glide bombs back at the Russians.
The glide bombs have been brutally effective. If true this really is an interesting development.
Whilst the Ukrainians have been successful in striking some of the depots storing these weapons the ability to shoot down the aircraft firing them has the potential to be very significant.
The Russian Air Force has been generally quite risk averse throughout the conflict. If they assess they are likely to lose a considerable number of aircraft this may impact their willingness to conduct these strikes.
Important not to jump to conclusions but one to watch for sure.
❝Chief of General Staff Raimund Andrzejcza❞ Is he really Chief of General Staff? I checked his shoulder pads and they are of a mere Major-General. Also it is easy to announce that Poland will do this or that but its only speech and pledges. There is no guarantee that NATO would actually work.
Thanks Phillips for this well reasoned if somewhat bleak analysis. It maps well with what I am reading from Ukrainian sources.
When I think back to the rhetoric President Biden used just before and shortly after the full scale invasion: the “limited incursion” gaffe - which appeared to signal to Putin that if he did a small scale incursion that might be okay; or the speech he made in Madrid in April 2022, where he promised to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes for them to, mumble mumble, “not lose”. I can’t quite quote him verbatim but that is the gist of what he said and this rhetoric shaped the policy he was comfortable with.
Likewise Trump is a loose cannon and we just cannot be sure what he will be like, but we also cannot act surprised if he does what he has signalled he would do if he gets his orange hands back on the keys to the White House.
Harris - again we don’t really know what she will bring.
Oh for a presidential figure of the stature of FDR, and while we’re at it can we get a Churchill like figure into number ten Downing Street?
I'm not sure what part of Phillips rant was well reasoned but Biden stood down the 70 years long doctrine of meeting Russian aggression with strength intentionally he claimed in order to, in Biden's words, "not provoke Putin".
My learned translation of beltway politics and military policy reads those words as we wanted this war.
That makes no sense to me.
A depressing but necessary assessment.
One can only hope Harris is being coy and evasive on Ukraine as a political strategy to avoid alienating some voters and win. I guess if somehow she wins we might figure out her Ukraine position by who she appointments to advise on national security. But a vigorous plan to assist Ukraine will always be difficult due to the Mike Johnson's of the political world, post-election violence and controversy and Trump screaming from the rooftops
Phillips. Interested in your opinion on this latest example of US double standards in their response to two similar allies needing assistance.
U.S. to Deploy Missile Defense System and About 100 Troops to Israel
Hi Folks. Just wrote up a quick article on the back of the US decision to send a THAAD battery to Israel.
I fully support this move for what that’s worth.
I do ask however why did Joe Biden not make a similar strongly deterrent manner for its other ally: Ukraine.
If Ukraine, like Israel possessed nuclear weapons, would the US have been a better ally to Ukraine. You can bet your bottom dollar they would have.
https://open.substack.com/pub/gmanschronicle/p/us-to-deploy-missile-defense-system?r=lyl1g&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Exactly! Ukraine enjoys, or at least used to, broad and bipartisan support in the US, and helping Ukraine military makes us safer. Support for Israel is contentious and seems to, on balance, undermine our interests in every region on nearly every topic. But Israel gets air defense teams deployed preemptively while Ukraine, after 2.5 years of terrorism, does not?
—> Why is this happening? (I’m actually confused, not asking rhetorically. I’m sure there are other reasons besides Israel has nukes.)
I am on a sabbatical at a College where they give me a house to live. I think I might be able to geuss which of my predecessors fixed the TV so it goes directly to Fox News! It means whenever I turn on the TV I see Trump or Vance addressing an audience and I struggle with the remote to make it go to Amazon or Hulu. Trumps audience boo when Ukraine or Zelensky are mentioned. There’s no way his attitude to Ukraine is ‘unpredictable’, as Elliott Cohen put it. I like his podcast. Id like him to be right. But, especially after the choice of Vance as running mate, its not believable. At the debate the Host asked Trump several times if he would support Ukraine and the answer was negative.
Europe as a whole has provided 2x the support of the US according to https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/ and Australians clearly support UKR according to a recent study: https://open.substack.com/pub/mickryan/p/australias-support-for-ukraine?r=wnycw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web If Trump wins, it's bad but how bad overall we do not really know. I don't see a lot of respect for him elsewhere.
