You know, it’s true that Richard Nixon did very well in the South by employing the so-called “Southern Strategy,” but Jimmy Carter took the South back from the Republicans in 1976. I think that a lot of people forget this.
So, once Ronald Reagan had secured the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, a young Connecticut Yankee named Paul Manafort decided that the best idea he could come up with was to have the candidate go down to Philadelphia, Mississippi and attend a county fair. The county (Neshoba) was chosen carefully. It was the same county where civil rights volunteers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner had been slain by members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan a mere sixteen years earlier. Reagan went to that county fair, and here is what he said:
In his relatively short speech, Reagan declared, “I believe in state’s rights…And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”
It worked. Ronald Reagan won every state in the former Confederacy except President Carter’s home state of Georgia.
Thus, Manafort is rightly considered one of the architects of the Republican Party’s post-Nixon Southern Strategy. Another thing he did in 1980 was team up with fellow race-baiters Lee Atwater, Roger Stone, and Charlie Black. With Black and Stone, he formed a lobbying group that soon had impressive clients like Ferdinand Marcos, Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia, and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. It was quite a climb for a guy who had only graduated from Georgetown Law School in 1974.
Mercenary by nature and evidently conscienceless, Manafort would go in more recent years to work with Vladimir Putin’s puppet clients in Ukraine, going so far to help lay the groundwork for the Russian annexation of Crimea.
As a consultant for foreign politicians, he could rake in millions without any requirement that his disclose what he was doing, but there are federal laws against lobbying on the behalf of foreign clients in the United States. That’s a requirement that Manafort apparently ignored, and he could now face prosecution for the “oversight.”
Here’s the Associated Press:
Donald Trump’s campaign chairman helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence U.S. policy.
The revelation, provided to The Associated Press by people directly knowledgeable about the effort, comes at a time when Trump has faced criticism for his friendly overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It also casts new light on the business practices of campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Under federal law, U.S. lobbyists must declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders or their political parties and provide detailed reports about their actions to the Justice Department. A violation is a felony and can result in up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
Reading over the coverage of Manafort’s abrupt resignation in the Washington Post and New York Times, I can’t help but feel that the media is soft-pedaling the real reason that Manafort decided to step down (or was forced out, you decide).
The way it’s being presented is that Trump decided to move in another direction and that in hiring new top staffers, Manafort was being demoted. Not enough emphasis is put on the fact that new revelations have unearthed evidence both that Manafort broke the law and that he’s been lying about it for weeks.
Where in the Washington Post’s article is there any mention that a Ukrainian member of parliament named Serhiy Leshchenko held a press conference this morning that “divulged more details of what he said were payments made to Donald Trump’s campaign chief in the U.S. presidential race by the political party of the Kremlin-backed former Ukrainian leader Viktor Yankovich”?
Is the timing not a bit of a tell here?
What’s kind of amazing is that we already knew that Trump was relying on cynical and mercenary race-baiting veterans of Reagan’s Southern Strategy, but Manafort’s replacement is a white supremacist (or indistinguishable from one, anyway) . Maybe Stephen Bannon won’t be so far in Vladimir Putin’s pocket that he’ll change the Republican Party platform to appease him. Of course, it’s too late to do that this year, so I guess we’ll never know.
There is less then 3 months to go so maybe Putin will come over and be in Trump’s campaign to help.
Putin’s in the news today:
Anyone aware of the German rhetoric and activities alleging Polish sabotage immediately before the 1939 invasion would find this development chillingly familiar.
Some people, for reasons unknown to me, have blinders on when it comes to modern Russia. Terrorism, sabotage, and right to protect… classic casus bellis for intervention that are all used in recent Russian political rhetoric.
Now a lot of these folks have accepted that Russia is the victim of a conspiracy and so it must be defended. Therefore, any aggressive action Russia takes becomes justified.
Legitimate criticisms of Russia are treated as lacking credibility, either by pointing to a lack of concrete evidence (the traditional gate-keepers being discredited) or at similar shenanigans pulled by the US/West.
As must seems obvious I consider Putin a devious, insincere and malign actor capable of anything. Personally I suspect the amount of Russian money sloshing around in Western government and media to be grossly underestimated. Our recent commercial infatuation with promoting those willing to value prosperity over integrity rather invites such abuse.
Having read fascist literature in detail from the 20th century it is interesting to note the similar contempt for the institutions of social democracy and a parallel doctrine of using its pluralism and tolerance as a lever to pry it open, sabotage and corrupt it. That our Republicans adopted this approach; hobbling our institutions, misinforming the public and then denouncing the outcomes doesn’t entirely overshadow the culpability of other political actors and the media in also enabling this strategy through opportunism, narcissism or greed.
Race, creed, nationality or heritage, I’m an equal-opportunity anti-fascist.
Manafort was pretty damn arrogant to believe that his consulting work wouldn’t run both him and Trump into trouble. Particularly after Trump’s campaign took particular interest in that obscure Republican Party plank, it was inevitable that the spotlight on his advocacies for Yanulkovich and his political Party would be destructive to their interests. As long as he was working in the shadows, Manafort was in a better position than he is now. I suspect he’ll be in an even worse position a few months from now.
It’s almost as though he thought we was protected… Seriously, by using Podesta and Weber he probably thought he was squaring the circle and keeping it all ‘business as usual’:
Manafort, and more so Gates, were consigliere, not the muscle. If they get them for FARA violations it will be something in the small print.
Looks like everyone is in the stew:
Whoopsie.
Must be another dastardly plot by Putin to install Trump in the WH.
The reality is that Trump’s campaign can’t withstand all the guns being fired at it by those protecting their turf in the Beltway white-collar war industry, and therefore, there are only wacko fringe wannabe-players left that will take the two-and-a-half months temporary gigs with Trump’s campaign. The Kagens, Weber, Podesta, Kissinger, et. al club understand how to bake and butter their bread. So, in the big picture, nobody is out and they’re the vermin that “gets stuff done.”
As Anthony Bourdain describes:
And biz is just swell: The Intercept — U.S. Defense Contractors Tell Investors Russian Threat Is Great for Business
I’m sorry, Marie, but your claim that “Trump’s campaign can’t withstand all the guns being fired at it by those protecting their turf in the Beltway white-collar war industry” is idiotic. Trump is a horrible, incompetent, racist candidate and Kissinger and “the war industry” don’t have one damn thing to do with it. All of those guys could suddenly endorse Trump and it wouldn’t swing 100 votes nationwide.
That thing you’re beating is less a dead horse than an undistinguished mass of blood. How about if you actually start paying attention to the campaign and, you know, actual facts?
When will you admit that the Goldman-Sachs “speaking fees” were out and out bribes?
When will you admit that it’s one thing to take money for a speech and it’s another to put Goldman in charge of your campaign?
You mean…they’re not essentially the same thing?
Oh???
You mean that the interests for whom one has been consistently working at great profit for at least 25 years …on the evidence of the results of one’s “work” if not a great deal more…do not have substantial control of what one does?
Oh.
Nevermind.
Yore freind…
Emily L.
another example of making shallow thinking a virtue.
Where is it “shallow” that I consider someone who has quite plainly worked for the Permanent Government at great reward is, has and will be sympathetic to its aims?
AG
When you give me some evidence of what they were bribing her to do. And while you’re up you can explain the equally obscene payments from The American Camping Association Atlantic City ($260,000), eBay in San Jose ($315,000), the Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women ($225,500), Beth El Synagogue of Minneapolis ($225,000) and the Economic Club of Grand Rapids ($225,000).
Crooked Hillary in the pocket of Big Camping!
I guess they just throw around a million dollars because they are such good citizens.
