Russia's Dying Dreams

As the year (2022) ends, people get into the mood to make predictions for how the coming year (2023) will go.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, one of Putin's more loyal lackeys, laid out a bunch of doozies on Twitter a few days ago. If I can refer to the Reuters article that reported on it:

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, an arch loyalist of Vladimir Putin given a new job this week, predicted war between Germany and France next year and a civil war in the United States that would lead to Elon Musk becoming president.

That noise you hear in the distance is me headdesking into infinity. Just on those two predictions alone, I'm asking the universe "who the FUCK spiked Dmitry's vodka with LSD?"

Okay. Okay. Taking a step back. Let's just see what else Medvedev predicted for the coming year:

In his list of predictions for 2023, published on his personal Telegram and Twitter accounts, he also foresaw Britain rejoining the EU, which would in turn collapse.

Musk, the Tesla boss who now owns Twitter, responded to the suggestion he would emerge as U.S. president by tweeting back "Epic thread!!", although he also criticised some of Medvedev's predictions. Medvedev has praised Musk in the past for proposing Ukraine cede territory to Russia in a peace deal...

Musk, it should be noted, needs all the ego-stroking in the universe right now because his mismanagement of both Twitter and Tesla has tanked Tesla stock to where Musk has officially lost $200 billion of value in 2022, the most a billionaire has ever lost in that timeframe.

Other things Medvedev predicted:

• The cost of oil will go up to $150.00 a barrel, which would reverse Russia's pending economic collapse.
• Russia will win its war against Ukraine, seizing the eastern regions that Putin's tried to annex.
• Poland and Hungary will join forces to partition western Ukraine.
• Germany will react to Poland and Hungary's annexation of western Ukraine by annexing Poland and Hungary, forming a Fourth Reich. This will essentially shatter NATO.
• France will go to war against the German Fourth Reich.
• Northern Ireland - even with Britain rejoining the EU, causing its collapse (yeah, go ahead and figure that one out) - will quit the UK and reunite with Ireland. Even though their border issues with Ireland were likely resolved with the Rejoin in the first place. (This is the point where I went cross-eyed)
• That US Civil War will lead to Texas and California forming their independent states, with Texas forming an alliance with Mexico. THIS is the point where I couldn't stop laughing for fifteen minutes straight.

Okay, that's as far as I'll go - he also predicted the end of the Bretton Woods economic agreements and the collapse of the US Dollar - before breaking down how EACH one of Medvedev's predictions are batshit crazy.

Medvedev's prediction of oil prices going up is a likely reaction to how global sanctions over Russia's invasion of Ukraine are crimping their economy now and for the foreseeable future. He's hoping that demand for oil goes up so high that other nations will quit their sanctions to get some of that sweet Russian crude.

His prediction that England will drop their Brexit stance and rejoin the European Union ignores the political dynamics in the UK, where the Conservatives still in charge of government have no intention of quitting their Brexit agenda. There would have to be a massive schism in Tory ranks to force an emergency election, and for the Labour party to win out. Even then, if the UK does rejoin the EU, there's no sign it will force the EU to split apart: After all, it would signal the EU's power to bring a nation that broke with them back into its ranks. It's not like Spain or Italy will quit if Britain reclaims a seat at the table.

There's not even any reason for the EU to let the UK back into their organization: Why trust a nation that would re-exit the minute the Tories got back in control? At best, the EU would compromise on a trade agreement that would turn the current No-Deal Brexit into a Soft Brexit that could alleviate England's current economic woes. And it'll be a deal that won't break the EU.

His follow-up suggestion that Northern Ireland will break with the UK to merge with the Irish Republic seems based on the current woes Northern Ireland has with the Irish border, which is a conflict born from Brexit. If Brexit ends, the border crisis ends: the Protestant half of Ireland would then stay with the UK. There's too much socio-political separation between Ireland and N. Ireland for any other issue to bring them together.