I agree. It would be very serious for Europe if Putin destroyed Ukraine and it is not at all clear what the limits of a European reaction would be.
Hi Martina, for a bit of a better picture, I suggest looking at what’s been allocated versus pledged to give a more apples to apples comparison. And wait the bilateral aid as much more valuable than the aid funneled through the EU, many countries were using to send junk in exchange for you subsidy.
Support in Australia may be high, but tangible actions have been not so great, from what I can tell.
Some disparate thoughts:
(1) “2-3 months of explosives”…nonsense! Only if you translate it all, including the 2k pound glide bombs, etc, into artillery shells, and then specify that you’re talking about artillery-equivalent ammunition.
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russia-loses-2-3-months-worth-of-ammunition-1726996045.html
(2) Long range weapons from allies = good. Real sanctions = better. The political will
- for a variety of hard-to-comprehend or hard-to-accept/contemplate reasons, is not there. it has not been there for many many months, despite how clearly it would serve our self interest, despite the war crimes committed systematically and at scale. Our leaders today do not believe “never again” - it was apparently just lip service they paid. It seems only the Baltics and Poland are ready to do what it takes. Maybe Finland. Not even wealthy Norway, not even the UK.
(3) the above is true despite heavy popular support for the Ukrainian cause
(4) the above is true despite pathetic political leadership (speaking by and large, of course. there are surely a handful of exceptions) which has failed to compellingly and repeatedly articulate to domestic audiences why Ukraine’s interest is our interest.
(5) I’ve commented before and it still rings true - there seems to be no vision for victory beyond letting Ukraine bleed itself dry.
(6) what happened to the ranged campaign against anti-air assets? I wonder if it achieved its goals, or if not, why it was de-prioritized.
(7) it seems Ukraine has still not figured out how to remove the factors (the ones it reasonably can) which keep would be volunteers from signing up.
(8) with Russia attacking Ukraine commercial shipping, does the detente break? Will Ukraine begin using sea drones on known shipments of dual use goods?
(9) the nuclear analysis in this article is not so good, imo. The reports say Biden administration thought there was a 50% likelihood of tactical nukes based on intelligence. We do not have access to that intelligence, so not sure how one could completely dismiss the conclusion. However, this does stink a bit of some assholes trying to throw out a narrative to give cover to their failures.
where to begin... the notion the Trump loves Putin is beyond absurd, where is the evidence of this? Are we still (and by we I mean you) still believing the Steele Dossier even after it was proven in court that the Clinton campaign hired Christopher Steele to fabricate it out of thin air?
the modern, anti liberal Democrat Party's ability to swallow whatever the MSM narrative is hook line and sinker without the smallest shred of evidence is fascinating.
ain
I find it even more interesting that you have chosen to suddenly like Woodward again... his previous book was about how he found evidence that Biden blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline, when he presented his case for this he was suddenly "right wing" but I guess now that he has jumped back on the train of insanity making claims based on nothing that Trump loves Putin he can be claimed once again by the left.
Nice Party you have there guys... while The Republican Party has become an actual Big Tent party which has welcomed in notable former Democrats like RFK Junior and Tulsi Gabbard and Comedians like Russell Brand, the Non-Democratic Party, after installing their latest shill candidate without any democratic election process have welcomed in people like bonafide war criminal Dick Cheney responsible for lying us into a 7 trillion dollar, failed war with his lies of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' that killed some estimated 2 million Iraqis all told.
In this same article where you cite Woodward's factless innuendo you tout Trump's 34 felonies without mentioning that the Court of Appeals eviscerated the Democrat prosecuting lawyers and reportedly said that this looks like "nothing less than a wholly political motivated attempt at election interference" which anyone who was unbiased and with any awareness of the law could only agree that the litany of pretzel like legal acrobatics it took to get a past the statute of limitations misdemeanor and turn it into a fictional felony by instructing the jurors that they didn't have to ever learn the underlying law which was allegedly broken to form their verdict, neither did they all have to agree on which it might be.
The federal Appeals judge further noted that the prosecutors may very well find themselves censured by the courts to the point where the prosecutors closing remarks were not to make their case but to practically beg the court not to punish them.
Trump and Republicans and others like myself who do not want to fund Ukraine do not do so because we love Putin, but because unlike the Democrats we LOVE AMERICA.
