Political Commentary | FJY.US

Marina Ovsyannikova holds sign protesting war in Ukraine on Russia's Channel One TV

Back to the USSR: America’s Media Corruption

By Frank Yacenda | March 20, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

America’s newsrooms could use more people like Marina Ovsyannikova. That’s her there, holding up that sign on Russia’s state-run Channel One TV informing viewers that they’re being lied to about Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.

“NO WAR,” the sign says, and then in Russian, “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you here,” and finally ending with, “Russians Against War.”

Facing possible prosecution and severe punishment, Ovsyannikova, a news editor at the station, felt she couldn’t stay silent any more as state television pumped out falsehoods to gin up public support for the country’s invasion of its neighbor. Her dramatic display of dissent was followed in short order by the similarly inspired resignation of Lilia Gildeyeva, a long-time anchor at Gazprom Media-owned NTV — technically a commercial station but closely aligned with the Kremlin — who fled the country before submitting her resignation, saying she feared she wouldn’t be allowed to leave if she resigned first. Just last year Gildeyeva was on a list of journalists praised by Putin for “achievements in developing mass media.”

While many in Russia know they’re being lied to by their so-called news media, many Americans have been slow to catch on that their so-called news media have been lying to them, too. Incessantly fed tall tales of “Russian collusion” and “Russian misinformation” and “Russian interference in American elections” by their own print and broadcast news sources, Americans have been led down a path of divisiveness, lies, coverups, and political fraud that would put Russian propagandists to shame.

Some of us have known for a long time that the mainstream media were complicit in deceiving the American public, largely on behalf of the Democratic Party and party elites and in the rabid and irrational manifestation of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). As a recovering journalist, I’m more attuned to these things than most, and have been calling out the lies and deceit in the nearly five years I’ve been posting my pieces on FJY.US and now on Substack. It’s always nice to be right, and as the truth inexorably comes out, things I’ve reported and opined on have almost in all cases been proven correct. It’s bitter pleasure, though, seeing how readily so many people, including people I know personally, bought, and continue to buy, into the lies being fed them.

Unless one is a regular viewer of Fox News — itself maligned by the media and political propagandists — or is willing to search out and read or listen to knowledgeable sources not corrupted by the prevailing political orthodoxy, one wouldn’t have a clue what really is going on in this country.

It only took 17 months and what amounts to a fraudulent presidential election for the exalted New York Times to finally acknowledge that the laptop reported in October 2020 by the New York Post to belong to First Son Hunter Biden is, in fact, authentic. The Times couldn’t even admit that it had covered up the story at the time it broke — part of a massive media and Big Tech coverup geared toward getting Hunter’s father, Joe, elected president, and to block the reelection of the Orange Menace. It buried the acknowledgment in a story this week reporting how Hunter borrowed money to pay a million dollar delinquent tax bill and remains under a federal investigation into his shady international business deals.

“People familiar with the investigation,” the Times bleated, “said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer [Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner convicted and sentenced to prison for fraud] and others about Burisma [the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Biden served for a cool million dollars a year despite knowing nothing about either energy or Ukraine] and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

Duh. Ya think?

Covering Up Biden’s Corruption

If you were reading my posts — or the New York Post — in October 2020 none of this would be news to you. You’d already know about the connection between Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Burisma, and the whole sordid affair. And if you were reading my posts or watching Tucker Carlson on Fox News, you would know about how the corruption involving Hunter ties directly to his father, then Vice President and now doddering about the White House masquerading as President while Ukraine goes up in flames. And if at the time you listened to Carlson’s interview with Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski you’d also know how that corruption extends to China and the Biden family’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

If you didn’t listen to that interview or read the Post stories and other key pieces of information I linked to in my October 29, 2020, piece on Applying RICO to the Biden Crime Family, the Dems, and the Media, now would be an opportune time to do so. Better late than never.

In a coordinated move that would make the Russian censors proud, most of the U.S. media and Big Tech — led by Twitter and Facebook — squelched the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election, going so far as to lock out the Post‘s own accounts and shutting down anyone who even mentioned them. They were given cover by a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials — including such professional Obama Administration liars and current CNN pundits as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, who has admitted previous support for the Communist Party — which said the Hunter laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Never mind that, by their own admission, they had no evidence to support this audacious claim.

“If we are right” — operative word if — “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this,” the letter said.

What would have been correct, and honest, would have been if they wrote “this is the Democratic Party trying to influence how Americans vote in this election.” But that was the last thing they wanted Americans to know as they were already casting their votes. Now these same “former intelligence officials” refuse to withdraw or apologize for their own misinformation discrediting the laptop story.