Medvedev gets crazier when he starts predicting how NATO will blow itself apart. He's convinced that when Russia defeats Ukraine, they'll take full control of the eastern provinces that they illegally annexed - including the Crimea - leaving the western sections vulnerable to the likes of Poland. Never mind that Poland would rather provide more military aid to Ukraine to ensure Ukraine never falls to Russia. Because the last thing Poland wants is a return of a Russian/Soviet empire at their own border. He's also ignoring the reality that Poland - having been divided itself between invading armies in World War II - is not about to inflict the same destructive annexation on another European nation. This is mostly Russian projection that other nations will be empire-building like they are.

This is leading into the fearmongering that Medvedev promotes when he claims Germany will forge a new Reich to dominate Eastern Europe as soon as Poland and Hungary move against Ukraine. Just invoking the Reich as a concept is his way to play to the dark memories of the Third Reich, when the Nazis blitzed in World War II and killed millions of Russians. 

One, Germany itself has been aggressive in shutting down ANY sign of Far Right fascist behavior, suffering through two straight world wars have been enough for them. Rebuilding a Reich is a pipe dream even for them: Just look at how the German government held mass arrests of extremists plotting to bring back the Kaiser and start a Far Right regime (a coup plot which was, by the by, backed by Russia).

Two, Germany is more likely to support Poland against Russia - which is supporting Ukraine - than annex it if Russia ever succeeded invading Ukraine. The thing about NATO, one of its key positive effects has been the treaty's ability to unite European nations to defend each other rather than split into competing factions the way it was when both world wars broke out. I can't speak for Hungary, which is under the control of a Russia-friendly regime: However, Hungary is still strongly tied to the EU and NATO, and they can't really go against either organization the way Russia wants to. 

This is the biggest reason why Putin and the other Russian elites want NATO gone: NATO's very existence prevents Russia from rebuilding its glory years of empire. This is why Medvedev predicts half of Europe turning on itself, with a German Reich triggering a French military response like it was 1877 (or 1914) all over again.

It's also feeding Medvedev's fantasy that the United States will break apart in Civil War. Granted, I'm a little worried that the U.S. already is in a low-grade civil war thanks to donald trump's insurrection attempt on January 6th, and thanks to the ongoing threats of violence coming from the likes of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. But I've reviewed this situation before and there's little reason for even Texas - a Far Right state in opposition to a Democratic-held federal government - to break away from the Union. The hassles of nation-building - with few other nations to aid them, loss of supply chains with the rest of America, economic disruption, what have you - just aren't worth it to make the libruls look bad.

There's currently no reason for California to secede at all: a solid Blue State that would likely do everything to support Biden and the Democrats in DC. Most other states don't have the resources to actively secede, even with all the Far Right fantasies of pulling it off (most wingnut militias will fall quickly to even the National Guard units before the US military even steps in).

And Medvedev's idea that an independent Texas would ally itself to Mexico goes against everything we know about Texas' racist rage towards Mexico. The Republicans controlling Texas - hi, evildoer Abbott! - are livid about Mexican migrants, and screaming about "defending the border" by building a useless wall. These are not people who would suddenly want to work WITH Mexico in any way. Hell, that border becomes a flashpoint with Mexico declaring the border with Texas isn't the Rio Grande anymore (because that was a treaty made with the US at the end of the Mexican-American War). There's a whole Trope for it - Mexico Called They Want Texas Back - to where if Texas does secede their biggest problem will be an angry Mexican army marching to the Nueces River.

Oh, and that stuff about Elon Musk becoming President? Under the US Constitution, Musk can't qualify, he's not a natural-born citizen. If Medvedev thinks a divided United States is going to find the time to rewrite a brand new constitution that would grant Musk the chance to get elected, and that either Texas or California would be that idiotic to elect him, he's really drunk off his ass.

So with all that said, did you notice the common thread between every single one of Medvedev's predictions?

Every single prediction is a Russian elitist's wish fulfillment. Every prediction is about how the rest of the world - especially the United States and Europe - has to fall apart in order for Russia to succeed.