Ukraine's problems are their own and we recognize that everywhere US foreign policy has tried to effect in the last 70 years has only blown up in our face. We want an end to the interventionist wars of US global Hegemony and guess what guys.... so does more than HALF THE WORLD.
More of the world is supporting Russia and not us. Whatever you think of this doesn't matter, as we are seeing the very real possibility of Turkey and it's huge military joining BRICS and subsequently leaving Nato, followed by Hungary we can see cracks in our own alliances while Russia continues to gain political, economic, and military strength.
We believe that maybe after our disastrous meddling in Viet Nam, Iran, Iraq, Afganistan, Libya and El Salvador we might want to cool the jets a little and take care of our own country.
That is what you ilk have chosen to turn into "love for Putin". We need to take care of ourselves and stop trying to police the world. After WW2 it has simply just not done us nor anyone really any good and only caused the world to hate us.
Somehow you group of lemmings believe that we should keep going with the decades long failed string of policies until we have nothing left and anyone who simply says it might be time to fix our own problems instead of trying to fix everyones else's is somehow a 'Putin Apologist'.
Allow me as a former Democrat to speak for the entirety of the Republican Party to which I have found myself more and more in alignment with these days when I say that we do not love Putin, we just don't care about protecting Europe any more... 100 years was enough, it was good for WW1 I guess and WW2 for sure but after that it has been diminishing returns. Even fighting the cold war may not have been wholly necessary for America as communism was doomed to implode anyway like it always seems to do.
Anyway, we, at least 50 % of the country and likely a much higher percent just don't give a single fuck about Ukraine, its highly corrupt leadership, or perpetuating a failed strategy of creating more and more enemies and hate for America across the whole world.
The general stance of the Modern Republican Party is NO WAR
While the blood thirty Democrats want to send everyone else's sons to teir death to fight a war we can't win over something which in no way benefits us at all.
Nice Party you got there guys, I'm embarrassed to say that I used to be part of it.
> While the blood thirty Democrats want to send everyone else's sons to teir death to fight a war we can't win over something which in no way benefits us at all.
There’s no evidence that Democrats want to send Americans to fight in this war. Or are you talking about sending Ukrainians to war? American Democrats have no power to send Ukrainians to war. Likewise, American Democrats have no power to send Europeans to war.
What you wrote here seems to be a wild exaggeration or misunderstanding. I can’t tell which.
> until we have nothing left
What does this mean? We mostly send supply surplus equipment to Ukraine, with some exceptions like artillery shells. What better purpose could those shells have than killing invading Russian soldiers?
Interesting post. To use a turn of phrase, it is always troublesome when passions turn to politics and politics turn to passions. But that is where we are now in this country.
War is just politics. Are there good wars? I don't know. All wars seem to point to our limited imaginations in solving problems. To my mind, not all wars mean bloodshed. You mentioned one form - the cold war. There are several cold wars now in which we are all entrenched.
1) The treatment of facts and the information we receive about facts is a cold war.
2) The treatment of women's rights is a cold war. Abortion has been weaponized.
3) Immigration is a key weapon of the new cold war. But that has its bloody elements.
4) Race and ethnicity continue their claim as political weapons.
5) "Whataboutism" as seen in your examples above is rampant. If you only look back one misses where they are now.
There is a book I recently read you might like: << This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality>> by Peter Pomerantsev.
I am an old lady so be kind.
I will endeavor to be kind old lady...
"War is politics by other means" is the famous quote you're looking for, it's often said that war is what happens when diplomacy doesn't work.
with due respect however, your comment comes from a place of absolute privilege. None of the "wars" you mentioned are actual wars. If you ever lived through an actual you'd never equate the things on your 5 point list there with actual war.
Like many on Phillips's threads you have chosen to use the topic of a violent, deadly and bloody war that didn't need to happen with whatever your grievances are with modern American politics and to be honest, as I mentioned already, I feel that it speaks to your privilege... the privilege of living in a country brought specifically to you by people who were forced to kill and/or die in actual wars so that you can sit here and make these exaggerated and not at all apt comparisons.
They also unfortunately died so grifting war mongers like Phillips who gets paid indirectly by the war machine to propagate more war can feel self righteous about as he virtue signals from his place of privilege while he advocates for sending Ukrainian men to their deaths for the profit.
in answer to your 5 grievances:
1) "The treatment of facts and the information we receive about facts is a cold war."
... do you have any facts to share?