Following the election, one-in-six Biden voters polled — 17 percent — said they would have changed their vote had they known about the laptop story or the other stories concerning scandals related to the Biden-Harris ticket that the media and Big Tech suppressed. Of course, I wonder what it would take, if all that isn’t enough, for the other 83 percent to change their vote. In any case, what even the 17 percent number says is that the outcome of the election would have been very different had the media and Big Tech not conspired to pull the wool over the eyes of American voters. Russian disinformation, indeed.

Back to the Beginning: Hillary Clinton

As I said, some of us have known all along that the so-called Russian collusion theory, which attempted to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, was a hoax perpetrated by Hillary Clinton and her campaign. Once the Mueller investigation ended in March 2019 with no evidence of collusion, prosecution of the real guilty parties should have been commenced, but wasn’t. The wheels of justice, to the extent they turn at all, turn exceptionally slowly, especially when highly placed individuals are concerned, and 14 months later, in May 2020, we began to get further confirmation of the extent to which the effort to discredit Trump essentially amounted to an attempted coup d’etat.

Once the 2020 election was over it was considered safe to reveal details of the conspiracy that led to the election of Jell-O Joe Biden and, more at issue, the defeat of Donald Trump. The full details of this conspiracy — that’s the actual word used by the author of the Time story detailing the process — were contained in a pivotal February 2021 piece by Time‘s National Political Correspondent Molly Ball. Titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” in it Ball writes that she gained access to “the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum.”

Admitting the story sounds like “a paranoid fever dream,” Ball wrote of “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” And this from a highly placed media person who ostensibly approves of this sort of thing.

“They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it,” she wrote. “And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.”

Ignoring, if you can, Ball’s use of a semi-colon, you can be excused if you think this sounds a lot like incessant Democratic blathering about “saving democracy,” which you also would not be wrong to equate to the same sort of electoral manipulation that led to the 2020 results. Only they want it in perpetuity. The classic one-party state. All with the full complicity and collusion of the “liberal” mainstream media. Back to the USSR.

In July of last year I posted a piece I titled If You Don’t Read Anything Else This Year, Read This. If you didn’t follow that guidance then, now would be a good time to do it. That piece quotes 36 tweets by researcher, writer, and podcaster Darryl Cooper in which he lays out why, exactly, ordinary people know that the 2020 election was stolen. It closely parallels what Ball says about the conspiracy involved in its “fortifying,” and things I’ve been reporting on all along.

Finally, last month, we got the latest filings from the long-enduring investigation being conducted by Special Counsel John Durham which ties the whole Russian collusion hoax back to its source: Hillary Clinton. We already knew that she was willing to sacrifice national security by conducting classified and sensitive official business on an unsecured private server when she was Secretary of State under Obama, but we now have evidence that her campaign was actually attempting to garner information directly from the Oval Office during Trump’s presidency.

We’ve also had evidence, which predates even the 2016 election and Clinton’s ludicrous “reset” with Russia, of her ties to Putin and his oligarch cronies. We also had evidence, which alarmed even some in the FBI, how Clinton Foundation — the Clintons’ family business — activities in Russia posed a potential threat to U.S. national security and risked providing “. . . a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial application.”

With grifters like Clinton and Biden and their cronies, and with media that coverup the facts and perpetuate the lies and deceit, that collude to “fortify” our elections, who needs Russians? It might be too much to hope for a Marina Ovsyannikova, but at least some journalistic ethics and integrity and less malpractice and corruption would go a long way. Even those things, it seems, have gone beyond the range of expectation. And with them goes the viability of our democracy.

Featured image: Marina Ovsyannikova Tells It Like It Is, AFP via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Hunter Biden, from his own laptop, via the New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Vlad and Hillary Cozy Up in Vladivostok on Sept. 8, 2012, AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel, Pool. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.

Dancing With the Devil

By Frank Yacenda | March 13, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man’s soul and faith

— Sympathy For the Devil, The Rolling Stones

How is the Biden administration dancing with the Devil? Let’s take a look.

Hat in Hand to Venezuela

See that funny-looking guy up there? That’s Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator. I can’t verify, so won’t allege, that Maduro is the actual Devil, but he’s a bad dude, for sure. And he’s one of the devils Biden and Co. are dancing with.

For some reason, the administration has decided it’s better to import oil from places like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and maybe even Iran, than to unleash America’s own energy resources. It’s a smoke and mirrors trick which they hope you’re too slow to see. As prices at the pump or to heat your house go through the roof, Biden wants you to believe it’s Russia’s fault, when in fact the problem and the upward climb in prices had begun long before Vladimir Putin sent his tanks and troops into Ukraine and even before the U.S. recently embargoed Russian oil.

The U.S. is down 1.4 million barrels of oil production a day since Biden took over and deliberately moved the country away from the energy independence that his predecessor worked hard to establish, the first time the U.S. had reached that point in more than 60 years. This is all in the pursuit of the Green agenda, bowing to the religious orthodoxy of Climate Change. Never mind that, regardless the source, it’s consumption that is the critical factor, not place of origin. And never mind that U.S. energy, and its extraction, is among the cleanest in the world. It’s all a charade and you’re not supposed to notice “little” facts like those.