Absent a concrete and identifiable quid pro quo (a lot of cash in a suitcase or wire transfer directly before or after the requested act), bribery doesn’t exist in the minds whoever supports whichever politician. The public is stuck back in the days when crooks were dumber and less patient to evaluate the existence of corruption and bribery. As with many other politicians and former administration folks, HRC’s speaking fees weren’t bribes but thank you gifts. The only unique element in her case is that is was also an investment for what she can do for them in the future.
AP
David Sirota
Perhaps just another backroom deal — soon Obama will need to feed at that trough to build his “library” and there’s not enough for two at the same time.
I have no idea what that means, Marie. I doubt you do, either.
I think Hillary should either disband the Clinton Foundation or hand it over to someone else, but the idea that contributions to a non-profit constitutes bribery is so absurd that it hardly warrants a response.
A meta-comment: the conspiratorial half-ideas that some on the left are floating are indistinguishable from those on the right. Add a few grammar errors and Marie’s comment would fit right in on a Daily Caller comment thread.
Make the connection Di. You’re so close. Make the final connection.
.
Okay, nalbar, here goes: when Hillary spoke to Goldman-Sachs, they gave her a list of legislation they want passed, as well as a list of appointees to Treasury, the Fed, and the SEC. Hillary said “no, I could NEVER do that,” then winked, and they passed her either a burlap bag with a dollar sign, or a novelty check like the ones they give to the winners of Publishers Clearinghouse contests. Then they all cackled maniacally and made a toast to neoliberalism.
How’s that?
Wait, I lost the thread — all of that was supposed to happen after Those People donated to the Clintons’ non-profit, because of course the best way to bribe someone is to make sure absolutely none of the money goes in their pocket.
Not the connection I was talking about, but it’s pretty good.
I’ll give you a hint;
If it talks like a republican, if it gets talking points from republican websites, if it constantly defends republican allies,
it’s a _____
.
oh please, I’ve had lots of disagreements with Marie3, but GOP talking points? I think she’s more of a really, really disgruntled leftist who despises incrementalism and what she sees as corruption. My problem with her here is that she uses the rhetorical tricks that, when used by anyone else, provoke hèr into a rage of denunciation.
Yeah, and I’d guess that you discounted the PNAC agenda in the 2000 election. Seemed to me that it was the best argument to vote for Gore in 2000 because those guys were more or less lining up for GWB and from that it seemed clear to me that if elected (since I’m not prescient, didn’t imagine “if selected”) that GWB would have us back in another war in Iraq. Weird how I got that one right before 9/11 entered the picture.
Did what I could to dissuade others from falling for the imaginary Iraqi WMD with some vague notion that the people in this country could stop the madmen. Maybe next time. However, that doesn’t alter the fact that too few people understood what was on the Bush/Cheney “to do list” and used that knowledge to prevent their selection.
Thank you for the non-sequitur.
Was that supposed to explain anything?
If you pay attention, you’ll note that it wasn’t a response to any of your comments.
I have no idea what it was a response to — as I thought I said pretty clearly.
Needs more Hitler in a pantsuit.
No, you need to photoshop Killery’s head onto Hitler.
Then you’ll fit right in – whether with a RealProgressive group, or a Tea Party group. Your choice, champ.
I thought it was quite an interesting image; not one I had ever seen before. Not sure why you are so disdainful, the only other ones I could find were just baggy pants.
That’s an incredible photo. The coy pose is what is killing me here. Thanks for sharing this.
If I recall correctly, at one point Hitler hired a photographer to do a shoot of stuff like this, to humanize him and play on traditionalist German emotions. Let me see if I can Google up more on this….
Ah! Found it! And I slightly misremembered. The lederhosen photos were among those taken by his personal photographer in the 1920s, mostly of poses he was trying out for making speeches, and the shorts shots were in fact deep-sixed by him as too embarrassing, and didn’t surface until after the war:
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/books-magazines/pictures-show-adolf-hitler-practising-poses-for
-his-speeches-and-relaxing-in-lederhosen/story-fn9412vp-1226267072924
Try Google imaging “Hitler photograph lederhosen” for the full glory of shorts plus speechifying poses.
“We have to work on making Hitler more relatable to the German voter. If we can just get 10% of the Jewish vote we’ll have a plurality from the full electorate! The vermin are in their ghettoes, terrible conditions. What do they have to lose?”
I was only addressing the Trump campaign staffing issue. I’ve previously and repeatedly made my opinion of Trump quite clear (and unlike most here, began doing so back in the 1980s and haven’t changed my opinion since then).
In every presidential election cycle, there’s tension between the different camps in the US war industry. Most of it not on public display because in the end, they continue to break bread together. However, the candidate that is a bit more favored by the industry somehow always manages to win.
Not that for the interests of the general public, the other candidate is any better in this area and is often quite worse. However, they aren’t absent during the primary process. If there isn’t a good horse for them to ride in one of the two parties, that’s when the solid majority among them coalesces around the party that does have the good horse. And the other nominee is either better or worse for the public. Otherwise the split approaches fifty-fifty and so too does the electorate with the “plus one” being the winner (1960, 1976, and 2000).
There’s more unity of purpose in this industry/faction in the 2016 general election than there has been since 1972. (More than 1964.) Their rap this time is the same as it was in ’72 — McGovern and his supporters are wackadoodles. Truth is irrelevant to how they play.
Oh Jesus, Marie — stop digging. When you write “However, the candidate that is a bit more favored by the war industry somehow always manages to win,” you’re suggesting that Barack Obama was more of a hawk than both Mitt Romney and John McCain, and that Bill Clinton was worse than George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole.
That’s insane, and so is the entire idea of a “war industry” that coalesces around one candidate. This is wingnut-style thinking.
You think/believe the following was warmly greeted by the “war industry?”
And it was mere happenstance that the WJC administration reneged on the deal? And that later GWB engaged in fence mending with Putin? Just because you can’t see how that industry split with the collapse of the USSR with one active military engagement in the ME and the other preferring restarting the Cold War doesn’t mean that others are as visually handicapped. (FWIW — the Pentagon doesn’t like big-whoop-ass wars either.)
Virtually everything you’ve written today is a non-sequitur. Here’s an idea: how about actually articulating a coherent thought instead of cutting and pasting?
Just an idea!
Story gets more and more difficult to discern who is the underee and who is the useror.
But we allknow who the usurers are.
Don’t we.
AG
The key connection was not with Putin but with Yanukovych, who was a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch in a period in which each Ukrainian oligarch owned his own party in addition to the popular parties. Yanukovych sounds so much like Trump in his love of showy construction and the finer things of life. All of that is more damning of Manafort than the very tenuous story so far about the annexation of Crimea (the correct story–no invasion). It sounds like he started out working for a lesser Trump.
What exactly did Manafort do for Yanukovych to reeceive that money? That’s where the illegal lobbying by foreign governments issue comes in? Who exactly in the US government did he lobby?
Thanks for reminding us why the Republicans hated Jimmy Carter so much: (1) he proclaimed a new era of desegregation and non-discrimination; (2) he actually won the South in 1976, blocking the permanence of the Southern Strategy.
It was segregation (and still is), not just racism, and not at all abortion that motivated the formation of the Religious Right by Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson, and errand boy Ralph Reed. And it took a coup in the Southern Baptist Convention to stop the desegregation advocates there and delegitimize Carter’s religious credentials. They argued abortion because Carter funded it, not desegregation that was the real reason. The motivating event for formation of the Religious Right was the Carter administration’s denial of Bob Jones University’s federal funds because of their whites-only policies.