2) "The treatment of women's rights is a cold war. Abortion has been weaponized."
... it's the left who has weaponized abortion. Trump and the courts correctly decided it was a states right as the constitution outlines. No where in the constitution is there a right to kill an unborn baby,
there should however be a law where if you equate this generally sick practice of as "women's health care" you yourself could then also be subject to being pulled apart limb from limb and sucked up a vacuum
3) Immigration is a key weapon of the new cold war. But that has its bloody elements.
Dems are using immigration as a war for sure, as you are bringing in illegals and allowing them to vote in federal elections and making it illegal to ask for ID somehow claiming that it's racist to require it, when the real racism is the presumption by Democrats that black people are somehow too dumb to figure out how to go to the DMV and get an ID or they don't have $35 to do it.
4) Race and ethnicity continue their claim as political weapons.
(see above comment on how the new racism in modern America is all from the Democrats)
5) "Whataboutism" as seen in your examples above is rampant. If you only look back one misses where they are now.
(not sure where whataboutism is in my comment??)
I appreciate the book recommendation, looking at the author took me 30 seconds to google that he himself is spreading total and pure propaganda.
Your recommendation seems to me to be more of an implication that I may somehow be impressionable and need to reform to the herd mentality you seem to subscribe to, when really I've got 50 plus IQ points on virtually most everyone I've encountered in this thread of factless, sycophantic, mis-educated and propagandized, intellectual dishonest morons. Phillips being the biggest one so far!
Hopefully that is not too unkind, it's not my intention to be cruel but you guys make it so easy :)
> see above comment on how the new racism in modern America is all from the Democrats
Democrats are racists, not the folks flying confederate flags?
The people who created the confederate flags were DEMOCRATS
Read up on Nixon’s southern strategy and how the parties changed. All the southern racists felt abandoned by the Democrats, and they found a new home in the Republican Party.
> making it illegal to ask for ID somehow claiming that it's racist to require it
The reason Democrats oppose requiring ID to vote is that some American citizens do not have any government ID, because they don’t drive. Typically, this happens with senior citizens. You may be surprised to learn that some American citizens do not even have a birth certificate. It happens.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/millions-americans-dont-have-documents-proving-their-citizenship-readily
https://www.usa.gov/citizenship-no-birth-certificate
Democrats as a general rule would like all Americans to participate in the democratic process, whereas Republicans continue to try to bring back aspects of Jim Crow, with its many obstacles to voting. They have to do this, because they have invited racists into their party and thus made people of color unwelcome.
GOP has done substantial research and this is completely false
the ONLY REASON why you treasonous bastards try to make this weak ass argument,(one which most black people find offensive), is because you are trying to steal an election you know you can't win
The GOP has done substantial research on how to suppress voting. All of their claims about fraudulent voting are bullshit. There is no basis for it.
"read up on Nixon's Southern Strategy"
I'm VERY well versed on that topic and it's 100% bull shit...
I used to be one of you Mr Paul... I know all the things you know, I'm aware of all the syllogistic arguments that are all accepted as fact even despite the fact that almost none of them have had to withstand any scrutiny.
The concept of safe spaces in Universities created a petrie dish where most of leftist doctrine was not allowed to be challenged and thusly grew like a fungus to rot the brains of the youth ... I was one of them!
I'm highly educated on all things leftist politics, from the concept that a trans woman IS a woman back to the teachings of Marcuse and last but not least the extreme 'genius' of Karl Marx. I generally am more aware of leftists doctrine that most ardent leftists.
I won't bother debunking the Southern Strategy for you, but the bottom line is this:
Democrats are engaging in active censorship (authoritarian)
Democrats are twisting the law to prosecute their political enemies
Democrats are the real racists, it's really oddly come full circle
Democrats try to control all main stream media apparatus
these are all hallmark traits of authoritarianism
you guys kinda treat Trump like he's Goldstein from Orwell's 1894 complete with your 2 minutes of hate each day, except your two minutes of hate never end
Democrats are full of hate and it seems all the can do is hate
Suppressing voting... you mean like making sure that the machines in Republican districts all fail on election day like in Arizona in the midterms?
Like counting all the ballots in PA in the middle of the night after they kick out all the GOP observers and magically Biden surges over 800,000 votes, the exact amount needed to over take Trump's huge lead?
Like the 70 plus cases of Democrat election interference, ballot harvesting and the convictions for throwing out GOOP Ballots, like the mules illegally dropping off ballots.