In the interconnected world we live in, that’s not the only complication. Not only is trading Putin for Maduro exchanging one dictator for another, not to mention that Caracas is closely aligned with Moscow, there also is the fact that Roszarubezhneft, a Russian state-owned oil company, owns 40% of five joint ventures with the Venezuelan state-run oil giant PDVSA. Those ventures account for 15% of the South American country’s production. The administration sent a delegation to Caracas to chit-chat with Maduro — breaking a long standing U.S. policy not to deal with him — to discuss waiving some of the sanctions on Venezuela targeted at the country’s oil exports. So to push Biden’s Green charade, he’ll dance with the devil-figure of Maduro. And in the process, violate our own self-stated intent to hurt Russia. Oil talks, nobody walks.

Willing to play the game, Maduro released two Americans his government was holding, former Citgo executive Gustavo Cardenas, a U.S. citizen, and Jorge Fernandez, a Cuban-American, days after the Caracas visit. He also said he’d consider resuming talks, stalled for months, with the Venezuelan opposition.

Our Friends the Russians Negotiate for Us With Our Friend Iran

No, really. I’m not making that up. I keep saying, you can’t make this stuff up. There is no length of absurdity this administration will not go to if it furthers its agenda, no matter how misguided that agenda might be.

Devil or not with whom we’re dancing, if you think it’s not a good idea to use one’s strategic enemy to negotiate on your behalf with another of your strategic enemies, you apparently have more sense than our so-called national security establishment. That would be the case aside from how one feels about the issue under negotiation, reentry of the U.S. to the Iran nuclear deal, and whether that deal makes it easier or harder for the Iranians to develop a nuclear bomb.

Since the U.S. withdrew from the Iranian deal under President Trump, it has no standing in the agreement or negotiations over it, so depends on the kindness of strangers to represent its interests. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that if the deal was bad before, when we were involved in its negotiation, it will be that much worse now, with the Russians looking after their issues first.

Given that reality, it’s not a huge surprise that the Russians have thrown new demands into the mix which have caused the negotiations, which had been nearing conclusion, to stall. Also not a huge surprise, the Russians demanded that Washington’s sanctions on Russia would not negatively impact its trade with Iran.

“In view of the new circumstances and wave of sanctions against Russia,” said Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s chief envoy to the negotiations, “We have the right to protect our interests in the nuclear field and wider context.”

That put Washington into a bind. Hungry for Iranian oil to replace Russian oil, does the U.S. agree to let Russia circumvent the sanctions put on it over the Ukrainian invasion, or does it pull back on the gas. It opted for the latter, with Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, saying the U.S. would not play Let’s Make a Deal with Moscow.

Dancing With the Iranian Devils

But, you see, the Biden administration already has been releasing billions to the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism. Faced with rising social discontent in Iran, which was at least one of the intended affects of U.S. sanctions, last summer the administration unfroze $29 billion in Iranian assets. With conclusion of a new nuclear deal with U.S. participation, another $100 billion in Iranian assets are likely to be unfrozen.

All this is on top of the $1.7 billion that the Obama administration — of which, let’s not forget, Joe Biden was part of — paid to the Iranians, all in cash to circumvent U.S. sanctions, in 2016. This included $400 million delivered by cargo plane direct to Tehran. Ostensibly these payments were in exchange for the release of four Americans being held prisoner by the Iranians, and Iran entering the nuclear deal. So much for the idea that the U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists or pay ransoms. You see, it’s not just gangsters who pay protection money, and yet oddly we heard no calls to impeach Obama for a clear violation of properly imposed sanctions or long-standing U.S. policy.

And now, after all this dancing with the Devil, here we are. I’m in no better position than anyone else to determine how close the Iranians are to developing a nuclear bomb, but some of my sources tell me it could be a matter of weeks before Iran “breaks out” with a nuclear weapon. And still we press on with allowing the Russians to speak for us, still want into the ineffectual nuclear deal, still are helping pay for Iran’s nefarious activities. And Russian trade with Iran, as much as an issue as it is, is hardly the biggest issue at stake.

It’s not just, as the Stones’ song goes, that the Devil “stole many a man’s soul and faith.” He’s doing pretty good at stealing some countries’ soul and faith, too.

Featured Image: Nicolás Maduro caricature by DonkeyHotey. The source images for this caricature are Creative Commons licensed photos from the Congreso de la Republica del Perú’s and newsonline’s Flickr photostreams. Used with permission.

Gas prices from back when gas was under $4/gallon. Photo by AP. Used under Fair Use.

Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s Governor to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Alex Halada, AFP. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.

