Sunday, March 6, 2022

Delusions and amnesia as the GOP tries to pin Putin's wars on anyone but themselves

 

From a Facebook post trying to blame Biden for Putin's war. Under what administration was Crimea taken? Obama worked with the Russian to accomplish this!!! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0mgQaFlo_p8

Delusions and amnesia affect so many of us in the blame game of who is guilty for Putin's Ukraine war. 

Every single president until Biden since the fall of the Soviet Union can be accused of doing their part in trying to bring Russia into the more peaceful world with economic ties and pussyfooting around Putin's travesties. for over 20 years.. Putin was deep in his  KGB heart the old Soviet Union and fixated on restoring Russia to the greater glory of the USSR. He made no secret of that, but we brushed off his words, actions, and writings. We tisked tisked when he poisoned his rivals and those who challenged him or raised a weak voice when Navalny's poisoning failed and instead he was imprisoned. We shook our heads when rumors circulated he was the richest man in the world, and it did not even raise a Western eyebrow. We ignored his grabs from Syria to Crimea/Donbas and Georgia...No wonder he had the fantasy that he was indeed the new czar. We all left and right, contributed to his delusions. The worst was Donald Trump, who praised him, who wanted to be a strong man like him, ignored his power grabs, and had done business in Russia with hopes to someday build Trump Tower Moscow even while he was running for office. We should have wised up and got educated with that telephone call by Trump to Zelensky threatening to withhold Javelin sales unless he found dirt on Hunter Biden and his dad. The first impeachment trial was the wake-up call, but most of the GOP was blowing Trump's horn to drown out the implications. You may forget that, but historians will not.

The history of that era was thoroughly investigated in the first Trump impeachment trial on the narrow issue of whether or not Trump tried to extort dirt on the Bidens.  Donald Trump was a delusional player in this tragedy. One wonders where this would be if Trump had been elected in 2020. At the beginning of th Russian invasion, Trump was glad for Vlad. Trump Calls Putin 'Genius' for Move on Ukraine - Rolling Stone  In the long run the first impeachment process had some impact on whether Putin felt comfortable about getting away with invading  Ukraine. Whether the javelins were delivered or not was not the GOP's trust in Trump's defense team. It was based on parsing English. and sheer partisanship. The lesser impact was the sniping and division in the US indulged by both parties that had us tied us up in accusatory knots, country too weak to get its act together, .and unable to look at the big picture. By far the greatest impact was Trump's attempt to undermine NATO. Putin miscalculated fueled upon these factors and a long history of the US raising only minor objections as Putin learned he could get away with Syria, Georgia, the Donbas, and Crimea...so why not Ukraine. His delusion (and the world's too), as he thought he could just walk into hugs and flowers to Ukraine because they were ethnic brothers. Eight years of an emerging democracy based upon the Maidan people's revolution in 2014 to shake off a corrupt leader, to look west, not eas.t, and growing prosperity, and experience with the Stalinist type of justice in the Donbas. all had changed the Ukrainian population. As a Ukrainian parliamentarian said today "They didn't want to be ruled by a crazy dictator". . "Another said, "it was better to die for freedom than to die on their knees". That is part of the universal message of Ukraine.. There are people willing to die for democracy while there is a large number in this country advocate an autocracy for us. 

We, too, were delusional. about Putin. He, we thought, was a rational actor or he would not dare to invade. .But Putin's useful idiot was sitting in the White House while Putin was sharpening his knives for his long-planned invasion and praising the leadership of such a great leader.  Even as Trump sits in Mar A Lago he was still praising Putin and the Russian invasion, . Now the GOP is focused on pointing fingers at the other side and trying to divert attention from Trump's role in feeding Putin's delusions as a way to escape blame.

As Putin's blitzkrieg failed and it morphs into a scorched earth operation bringing death, destruction, and terror,. the West responds with a slow burn diddling over supplying Migs, to Ukraine to police their own skies, If we do not put our boots on the ground and our US manned jets in the air, the chances for a mad Putin to pull a nuclear trigger is a diminished gamble of mutual self-destruction that I cannot even fathom. . If the only issue is who pulls the trigger in the battle for air superiority and an urban ground war, NATO or Ukrainians, then, dangit, send those Polish Migs. There is no time to retrain anyone. I am puzzled about one other attack weapon that Ukrainians know how to use and I wonder whether it is being used now.. Last summer, Ukraine bought twenty armed drones from Turkey in a "private" sale deal and another 40 are purported to be on the way. One of the problems in supplying planes and armaments to a former Russian satellite is that they are trained on Russian weaponry. Croatia in the 1990s did make the switch as did all of the NATO allied nations. Croatia had time in the midst of the war with Serbia to retrain forces on western weaponry while the focus was on the ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by Serbians in Bosnia. That phase of this conflict was resolved by jets from the US 6th fleet knocking out the Serbian airforce and enforcing a no-fly zone. However, Serbia was not a nuclear power and the future of the earth's existence was not in question. So far, Putin is right to think he is at war with NATO though is within a limit of direct confrontation, but if he has designs on Poland and the Baltics and uses this as his rationale, then Poles are right to be the ones to supply the Migs since they are the ones most at risk.
Update: March 8, 2022
Another Vlad in east European history was from 15th century Romania...Vlad the Impaler (better not ask how he got that nickname). His better-known last name was Dracula. I like the Vlad the Mad title for Vladimir Putin; he deserves it. Either he was mad in the British sense of the word (crazy) or angry as he miscalculated that a blitzkrieg in Ukraine would be a cakewalk,,,, and he has reacted with a scorched earth strategy, destroying all in his path, buildings, and people, in his rage. What the two Vlads have in common other than their names is a cruel disregard for human suffering which they weaponized..

Thanks to the New York Post for pinning the "Vlad the Mad" on Putin.



Keith Sanders

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