Manafort was in Yanukovych’s pocket; Yanukovych was in Putin’s pocket. Very much matryoshka dolls.
But it is interesting how few Republican politicians did not see the Putin accusation as a problem with Manafort. It’s all spin and no substance with them, isn’t it.
Along with a few dozen others in DC.
Handed it off to the Podesta Group and Mercury LLC (Tony Podesta and Vin Weber respectively) that did the lobbying on the Hill and at the WH on behalf of Ukraine (before and after Yanukovych’s election to president).
Not fair. Yanukovych has much better taste in construction and decor than Trump.
And then what did Podesta and Weber ask for or repesent as an objective?
Specific interests of the Government of Ukraine?
The direct tie to the interests of the Government of Ukraine is where any legal registration problems occur.
Imagine a Trump monstrosity in Ukraine’s cityscape or countryside. Now imagine the response of the locals. My sense was that Yanukovych was constrained by necessity, not taste.
But in any case if anybody working on the account in the Podesta and Weber firms needed to be registered, as I imagine they did, they were properly registered. These firms may do disgusting things, but they make a serious effort not to break the law.
Some intrepid reporter needs to check out that lead.
Though it’s possible that Yanukovych just had, and still has, a lot more money than Trump.
They also haven’t quite gotten rid of the Yanukovych connection, since they’re holding on to Manafort’s Ukraine lieutenant Rick Gates, according to the Times story, though Bloomberg isn’t sure.
Why would they? So long as the ready cash gets laundered properly.
Both Manafort and Gates are liable to felony prosecutions under the Foreign Agents Registration Act based on the AP story.
money laundering like this?
.
Lots of questions; no answers. Typical Balloon Juice reporting.
So far, there’s no there there to show any wrongdoing. Just the allegation that the campaign did not support Vermont media businesses.
I suspect that Al Giordano will be on this case before long.
Sanders’s presumption to run for President must be punished, after all.
As Josh Marshall points out this law is basically a joke but Manafort is so high profile they might have to do something.
Turn over the rock of the “conservative” movement and there sure are a lot of repulsive bugs. It really is all about the money for these guys.
When exactly did the rock-ribbed anti-communist “conservative” movement of St Reagan become a collection of Putin fanboys? I’m now reading that our glorious white supremacists have come to love Putin, presumably because he’s a “Stong Leederer!” And a white male of course. And if Putin is really hoping for a Trump “partnership”, how does having Ukrainian leaks of Repub bribery help his man? Who is behind this info?
As one not that comfortable with Russia-bashing in all its many forms, I worry that these types of revelations provoke the use of more anti-Russia sentiments by the DC warrior class, Dem and Repub variants. We’ve had more than enough of that, given that we’re dealing with the other nuclear superpower—and without rehashing the blame for the “invasion” of Crimea and its now irreversible annexation.
This reluctance on the left to acknowledge Putin’s character is demoralizing. This isn’t just an ideological rehash of the Cold War. This is a very bad man.
That’s distinct from legitimate Russian economic and security interests that may clash with the interests of our elites and for which we may rightly be reluctant to die.
And if I see one more person try to dismiss Putin’s malevolence and dismiss Ukraine’s historic suffering at the hands of Russian/Soviet strongmen by calling them a bunch of Nazis…
…I am going to puke.
The reluctance to see Putin as a oligarch-friendly Russian Orthodox nationalist and instead cast him as a neo-communist KGB agent is also demoralizing to sound policy with respect to Russia. That is what makes it not a replay of the Cold War.
Ukraine’s historic suffering has come at the hands of both the left and the right internal parties and the meddling of external powers. There were neo-Nazis in power immediately after the US-assisted coup in Ukraine in which the US selected the interim prime minister. Apparently they lost big in the last eleciton, which explains the relative quiet in eastern Ukraine. If things are heating up again in eastern Ukraine, likely it is in relation to the next election.
When will US analysts see that Russia has no interest in the cost of administering Ukraine but has and abiding interest in the base in Sebastapol and a preferential interest in a base in Odessa if it can come with little cost.
My reading of Putin’s show of force at the Ukraine border is to deter Ukraine nationalist militias being tolerated by the current Ukraine government. And to reassure ethnic Russians still Ukraine citizens that Russia will not throw them under the bus.
We appreciate Putin being a malevolent strongman when he suppresses potential terrorists in the Islamic regions of Russia such that they cannot migrate to the West.
We appreciate the fact that he is strong enough to hold the Russian oligarchs mostly in check and permit normal forms of trade with Russia.
US policy always appreciates malevolent strongmen as long as they are our malevolent strongmen. Putin’s sin is not malevolence nor being a dictator; his sin is his independence from US/NATO policy. “If you’re not for us, you’re against us.” thinking did not end with the Bush administration.
His other sin is meddling in US domestic affairs in a rather spectacular way. That’s what’s new here.
How has Putin meddled in US domestic affairs besides being a friend of Trump and entertaining Jill Stein for dinner?
Has he contributed to either campaigns, cut ads for either, or any other material support for their campaigns?
Guilt by association is ugly no matter how noble the cause it serves. It also seems to be widely practiced as a rhetorical technique during election years.
Yes, Donald Rumsfeld did meet with Saddam Hussein. But Donald Rumsfeld most importantly arranged for US military support of Saddam Hussein as the Iraq side of the Iraq-Iran war in which the US provided TOW missiles to Iran. Association alone doesn’t tell the story; nor is it by itself evidence of wrongdoing.
He fucking did a Watergate break-in and selectively leaked documents to undermine the left in this country. And you’re making excuses for him and denying it happened or will continue to happen.
Good God, that question-verging-on-a-claim by TarheelDem was willfully dense. What the hell is going on here? Intellectual pollutants have been poured into the Pond or something.
Seems simple to me: For certain segments of the left, the USA is the Great Satan, the sole force for evil in the world. Foreign folks doing bad things? It’s because they have no agency of their own; they have been coerced, bought, or otherwise incented to do such things by the USA. And anyway, whatever evil committed by other countries is no worse than stuff the USA did/does, so how dare we condemn them?
It’s not mere BothSidesDoIt-ism; it’s active ideological refusal to cast the USA in anything but the most negative light.
The situation of my analysis is that I have some minimal agency over what the US does and absolutely none over what other nations do. Good and evil are not categories that one can use as blanket judgements of nations. Most nations do both.
So critical thinking can possible have the most practical impact on US policy. And analytical thinking can best identify how US policy can play against the actions and leaders of other countries.
In fact, US foreign policy has been surfacely successful and clandestinely problematic for the past 70 years. We won the Cold War (successful) without a nuclear war (very successful) but overthrew every democratic government in Central America to suit US corporations, overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and installed the Shah, earning the enmity of Iranians that resulted in a revolution. We took over the colonialism in Indochina from the French and defended our own puppets in South Vietnam from the inevitable triumph of the actual nationalists for 21 years. We intervened in Afghanistan to set up Islamic jihadis to bring down the Soviet invasion, wound up creating terrorists who thought that bringing down the second superpower meant they could bring down the first superpower by attacking the World Trade Center. By 2007, they very nearly succeeded due to our own government’s foolish response. We added to that by having a war of choice against Iraq and calling Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the axis of evil and implying they were in some sort of alliance like the WWII Axis. Toppling Saddam Hussein created a power vacuum that we are still coping with 13 years later. Iran elected a popular hardliner and only elected a more flexible President after we open negotiations on the nuclear issue (a good thing). North Korea responded by kicking out the IAEA inspectors and rushing to build a bomb and build a missile capability. And we are still stuck in Afghanistan, the fabled “graveyard of empires” after 15 years. All out of those clandestine actions that seemed so small at the time.