The Dismal State of the Union

By Frank Yacenda | March 2, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

“Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he’ll never gain the hearts and minds of the Iranian people.” — Jell-O Joe Biden, State of the Union Address

And you have any doubt that we’re all in mortal danger?

Yes, Jell-O Joe Biden actually said that during his State of the Union address Tuesday evening. Often sounding like the drunk you run into at a city bus stop late at night and stumbling on almost every sentence uttered during the rambling, 62-minute annual ritual talk, if Biden failed to inspire confidence in you, imagine how much less he might have inspired in the besieged Ukrainian people had they gotten to hear him.

Dedicating the first 12 minutes of his talk to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden’s claims for credit in deterring Putin fell short and could easily be picked apart. Perhaps the bigger danger lies less in this administration’s missteps that led to the current situation than in its self-delusion that it actually did and is doing all it can to deter Putin. Every day that delusion, not just in regard to Ukraine but on every front, is paraded before the public, and increasingly the only ones deluded are the President and his coterie and the ever smaller percentage of the population who continue to think there is any hope for this administration.

I don’t know if I’m the only one, but somehow it came as a bit of a shock to realize that this was Biden’s first SOTU. To me it seems like years since he took office and began driving the country straight into the ground, starting on Day One. But, no, it’s been just over one year. And the scariest part is to think that there remain nearly three more years of this national nightmare. While the Republicans are likely to secure a take-over of the Congress, perhaps of historic proportions, in November — assuming we and the world make it that far — it’s painful to think that 10 months remain before a change comes to that branch of government. And still, even then, the White House will remain in the hands of squinty Joe, the profoundly inept Kamala, and the merry band of morons pulling the strings of what passes for government in this country.

There was some fantastical thinking among some in the pundit class that Biden might have taken advantage of the SOTU to do a reset, given how fabulously his so-called policies have failed over the past year. But, no, that was not in the cards. Mostly he just drilled down on the same stupid objectives, obfuscated and outright lied on some of the administration’s “successes,” and rebranded the dead-in-the-water “Build Back Better” monstrosity.

Smoke, Mirrors, and Fooling Some of the People

The Grifter-in-Chief’s claims that he united NATO and that we did, and are doing, all we can to deter Putin fall flat on their face in light of the facts. It was when Putin moved his tanks and troops into Ukraine that galvanized Germany and caused other countries to sit up and take notice. Until then, Biden and Harris’s feeble calls for “unity” had little impact. Shocked into action, Germany finally agreed to send lethal aid to Ukraine and even neutral Switzerland and Sweden took action to sanction Russia. The U.S. dragged its feet on cutting Russian banks off from the SWIFT international bank transfer system, and still has cutouts for the Russian energy sector, which makes up 40% of the Russian economy and provides funds to Putin to fund his warmongering.

Biden made a big point of having released 30 million barrels of oil from our national strategic reserve and talking other countries into releasing an additional 30 million barrels from their reserves. To the uninformed, that sounds like a lot. But when the U.S. alone uses 20.5 million barrels a day, that amounts to less than three days worth of consumption, not to mention that it defeats the purpose of having a strategic reserve in the first place. Meanwhile, the U.S. is still buying more than 670,000 barrels of oil a day from Russia. And while the U.S. goes hat-in-hand to beg OPEC to pump more oil to control jumping prices at the pump, Biden has canceled drilling on U.S. public lands, stopped all new drilling in this country, blocked construction of new liquefied natural gas terminals that could supply U.S. natural gas to Europe, and canceled the Keystone XL pipeline that would have carried Canadian oil to the U.S.

Who does Biden think he’s kidding? Even as he spoke Tuesday night, the price for oil spiked another $5 a barrel on Asian markets, and has gone up still further since. The world price for oil is now pushing $114 a barrel, up more than $17 or 8.4% for the week, as I write this.

With a 40-mile-long (64-km-long) column of Russian tanks and other vehicles headed toward Kyiv, the U.S. blocked Poland’s offer of old Mig fighters to Ukraine and it also refused to provide a number of U.S. jets slated for retirement. It took nearly a week of Russian aggression for Biden to finally announce the U.S. would ban Russian airline flights into the country, something the Europeans did days prior. Doing everything we can? Hardly.

More Blather on the Domestic Front

Biden’s drivel didn’t stop with Ukraine, of course. After leaving the Southwest border open for his entire term, leading to record numbers of illegals entering the country over the past year, Biden lamely called for securing the border. He lamented the rising death toll from fentanyl deaths, for which he bears so much responsibility, and blathered on about funding, rather than defunding, the police, in contravention of his party’s policies over the past two years and contributing to spiking crime across the country.

“The answer’s not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police,” he called out to applause, as if from trained seals, citing what might be obvious to most Americans, as members of the Squad, responsible for so much of the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party, sat on their hands.