In particular, Medvedev's fantasy that the US will collapse into civil war with different states forming their own nations echoes similar predictions I saw Russians make back in 2009. It's a recurring dream apparently of the Russian mindset, having endured their own breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 that has them wishing their rival the United States would do the same.

Russia - having lost its global standing when the USSR fell apart - is both angry and terrified about the NATO treaty that encompasses most of a European continent allied against outside forces (of which Russia is one). It's a self-defeating situation for Russia: The Russians need NATO out of the way to achieve Putin's dreams of rebuilding their imperial glory days of Peter the Great; but NATO stuck together partly because they feared in a post-Soviet world the rise of a Russian dictator (like Putin) who would conquer and divide Eastern Europe, in ways that led to two destructive world wars that Europe never wants to endure again. It's a Russian dream that - to nations like Germany and France and England and Poland - dare not come true.

Russia as a nation/people suffers from either a weird case of Imposter Syndrome or a self-punishing inferiority complex. Putin and other high-ranking Russians on the one hand see Western Civilization as weak and corrupt (and in Putin's homophobic world-view, sexually deviant). On the other hand, they are absolutely terrified that these weak nations will attack and destroy Russia. It doesn't help their psyche that they've been this way for centuries - Peter the Great himself was envious of European improvements and sought to emulate them - both coveting a dominant role in Europe and dismissing European cultural norms and political beliefs.

Russia has always been an outsider force in Western politics, even when they were allies to the remaining democracies during World War II. It's both rankled their pride and left them wondering what they've done wrong to be so slighted. It has a lot to do with how corrupt the ruling forces in Russia have been - either under the Tsars, or under the Soviets, now under Putin - to where the other major powers have been and still are wary of dealing with Russia in any way.

Thing is, Russia's corruption - not just economic greed but political brutality - has been so constant, so prevalent that they've failed repeatedly to reform themselves to where the Western nations can ever feel safe. Hence the ongoing existence of NATO and the EU, both of which enrage Russia into staying violent and corrupt, and nothing improves.

It's that same corruption now eating away at Russia as 2022 rolls into 2023. The political elites - the oligarchs that own everything to Russia's ruin - dare not turn against or reject the violent dictatorship of Putin that has pushed the nation into an unwinnable ground war in Ukraine.

The only way to end their nightmare is to dream of a world that collapses before Russia does.

But that dream is a lie, just like every self-delusion Russians have been feeding themselves for ages.

It's more of a nightmare for Ukraine and Europe and the United States and the world, that's not going to end until Putin is gone.

Gods help us.

May the new year see an end to this corrupt Russian madness.

One Sentence Statement about the Passing of Pope Benedict XVI

There is a Circle of Hell dedicated to those who betrayed their position of office, there is a Circle of Hell for priests and bishops and Popes who allowed pedophiles and rapists to attack the children and families of their own parishes, there is a Circle of Hell for those who lied against the victims, there is a Circle of Hell for those who covered up crimes for the sake of power and money, and so there is a Circle of Hell tonight for Pope Benedict XVI who died knowing full well that thousands of young women and men of his own Catholic Church had their lives broken or destroyed all so he could be Pope.

The Day a Young Woman Nuked a Misogynist From Orbit (w/ Update)

Normally I don't double-blog on a day, but this story is both disturbing and hilarious that it deserves attention.

It seems earlier this week, a social pariah named Andrew Tate - former kickboxer, open misogynist, and unrepentant cigar smoker - was allowed back on Twitter under Elon Musk's umbrella policy of letting wingnut assholes back online, and Tate immediately tried to insult/flirt with known environmental activist Greta Thunberg, taunting her with declarations about all the gas-guzzling cars he owns. Referring to Rodlyn-Mae Banting at Jezebel for more:

The self-identified misogynist, 36, tweeted at 19-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg for some reason about the 33 cars he owns. “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” he wrote, attaching a photo of himself filling up one of his aforementioned many cars presumably to prove his immense wealth and unmatched masculinity...