But we still have reduced the number of nuclear weapons from their all-time high at the Reykjavik talks, reduced the nations with remaining stockpiles of chemical weapons to five, and come close to eliminating all biological weapons but our own. The wars over the past 70 years have deployed millions of land mines and anti-personnel weapons (cluster bombs, especially). And the largest chemical weapon in use is tear gas and pepper spray, used indiscriminately by most domestic police forces.
If you want to count atrocities, you can put up Kissinger’s recommendation and Nixon’s authorization to replace King Sihanouk with Gen. Lon Nol, followed by the bombing of Cambodia as one of the most horrific in its consequences of making the Khmer popular enough to come to power. Without that US policy of creating a power vacuum, there would have been no “killing fields”. You can include the US policy of providing billions of dollars of military aid to Israel over at least 48 years with no accountability for bringing a just end to the expropriation of Palestinian land. You can add the toleration of the Gaza blockade. And you can add Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and their torture regimes ordered from the Vice President’s office and implemented by consultants hired by subverting the ethics committee chair of the American Psychological Association into supervising the reverse engineering of Chinese and North Korean torture regimes to serve CIA information gathering “requirements”. Those are some horrendous actions taken in the darkness of classified operations and finally self-defeating.
So now we are herding up a cheerleading squad because the sole story of the day from now until November has to be using One Nation Stronger Together Morning in America against Two Nations Weakened by Immigrants, People of Color, and Lefties Led by Crooked Hillary.
I didn’t sign up for that sort of cheerleading within the frogpond.
Honest discussion and disagreement over real issues is needed even in election season when the campaign imperative is to “stay on message”.
It’s a refusal to cast the USA only in the most glaringly Pollyannaish positive light. If we are going to survive, we must change our foreign policy.
And there’s however many hundred words in response telling us, once again, how utterly horrible the United States is and how totally it’s screwed up everything it touches in the world. Pointing out that other nations might could maybe possibly share some culpability for bad stuff happening is “herding up a cheerleading squad”.
Thanks for proving my point.
No actually it is an accurate history of the US foreign policy,
SO, if according to you it is;
The critique should fall on the shoulders of those who fomented said foreign policy,
not at the messenger who recounts said foreign policy.
Tarheel pointed out the history,
you are the one condemning it.
history is rife with both wrongdoing (in the moral sense, e.g., Iraq invasion*) and self-defeating, counter-productive (often via unintended, but shoulda-been-anticipated, consequences) is not
Not even a great stretch, imo, to call such a mis-characterisation “herding up a cheerleading squad”!
Hard for me to see the “cheerleading squad” mis-characterisation you accuse t.d. of as any more egregious than the mis-characterisation (imo) that you just engaged in in reply.
Leaving him/her on about as solid ground as you were to reply “Thanks for proving my point.”
Jus’ sayin’. No dog in this fight, that’s just how it looks to this neutral observer.
*Occurs to me that vivid memory of the “blame-America-first” slander of the real-time opposition to that War Crime probably still has me highly sensitized to how close you seemed to tread here to that offensive rhetoric.
well, I think you missed Tarheel’s dichotomy between the FP surface success and clandestine failures;
See, for me the constant cynicism is the ‘tell’. The desperation to show government, whether foreign affairs or domestic policy, is an abject failure. The driving NEED to counter every Booman post, no matter the subject, as simple minded naïveté.
Government never works is the theme they rely on. In that theme they project their personal frustrations.
It’s not Progressive in any way. It advances no Progressive goals. It’s reactionary, in that everything needs to be blown up and recreated. But recreated only within narrow definitions that THEY will provide. Attack all that disagree.
At its foundation its authoritarian and reactionary.
Sound like something familiar?
.
It’s not just that. He’s been indirectly running the policy side of the presidential campaign of the candidate of one of our two major political parties. That Trump is a buffoon and will probably lose does not mitigate the fact that he carries tremendous influence with a sizable chunk of our population and that his idiotic ideas and statements always receive top coverage.
Your certainty of the moves that are going on in cyberspace between national government-sponsored hackers and hackers associated with other groups or independent of anyone is interesting in following the official story. There is enough ambiguity that unless you have the specific technical facts that establish the trail of evidence (which would be voluminous server log records), the safest position is to accept that a state-sponsored hack is one but not the only possibility.
It will continue to happen as long as our own government is not interested in defensive security because it would prevent its ability to attack the systems of its own people. In fact, at some point, nations will realize that cyberwar is a juvenile fantasy that costs more than it delivers in results. Having real and not bogus network security is what is required, not blaming heads of state or their own cyberwar agencies.
And the US, which has compromised how many foreign elections getting exercised over it being done to us is rather interesting to watch; we’re not so exceptional and invulnerable as we (or Donald Trump) think.
To the specific case, the best that I have is from Marcy Wheeler, who first reported this:
The Two Intelligence Agency Theory of Handing Trump the Election
There is more in this, but the next day Wheeler’s analysis added this:
The Other Factor in the DNC Hack: WikiLeaks’ Personal War with Hillary Clinton
And on July 29, another three days later, this:
Two (Three, Four?) Data Points on DNC Hack: Why Does Wikileaks Need an Insurance File?
So the best we know at this point is that Guccifer is presumed to be a cutout for the Russian GRU.
The next data point is the New York Times story and the Washington Post story, both sourced with high-level anonymous leaks from the US government. After showing the confusion in the New York Times description, Wheeler quotes this from the Washington Post:
Wheeler summarizes the above with this:
The fourth data point is this one:
The link for James Clapper goes to a The Hill article entitled “Intel head cautions against ‘hyperventilation’ over DNC breach”.
The last data point is about the allegation that there was malware on the DNC site in consequence of the Wikileaks hack. Apparently, that was a garbled repeating of a github report of malware that Wikileaks had not removed from a previous fileload on something other than the DNC documents.
So what is the evidence that Putin wants Trump elected?
What exactly was the hack intended to accomplish to that end?
Why is it that the DNC has been so lax in securing their network?
If this is like Watergate, at this point all we know is that someone burgled information from the Democratic National Committee and left tape on the door.
In this case, Clapper is correct. Given what the US has done similarly in other countries, hyperventilating about it and making it a causus belli is not wise. Certainly not something over which to go to war with Russia.
It does not reflect on Trump unless there were demonstrable contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
The public does not see it as an issue with Trump; there are much more salient issues, such as the treatment of the Khan family, that have captured the public’s attention.
The DNC and ActBlue are not the left in this country. It is not clear what you mean by “undermining the left in this country” otherwise. Has there been evidence of ID theft or doxing of ActBlue donors?
Hacking will continue to happen without solid identification of the the perpetrators as long as the NSA is not interested in stopping hacking. They and the FBI are the ones who insist on back doors. They also make a practice of holding identified software bugs and using private contractors to write zero-day exploits for offensive cyberwarfare without making sure that those contractors are not selling that malware elsewhere.
The Clinton campaign’s communication operation seizing on this as an anti-Trump talking point is a monumental waste of effort and diversion of resources IMO.
tl;dr
Sorry.
Another low information political reader.
Just stick with motive and opportunity; it’s remarkably clarifying.
I fear you underestimate Putin at our peril. The only thing restraining him from exporting his unrestrained tyranny through conquest is lack of resources and the vulnerability of Russia’s economy to global pressure.
In the meantime he is a vindictive and resourceful opponent who will enlist whatever means necessary to achieve his ends.
Those are two major hurdles. The internal contradictions of the Russian economy are a third.
Most heads of state are selected or elected because they are vindictive and resourceful people who will enlist whatever means necessary to achieve their view of the national interest.