Showing that he doesn’t have a clue about the economy or how business works, he told business to “lower your costs, not your wages,” completely oblivious to the fact that labor costs are the largest expense for most businesses. And then, criticizing corporations that allegedly pay no taxes while making billions of dollars, he called for an increase in the corporate tax rate to 50% from the current 21%, the reduced rate which was responsible for repatriating so much corporate money back to the U.S. Never mind if, as he claims, corporations don’t pay the 21%, how he intends to get them to pay the 50%. Logic apparently is not Biden’s strong suite, either. Meanwhile, even as we still buy Russia’s oil and many of our military parts come from China, Biden called for buying American products.

Perhaps most noticeable was how the COVID virus, after permeating the halls of Congress the past two years, suddenly had been banished exactly on the night of the SOTU, and masks, previously required by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, suddenly had virtually disappeared from the hallowed halls. And in contravention of the teacher unions’ obstinate position that has done so much harm to the nation’s children, he called for students to return to the classrooms. Ya’ think?

We can’t have a Biden speech without some reference to his deceased son Beau, making some obscure connection to burn pits and his death, and then we also can’t have a Biden speech without some form of plagiarism, either.

“The state of our union is strong because you the American people are strong,” Biden shouted, sounding remarkably like his predecessor, who said during one of his SOTUs, “The state of our union is strong because you are strong.”

One of Biden’s more memorable quotes melanged together some half-formed criticism of Trump’s border wall with promotion of vaccines which, let us not forget, came about as a result of the latter’s Operation Warp Speed:

“You can’t build a wall high enough to keep out . . . a . . . a vaccine,” he said.

If you want more depressing entertainment, you can read the full transcript of the SOTU here.

If any of this troubles you, take heart. The intrepid Kamala Harris awaits in the wings. Asked by a radio host to “break it down in laymen’s terms for people who don’t understand what’s going on [in Ukraine] and how can this directly affect the people of the United States,” the second in command of the Free World broke it down in terms more suited to kindergartners.

“So Ukraine is a country in Europe,”Harris said. “It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong.”

Are you starting to get the idea why I say we are sooo fucked?

Featured Image: Sunken Boats. Carlos Moral Reis, Pexels. Used with permission.

Russian Convoy of Tanks and Military Hardware Bears Down on Kyiv. BBC. Used under Fair Use.

State of the Union. Sarahbeth Maney, AP. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.

Twisted Up in Our Own Shoelaces

By Frank Yacenda | February 24, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” — George W. Bush

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” — George W. Bush

It’s a sad day when we have to go back to former President George W. to illustrate how befuddled our current so-called “leadership” is, but somehow his linguistic faux pas seem to best encapsulate the current confused state of affairs in this country. Besides, the present occupant of the White House, once King of the Gaffe, now seldom makes enough sense to even come up with a colorful misquote. He just presents as ornery and mean and overwhelmingly somnolent, and most of his words, such as they are, are fed to him by others on a teleprompter. At least George W. made a stab at it on his own, as ill-fated some of those attempts were. If you want to hear equally nonsensical statements, you have to turn to our allegedly second in command (sic), VP Kamala Harris.

As I write this, we’re seeing the results of our feckless approach to dissuading Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. There are reports of explosions, likely from Russian cruise missiles landing in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, as sirens sound and tens of thousands of people flee the city, removing the doubts and questions of recent weeks whether Putin planned on invading Ukraine or not. Now we know.

While a masked Harris, looking more like some comical representation of a cartoon dog than a leader of the Western world, prattled on about “unity” in the aftermath of a security meeting in Munich a few days ago, Putin was lining up his ducks and getting them ready to quack. In a big way. Following a diplomatically polite meeting with Harris, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky laid out the reality in more clear terms.

“We don’t need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen,” Zelensky said, “and after our country will be fired at or after we will have no borders or after we will have no economy or parts of our country will be occupied. Why would we need those sanctions then?”

The prescience of Zelensky’s fears have now been made manifest. Whether the Nightmare Scenario I postulated previously will come to pass remains to be seen, but clearly Russia and China are in close touch, and China is observing closely what transpires in Ukraine. But as I predicted, Putin held back until after the Beijing Olympics had ended to make his move.

Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy

Biden (shown in the photo above with photos of media representatives, the friendly ones he was “supposed” to call on circled, at a rare press event) has done everything possible to aid and abet Putin’s plans while hindering our own ability to counter, in real terms, Russia’s threat, not just to Ukraine but to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Right from the beginning of his administration, Biden deliberately took America from the energy independence that had been a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s economic policy to returning the country to dependence on foreign sources of oil, including Russia. In 2021, the U.S. imported about 250 million barrels of oil from Russia, tripling the 2020 amount and setting a new record. While canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried Canadian oil to refineries in the U.S., and now canceling oil leases on U.S. public lands and blocking all new drilling in this country, Biden lifted sanctions and greenlighted Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to carry Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany.

