The Blue Country Gazette is the successor to the Rim Country Gazette, reflecting our evolution to a nationwide political blog for readers who identify as "blue," liberals, progressives, and/or Democrats. Our mission is to provide distinctive coverage of issues during a time of extreme polarization in the U.S. We strive to provide side-stories and back-stories that provide additional insights and perspectives conventional coverage often doesn't include.
Wait a tick! Didn’t Vladimir Putin deny all that election interference folderol? And didn’t our fake president eagerly take his side? Now Russia is just going to admit to the world that they were both lying all along?
Things are not going well for Li’l Vlad in Ukraine. I’ve seen Walmart
Black Friday stampedes that were better organized. And his generals are
dying faster than Dick Cheney’s
cavalcade of gently used baboon hearts. So it stands to reason that the
feckless flacks at Russian state TV are starting to lose their shit
over Vlad and Sergei’s Bogus Journey.
In fact, they’ve gotten so desperate, they want their sleeper agent back in the White House, tout de suite.
According to Julia Davis, a Daily Beast columnist and tireless
monitor of Russian media, TV host Evgeny Popov is begging us Yanks to
reinstall Putie’s puppet before it’s too late.
POPOV: “It’s time for us, for our people to call on the people of the
United States to change the regime in the U.S. … and to again help our
partner Trump to become president.”
Oh, and Popov isn’t just some random asshole. He’s an extremely important and influential asshole:
Of course, this isn’t the first time Putin’s official propagandists
have pined for the return of their sudoriferous smegma golem. In her Monday column, Davis noted how much Russia was already missing Trump last year:
Back in 2021, during his TV showThe Evening With Vladimir Soloviev, the hostpinedfor
the return of his favorite American president: “Things were so good
under Trump... Listen to Trumpushka.” After playing a clip of Trump’s
interview with Sean Hannity, wherein the former president dismissed the
idea of helping Ukraine fight off Russian aggression, Soloviev sighed:
“[He is] so sorely missed.” Between the war in Ukraine, which is likely
to become a prolonged struggle, and the crushing U.S.sanctions,
only one candidate shows the promise of potentially erasing the
consequences of Russian aggression and dramatically limiting America’s
support for Ukraine. Clutching to these prospects, the Kremlin’s
mouthpieces are openly signaling Russia’s intent to involve themselves
in yet another U.S. election.
Isn’t it weird that the guy who was tougher on Russia than anyone in the history of the universe is
so sorely missed by the very people whose feet he was holding to the
fire? Why would they ever want that ferocious adversary back in power?
It doesn’t make any sense!
Unless, you know, they’re convinced the ocher abomination would step
aside while Putin curb-stomped former Soviet republics to his heart’s
content. Who knows, really? Other than anyone whose brain is still
connected to their ears, that is.
Donald Trump continues to heap praise
on the world's most notorious authoritarians. During a Saturday rally
for his slobbering acolytes, Trump called China's leader “smart” for
ruling over his country "with an iron fist," praised North Korea's
murderous dictator as "tough," but of course spent most of his time
waffling between praise for Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin and
halfhearted condemnations of Putin's invasion.
Mostly, however, Trump once again proved why he was the most brazenly
incompetent, ignorant, and dull-minded person ever thrown into the Oval
Office. To Donald Trump, deciding to murder tens of thousands for the
sake of annexing a country is no different from any other botched
business deal. Trump, who embodies narcissism down to every last
clinical detail, still appears unable to grasp even the most
catastrophic of world events in any capacity except as they relate to
his own ambitions or goals.
There are a great many Americans who can listen to this weird,
nonsensical rambling without getting the urge to shove screwdrivers in
both ears, which says more about the current state of America than
historians will ever be able to. The man is an incompetent, sociopathic
ass.
Yes, Putin is "smart," says Donald Trump, having already explained to
us that his definition of "smart" is when a person disregards all law
and morality rule over others or just kills them outright. And "that's a
hell of a way to negotiate," putting "200,000 troops on the border."
It was "a big mistake, but it looked like a great negotiation." But it "didn't work out too well for him."
It's not often that Trump can still muster anything but word salad in
his rally speeches, but an extended riff comparing a murderous war of
conquest as a "great negotiation" that was flawed only because it
"didn't work out too well" does manage to be quite emphatically worse.