Like the thousands of ballots found in trash heaps all of which were GOP votes?
there's only ONE reason why you guys are scared of ID for voting, is to be able to cheat.
You need ID to go into a bar, I guess black people don't go into bars, you need ID to get on a plane. I guess black people don't fly on planes? You need ID to buy a bus pass, I guess black people don't take the bus... only you authoritarian communists believe this total bullshit...
Time to wake up brother, Thump cares about people, about the working class, Trump is Anti War, Trump is for security of the border, and Trump is GREAT for the economy
Democrats are PRO WAR, PRO CENSORSHIP, pro corporate capture, pro big pharma.
I write to you as I talk to my elder son. He is a Libertarian and to be honest, in terms of politics, there is little we agree on. But, we listen to each other and we try to learn. The important part is that each individual is entitled to their truth and that we do not get lost from searching for it or being driven from it. To exercise that truth as an individual, we have a responsibility — to know what is going on about us and to look out for each other. Care is essential. I do not think you are impressionable at all and I am happy you seem to care.
We can point out things we find offensive or absurd in each and every political position offered by our main political parties and by those in this country with strong political pull.
Your point on privilege has been something I have been thinking about for weeks. We do not know war here. I wonder how attitudes would change should we experience the bloodshed firsthand. Unlike most of the world., war is something we read about. Thinking along the lines of other people's kids fighting our wars saddens me.
The other concern I have and that my son agrees with is the power a small number of people hold over information flows and informational technologies like satellites. How dependent are countries on Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos?
Thanks for sharing. I truly appreciate your views. I confess I probably make it too easy to refute but I write from the heart. ^^
you are a rare individual old lady Renner... If I may share something from my heart
There was a genocide in my home country during my lifetime. I was already here but members of my family were killed, villages they grew up in decimated, was is literally the worst.
My oldest friend Amy had a little brother I've known all my life, he was kind, smart, loved by pretty much everyone and was also on the team that developed noise cancelling headphones.
Drew lived in NYC and took the train to the WTC stop every morning.
Luckily Drew escaped through a tunnel but as it turns, tragically his lungs were full of asbestos and powderized glass and years later Drew died of severe painful lung cancer.
At his funeral a strange feeling came over me, I was sitting in the funeral and listening to some of Drew's electronic music beats his family decided to play for the procession, a severe sadness overtook me, for some reason I was more sad than any other death, even of my little brother who was only 1 at the time.
The reason why I was so sad was because it was not just a death, it was a murder, and not just any murder, but a murder by a man named Osama Bin Laden, who from some far away cave ordered the death of thousands, Drew being one of them.
I asked myself, why would anyone want to kill Drew?? Drew was so kind and giving and would have given his life for others.
Thus was the source of this new sadness, the sadness of senseless violence directly targeting the Drew Burrows of the world.
I cone on to this forum and talk about maybe not starting WW3 and suggest that it's possible that Putin while not a great guy by any means may not be the megalomaniac we are told to believe, that maybe we should try to make a deal to end the war before it spirals into WW3 or worse to nuclear war and the group think herd on here call me a Putin bot. They do so because they largely have no logic or fact to refute me other than unprovable narrative.
The history of America stirring the proverbial pot, enticing coups and provoking wars is vast, everything conflict is not WW2 / Hitler, but the people who make bombs, those who profit around them, and their mouth pieces like Lindsey Graham, would have us believe that the whole world is trying to kill Americans and the only way we can deal with it is to bomb them first.
Coming form the heart Miss Renner, do we not at least need to try to resolve issues inside ourselves before e go trying to fix the rest o the world?? What kind of psychopathy would that behavior be labeled on an individual level?
I posit that as a nation we are acting like psychopaths, looking to everyone else's faults while we ourselves are more divided than any time in history.
I believe we should allow Europe to deal with Europe (for a change) and work on ourselves for if we do not we will lose all.
Mr. Brim, your reply means a lot to me. I too have felt loss where grieving is less than a process and more like a glass shattering on the floor, over and over. My heart goes out to you. I pray you find comfort.
I agree with you on our need to resolve issues inside ourselves. I also agree with your assessment that it is duplicitous for the US to scream about election inference, land grabs, or slavery, for example. We are certainly not pure as a nation. The problem with looking back is that it swallows the present and hides the future. We can only move forward and remember what we did learn from the past.