Facing off against them only makes them opponents when their national interests conflict with your own national interests. It would be helpful for Americans to be more specific about what those conflicts actually are. Otherwise we degenerate into team trash-talking about other countries. And are suckers for war talk.
There is no nuance there; no discernment. I have an extensive collection of books written about Hitler prior to 1939. They make for interesting but generally discouraging reading.
My thesis is that with perception war is made less likely, not more so. That Putin appeals to any American for any reason strikes me as deplorable and, sadly, with considerable precedent. That good people should seek peace and compromise is a human strength, that they should do nothing in the face of a clearly perceptible threat is a weakness. There are a dozen instances when international resolve would have undone Hitler’s ambitions yet he gambled on our complacency and often won.
I don’t know whether they are unaware of the links between Putin, European fascists, and American white supremacists , or they just ignore them. Trump did not start this, he allied himself with it.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/putin-follower-appear-us-white-supremacists-far-right-conference-1463350
http://blog.adl.org/extremism/american-white-supremacists-attend-russian-nationalist-conference
More on this.
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/79686
Well, we do know that Clinton administration and associates were directly involved in getting Yeltsin re-elected. And Carville et. al were directly involved securing the election of Lozado in Bolivia and who the people in that country hated, etc., but I guess those don’t count as meddling in foreign elections because it’s OKIYAA.
There were always claims in the US that the USSR was meddling in US domestic affairs and elections. Unions were a commie plot, anti-nuclear protestors were pawns of the Kremlin, anti-Vietnam War activists were pinko-commie agents of the great Satan. This crap is really old and both political parties play it. If this country could survive very real, white fascist support for Hitler and Nazism, I’m sure we’ll do okay with the current contingent of white neo-Nazis infatuation with Putin.
Even though everything you say here is factually true, I cannot discern any point in relation to the issue we are discussing, other than that, because various bad things have been done by various other agents, we really shouldn’t be bothered by the development of the Trump/Putin/racist nexus.
On the contrary, the well-known evils of the things you mention make clear just how bad the Trump/Putin/racists are, to what doleful consequences they can lead, and how important it is to deal with them.
The development of a US racist and Putin Russian nationalism nexus (and all of the European nationalist xenophobes at this point is primarily a local political issue within each nation. It is similar to the US support of Stephen Harper’s election during the Bush era and Obama operatives support of David Cameron’s campaign.
To deal with that, we need wise domestic policies at home and de-escalation of the international conflicts that drive nationalism. And extrication from the quagmire wars that the Bush administration put us in.
And, come to think of it, we might start paying attention to Hungary’s politics, which reflect the same sort of racist nationalism.
The shocking realization this week is that in Trump we are not dealing with the usual US conservative nationalist racism, but something more akin to the neo-Nazi parties in Europe. The difficulty for Americans is that Putin is not looked at as a Russian Orthodox (religious) nationalist but as a socialist KGB operative carrying the latent hopes of the old Soviet Union.
At the same time there is the realization that at critical points Trump saved Obama’s bacon in Syria when a major US self-defeating intervention was looking inevitable.
I think you meant to say Putin saved Obama’s bacon in Syria. I happen to agree with that to some extent. Obama was looking for a way out of the Gordian knot he got himself into with a momentary bout of rashness.
What you’re leaving out in this discussion is NATO and Putin’s attempts to leverage pressure points in Europe to weaken that organization.
His elevation of the Russian Orthodoxy is primarily for domestic purposes although I believe he sees Russia and its sphere as the true defender of traditional Christianity against the decadence of the West.
The true defender but the ‘one true church’:
Those are Ukrainian non-Orthodox views quoted, to be sure, but make your own assessment of the implications. Just for the record:
This is partially why Putin feels more old-school to me in his autocratic ambition.
Interesting to see Christianity Today drop its panic about Russian communism and return to good old Protestant anti-papism (if in disguised form). More and more we have to consider the source and not take them at face value (and enough lefties take Sputnik and RT and Saker at face value to come off as Russian applogists). We should do the same for essentially Republican sources, which Christianity Today has been for about 30 years.
Yes, Putin has discovered that Caesaropapism is a way of using the internal culture war for political gain. (Putin is now on the side that Solzhenitsyn was on 40 years ago and Solzhenitsyn is still a classic critical novelist about the Soviet Union.) But automatically and reflexively asserting that either Putin or Kirill seek expansion well beyond Russia’s borders requires presenting evidence. So far in US discussion about Russia, that evidence is lacking.
My analysis without evidence (show me some) is that Kirll and Putin have a primary concern about the Russian Orthodox faithful in Ukraine and Belarus and the impact of national politics — either toward secularism or Catholicism — on those people. For Putin that is totally political, like the Republican’s absorption of the Religious Right and the culture war.
Currently the maximal position, IMO again without evidence, is that Ukraine and Belarus should be Russian Orthodox nationalist states. For Putin, this would insulate Belarus from NATO takeover (Belerus did have a brief democracy movement during the period of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street and did crush it with force.)
Putin internally will have difficulty forcing Russian Orthodoxy on the Islamic areas of the Russian Federation; likely those move to religious and cultural autonomy so long as religion is not politicized. And forced Russian Orthodoxy has implications for what Jews remain in Russia.
Reigniting the Cold War by Russian Orthodox ambitions into Catholic, Protestant, Islamic and secular countries in the neo-Tsarist “new abroad” IMO seems far-fetched. Putin is a realist who knows what it takes to deal with Chenchya and the other Islamic areas within the Russian federation. He likely understands from his KGB days the beneficial effects of multiculturalism and a de facto neutrality of the state except where serving the majority sentiment serves the legitimacy of an authoritarian state. Successor rulers might not have that realism, but this IMO is one of Putin’s more overlooked qualities–the realism about his limits. And the fact that he will make deals that optimize his position when he cannot maximize his position.
Just as the Ottoman model attracts Erdogan, likely the Byzantine model as imitated by the tsars attracts Putin as providing long-term stability for the Russian Federation. He is going to have to carefully measure where he has imperial relations and where he has tributary relations with internal states and with external nations. Belarus is an obvious current tributary; his ambitions for Ukraine and even Turkey are to have them as tributaries as well to ensure mobility in the Black Sea.
By the way, most US friendly relations with countries eventually turn into tributary relationships. That is the hidden meaning behind our “special relationship” with the UK and with Isreal. The conflict with Netanyahu is Israel’s trying to negotiate the foreign policy contents of that tributary relationship.
What offends Americans about Putin is what some like about Bush and Trump. His posturing as manly strength. The hypermasculine image of his foreign policy regardless of the reality.
Yes, I agree about Putin, Syria and Obama.
‘They enemy of my enemy is my friend’
.
In the current world, the enemy of my enemy might still be my enemy. Case in point — Syria. Daesh/ISIS/ISIL and al Quaeda/Nusra Front
You managed to do that in under 500 words, I’m impressed.
.
It feels like the whole left has become Alvy Singer’s father.
Well, not the whole left. There’s a pretty lively conversation happening here, for instance. In the larger liberal community, the moral equivocators appear to be in the minority on this issue.
You don’t get nuance on this issue very well, do you? I haven’t yet seen anyone defend Putin on here.
Booman writes:
“A bit of a tell !!!???”
What? We need more tells to inform us that WAPO and the Times are, have been since the early ’50s and will remain totally under the control of the CIA until the Permanent Government is totally defeated. If that ever happens, of course.
The “tells” are all over the place.
In recent memory:
1- Judith Miller’s CIA asset work for the Times
and
2-The takeover of WAPO by Jeff Bezos…he wasn’t even the highest bidder… miraculously followed by a huge CIA contract awarded to Amazon
are all you need to know.