Thunberg provided the only sane response:

yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com https://t.co/V8geeVvEvg

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 28, 2022

The rest of the Internet pretty much cheered Greta for her putdown, and declared her Queen of the Mic Drops for the month of December.

The celebrations of Greta's victory were kind of like this

It gets sicker/funnier from here:

A badly burned Tate responded to Thunberg’s tweet with only, “How dare you!?,” and then started furiously retweeting the few fans of his insisting he won the battle he started for no reason...

The former professional kickboxer and 2016 Big Brother contestant has been raising eyebrows for some time for spewing a seemingly endless stream of sexist hatred, but things reached a head earlier this year when his online misogyny was seeping into classrooms and affecting young boys’ behavior all over the world. Since then, Tate has been banned from most social media platforms, including Twitter. In late November, Elon “Free Speech Absolutist” Musk reinstated Tate’s Twitter account shortly after taking over the company, which seemed at the time to be a horrific move. But it turns out Musk did the internet a favor, because we all got to witness this sad excuse of a man get the dragging he deserves in real time before the year’s end...

Well, Tate did follow up with a few more mocking tweets. One of those tweets was a video of him sitting in a kitchen, eating pizza and lighting up a cigar like he was the lord of his dominion.

Turns out, that video turned into a huge self-own when the Romanian police - looking for Tate on allegations he committed human sex trafficking - used that photo to realize he was in their country at that very moment, and descended on his residence with arrest warrants in hand. Back to Jezebel, this time with Laura Bassett:

A Twitter spat that misogynist social media personality Andrew Tate started with 19-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg over his masculinity led Romanian authorities to arrest him and his brother, Tristan, for human trafficking and rape on Thursday, according to local media and police.

Tate had taunted Thunberg on Twitter about his 33 cars, to which Thunberg replied with a joke about “small dick energy” that racked up millions of likes. Tate then posted a humiliating two-minute video of himself smoking a cigar in a robe and insisting that he was not owned at all by teen girl. But he seems to have really fucked up there: A local pizza shop listed on the box in the video reportedly tipped off authorities as to his whereabouts.

As a side note: They have pizza chains in Romania??? 

Police raided his villa and detained the Tates on suspicions of sex trafficking. Semafor reports that the suspects “allegedly used a ‘loverboy method’ to lure victims into marriages and then sexually and mentally abused them to perform in exploitative videos, authorities said.”

If Tate ends up in prison because Greta Thunberg bodied him on Twitter with a small dick joke, it will be the most chef’s kiss ending to his story the world has ever seen...

This story starts off creepy, with a known misogynist (33 years old) sending tweets to a woman almost half his age (Greta is now 19, but still way too young for him) in one of those "oh god, he's being a perv towards her" kind of vibes. She gets her revenge in public by labeling his faux Alpha Male BS as "small dick energy," which clearly knee-groined Tate in his pride, angering him enough to respond... only to have that response condemn himself with arrest on rape and trafficking charges. 

The schadenfreude is too delicious, more tasty than pizza. 

Yes, I went there.

It's turning out Tate shouldn't have.

BWHAHAHAHA.

Update: I just want to make sure that the reports on Tate's arrest are credible. The Guardian is covering the story, and they're very reliable. 

Where the Grifting Takes the GOP

You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you.
-- Lester Freamon, The Wire

In a followup to last week's bombshell that a New York Republican Representative-Elect was a gaslighting fraud, I need to note that the authorities are finally paying attention to George Santos and opening criminal investigations on him. O the irony of grifting your way into elected office letting prosecutors find out you were grifting in the first place.

While the mainstream media is busy assigning blame on who's responsible for Santos getting as far as he has - blaming Democrats for not doing enough Oppo Research, blaming local press for not digging into Santos' bogus resume - the most blame should be aimed at Santos himself for setting himself up for this exposure and ridicule (if not future jail time). After that, most of the blame should be aimed at a Republican Party that is not only vulnerable to con artists buying their way into their ranks, but happily defending the grifters even when their scandals threatens to expose all the other corrupt sins hiding in the GOP closets.