Exactly for the reasons you state, we have a lot of work to do in this country. Our work is to come up with how to get this done. We need to make choices on how we move on. This is where we disagree on the who and the how.
Less generally and pie in the skyward, Europe is finally coming to terms that it needs to act differently from the past. One of the wars is on their doorsteps. They have been trodden upon before and should learn from the past.
I am currently reading a reporter's book on the war in Syria. She writes about individual stories. History lives in individual stories - like yours. your family's and Drew's. I have come to realize that every time we read the number of people killed in a conflict that number is about individuals and the untold numbers affected by each loss. I agree we are too casual about loss.
Take care.
Thank you again for partaking something so rare in America today, discourse.
I would guess that the reason we disagree on as you say, the who and the how is largely because, and please forgive my directness, because the entirety of the liberal establishment has been taken over by globalists.
One of the key actors in this play is George Soros.
Soros's stated goal in his autobiography in his own words is clear... Soros believes that we need to do away with national sovereignty and that humanity can only function properly (whatever that means) if we all accept a single global government, he goes on to say that he feels that and I quote, ":the only way to get Americans to accept global governance is to create chaos so extreme they are forced to".
Soros is the largest single funder of the democratic party, specifically he funds DA elections because he states that he "get the best return on his dollar" by helping to elect District Attorneys. every one of the DA he funds are all very actively not prosecuting violent crimes, particularly ignoring crimes committed by illegal immigrants in all cases except the ones that are so public they demand a prosecution of some sort.
No matter how much he may feel we need to be governed by a one world government, to take on that mantle, an unelected person who no one voted for is using his wealth for a deception against Americans that directly corresponds to very much loss, pain, suffering and even murder, is the most cynical view of humanity, treating those people's lives like pawns in his game of global dominance.
The formerly liberal party of which I used to be a part of, has unwittingly taken up his cause and the cause of other unelected people like Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum where world leaders come to work shop their ideas for how the rest of us should live.
Their ideas which they speak out loud on camera for all to hear, are that and I quote "the era of human freedom is over", this from Yuval Noah Harrari who seems to be Schwabs side kick.
Here's a snippet of more of Harrari's compassionate wisdom for humanity...
https://x.com/TheClayClark/status/1845791236071751912
#YuvalNoahHarari | "Most Legal Systems Are Based On a Belief In Human Rights. Human Rights,Just Like God In Heaven Are Just a Story That We've Invented. Take a Human Being, Cut Him Open, You Won't Find Any Rights."
The left is woefully ignorant about people like Schwab and Soros and if you talk about them they glaze over, or call is a conspiracy, but when a man talking in front of Joe Biden and XiZingPing in the same audience uses a phrase like "the useless eaters" when referring to the bulk of humanity we should pay very very close attention.
The liberal party has been co-opted by leftists who want to bring some form of communism to America. If that's what you want well then you have a right to vote for that, and that's pretty much what you would get with a Kamala Harris Presidency, she uses communistic language as does most of the higher ups in her party, her father was an avowed Marxist and her running mate is now alleged to have extreme tie to the CCP though on that note I've not seen any actual evidence of that charge yet.
I have a different view of communism, I have what when I was in the left we would have called "lived experience" with communism. Communism is a nice concept and I'm being sincere when I say this... yes it would be great if we all lived together sharing everything., however the reality of communism is simple, communism is the centralization of power, and the more centralized the power the more apt to corruption it becomes, which is what we've witnessed in literally ever instance communism has been tried, and like the adage goes, Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I have mountains of evidence that the real goal of the neoliberal order or what the global south is calling the "rules based order" (which partially means 'rules for thee but not for me') is to create a technocratic authoritarian state which will act with the intention of 'for the good of all people'.
That sentiment is what every dictator from Julius Caesar to Adolph Hitler said about their utopian dream. The modern Democratic party is exhibiting more and more of those same authoritarian's traits every day.
"The hallmark of fascism and dictators is censorship"
I don't see the GOP trying to censor anyone, but the Democratic Party has engaged in nothing less than Stalinesque levels of censorship.
I don't expect to change anyone's mind with this but just wanted to share why I left the left and became eventually a Republican...