You know this, Booman.
“Soft-pedaling?”
That’s what you are doing.
AG
I just realized that “Arthur Gilroy” is a parody account. Why didn’t someone tell me sooner?
Riffing, snark, and sarcasm are not necessarily the characteristics of a “parody account”.
“Parody account.”
Like the accounts of Trump’s Manafort “firing” in WAPO and the Times?
I got yer “parody.”
Right here!!! Iraqi aluminum tubes. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
How many millions died, were wounded or had…and continue to have…their lives totally ruined by this particular “parody” of a free press.
Wake the fuck up.
AG
Stop, “Arthur” — you’re killing me!!! The non-sequitur was great (aluminum tubes? where did that come from?) but the “wake the fuck up” was genius!
I’m glad you didn’t call me a “sheeple,” though — that would have been too on the nose.
I have been reading Arthur for quite some time and I would count the world a lesser place without his posts. I don’t read them all, to be honest, and I don’t agree with them all, to be sure, but he has convinced me over the years that we are in a two-party duopoly which looks out for the elite first and foremost and then, only then, argues over the size and shape of the crumbs which are left for the rest of us.
The ideological contest between the two parties might even be genuine in that some elites feel we should look after citizens a little bit and other elites think it’s just tough biscuits. But their main product is the show which is more bread and circuses than debate in the public square. We all vote and we could change it tomorrow but we would probably have to really re-educate ourselves and there seems little prospect that we have the collective will to do that.
I like Arthur and he’s worth reading; say what you will he’s a man with an independent viewpoint and I think that adds value no matter how confronting, distracting or uncomfortable it can become.
Thank you, Shaun.
I do keep trying…
AG
Sheeple.
Or…servant to the herdsmen.
Not sure.
Probably a little of both.
AG
Arthur, you’re just making me look bad.
My point? (Not aimed at you.)
AG
LOL, I know Arthur, I was only kidding. I thought it was funny too.
All libertarianism is parody.
.
The only thing miraculous is that an intelligence agency has decided to use the commercial cloud at all. Given that, and they were taking bids from other vendors, Amazon is a pretty sensible choice. I know I’d choose them over IBM.
Sarah Kendzior, Quartz: Donald Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin underscores an unsettling truth about the two leaders
Not the only xenophobic, bigoted demagogues in the world, who celebrate white supremacy as patriotic nationalism. Not the only politicians with broad and deep histories of corruption. And likely not the only political actors allied with organized criminal activity.
Oh, so it’s okay then. Thanks for clearing that up, Tarheel.
Any other apologies you want to make for these two gentlemen?
It is what it is. Being moralistic in setting policy often backfires and undermines actual moral decisions. Something that the neoconservatives and “humanitarian” liberal apologists for foreign policy forget in their pandering to Americans’ vanity.
If a foreign policy is not aimed as global peace and domestic prosperity, it likely is bankrupt morally. Strength and diplomacy are strategic elements deployed in a certain historical environment. Right now the environment is the chaos consequential to George W. Bush’s misreading what was required to defeat al Quaeda and the inability of the Obama administration to completely reverse that policy direction for domestic political and institutional political reasons. The GOP would not allow a free hand, and the law enforcement, homeland security, military and intelligence organizations would not reverse course.
Business as usual in these circumstances creates more of a mess.
How is that an apology? It’s just stating facts. It’s not a show of support for Putin. This whole election season really has caused some people to lose their heads.
On every side.
“You know, he’s bad, but he’s not the only guy to invade another country and try to exterminate their people.”
“Yeah, gas chambers are extreme, but it’s just a technological advancement, he’s not really different than the Visigoths if you think about it.”
“So he chopped people up, put them in his refrigerator and snacked on them from time to time. It’s not like he’s the first cannibal in the history of the universe.”
“Yeah, he killed anyone who wore glasses because he assumed they were intellectuals, but Genghis Khan killed literally everyone.”
“So he raped her. At least he didn’t kill her. And there’s a lot of rapists anyway.”
“They’re xenophobic, bigoted demagogues with dual histories of corruption, aggression, and celebration of white supremacy repackaged as patriotic nationalism, but they’re not the only xenophobic, bigoted demagogues in the world, who celebrate white supremacy as patriotic nationalism. Not the only politicians with broad and deep histories of corruption. And likely not the only political actors allied with organized criminal activity.”
Exactly.
So you think my riff on “They’re xenophobic..” is praising them with faint damns.
That is a greater-of/lesser-of two evils view of the world that might give moral comfort but does not practically dictate what policy should be.
Putin is head of a nuclear-armed state that we at one-time successfully negotiated nuclear arms reductions.
Trump claims to be a businessman but is the GOP nominee for President.
We have to deal with Putin as a head of state. We can prevent Trump for ever sitting in the White House if we can mobilize a consensus against him on real grounds. More that Trump and Jill Stein have had private visits to Putin as a matter of getting the Russian government view on issues.
It is not obligatory for private individuals to seek out Trump’s view on anything — yet.
The reality is that they are similar creatures, and similar to many of the heads of state that the US has supported, especially since World War II.
The issues are Trump’s xenophobic bigoted celebration of white supremacy, his corruption, and his alliance with organized criminal activity. That is demonstrable even outside of his relationship with Putin and any other foreign leaders he might visit.
The fixation on Putin does not communicate any of that to average voters–it communicates a Russia that no longer exists–a state capitalist dictatorship professing socialism and exporting communist ideology but being nothing but a huge capitalist monopoly. So changing to a nationalist capitalist oligarchy was not that big a shift. But what Americans hear is Russia = communist expansionism = Cold War Soviet Union.
Putin is not an issue that lowers Trump’s margin. More significant in my opinion is Trump’s hiring of immigrants as ways to suppress wages. But then, Trump ignores the economic impact of immigrants to hype up the fear.
His value proposition really is: There are two Americas and we are going to prevent the unity of white, black, Latino, and immigrant Americans because they might vote against the interests of billionaires like me. The appeal to fear and white male vanity has been a winning formula for 240 years.
Clinton has to show that a girl is brave enough to face that fear and deal with it while Trump is a fearful weenie who spreads panic. And that the two Americas are really the 0.01% like Trump and the rest of us. I think that Clinton can make the first argument. I’m not sure that she is willing to make the second. We will see.
Clinton cannot afford to use a fear-driven foreign policy to motivate voters; that plays into the emotion that Trump is trying to stoke. That will be easier if the Daesh caliphate is no more before the election. And collaboration with Russia and Syria are absolutely necessary to make that happen. Playing eastern front/western front games in order to weaken Assad delays that victory. Her argument is that with all the resources the military and homeland security have we are in fact strong and here is the evidence to rebut Trump’s fear campaign. Some deconstruction of the origin of the footage in Trumps new ad would also help. Forty-year-old footage of immigrants riding trains into California, when exposed as being in the Nixon administration and color footage of today is possible to do.
If we are going to condemn folks like Trump and Putin,let’s use that standard for all of the foreign heads of state and domestic politicians.
I have not been viewing Putin as a campaign issue against Trump. I have been viewing him as a reality, and his activities in connection with Trump as something that is already having troubling effects among a certain sector of our populace.
What is involved here is closer to manipulating a civil war than risking nuclear war.
I believe that Trump’s campaign has been substantially influenced by the Putin (etc.) factor. It is well known that Trump’s own views, until fairly recently, were quite unlike what he’s been spouting lately. There is little reason to believe that he has any actual views on international policy other than what he sees as good for himself. Like building hotels in Russia and Eastern Europe. So wheere do you suppose he’s been getting his rather unusual policy positions from lately?