As Jill Dennison notes at her blog:

I could point to so many, such as Marge Greene who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives despite being a follower of QAnon, despite believing that Jewish space lasers (hint, in case any Republicans are reading this, there ain’t no such thing as Jewish space lasers) started the California wildfires.  Or the pistol-totin’ barhop, Lauren Boebert who proudly put a photo of all her children holding big guns on her Christmas cards.  And then, there’s Kevin McCarthy, vying to be the next Speaker of the House, whose only platform is revenge against any and all liberal democratic policies and those of us who support those policies.  But for now, I want to focus on one incoming member of the House, a person who will be seated in the House of Representatives next Tuesday, a person who has broken the boundaries of dishonesty:  George Santos...

This is a new low even for the Republican Party and if, in fact, they allow him to be seated in the House on Tuesday, it will be the most definitive statement yet that there is no conscience, no morals, no values, and no integrity within the Republican Party.  One lie of any substance would have disqualified any Democratic candidate, but Mr. Santos told lies about every single aspect of his entire 34 years!!!  I imagine there are some Republicans who are wishing they could crawl under a rock right about now – Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney – but the rest seem to be scratching their heads and wondering how to get this out of the news, how to make it disappear.  Not a single word from the otherwise garrulous Kevin McCarthy… funny that.

This is, for the Republicans, as bad a nightmare as the former guy, an egomaniac, planning to run for the Oval Office again.  I would pity the Republicans, but … they brought this mess on themselves when they first began letting unqualified circus clowns run for office.  It seems to me that a person who cannot even be relied upon to tell the truth about where he went to college (he didn’t), property he claims to own (but doesn’t), where he has worked, his ancestry, his criminal past, where he lives, cannot possibly be trusted to be an honest lawmaker!  I thought Herschel Walker told some mighty big lies, but Santos even makes him look like an amateur.  Santos is right up there with the former guy, who wouldn’t recognize the truth if it smacked him upside the head!  This is NOT what this nation needs … lawmakers who cannot ever be trusted, whose words and actions must always, always be fact-checked!  But alas, this is the new GOP – which, by the way, no longer stands for “Grand Old Party”, but rather for “Gaslight Or Perjure...”

Dennison - and others - are calling on the Republican leadership to do the right thing, the ethical thing, but the likes of Kevin McCarthy cannot afford to kick Santos to the curb because their control of the US House is on a precarious - 5-seat margin - footing already. McCarthy himself is facing an unheard-of fight of his life for the Speakership, and he needs all the grifters he can find to save his own ass in this moment. Even though Santos will condemn McCarthy - and the rest of the GOP - down the road.

This scandal with Santos is exposing the reality that the Republican Party for all historic purposes is no longer a political party, it's an ongoing criminal conspiracy. As Amanda Marcotte points out at Salon, entire decades of lusting after power has turned a once-proud Party into a haven for grifters: 

One thing was dead certain within moments of the New York Times publishing its exposé on the many lies of George Santos: There was zero chance that this brand new Republican congressman-elect from New York would be shamed into giving up his seat. Perhaps that didn't seem obvious to everyone at first, especially those with lingering memories of the pre-Trump era, when we all pretended to believe that Republican voters cared about hypocrisy, lying, overt racism, sexual abuse or any of the other personal or professional scandals that used to take politicians down routinely. But I never doubted for a moment that Santos would move onward toward being seated and that the incoming Republican House majority would allow it...

Despite all this, the only way he doesn't join Congress as an esteemed member of the Republican caucus is if New York prosecutors can nail him for something first. I believe this in the way I believe that chocolate is delicious and cats are cute. After all, what is the modern GOP, if not a holding station for every two-bit criminal and grifter who wants the job security that can only come with exploiting the endlessly credulous Republican base? The party can no more start kicking out the fraudsters than it can stop trying to cut taxes for the rich. This is just who they are and what they do. George Santos is in no sense an anomaly. He is the Republican present and, even more to the point, the Republican future...