A business deal. Leveling Ukrainian cities is, to the man who himself
tried to join the dictators of the world with a violent coup of his
own, just a business deal.
It should go without saying at this point, but we're going to say it
anyway: Anyone who so much as remains in the Republican Party as a
voter, anywhere in America, is in league with this walking horror show.
The extortion, the coup attempt, the eagerness to lie and mislead and
harm for personal benefit, the mocking of pandemic deaths and of
international war—all of it. The fascist party can no longer keep
government running, much less respond to a worldwide crisis, but the contempt for basic human decency is the most defining.
Trump has tried mightily to distance himself from his past support
for Putin, now that Putin has launched an all-out war to attempt to
boost his own domestic glory, but he just cannot stomach doing it for
long. This clip shows why; to him, large-scale, industrialized murder is
merely another negotiation, one that he can only judge based on whether
the murder is proving effective or whether it "didn't work out." It's
the same reason he was glued to his television set during the Jan. 6
violence, refusing to take action; in his own head, there was no action
he should take until his television set told him who was most likely to
win.
Pitchfork Putin and his obedient, obeisant wife, Donaldo, subserviently standing by her man.
In 1962, Barbara Tuchman wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Guns of August.
The book tells the story of the first weeks of World War I, and in
particular how assumptions and alliances that were supposed to make sure
that such a war could not happen, turned into a house of cards that
guaranteed a continent-spanning catastrophe.
The fifth chapter of that classic text
is called “The Russian Steam Roller,” and it focuses on the assumptions
that Europe made about the key role Russia would play in preventing, or
ending, any war. “The Russian colossus exercised a spell upon Europe,”
wrote Tuchman. The perception of Russia’s size and might gave the French
reassurance that the Germans would not dare to attack them. And
perversely made the Germans anxious to attack quickly and conquer
France before that “steam roller” could sweep them from the east.
“Although the defects of the Russian army were notorious, although
the Russian winter, not the Russian army had turned back Napoleon from
Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and
British in Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the
siege of Plevna, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a
myth of its invincibility prevailed. The savage cavalry charge of
yelling Cossacks was such a fixture in European minds that newspaper
artists in August 1914, were able to draw it in stirring detail without
having been within a thousand miles of the Russian front.”
Everyone knew that in Russia’s last engagement against Japan, that
army’s performance had been nothing short of abysmal, and despite
bringing huge numbers to the field, it has been simply taken apart in
battle. Even so, “The army’s efforts to purge incompetence and
corruption since the war with Japan were believed to have brought
improvement.”
Does any of that sound familiar? In much more recent writing (as in this Twitter thread posted earlier today), University of Chicago foreign policy professor Paul Poast picks up the theme.
“Many are surprised by the poor performance of Russia's military in
Ukraine,” writes Poast. “But let's be honest: when it comes to fighting
wars, Russia has always -- to use the formal term -- ‘stunk’.”
Poast cites one of histories most famous infographics to show how
Russia’s victory against Napoleon is really one of cold weather and
distance reducing a force to a shadow.
He points out that even in the Russo-Finnish “Winter War” of 1939,
Russia “won” the conflict by simply piling on the bodies. giving up
between five and seven soldiers for every one lost by Finland. The ratio
of losses when it came to tanks and aircraft were even worse.
Let’s look at what that least Pulitzery of sources, Wikipedia, has to say about the Winter War.
“The Soviets made several demands, including that Finland cede
substantial border territories … Most sources conclude that the Soviet
Union had intended to conquer all of Finland, and [establish a] puppet
Finnish Communist government.”
Instead, Russia settled for those small border territories after four
months of fighting, in which its total casualties were 168,000 killed,
207,000 wounded, and 5,600 captured. Of the Russian wounded, over 61,000
suffered from frostbite.
Russia demanded territory, then made a move to capture the whole
nation, then suffered extraordinary casualties before signing onto a
deal for a chunk of territory roughly the size of its initial demands.
The only reason Russia was able to get even that much was that … there
was no organized opposition to assist Finland. Busy fretting over
Germany, Europe and the U.S. watched from the sidelines. Meanwhile, it
was Russia’s miserable performance that convinced Hitler to turn on them
and attack. Because he forgot that Napoleon thing, about all the
distance and cold.