Given that petroleum and gas exports are key elements of Russia’s economy — which, with nearly two and a half times the population, is smaller than Italy’s, or with nearly five times the population, is smaller than that of Texas — there is little Biden could have done that would not have been a bigger help to Russia and bigger hurt to the U.S. While Trump argued Germany and Western Europe should not be dependent on Russia for their energy needs, Biden encouraged it. Good work, Squinty Joe. Now we know who Putin’s real pooch is.

While Americans are now paying $4, $5, $6, and more for a gallon of gas — often spending north of $100 to fill their tank — compared with under $2 while Trump was president, Biden has cautioned that sanctions against Russia will incur further costs in the form of still higher energy costs to this country. Brilliant plan. With fuel prices at an eight-year high and inflation at a 40-year high, now Americans are told to buck up and pay up. And of course, the usual media toadies are blaming all this on the Ukraine situation, when in fact those issues were well underway and established long before Ukraine popped up as a crisis. Along with Russia, OPEC, and Iran, the real beneficiaries of this administration’s obtuse policies are the special interests who stand to profit from a so-called “green” economy, much as they did under Obama, when Biden was Vice President.

Biden’s strategic failures are numerous, but none bigger or more notable than his disastrous and scandalous surrender and withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was like giving a green light to Putin, Xi — with his eye on taking back Taiwan — and every other power-hungry despot in the world. And don’t forget: Biden declared climate change (when he wasn’t blaming white supremacy) as the biggest threat to U.S. security. I wonder how many Ukrainians, or even Americans, would agree with that assessment.

We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. The same old merry band of morons that were in charge the last time Russia took a bite out of Ukraine, annexing the Crimea in 2014, is back in charge, and Putin knows that. And he knows he can play them like a balalaika.

I’m reminded of the game of chicken we used to play when I was a kid. One kid draws a line in the dirt with his foot and says, “I dare you to cross this line.” The other kid goes, “Oh, yeah?” He steps across the line and says, “There– what are you gonna do about it?” The first kid laughs and announces, “Now you’re on my side.”

What are Russia’s Real Objectives?

Putin and Russia couldn’t be more clear about at least some of Russia’s priorities and how sanctions won’t deter it from pursuing those priorities.

“Excuse my language, but we don’t give a shit about sanctions,” Russia’s ambassador to Sweden, Viktor Tatarintsev, told the Swedish daily Aftonbladet earlier this month. “The expansion of NATO is the biggest threat to Russia.”

Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, using more polite language, reiterated the same point to CBS’s Face the Nation this past Sunday.

“We would like to put everything on the paper, we would like to see legally binding guarantees for Russian security,” Antonov said. “We sent our package of proposals, what should we do? We don’t want to see next wave of expansion of NATO. We would like you not to use any Eastern and Central European countries, as well as Baltic states, to deploy their new weapons. We don’t want INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] missiles deployed in Europe.”

The INF Treaty was signed between President Ronald Reagan and then-Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987, but President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the treaty in 2019, citing Russian non-compliance, and also concerns about a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific, since China is not a signatory to the treaty. Subsequently, Putin also suspended Russia’s treaty obligations.

Some in this country, such as former Democratic Congresswoman and one time presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, adhere to the theory that making it clear that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO would have caused Putin to back off on his threat to the country. If one puts the current crisis in the context of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where the U.S., under President John F. Kennedy, faced down Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles to Cuba, 90 miles off our shores, Russia’s concern about NATO expansion on its borders makes sense. A little heralded part of the resolution of that crisis was the unpublicized agreement by the U.S. to withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey, on the Soviet Union’s border, revealing the reciprocal nature of not placing nuclear threats right on an adversary’s border.

Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion certainly are real, but whether they tell the whole story or are simply a red herring for concealing Putin’s expansionist aims may have been answered by Putin himself during a lengthy monologue, delivered on February 21. In that monologue, described by some as “surreal” and historically “revisionist,” Putin claimed that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent country and merely is part of the old Russian empire. In the same speech, Putin announced he was recognizing two predominantly Russian rebel regions in the eastern part of Ukraine, the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic.” Putin later ordered troops to cross the border to those two districts, under the guise of being “peacekeepers.”

For his part, Biden issued an executive order putting sanctions, not on Russia, but on the two breakaway regions. You can’t make this stuff up.

“Ukraine is a test of western resolve. It’s not just about Putin,” said former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley. “The Chinese communists and Iranian jihadists are watching too. It’s a major leadership moment for Biden. So far, he’s failing.”

Following launch of his invasion of Ukraine overnight, Putin issued the most dire threat yet to the U.S. and the West.