> Woodward's factless innuendo
Aren’t you disturbed at all that Trump continues to have a relationship with Putin? What kind of person do you think Putin is?
no, I'm not at all concerned because it's all lies. What I am concerned with is that Biden and Harris have no relationship with a hugely powerful nation with a larger nuclear arsenal than ours who also happen to be creating a financial coalition that now is substantially larger than the G7 which is rapidly turning into a military coalition which looks like Turkey will be joining any time now. When the talking stops is usually when war happens.
I don't know what kind of person Putin is, probably pretty bad, but why the fuck should I care??
He doesn't run our country, he's not even on our continent, it would be 100 years before they could even think about projecting power to the western hemisphere and from all the evidence I've seen on Putin's alleged plans to retake Eastern Europe to rebuild the soviet union are at very best heavily exaggerated if not just plain untrue.
> no, I'm not at all concerned because it's all lies.
Of course. Everything you don’t want to believe is all lies.
> More of the world is supporting Russia and not us.
Not true. Russia has few friends.
you are busted fake fact checker!!!
FACT:
China... Population 1.42 billion
India... Population 1.47 billion
The combined 43 of 46 countries in Africa who singed a deal with Russia this year population 1.373 Billion
that's 4.263 billion people right there
Brasil, Iran, Quatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Malaysia etc will out that number to well over half the world BUCKO!
You have a low bar for what it means to be a friend.
Thank you Mr Putin for your analysis.
your comment makes my point exactly... anyone who doesn't want to be involved in a war that has nothing to do with us is a "Putin Apologist" because brain dead people like yourself are incapable of critical thinking or independent thought.
Personally I've lived through one war already and I suggest you go fight one and see if you still then want to tell others to go through that hell
Welcome to the discussion, Russian bot.
How would you like to be in the post war world if Hitler won? It was only Poland he wanted, right?
American human here...
your "what if Hitler blah blah blah" has been used to death, it was Sadam, it was the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, It was Kim Jong Un...
you lemmings do quite love going over that ledge time and time again no matter how many times your masters make you jump off the cliff LOL
Uh, I never equated those on the list as Hitler's. That's your "blah, blah".
Putin however is waging an unprovoked war of aggression. It also includes the war crimes of rape, murder of civilians, kidnapping children, destruction of cultural sites, etc.
Seems civilization generally considers that bad. Do you?
And skip the moral equivalency stuff. Here and now is an issue of a war of aggression and violation of previous accords between Russia and Ukraine by Russia.
How many rubles/hour do you earn?
> see if you still then want to tell others to go through that hell
Who are we telling to go through that hell?
There has not been a request from Ukraine for US or NATO boots on the ground. They are fighting and dying. They are asking for weapons only, dear comrade.
for people like yourself who are illiterate on all matters military...
Every single missile 'Ukraine fires' are actually fired by American troops on the ground, 'volunteer' units who are still on the US payroll.
The missiles are ours, the satellite system is ours, the Secure GPS is ours and by law the codes for it cannot be shared with foreign soldiers, the targeting, planing and flight paths are all determined by and executed by American, British or German military personel
I would be surprised if the non Ukranian troops were firing missiles. Surpassed and glad, comrade.
> the notion the Trump loves Putin is beyond absurd, where is the evidence of this?
Trump values his relationship with Putin highly. They are friends. Trump stated that he trusted Putin’s assessment over his own intelligence agencies.
Trump has many ties to Russia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officials
> have welcomed in people like bonafide war criminal Dick Cheney
Do you have some evidence for this? Cheney made his statement. When did a democrats welcome him? Are you possibly confusing Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney?
I work in the belt way and am very certain when I say the names of people in the political sphere
it was announced by all of MSNBC that DICK Chenney said he was voting for Kamablah
from your own source... maybe you should read to the end next time pal...
"Ultimately, Mueller's investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"."
plus Wiki is not an un biased source for anything other than what albums a band released or the sort and from my point of view Wiki might as well be CCP controlled
I didn’t make that claim. I said that Trump has many ties to Russia, and he does. There’s a lot of evidence that he considers Putin to be a friend.
What excuse making and fantasy to give yourself permission to vote for trump
You mean fact observing.
If Kama-blah gets in you and I will all be virtually enslaved unelected, self appointed, technocratic globalist rulers who love to speak of 'Governance' rather than Government and tell us that we will "own nothing and be happy", Schwab, and say things like "the era of freedom of choice is over", Yuval Noah Harrair...
educated yourself slave