This is what gets delicately described as "negative partisanship" in mainstream media and political science textbooks, and all too often treated as an equal problem on both sides. Of course it's true that both parties include some voters who are more motivated by dislike of the opposing party than by support for their own. But with Democrats, that at least has some basis in real-world concerns, given that Republicans are the party of abortion bans and the Jan. 6 insurrection. But on the other side, Republican voters mostly coast on hyperbolic vitriol about the evils of Democrats, which are at best vague insinuations of corruption, and at worst outright lies and QAnon-style conspiracy theories. 

Convincing Republican voters to believe that Democrats are literally the worst people imaginable certainly helps Republicans win elections. But it's also destabilizing the party from within, because shady characters of all flavors now understand that no sin or crime is so great that it cannot be wiped away by running for office as a Republican. The result is a party full of cranks, chronic liars and petty criminals, a situation that gets worse every election cycle, as demonstrated by the Santos fiasco...

We still don't know where George Santos got the money that allowed him to run and win a congressional election in a pivotal swing district. But he's still likely to be seated next week with no serious impediment, offering America's swindler class another reason to believe that going into Republican politics is like getting a license to commit fraud. There's no real chance of political backlash in a situation like this, with the GOP voter base heavily dosed up on Fox News hate. Worse yet, it seems increasingly clear that federal law enforcement is too afraid of looking "partisan" to prosecute Republican politicians over anything, so there are no serious legal consequences either. Sam Bankman-Fried may be kicking himself for getting into cryptocurrency instead of GOP politics, if what he wanted was the ability to defraud whoever you like with impunity...

I wrote in 2015 that the Republican Party was dead in spirit, with only a decaying body shambling about going through the motions of politics in order to keep all the money and power in their undead uncaring hands. With the 2016 election of donald trump, the Republicans were stuck with the reality that he paved the way for all the other grifters to yell and scream enough on Far Right media outlets to win offices in safe gerrymandered districts (or safe Red states full of Culture War angst). 

With these political offices in their hands, they can con their way to put more government funds in their own pockets. They can then campaign and fundraise to their hearts' desires, sucking up every last penny from the suckers who buy their vitriol and eat it like caviar. This is the new con game, where the liars can make money even if they lose by declaring themselves victims and fundraising off of that.

This is where the modern GOP is. A party filling up with George Santos and a hundred other grifters. Now literally "trumps all the way down." 

trump can't go to jail for his crimes fast enough. Here's hoping he shares a cell block with Santos sooner rather than later. Along with the other Republican grifters thriving off of fear and hate and greed.

The Document of trump's Atrocities

Here's some light reading for this Christmas weekend, everybody.

The Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

At a whopping 845 pages in PDF format.

Dunno if the Republicans will keep it up after they take control of the House in January, so download it while you can!

Don't worry, I made sure my library ordered a print copy for checkout!

If only the professor who taught me Government Documents Librarianship could see me now!

I'm already seeing photos of Giuliani's failed press conference at the Four Seasons Landscaping store front. It's now a matter of official public record. BWHAHAHAHAHA.

'Course, the rest of it is not as funny...

Who IS This Guy?

So a rather bizarre scandal reared its head this week - in a month, nay a life cycle of utter madness ever since 2016 Gods help us, so this being cray-cray is saying something - when the New York Times started looking at the newly elected people from this midterms cycle, and discovered this George Santos who won a US Congressional seat in the Long Island part of New York was, well, lying about his entire goddamn resume and parts of his personal biography.

Since the Times is definitely behind a firewall for me, I'm pilfering much of the info from Raw Story so do help a blog out and donate or subscribe to Raw Story please and thanks. Oh, the report via Travis Gettys (I can't see who the Times reporters are, my bad):

George Santos, a son of Brazilian immigrants who presented himself as a "seasoned Wall Street financier and investor" who owned 13 properties and operated an animal rescue charity, became the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, but a New York Times review of public documents and court filings called into question his résumé.