As Poast points out, even Russia’s wars on Chechen separatists,
largely ignored by the West, were anything but romps. Russia genuinely
lost the first of these wars, and before reducing Chechnya to rubble in
the second, Russia suffered 160,000 casualties. Poast produces this
graph, looking not so much at “wins” but at casualties.
In half the wars that Russia has participated in, Russia lost more
people than anyone else, regardless of the number of participants.
Whether fighting someone head to head, or as one of several nations in a
more extended conflict, Russia “won” the contest for losing more of its
own.
With all the pundits talking about the war now turning into a “war of attrition,” this is what that really means.
“The Russian military essentially uses an ‘attrition model,’” writes
Poast. “Keep take losses until the other side quits, is destroyed, or,
if the fighting goes long enough, Russia itself decides to stop
fighting.”
Russia has not changed these tactics in two centuries. Its miserably
equipped, miserably led army wins conflicts not by defeating enemies on
the battlefield, but by being willing to keep taking losses long after
there is no rational way of achieving anything that makes sense as
“victory” in a sense of value for the lives and cost expended. It’s a
model that’s made possible by an almost unbroken of autocratic rule that
makes it possible to feed intolerable numbers into the meat grinder
without political consequences.
Right now, the Ukrainian government sets Russia’s casualties at over
40,000 after a month, with 15,500 killed. That’s actually less than the
rate at which Russia burned through its troops in the Winter War. For
Ukraine, the losses are around 1,300 killed and 5,000 wounded. Russia
will take those odds. And if feeding the new crop of spring conscripts
into the mix elevates the ratio to 15:1 or 20:1, they’ll do that, too.
The only way to stop it is to stop the war is to stop Russia’s
ability to use the artillery, missiles, and bombs it uses to savage
Ukrainian civilians. And to do that, Ukraine needs a steady resupply
from the West — the one thing Finland did not have in 1940.
“But let's be honest: when it comes to fighting
wars, Russia has always -- to use the formal term -- ‘stunk’.”
It's not just that they're all authoritarians. Their culture wars have similar agendas.
In a speech on
Friday delivered from his office in the Kremlin, Putin criticized the
West’s “cancel culture” which, he charged, is “canceling” Russia -- “an
entire thousand-year-old country, our people.” It was the third time in
recent months Putin has blasted the so-called “cancel culture.”
Which is exactly what Trump, Tucker Carlson, and the GOP have blasted for several years.
"The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear
of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as
we know it," Trump said as he accepted his party's nomination at the Republican National Convention in 2020.
Tucker Carlson, one of Fox News’s most prominent personalities, has
charged that liberals have been trying to cancel everything from Space Jam to the Fourth of July.
Putin’s fixation on transgender and gay people has also been echoed
on the American right. Republican state bills aimed at limiting LGBTQ
rights or discussion in schools are soaring. Last fall — months before
Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott threatened to criminalize parents who give their transgender children gender-affirming care — Putin argued that teaching children about different gender identities was “on the verge of a crime against humanity.”
Then there’s admiration for Putin himself. Just before Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Trump deemed him
"savvy," "genius," and "smart” for “taking over a country, literally, a
vast, vast, location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and
just walking right in.”
On his Fox News program Carlson asked, rhetorically, “why do I hate
Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to
get me fired for disagreeing with him?” But Carlson called Ukraine “an obedient puppet of the Biden State Department,” and suggests Putin’s invasion was nothing more than a “border dispute.”
Putin’s lies and the lies coming from America’s extreme right are
mutually reenforcing. Carlson’s Fox News segments show up in Russian
propaganda. And when the American site “Infowars” resurrected an unfounded Russian claim that the United States funded biological weapons labs in Ukraine, Putin repeated the Infowars story.
To conclude from all of this that authoritarians think alike is to
miss a deeper truth. Putin, Trump, Carlson, and a growing number of
rightwing commentators and activists have been promoting much the same
narrative — for much the same reason.
Remember, Putin was put into power by a Russian oligarchy made
fabulously rich by siphoning off the wealth of the former Soviet Union.
Likewise, Trump and the radical right in America have been bankrolled by
an American oligarchy — Rupert Murdoch, Charles Koch, Rebekah Mercer
(daughter of hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer), Blackstone CEO Stephen
Schwarzman, and other billionaires.
What do these two sets of oligarchs get in return? Strongmen divert
the public’s attention away from the oligarchs’ hijacking of their
economies toward cultural fears of being overwhelmed by the “other.”
