I’m having some trouble focusing on anything other than the turmoil in Ukraine, considering it has at least the potential to spin out of control and lead places we don’t even want to contemplate. In times like these I am grateful to have a very level-headed and studious president, because one alternative was John McCain. I haven’t forgotten what Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) said about McCain back in 2008:
“The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine,” Cochran said about McCain by phone. “He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”
Also, too, the idea that I might read the following in some alternative universe sends a cold chill down my spine:
Vice President Sarah Palin spoke with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk on Friday to “reaffirm the United States’ strong support for the new government and our commitment to the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and democratic future of Ukraine,” a statement from the vice president’s office said.
I can’t tell you how happy I am not to be living through that hell.
Or we could have Mitt Romney asking his good friend Bibi Netanyahu what to do.
Ukraine is simple. Say good by to Crimea and buy Eastern North American LNG producers/terminal builders.
For an explanation of your inexplicable preoccupation with Ukraine, suggest reading The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals. Liberals and leftists lost New Deal economic policies under Clinton; the former clapped louder and louder for eight years and told the left to STFU and get in line. Obama is doing to the anti-war, anti-imperalism dregs of liberalism what Clinton did to the New Deal.
All those “liberal” suckers that jumped on the bomb the crap out of Libya to “get Gaddafi” bandwagon were just being softened up for more US aggression. They didn’t object much to the Obama/Kerry call to take out Assad, and do their best to ignore all of Obama’s drone strikes and his “kill list.”
The $5 billion spent on covert activities to overthrow the various Ukrainian presidents of the past decade will bite some in the butt. A shame really that the “some” rarely includes the those that support and conduct the activities that lead to deaths and injuries and destruction of others.
Ray McGovern: Ukraine: One `Regime Change’ Too Many?
The thing to realize is that Presidents don’t really have the GS level to start wars. Otherwise, they’d have the power to end them too.
Actually, if McCain were President we might watch his head explode, but then again he’d probably be happy with his wars in Iran and Syria.
This situation scares the hell out of me. Our calm, collected president is all that might save the whole damn world. We have to let him know that we support a peaceful solution. We have to educate our fellow Americans about the danger, and get them to speak up. We have a say in what our nation does. Now is a very good time to use it.
No, no, no, we have to educate the American people that the Ukrainian protesters are all neo-Nazis in the pay of the EU, the IMF, and the Frankfurter Wertpapierbörse, tasked with delivering the people of the Ukraine bound hand and foot to the banksters.
This is why it was vital to maintain the bunch of kleptocrats who were in there.
But now it’s too late, and the only thing left is to make sure nothing stops a bunch of Russian oil-spivs from handing the Ukrainian people over to Gazprom and the Eurasian Commission.
Or something.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was scary. Everything since then has been either theater or preludes to a war the US wants and will get and other than buying weapons instead of the other things we need, it doesn’t threaten the life, health, or well being of US civilians and only a few non-civilians will pay a price.
I hope you’re right. I’ll assume you’re right for my own peace of mind.
But, have you studied Strauss and Howe’s theory of generational history? They found that history has a very definite repetitive pattern. Right now, we are well into a crisis period. The last crisis period brought us the Great Depression and WWII. The one before that, the Civil War. Before that, the Revolution. During Crisis Periods, problems that would have been easily solved at other times can escalate into extremes. Of all the problems we’ve faced recently, this has the best chance of getting out of hand, even if nobody really wants it to. If McCain and his ilk get their way, the military will definitely be engaged, and having the US and Russian militaries in the same space could be very bad. We have to make it very clear that we support a peaceful resolution. Obama will need our help.
We’re still in the Great Recession — but with all shiny toys and excess calories we get, will take a few more years for Americans to really get it.
Was only addressing the Ukraine as a flashpoint for a war that endangers us sitting here in the US. How much did we suffer when Iraq was significantly destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed or injured? Nothing really. Same with the Iran-Iraq war in which the US supplied military stuff to both sides. Or Indonesia. Etc.
Indonesia? We just wrote the list.
Well, I hope this doesn’t turn out to be a sort of CMC in reverse, with the US and its NATO allies acting militarily, or seeming to do so, in what is clearly Russia’s sphere of influence.
And right now, Putin is looking about as scary and aggressive as Nikita did in the early stages of the missile crisis. Let’s hope Vlad ends up being as level-headed and rational as NK was 52 yrs ago — but I’m rather pessimistic on that score.
Meantime, Obama et al need to tamp down their somewhat surprisingly tough rhetoric and not position themselves such that, having tossed their hat over the wall, they have no choice but to follow it to the other side.
Did we have any objective and honest reporting back then or do we today? Vlad’s a bit nutty with his religious devotions (but so was GWB and so is Obama), but he’s not crazy and he’s highly intelligent. At his core, seems honestly to want Russia to be all that it can be. And given it’s wealth in natural resources and high education levels among urban populations, Russia has significant potential.
I don’t mind Putin wanting Russia to be all it can be — but in benign contexts like the Olympics, chess, and space exploration. Not in geopolitical or military supremacy ways.
And my sense of him is, while he’s not the one-dimensional evil doer our one-dimensional press portrays him, he is still the ex-KGB head who is apparently attempting to resurrect some vestige of the old Soviet Union, building up Russia’a military might, asserting itself in protecting its interests in neighboring former Soviet satellites, possibly looking to teaching the US or Nato a bitter lesson, somewhere and not too long from now, on the battlefield.