Both Citigroup and Goldman Sachs told the newspaper they had no record of Santos working there, as he had claimed, and Baruch College found no record that he had graduated in 2010, also as he claimed.

The Internal Revenue Service also found little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friend of Pets United, was a tax-exempt organization.

It gets crazier.

Santos loaned more than $700,000 to his campaign and donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the past two years, but his company, the Devolder Organization, has virtually no online presence and his financial disclosures don't reveal any clients -- which election law experts say could be a problem if those clients actually exist.

The Times also could not find any records of the properties his family allegedly owns.

This part of the story quickly raises a ton of red flags. If Santos doesn't have a verified source of employment or income (if he's not earning money from the properties he claims to have, for example), then where the hell did that $700,000 he "loaned" to his own campaign come from? This reeks of money laundering. I mean, for all of the fakery surrounding trump's questionable finances, at least he actually owns stuff he can use as collateral to get loans. 

All anyone can confirm at the moment is that George Santos was caught committing checking fraud in Brazil back in 2010, and that Santos had been evicted from residences several times for missing rent payments. 

With a hot scandal to follow, there's been denials and recriminations and further exposure of Santos' falsehoods. He claimed he lost employees in the tragic Orlando Pulse mass shooting, but nobody can tie any of the fallen to his alleged businesses.  The latest report is that Santos may be lying about his family's Jewish background that they fled due to the coming Second World War and Holocaust. 

There's open questions now if Santos is really gay. After all, he's lied about everything else about himself. (Update: Santos was married to a woman before divorcing in 2019. It could just mean he was bi/closeted and came out afterward. It happens. But he never mentioned the marriage when he campaigned, so... Lie of Omission.)

This story is exposing a lot of sins right now, and not just Santos'. 

The Republican Party at the New York level has to deal with the reality one of their bright new stars is a goddamn fake, not to mention the thousands of campaign dollars they've gotten from this guy puts everyone's ledgers under scrutiny. The entire GOP party in that state has a lot of answering to do.

The Democratic Party at the New York level is also getting yelled at. In this day and age of extreme partisan politics, Oppo Research should be Campaigning 101. This wasn't Santos' first attempt at elected office, and one thing you're supposed to do is go through your opponent's work history and background to find ANY questionable acts and weak spots in their narratives to exploit. While Santos' opponent reportedly did some digging, and then tried to get the papers to follow up, nobody really paid attention until he'd actually won (and ironically getting the attention as a "future GOP star" in a mostly-Dem state). There's a growing push to remove the current party head in New York - who's floundered at keeping the party organized already, this is one more faux pas on him - and this could get ugly.

This is also a massive indictment of our electoral process, especially for the Congressional and state legislative offices. I've complained about this before, that our choices for candidates are barely - if ever - vetted for qualifications to the jobs we're supposed to elect them to. The parties are so desperate to draft celeb candidates - or too beholden to the religious and cultural extremists to allow the more unhinged and vulgar - that they don't care about actual QUALITY of that candidate until it's too late. You would think a stronger background check would be run on these candidates - especially to make sure you don't get anyone like Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott embezzling from your own party's funds - to guarantee you're presenting the Best and the Brightest to reflect your party's ethos. Guess what Republicans, someone like Santos - and so many others - are proving your party has no ethics at all.

It does not help that the only ones who can even put their names on the ballots for consideration are the only ones who can AFFORD - by clean money or laundered - to run in the first place. It costs money to file for an election primary, it costs thousands of dollars to run any kind of campaign. You can see it with Santos working to buy a win with $700,000 that nobody can confirm came from honest business. Elections have turned into a racket, a billion dollar industry that buys you a lot of political influence that can siphon even more taxpayer money into your own pockets later on. Gods help us with that open scandal.

Everything about Santos demands a full criminal investigation.