Speaking at 6 a.m. Moscow time this morning, Putin threatened “consequences greater than any you have faced in history” should Western countries become involved in Ukraine.

What these “consequences” might consist of were left deliberately ambiguous. Might they include massive cyber attacks? Invasion of the Baltic states? Nuclear retaliation? It is relevant to recall that, following resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, both Kennedy and Khrushchev said they had madmen on their side urging them to push the nuclear button. One has to wonder, given his increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior and his twisted world view, whether Putin would not have been one of those arguing for nuclear Armageddon. Or that he is not now capable of it.

How much further Putin’s view of returning Russia to what he sees as its former greatness will go, we will have to wait to see. We don’t have to wait to see Biden’s failure. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of that, all through this administration. Now we’re seeing more of it, and where it leads.

Featured image: Twisted Shoe Laces. Pixabay. Used with permission.

Befuddled Biden with press photos. EPA/Oliver Contreras/Pool Photo. Used under Fair Use.

Putin and his pooch. Reuters, from Esquire.com. Used under Fair Use.

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Finally, Something That Is Bigger Than Watergate

By Frank Yacenda | February 17, 2022 | Comments 6 comments

For half a century we’ve heard one political scandal after another called “bigger than Watergate.” None other than Watergate co-reporter Bob Woodward has uttered those words over and over as he peddled his various books across the years, relying on the famed laurels he earned at the early pinnacle of his career. And now, finally, thanks to the plodding but relentless investigation of Special Counsel John Durham, we’re getting details of a scandal that, if substantiated, really is bigger, far bigger, than Watergate.

A recent 19-page court filing made by Durham’s team contains clear indications that the now nearly three-year-old investigation is looking past — far past — indicted Hillary Clinton presidential campaign legal advisor Michael Sussmann. Three times in the submission Durham informs the court that he is conducting “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” not limited to defendant Sussmann. Sussmann, for his part, has pleaded not guilty to lying to the FBI, and has answered with his own six-page filing accusing Durham of being wrong about key facts and attempting to prejudice the jury pool.

Part of Durham’s allegations is that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was spied on by Sussmann, working with cybersecurity experts, and touting the information to the media and government agencies, including the FBI and CIA, hoping to spur an investigation of Trump. Which, we may recall, is exactly what eventuated, in the form of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the subsequent ill-fated, but costly and highly destructive, investigation conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

While the Watergate burglars physically broke into Democratic Party headquarters, Durham’s allegations imply an electronic break-in to the Trump campaign. Those kinds of dirty tricks might make the scandal as big as Watergate, but not necessarily bigger. The bigger issue, the one that — again, if substantiated — would make this scandal not only bigger than Watergate, but substantively a direct threat to national security, is that a government contractor, referred to as “Tech Executive-1” in the Durham filing but reported to be early Internet industry pioneer Rodney Joffe, may have been gleaning and passing on data from White House communications during Trump’s presidency. Joffe has not been charged in the case.

Was Trump Right?

Trump has alleged all along that his campaign and, subsequently, his presidency, was spied on. He called the campaign spying “Spygate” and alleged it was conducted by his opponent, who is called Crooked Hillary. He clearly feels, if prematurely, vindicated by Durham’s filing. In an exclusive interview earlier this week Trump told Fox News Digital, “It looks like this is just the beginning, because, if you read the filing and have any understanding of what took place, and I called this a long time ago, you’re going to see a lot of other things happening, having to do with what, really, just is a continuation of the crime of the century. This is such a big event, nobody’s seen anything like this.”

In a prior statement, Trump said, “What Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left Democrats did with respect to spying on a President of the United States, even while in office, is a far bigger crime than Watergate.” He called for further criminal charges and implied that the perpetrators, in an earlier time, would face the death penalty, which is what his opponents would have called for were he the offending party.

“Can you imagine,” Trump said in his statement, “if the roles were reversed and the Republicans, in particular President Donald Trump, got caught illegally spying into the Office of the President? All hell would break loose and the electric chair would immediately come out of retirement.”

Asked by a Daily Mail reporter to respond to the allegations contained in the Durham filing, Clinton first ignored the question, walking masked past the reporter and waving. She later came out with a tweet to blame Trump and Fox News for “spinning up a fake scandal.”

“Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it’s a day that ends in Y,” Clinton tweeted. ‘The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.”

To back up her denial, she linked to an article in Vanity Fair written by Democratic Party toadie Bess Levin and subtitled, “In less breaking news, Donald Trump remains a moron.”

Aside from the two former candidates sparring, part of the issue revolves around the value of the data mined by Joffe’s group. According to Durham’s filing, the investigation has approximately 17,000 documents related to Tech Executive-1’s companies, including approximately 226 emails relevant to Sussmann’s defense. While it is not clear whether any specific information was gathered from White House communications, it appears that Joffe’s efforts “exploited” the communications to garner what is called DNS — Domain Name System — information indicating which computers White House computers connected with in an effort to garner derogatory information about Trump. One objective, which failed, was to tie Trump to the private Russian bank, Alfa Bank.