Apparently Landowski, Manafort, and Brannon. Trying to piece together the most mobilized right-most wing of American politics.
Because Clinton holds the center and the far left is not wrapping around to Trump.
Right.
that’s brilliant
The money quote:
Putin’s threat is not geopolitical (except in alliance with China through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization).
Putin’s threat is as a model for the next stage of capitalism in a nation that already has the most extensive surveillance capabilities in the world. And these are capabilities, like nuclear weapons, that Trump is eager to use to inflate his ego. Compared to Trump, Putin is more restrained and disciplined. Putin has had to follow orders in his career. Trump never has.
>>Putin’s threat is not geopolitical
you seem to be ignoring Russia’s involvement in Syria and whatever is going on between them and Turkey.
Putin’s threat in Syria is Russian policy for the last 60 years. It’s not special to Putin.
I am much more concerned with Putin’s position vis a vis international fascism/racism, especially as it relates to tour own country. This is something we really could do without.
I’m not even sure why you call it a “threat”. It’s a threat to al-Qaeda, probably to ISIS, certainly to the neocons.
I am not ignoring those actions. Just that they do not constitute a threat in a region that the US has thrown into chaos by its invasion of Iraq.
Russia has long diplomatic and military ties to Syria. His coming to their aid is no different than our coming to South Korea’s aid in similar circumstances. Where is the threat of returning Syria to stablity and suppressing both al Nusra and Daesh?
At the moment, it is not clear what is going on between Russia and Turkey but an elaborate dance. Russia’s interest is in unobstructed access between the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Russia’s support of Syria means that Russia has an interest in Turkey not supporting any of the rebel groups in Syria. Russia’s internal security requires that they try to get Turkey to close its borders to Daesh fighters traveling to the Caucasus and to the Russian Islamic areas. Daesh fighters from Chechnya and Dagestan are known to be in Syria.
Also from Russia’s perspective a pipeline through Turkey to Europe would compete with the currently proposed pipelines from the Gulf States to Turkey that depend on peace in Syria to be constructed.
Where is the threat in that?
Turkey is currently a member of NATO and an observer at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. If Turkey becomes a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a mutual defense pact like NATO, would it be required to relinquish membership in NATO? Hard-edged alliances are more likely to come to conflict and war than those that have means of diplomacy. As long as there is not a hard boundary line of conflict, where is the threat to the United States?
As far as Ukraine and the Baltics are concerned, Putin is not threatening them but responding to the fact that the Baltics and Poland are armed right at the Russian border. And Ukraine’s particular point of concern is the base at Seabastapol, which has been partly secured through its annexation to Russia.
The plain fact is that Russia does not have the economy that can support threatening behavior, and Putin’s actions understand that.
The main geopolitical maneuvering is in alliance with China, support of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and agreements to have part of the Chinese New Sillk Road routes to Europe run through Russia. This provides an alternative to ocean shipping through the Straits of Molucca, Persian Gulf, and Red Sea should they become blocked. Overland is more expensive than by sea but provides a way of getting supply chains relocated with minimal disruption.
The only threat I see is the US presumption that if you are not our friend and tributary, you are our enemy. If that is US policy, it is a huge mistake.
What threats to you see from Russia other than miscalculation leading to an unwanted nuclear war?
Very helpful comments and framing the situation as an International Relations situation. Ppl need to put aside the Hitler-redux/ Sudetenland goggles for critical analysis of the international relations geopolitics, with the goal of avoiding armed conflict. Note that Syria should be considered part of Russia’s “near abroad” , via E. Turkey, where the to and fro of Daesh fighters is a critical concern.
In modern Russia the wealth of the oligarchs is pretty solid evidence there is enough money sloshing around to make the $12.7M alleged to have been paid to Manafort no more significant that a rounding error. Money and a Security Council veto are Putin’s most potent weapons.
That both parties have turned US politics into ‘pay-for-play’ has inevitably created vulnerabilities in our national security which are being exploited by our enemies. Everyone has their price and for the Manaforts and Podestas of this world it doesn’t take much to betray US foreign policy, not to mention our values and principals. We had better rethink this whole paradigm because it is weakening our security and prosperity for the sake of pennies on the dollar compared to defence spending.
Yanukovych himself could handle 12.7 million. He didn’t need Putin.
Your second paragraph is spot-on and is one of the unintended (I assume it was unintended) consequences of the Citizens United decision.
Manafort, Podesta, and Weber and their worker bees in lobbying should face public shame for this ugly face of how the duopoly money machine operates.
The Republican Party gutted their principles long time ago. Democrats had a call to Bernie meeting but Podesta still is a favored player. As no doubt Weber will be post-Trump with the GOP.
We agree. The duopoly is a significant national security threat as well as antithetical to our democratic values. This is how empires are hollowed out from the inside by profiteering elites.
Podesta is lawyering up. See my comment below in the main thread.
Trump has turned on the shit-spewing fan just in time to run up to the Labor Day election season.
First out of the dung barrel is the Immigration argument about Two Americas: Immigrants are dangerous. Fear, fear, fear. Hillary will have open borders. Trump will keep our borders secure. Leni Reiefenstahl would be proud of the footage and flow. Clinton segments in black and white; Trump segments in color.
Wait for the polls to bump up in the test buy in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Ads run Aug 19-29.
Reifenstahl was far more sophisticated at propaganda than anyone on Trump’s team, including Trump. They’re selling the political version of a 1950s cheesy, black and white horror movie that not even Ed Wood would put his name on.
I’m not a cinema critic, but cheesy apparently sells to the Fox News audience types. The Breitbart types should mark a change even to this Manafort and Black style production.
If you are peddling fear, I guess that horror tropes would be your genre, wouldn’t it?
The Times is beyond pay wall or something, so I can’t read how taking money from the at the time ruling president of Ukraine is supposed to have laid the groundwork for the annexation of Crimea.
On the face of it, it looks like a rather implausible chain, considering that the at the time ruling president of Ukraine could have given his permission to have a referendum on joining Russia instead in Crimea, had that been his top priority. In addition, Russia appears to have had no interest in annexing Crimea until he was overthrown.
But perhaps the Times has grounds for the claim of groundwork for annexation, if so it would be nice if somebody could quote the relevant part.
Those that have quoted liberally from the Times article accept the claim as fact without evidence. It’s all political PR and sells very well among those that haven’t taken the time to inform themselves at a minimal level as to what transpired in Ukraine during the 2002-2014 period and how in real time the “good guys” from the perspective of US elites shifted. (Have a link to a decent summary review of part of the period in my diary on this.)
It’s funny how nominal progressives keep making apologies for nationalistic right wing dictators with imperialist aspirations.
“He’s Russian. He’s from Moscow. If he doesn’t steal from Ukraine, who is he supposed to steal from?”
“Putin is persecuted enough!”
Except we don’t. What’s not so funny is how nominally liberals keep falling for propaganda that leads to an untold amount of suffering and costs a lot of money. Keep believing that one side is all good and the other is all bad when both sides are mostly bad.
Lefties never support fascism (either soft or hard in application) at home or abroad or war for the hell of it or to steal from other peoples, countries, or nations because that will give us more.
Lefties aren’t Vichy Democrats. Lefties don’t bow down to those claiming that they are the betters and therefore, know what’s best for all.
Scoff all you want — I can take it because I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with those like you (an advantage of being old and retaining my marbles) — because lefties have gotten every picture right since before I was born and non-lefties have gotten every single one wrong.
Goodness gracious, Marie, feel free to start your own damn blog where you and like minded people can be superior to us together. Wouldn’t you enjoy that more than engaging with morally and intellectually inferior people like us?