Frankly, I would stay away from buying real estate in Alaska for the next, say, 10 years …
Did you miss the weeks of US domestic coverage of the Olympics and rooting for them to fail? Sorry, US foreign policy towards Russia hasn’t been benign for a century and we take every opportunity, either natural or US created, to kick them.
If you haven’t done so, read Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy, “Blowback,” “Sorrows of Empire, and “Nemesis. The USSR was a piker compared to the US wrt to establishing satellite military installations around the world. What part of the NSA collection worldwide communications don’t you get?
As the US has never allowed any territory it acquired and designated as a protectorate or state to break away, there’s no obvious corollary to the Russia-Ukraine situation. However, if Russia funded any political faction to oust the government of any country in which we have military installations, do you think we’d sit back and say, “okay, fine?”
Actually, compared to the relentlessly skeptical coverage in the weeks leading up, and compared to coverage in most other years, the network didn’t do too badly covering the action, even occasionally showing events where the US was not a major participant. One of the least US-centric two weeks of Olympic coverage of recent decades — an improvement over most recent network flag-waiving broadcasts of the Games. From what I saw of course.
As for the rest, I think I havent been clear: I hold the US’s heavy-handed and hypocritical foreign policy attitude — for the most part unchanged from R to Dem admins since LBJ — primarily responsible for many of the problems we face today in the world, including Russia and terrorism.
I’ve long felt we need to get out of the business of considering nearly every nook and cranny of the globe as being in our vital interests. We need to close down just about every one of our foreign military bases and bring ’em home. Let the natives deal with their problems, while we can push at the same time for a more robust and reliable way to bring international pressure, including military, to bear in any trouble spot. But the latter is probably decades away from happening in any meaningful sense as it would require full cooperation from all major countries of the world.
Mostly agree — but the humanely sounding R2P has been demonstrated to be just another cynical ploy to impose more violence where a US gain is desired. We are much too dishonest to be a force for good and therefore, should limit our engagements to diplomacy and humanitarian aid. Of course, that wouldn’t serve the interests of US and European corporations peddling military junk.
I seem to have missed the part where we act militarily…
The only way to turn this into any form of a possible positive situation for the USA. Is to send all of the neocons over to the area and not let them back in the USA. After all from what I have been reading this insinuation was orchestrated by them.
Yes, but I’m greatly relieved we have John Kerry to remind Putin of ancient Stallone movie plots.
From Kerry’s comment about Putin inserting a 19th century measure into a 21st century issue it would have been grown up of Putin to set aside his kingmaking greed and urge the UN to offer assistance.
And then there’s the vision of Paul Wolfowitz licking his hair in anticipation of weighing in with some insanity.
We’re now walking a mile in the shoes of those who had to sit on their hands watching Cheney march this country into Iraq.
BooMan, I think you may be having an issue with your RSS feed. This is the second time in two days that two seemingly identical items show up in my RSS feed with the same title.
On the first one yesterday, the post appeared to be the same, but on one iteration there was only one comment, and it was from Arthur. There were multiple comments on the second one. (Progressives’ Image Problem)
On this one just now, the text of your post is slightly different, which I can see from Leaf. One was the link to this thread and the other comes up as : Sorry. I can’t seem to find that story. (Preoccupied With Ukraine)
I’ve only been using RSS for a couple of months, so maybe this just happens if you revise a story after you submit it?
From one of my diaries on the events in Ukraine:
○ Rear Admiral Denys Berezovsky, new head of Ukraine’s navy, defects in Crimea
○ Ukrainian troops dispatched in Crimea switch to region’s side – sources
The NY Times is reporting that the coup regime is planning on replacing the governors in eastern Ukraine with oligarchs. I have been corrected that governors are elected but appointed in the Ukraine, you know, like the presidents now are.
This would be the creation of the ultimate fascist “corporatist state”. You get to work for the man who makes the laws for you.
However, at least one of the current governors already said that his state doesn’t recognize the government in Kiev, and I think it might be difficult for these oligarchs to seize the reins of power in the east. And I suspect that some of these oligarchs might prefer operating in Russian-controlled territory, where they actually have fuel to run their factories.
Get fracking, Kiev.
not elected but appointed. Whenever you getting around to it, maybe you could get a correct feature.
The idea the Kerry is talking with his counterpart Lavrov in very comforting when domestic politics can drive very bad mistakes.
The fact that neo-con Victoria Nuland and her buddies forced this situation however is not comforting unless Kerry exerts authority over his Department. The conversation between Nuland and Pyatt reported on YouTube and covered by the BBC was not reassuring at all. A resignation is in order, but Nuland’s from the never complain, never explain, never resign neo-cons.
This failure should be laid at Victoria Nuland’s door. Someone needs to inform the State Department that the Cold War ended in 1989. And that instead of being unhelpful, Putin and Russia stopped the US from doing something very stupid in Syria.
Kerry can finesse this one in Kyiv if he can get assurances of protection for the Russian minority in Ukraine and honoring of Ukraine’s lease for Sevastapol. A velvet divorce for Crimea might be Putin’s price to settle this. But the hysteria in DC and the EU is much uncalled for.
And members of Congress should keep their traps shut for right now—but won’t.
Russia needs to know who speaks for the US and what exactly is US policy in the region.
Not as a defense of Nuland, but this crap in Ukraine has been building since 1945. This is the crown jewel of CIA-Nazi cooperation.
Robert Parry, Consortium News: What Neocons Want from the Ukraine Crisis
Can we fire Victoria Nuland now?