Putin’s MO has been to fuel Russian ethnic pride and nationalism. The
Trump-Carlson-radical right’s MO has been to fuel white American
nationalism.
In both cases, strongmen and their allies have mythologized a
“superior” culture (replete with creation stories of blood ties,
motherlands, and religion) supposedly endangered by decadent forces
intent on attacking and overwhelming it.
To Putin, the decadent force is the West. As he put it
Friday, “domestic culture at all times protected the identity of
Russia,” which “accepted all the best and creative, but rejected the
deceitful and fleeting, that which destroyed continuity of our spiritual
values, moral principles and historical memory.” Hence, a mythic
justification for taking Ukraine back from a seductive but inferior
Western culture that threatens to overwhelm it and Russia.
The Trump-Carlson-white nationalist narrative is similar: America’s
dominant white Christian culture is endangered by Black people,
immigrants, and coastal elites who threaten to overwhelm it.
The culture wars now being orchestrated by the Republican Party
against transgender people, gay people, poor women seeking abortions,
and schools that teach about sex and America’s history of racism, emerge
from the same narrative as Putin’s culture war against a “decadent” West filled with “sociocultural disturbances.” As does the right’s claim that “secularists” have, in the words of former Trump Attorney General William Barr, mounted “an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.”
These tropes have served to distract attention from the systemic
economic looting that oligarchs have been undertaking, leaving most
people poor and anxious. Which is why the grievances that Putin, Trump,
Carlson, and the GOP use are unremittingly cultural; they are never
economic, never about class, and most assuredly not about the predations
of the super-rich.
Reduced to basics, today’s oligarchs and strongmen (along with their
mouthpieces and lackeys) are trying to justify their wealth and power by
attacking liberal values that have shaped the West, beginning with the
enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – the values
of tolerance, openness, democracy, self-government, equal rights, and
the rule of law. These values are incompatible with a society of
oligarchs and strongmen.
Ultimately, the oligarchs and strongmen will lose. Putin won’t
succeed in subduing Ukraine, Trump won’t be reelected president, and
Carlson and his ilk won’t persuade Americans to give up on American
ideals. But the culture wars won’t end anytime soon because so much
wealth and power have consolidated at the top of America, Russia, and
elsewhere around the world that anti-liberal forces have risen to
justify it.
TWO brand new Tom the Dancing Bug books! Tom the Dancing Bug Awakens; and Tom the Dancing Bug, Without the Bad Ones! Order today, RIGHT HERE AND NOW.
"This fine collection of work by Mr. Bolling provides ample evidence
as to why he is unanimously considered one of the greatest cartoonists
in the known universe. How he would rank in that other part of the
universe is, of course, a matter that's still being hotly debated within
the scientific community." –"Weird Al" Yankovic
JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's INNER HIVE. Join the team
that makes Tom the Dancing Bug possible, and get exclusive access to
comics before they are published anywhere, sneak peeks, insider scoops,
extra comics, and lots of other stuff. JOIN THE INNER HIVE TODAY.
Half the political ecosystem of the United States has gone completely feral, like the wilderness around Chernobyl did.
Over the past six or seven years, I've had one
line of Elvis Costello’s that keeps banging around in my head. It was
there as I sat through the amazing confirmation hearings of the
collection of unemployables that the previous president* installed in
his Cabinet. It was there during the hearing on Neil Gorsuch’s
nomination to the Supreme Court. It sounded like the genuine trumpet of
doom during Brett Kavanaugh’s extended manic episode before the Senate
Judiciary Committee. And it was back this week as I watched the rancid
flotsam of the Republican senatorial caucus treat Judge Ketanji Brown
Jackson as though she’d been caught stealing silverware from the Harvard
Club. And this is what I’ve kept hearing through most of this wretched
decade.
I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused.
I try, but I can’t do it. I can’t look at what’s going on and find
any of it clever or funny. I can’t use, “but it works” as an excuse for
dangerous political foolishness anymore. I’m still willing to chuckle
over past political shenanigans. But what’s going on now comes too damn
close to the violent politics of the 1850s for me to chuckle wisely at
it. Preston Brooks was not a million laughs.
We have two political parties and only two political parties, and one
of them has gone utterly insane. Half the political ecosystem of the
United States has gone completely feral, like the wilderness around
Chernobyl did. They conduct their politics on a poisoned landscape.