Durham Has the Clinton Campaign in His Sights

It’s been known for some time that the Clinton campaign and the bogus Russian dossier, which contained numerous unsubstantiated and false accusations that attempted to tie Donald Trump to Moscow, has been under investigation by Durham’s team. On Nov. 3 of last year the primary source for the infamous dossier, Igor Danchenko, was arrested and charged with lying to federal officials about his Russian contacts during his 2017 interviews with the FBI.

Along with supplying fabricated information to Christopher Steele, the former British intel operative who provided the dossier to the Clinton campaign, Danchenko had lied about never speaking with what was identified as “PR Executive-1,” described as a “long-time participant in Democratic Party politics.” It was later revealed that PR Executive-1 is Charles Dolan, Jr., a former executive director of the Democratic Governors Association who advised Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and also volunteered for her 2016 campaign. It is alleged that Dolan supplied Danchenko with information and Danchenko’s deception about his contacts with Dolan “was highly material to the FBI’s investigation of these matters.”

One key thing revealed in Durham’s recent filing is that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz had not been fully forthcoming about his activities that are relevant to Durham’s probe of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. For one thing, Horowitz had failed to disclose that he met with defendant Sussmann in March 2017. A focus of that meeting was discussion of how the computer of an employee of the Office of the Inspector General had been detected connecting to a virtual private network in another country, information Sussmann had gathered through his connection with Joffe.

Also revealed was that Horowitz had failed to turn over two cell phones belonging to FBI General Counsel James Baker, the official Sussmann is accused of lying to, claiming he was not advising the Clinton campaign while peddling stories of Trump-Alfa Bank connections. Durham has sought possession of a number of FBI phones, including the Baker phones, and is “working diligently” to review relevant materials on them for presentation to the court.

Unindicted Co-conspirators

During the Watergate festivities we heard a lot about “unindicted co-conspirators.” Well, there are plenty of them in the current imbroglio. Not the least of them are the media miscreants who spouted the lies about the alleged “Russia-Trump” conspiracy as if they were fact (and in most cases, still do, and who are now covering up the latest Durham revelations), and Democratic Party apparatchiks, not the least of which are California Representative Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who almost certainly knew, and know, the allegations about Trump were bogus. Working in tandem, those co-conspirators wasted the country’s time, trust, and resources for the better part of five years, and are continuing to squander the national trust and treasure in an effort to drive a stake in Trump’s heart.

There are plenty of guilty parties who may or may not ever be indicted by Durham or anyone else. These include not just Hillary Clinton herself, but also the current occupant of the Oval Office who, along with his boss Barrack Obama, was informed of the phony efforts to defame Trump and allege collusion with Russia to distract attention from Clinton’s illegal use of a private server for conduct of classified government business. They also include former CIA Director John Brennan, who informed Obama and Biden of the plot, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who knew the allegations against Trump were unsubstantiated and who lied to Congress, former FBI Director James Comey, who approved of false filings to the national security FISA Court, his deputy, Andrew McCabe, and former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, all of whom furthered the bogus plot.

We know all this went on thanks to former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Clapper’s successor, who held multiple conversations with Durham and confirmed there was sufficient documentation of all this rot. Perhaps most explosive and damning is a CIA Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL) that the CIA forwarded to Comey and Strzok stating that Clinton allegedly approved in the 2016 election “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Does it get any clearer than that? I don’t think so. Now the question is, will any of these big names, whether it’s that of Hillary Clinton or Comey or Brennan or Obama or Biden, wind up in any indictments? I doubt, and have doubted for a long time, that our dual system of justice will bring justice to the biggest offenders. As I said about three years ago, in March 2019:

“But do I see it happening? Do I believe that tomorrow the sun will come up in the West and set in the East? The depth of corruption, the extent of the collusion, and the two levels of justice we live with in this country all make prosecution of Hillary and most of the other guilty parties about as likely. Sure, there might be some low-level functionaries punished, beyond the resignations and firings that have already taken place. Maybe. But the worse offenders? The most egregious actors? Not likely.”

I hope I’m proven wrong. But I doubt I will be. The better chance is that we’ll see Hillary again vying to be crowned to what she sees as her divinely ordained place as President of the United States. May that divinity have mercy on our souls.

Featured image: Hillary Shocked, source unknown, from BizPacReview.com. Used under Fair Use.

Donald Trump, source unknown, from HuffingtonPost.com. Used under Fair Use.

John Durham, source unknown, from NeoNettle.com. Used under Fair Use.

Adam Schiff, Getty Images, from DailyCaller.com. Used under Fair Use.

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