You’re one to talk about scoffing. The non-stop projection continues.
It doesn’t implicate Manafort directly but we know he was leveraging Russian nationalism in the Crimea at the time on behalf of his client:
It fits a pattern established by a number of sources for Manafort’s involvement.
I wonder what would happen if Mexico hosted a 15-nation military excercise for Mercosur. I bet there would be some US-inspired pushback.
The “near-abroad” of the US is Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
The US has government operatives who do what Manafort did elsewhere in the world.
Yes, that is exactly what disqualifies Trump as President but it does not mean that turning Ukraine into the southern flank of NATO is a wise move.
Sebastapol is the non-negotiable interest for Russia just like Cuba was for the US during the Cuban missile crisis. Wise foreign policy advisors know to not threaten nation’s primary interests unless they have the actual power to take over those nations.
And then there’s the question of administration, as the Bush administration found out in Iraq.
Manafort is just a privatized undercover operations man.
This is beginning to explain why Kagans are supporting Hillary Clinton. (As if Victoria Nuland’s appointment were not enough.)
That’s a bag of marbles. Crimea is Putin’s; low-hanging fruit the Ukraine couldn’t hold and the West couldn’t reinforce. The Ukraine, however, is a crucial international state and not part of Russia’s ‘near abroad’ culturally, economically or politically. If Europe and the US can’t protect Ukranians from the obvious depredations of their near neighbour where do you suggest stopping them? And who will trust us?
The Baltic states were probably a bridge too far for NATO; neo-conservative foolishness we may come to regret more than invading Iraq. I’m not saying they don’t deserve protection, of sorts, but hard to imagine how this is enforced short of nuclear confrontation, which was the neo-conservative plan, it seems.
You may have noticed I’m a fairly outspoken critic of US foreign policy were it seems venal, cruel or stupid. Having said that I have no illusions as to the good will or intentions of the likes of Putin, Erdogan or the Chinese when it comes to disruption and bullying. History is our best guide in these matters and we fail to learn its lessons at our own cost.
You have envidence that Putin wants the cost of administering Ukraine against its will?
Or that Putin wants really to absorb the self-proclaimed Donbass region or the other ethnic Russian enclaves in eastern Ukraine so long as the Kiev government provides relative acknowledgement of equal rights of Ukrainian citizens regardless of ethnicity. Is that not what the last election to Parliament settled, taking some of the ethnic fire out of the right?
The thinking after the collapse of the Soviet Union was that Ukraine would be the southern version of Finland, an essentially neutral state that would benefit from trade between Europe and Russia, not a hard militarized boundary between Russia and the West (as the Cold War theorists used to put it.)
Foreign policy is finally about capabilities and opportunities, not good will (despite much diplomatic language that uses this buzz word). Intentions are important but always ambiguous and hard to guess even when the head of state states the straight up and outright. There is always the question of “Did they really say that?”
Disruption an bullying are tools of politics at all levels; some politicians seem to prefer to use them more than others. Putin does know when to be a charmer as well or to lend a hand.
Sometime I would like someone to argue out what including Russia in NATO would look like. I think that the dynamics could be very interesting and could range for UN-style stalemate of powers to Russia acting as a bridge between Europe and China.
National inteerest and culture matter as much as specific personalities. Putin’s current stance is as much reflective of his domestic politics as his whims and preferences.
I give up. Sometime I would like someone to argue out what including Imperial Germany in the Triple Entente would have looked like. Honestly.
Might have prevented World War I.
It all depends on the purpose of your diplomatic world order.
Colliding empires can collaborate and often have up to a point.
The point is national interests; personal style and ambitions always play out in playing the “advancing national interests” drama.
I don’t understand the frustration with realist approaches to international relations.
Might have prevented the Great War? Methinks our ‘realism’ needs to be a bit more realistic.
Austria was falling apart. Germany and Italy were in the Triple Alliance with Austria.
The Triple Entente was UK, France, and Russia. Serbian nationalism was sponsored by Slavic Russia, or at least that’s what the Austrian Empire thought. Austrian threats on Serbian nationalists were responded to with diplomatic protests from Russia.
Imperial Germany had developed the Schlieffen plan for a rapid attack in case of war with the Triple Entente. It functioned as a pre-emptive attack without recall until it was complete with victory in France. The rollout of this attack triggered responses from France and the UK.
Having Imperial Germany in the Triple Entente would have meant that diplomacy might have continued longer unless Austria-Hungary also had a pre-emptive strike plan — against whom?
Saner heads might have prevailed so long at they had the thought that accidental war was possible. QED YMMV
Yes I think Putin, while he is walking a thin line domestically, would welcome a non-existential confrontation with the Ukraine; don’t underestimate Russian nationalism, it has not yet begun to run its historical course and reckons itself as yet undefeated.
I think that is exactly what he wants and he has his hand on the volume dial as we write. He has just recently reorganised his inner circle and removed those whom reckoned themselves alternate decision makers:
No more Mr Nice Guy.
No “Team of Rivals” for Putin. Looks like shuffling in proteges and potential successors. It does have that old nomenkatura feel about it, doesn’t it.
Kremlinology lives.
Although I think that Putin better fits the mould of Imperial Russia and the Okhrana. He’s no communist, he just admires in hindsight their totalitarian security state.
Thank you.
I find the connection between that and the annexation of Crimea rather weak though. The East-West divide in Ukrainian politics has been there since independence, and party of regions were not the first or last to use it for political gain.
Of course any event that happened before another can be claimed to have been part of what caused it, but then again the military exercise that according to the officer interviewed in the linked article aimed towards Ukraine joining NATO can also be seen as setting the scene for the annexation of Crimea. In which case the fault ends up with Bush.
OT:
Haaretz: Report: US Transfers Nukes from Turkish Airbase to Romania
Well, we can rest easier at night, can’t we?
Days after Putin meets Erdogan for a chat. Been warning about Erdogan for a while now. Watch this space.
And several weeks after Erdogan accuses US of plotting coup against him, suppressing Turkish officers from Incirlik and a section of Turkish intelligence.
If US (or a clandestine unit of US CIA operations) did collaborate with the coup plotter, it was a relatively large but not catastrophic error.
Erdogan seeks the foreign policy reach of the Ottoman empire. Whether that reflects imperial ambitions or just influence proper to Turkey’s size and wealth is debatable.
Erdogan, al Sisi, Rouhani, Salman — all are pieces of work.
“…influence proper to Turkey’s size and wealth…” I’m suggesting that he has backed ISIS for years, has territorial ambitions in Syria, bombed his own people and blamed the Kurds for domestic political advantage and precipitated the migrant crisis to leverage power and seek revenge on Europe; that his aspirations extend beyond Ottoman geopolitics to founding a new Sunni caliphate. I’m saying that billions of Western global investment flooded his ’emerging market’ economy, fuelled his rise and is now held hostage to his ambition. These are not equivocations, it seems to me, or needful of any disclaimers.
Whether the coup is a CIA debacle or a false flag for his own purposes Erdogan has used it to consolidate and extend his own power and now rules the state, a NATO member, with an autocratic hand. I suspect the latter but anything is possible. Either way he is a venomous reptile who will prove to be nothing but trouble for Europe, the US and the West.
Louis Nelson, Politico: Podesta Group retains outside counsel over Manafort-related scandal
People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, case 2016.
Now which Podesta is it that is on the Clinton transition team?
I wonder is Vince Weber is also lawyering up.
Time for a house-cleaning.
Like I said, “People who live in glass houses….”
Unwittingly? My bollocks. For years? How many? Whether or not?:
The NGO’s cover was publicly blown in 2012. Our elites are not only venal but sloppy.