Here, for example, is Mitch McConnell, leader of the Republicans in the
Senate, explaining why, consarn it, he just can’t vote for Judge KBJ, a decision that was approximately as unexpected as the rising of the sun.
“I went into this process with an open mind…”
That’s as far as you have to go to know that on this, as on most
things, McConnell is even more truthless than he is ruthless. He voted
against Judge Jackson when she was nominated to the position she
currently holds. A month ago, upon the announcement of her nomination to
the Supreme Court, he said in a statement:
I voted against confirming Judge Jackson to her
current position less than a year ago. Since then, I understand that she
has published a total of two opinions, both in the last few weeks, and
that one of her prior rulings was just reversed by a unanimous panel of
her present colleagues on the D.C. Circuit. I also understand Judge
Jackson was the favored choice of far-left dark-money groups that have
spent years attacking the legitimacy and structure of the Court itself.
Mitch McConnell’s mind was not open on this nomination, but it
remains open for business. They’re all corrupt and/or crazy. But they’re
not funny and they mean what they say.
Apparently, Vladimir Putin has been browsing a lot of American substackery these days. From the Guardian:
He went on to compare the treatment Russia had
received with the controversy surrounding Rowling’s comments on
transgender people. “Recently they cancelled the children’s writer
Joanne Rowling because she – the author of books that have sold hundreds
of millions of copies worldwide – fell out of favor with fans of
so-called gender freedoms,” Putin said.
Those Ukrainians with the rocket launchers are not defending their
homes and families. They’re cancelling Putin. Maybe he should start a
blog. Freedom!!!!
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Chilly Winds” (Wade Ward): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1937,
are senators talking about FDR’s new ideas on the Supreme Court. Alas,
unless you can lip read, you can’t hear what the senators are saying.
Your mileage may vary on whether or not that adds to the quality of the
film. History is so cool.
Most of the elders of the Republican party very much would like
disgraced Missouri Governor Eric Greitens out of the race for the Senate
seat held by retiring Republican Roy Blunt. Greitens resigned as governor
after allegations surfaced that he had physically abused a woman with
whom he was having an affair. Now, in a filing submitted by his ex-wife,
Greitens is accused of physically abusing both his wife and his
children. From the Washington Post:
Sheena Greitens, who now lives with their children in
Austin, where she works as a university associate professor, described
for the first time publicly what she says she experienced at the end of
their marriage, in documents filed as part of an ongoing child custody
dispute in Missouri state court. “In early June 2018, I became afraid
for my safety and that of our children at our home, which was fairly
isolated, due to Eric’s unstable and coercive behavior,” she wrote in
the filing, which was obtained from Boone County Circuit Court. “This
behavior included physical violence toward our children, such as cuffing
our then three-year-old son across the face at the dinner table in
front of me and yanking him around by the hair.”
Incumbent Republican senators raced to throw Greitens overboard. For
his part, Greitens has posted a video in which he goes seriously
bananas. From Mediaite:
I wanna tell you directly, Karl Rove and Mitch
McConnell. Hear me now. You are disgusting cowards and we are coming for
you. We are no longer going to allow you – not just to attack me and
attack my kids, but to destroy this country, and that’s what you’re
doing. You’re making life hard for millions of families around this
country by cooperating with the left, by stabbing President Trump in the
back, by stabbing the people of America in the back, and we’re not
gonna stand for it anymore.
Know this. The freedom wing of the Republican Party, true patriots,
true conservatives, we are coming for you. And we’re not just taking
back our party, we’re taking back our country. We see your game, we see
your lies, but we also know this: that at the end of the day, truth
prevails.
The prion disease is particularly acute in Missouri. Greitens is leading almost all of the polls taken in this Senate primary. However, he does worse
than all the other prospective Republican candidates against the
prospective Democratic candidates. But, of course, it’s the Democrats
who never can get along with each other.
Hey, Smithsonian, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
Spinosaurs broke all the rules. Where most carnivorous
dinosaurs had knife-like, curved teeth, spinosaurs had conical chompers
more like those of crocodiles. Even the snouts of these dinosaurs were
long, giving them a crocodile-like look, instead of the familiar
profiles of Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus. Some species even had
prominent sails growing from their backs, ornate biological billboards
that acted as social signals. But that’s hardly all. Some spinosaurs –
including the immense Spinosaurus itself—were the only non-avian
dinosaurs known to split their time between land and water.
To hell with the rules, says Spinosaurus. I got me some penguin bones! From National Geographic, where it’s also a good day for dinosaur news!
Now, using the biggest dataset of its kind,
researchers have compared the density of the prehistoric carnivore’s
bones to a wide array of living and extinct animals. The analysis found
that Spinosaurus—and, surprisingly, its British cousin Baryonyx—had
highly dense bone walls like penguins do, suggesting they likely spent
much of their time in the water and hunted down aquatic prey.
Rules are made for lesser creatures. A few had to be broken so as to live then to make us happy now.
I’ll be back on Monday, looking forward to the full Senate’s debating
the Judge KBJ nomination, which I’m sure will be engaging, and
enlightening, and an embarrassment to democracies all the way back to
Pericles. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line,
wear the damn masks, and get the damn shots, especially the damn
boosters.
From now on, every Supreme Court decision on which Justice Clarence
Thomas is the deciding vote comes with a giant asterisk: This matter was
decided by a man whose wife advocated for the overthrow of the government.
Those aren’t the only Thomas votes that require the asterisk, though.
Take the Supreme Court’s January rejection of Donald Trump’s attempt to
block the Jan. 6 select committee from getting White House documents. Thomas was the only dissent on that.
Now we know that, during the same period as the White House documents
Thomas would not have allowed to be sent to the select committee, his
wife, Ginni Thomas, was furiously texting away with then-White House
chief of staff Mark Meadows about the need to overturn the election,
sending him conspiracy theory videos and texts like, “Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for [Trump’s] back.”
In late 2021, Trump tried to assert executive privilege over hundreds
of pages of documents relating to Jan. 6, even though he was no longer
the executive. The actual executive, President Joe Biden, had declined
to assert the privilege and hold back the documents. Trump lost in
district court and appeals court and then at the Supreme Court, where
Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and
Amy Coney Barrett all agreed that Trump could not block the national
archivist from turning over the documents to the select committee.
Ginni Thomas’ texts came not in those documents, but in documents
voluntarily turned over to the select committee by Meadows in the brief
window before he stopped cooperating. So it’s not that Clarence Thomas
knew—for sure, at least—that his wife would show up in the White House
documents Trump was seeking directly to block. But, while the Thomases
claim to keep his work as a Supreme Court justice and her work as a
right-wing activist separate, they also describe themselves as “best
friends” (interestingly, a term that shows up in one of Ginni’s texts to
Meadows). It seems unlikely that she exchanged 29 texts with Mark
Meadows and just never mentioned it to her best friend. Ginni also attended the Jan. 6 rally before the storming of the Capitol, and she has ties to some of the organizers of that event.
Even if Clarence didn’t oppose the rejection of Trump’s
post-executive privilege claim because he thought there might be
documents relating to his wife in those documents, he opposed it as the
husband of someone who was, at that moment, cheering on Trump’s efforts
to overturn the election, even offering (terrible) advice to Trump’s
chief of staff about which lawyers’ efforts should be promoted. That’s a
glaring conflict of interest, but it’s just one of many cases in which
Thomas failed to recuse himself from matters in which his wife was at
least tangentially involved. They are a walking ethics violation—or they
would be if judicial ethics was something that applied to conservative
members of the Supreme Court.
Clarence Thomas has said that Ginni works “24/7
every day in defense of liberty” and that they “are equally yoked, and
we love being with each other because we love the same things.” Being
“equally yoked” is a reference to the biblical injunction against being
unequally yoked in a relationship with an unbeliever. An equally yoked
team of oxen means they are pulling in the same direction with the same
strength, getting the job done, whereas an unequally yoked team of oxen
would be unable to do so. That’s an explicit statement that he sees her
work—which includes sitting on the board of multiple far-right groups—as
linked to and aligned with his own.
Husbands and wives have to be able to engage in separate work and
separate lives to be independent of each other. But they also have to be
able to acknowledge that sometimes their partners’ work has an effect
on their own, and to do the ethical thing in stepping back in those
moments. (I am married to a regular old lawyer. On at least
one occasion he has asked his employer to screen him from a matter I
have written about.) Clarence Thomas, by contrast, is not just refusing
to recuse himself where his wife is involved, he is telling us that his
work and his wife’s work are actively linked. That they share a project
of remaking the nation’s laws, she from the outside and he from the
inside. This is deeply corrupt, and not just where Jan. 6 is concerned.
We can only imagine what RBG would have to say about the shenanigans of the Dishonorable Justice Thomas and his Q-anonsense wife. The Supreme Court is truly at the lowest point in its history. Is that a pubic hair on your Coke can?
At this point the staggering miscalculation shown by Vladimir Putin
in invading Ukraine is fairly obvious to everyone (except perhaps to
Putin himself). He expected a quick victory over Ukraine’s armed forces
and he didn’t get it. He expected most Ukrainians would embrace their
Russian invaders—or at the very least meekly submit to Russian rule—and
he didn’t get that either. He expected a disjointed, tepid response from
the NATO alliance, and he got that one wrong as well.
But he had very good grounds for at least some of his expectations.Washington Post
columnist Greg Sargent interviewed acclaimed historian and Russian
expert Timothy Snyder about the motivation for Putin’s invasion of
Ukraine. Snyder believes one of the primary reasons Putin launched this
ill-conceived war was a perception that the West—and particularly the
U.S.—would fold under the weight of its own internal discord and
divisions. The Trump-inspired insurrection that occurred in Washington,
D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021—and the subsequent efforts by Republicans to
ignore, sanitize, and whitewash it—provided Putin with the confidence
that any U.S. response to his war would simply underscore its innate
weakness and impotence.
Snyder points to a now-deleted “declaration of victory” that was posted on Feb. 26—rather prematurely, as it turns out—by the Russian state-controlled press. As reported by the BBC, that
declaration boldly announced that Russia was taking its rightful place
in the world, and that a “new world order” was in the offing:
"Vladimir Putin has assumed, without a drop of exaggeration, a
historic responsibility by deciding not to leave the solution of the
Ukrainian question to future generations," the article says.
It concludes by claiming that the military action "is Russia's return
of its historical space and its place in the world", which has put the
Anglo-Saxons of Europe and the US in their place.
"Western global domination can be considered completely and finally over," it claims.
According to Snyder, based on the events of Jan. 6, Putin likely
believed ”that the West just basically needed one more push to fall into
total disarray.” From the interview:
If you watch Jan. 6 clips over and over again, you can get that impression. The Russians really have been fixated on Jan. 6.
They thought a successful military operation in Ukraine would be that
nudge: We’d feel helpless, we’d fall into conflict, it would help
[Donald] Trump in the U.S., it would help populists around the world.
As Snyder observes, the Jan. 6 insurrection—and worse, the lack of
accountability (so far) for those at the top who planned it—confirmed
everything that Putin had been telling himself for years, namely “that
democracy is a joke everywhere.”
But the deeper point is that Trump’s attempt to overthrow the
election on Jan. 6 made the American system look fragile. They think,
“One more Trump and the Americans are done.” In invading Ukraine, they
think they’re putting huge pressure on the Biden administration. They’re
going to make Biden look weak.
That probably was their deep fantasy about the West: Successful
military occupation in Ukraine; the Biden administration is totally
impotent; we humiliate them; Trump comes back; this is a big strategic
victory for us.
On one level this could be seen as yet another instance of a
megalomaniacal dictator placing too much credence in his own propaganda.
But it also shows the depth and scope of Trump’s betrayal of this
country, and the betrayal by every Republican who has abetted it since
Jan. 6. If our most powerful and dangerous geopolitical foe is motivated
enough by our purported “weakness” to risk a world war, what does that
say about the people who gave him that idea in the first place, the ones
who by their reckless actions put our country in this position?
The fact that Trump and many elected Republicans behaved like pathetic sycophants
to Putin during his entire administration was certainly bad enough. But
as Snyder points out, they compounded their treachery by orders of
magnitude when they instigated (and later endorsed through their votes) the attack on our democracy on Jan. 6. From that point forward, Trump’s Big Lie and the subsequent lies that have now metastasized through the entire Republican party
quite literally provided aid and comfort to Vladimir Putin, bolstering
his confidence that he could start an unprovoked war without any serious
consequences to himself or his own country. The refusal by Republicans
to take responsibility for those events and own up to Trump’s lies gave
him all the motivation he needed.
The treasonous actions of Jan. 6 lead straight to Putin's slaughter of innocent civilians, including children and babies.