Hell, we need to run a criminal investigation to find out who George Santos really IS.

The Taxman Cometh for trump

Along with all the other bad news donald trump's been getting this month, this week revealed the US House Ways and Means Committee voted on making trump's federal income tax filings available to the public.

You might remember a while back, trump lost his fight to keep his tax returns private when the Supreme Court - even stacked with Far Right Republicans - said "Haha, no." As I noted at the time:

Although Reuters didn't go into the reason(s) why the Ways and Means were looking at trump's taxes, if I recall from other sources it was because the Committee was digging into trump's many violations of the Emoluments Clause. trump had been using his properties to entice and squeeze as much money out of the government (forcing the Secret Service to reside at his hotels at double-billing!) and foreign lobbyists since Day One. It had been this long going after trump on this open grift - delayed either by Republican control of Congress or trump's control of the Justice Department - that only now have the courts cleared this matter.

Problem is, the current Democratic control of Ways and Means is going to end in a month: Republicans won a narrow victory to control the House, and there is no way the MAGA wingnuts running the GOP caucus is going to expose their God-Emperor trump to public scrutiny. If there's anything the current committee can use the tax returns info they now have, they better make it quick before Christmas...

Ah, yes. They did. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh, that felt goooooood.

It turns out I was wrong on the reasons why the Ways and Means wanted to examine trump's tax returns. The House committee wasn't so much looking at if trump was violating the Emoluments Clause, but if the Internal Revenue Service was doing their job in automatically auditing trump as sitting President Loser of the Popular Vote.

Turns out there's an Executive standing order - due to Richard Nixon's brush with tax dodging back in 1973 - that mandates the IRS audit the President every year he's in office. And it turns out the Ways and Means' worries were legit: Turns out the audits were not happening to trump (via Dustin Jones at NPR):

The House Ways and Means Committee in its own report said it found that only one audit was started while Trump was in office and no audits were completed.

This is in violation of standing IRS policy.

"The Committee expected that these mandatory audits were being conducted promptly and in accordance with IRS policies," Committee Chairman Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., said in a statement. "However, our review found that under the prior administration, the program was dormant. We know now, the first mandatory audit was opened two years into his presidency. On the same day this Committee requested his returns."

This raises a few questions. Above all, the question "Who gave the order to stop auditing trump?" This is something either the IRS head (who was originally an Obama appointee up until 2018) or the Treasury Secretary (trump ally - and corrupt SOB - Mnuchin) interfered.

There's a bit of irony here in that - of all the Presidents and candidates for that office - trump is the only one since the Nixon era who both refused to publicly reveal his tax returns and then refused to let the IRS audit them. All the while excusing his refusal by claiming he was being audited (oops, he really wasn't) as though that would have stopped him (it wouldn't have. Presidents released their tax returns every year even as they were being audited by the rules).

Even as the tax experts start poring over the actual numbers in trump's filings, these failures of accountability are troubling signs that serious reforms towards transparency and Congressional oversight are needed. As Steve Benen notes over at Rachel Maddow's Blog on MSNBC: 

In the wake of Nixon’s resignation, a series of ethics reforms were created, including an automatic audit of every sitting president’s taxes, every year, regardless of circumstances. A president need not be suspected of any wrongdoing; the reform was simply created to help bolster public confidence.

Most modern presidents, eager to appear forthcoming, released their tax returns to the public anyway. Trump — the only modern major-party presidential nominee to refuse to disclose his tax returns — used the post-Watergate reform as an excuse to justify secrecy.

Indeed, even after taking office in 2017, the Republican refused to release the materials, insisting that he couldn’t because he was under audit. Even at the time, the argument didn’t make sense: Trump was free to release the documents anyway, as other modern presidents from both parties had done.

But we now know that the underlying assumption was also wrong: The automatic, mandatory audit didn’t happen.

This is important for a variety of reasons. For one thing, Trump lied. For another, there was an apparent breakdown in the system that warrants additional scrutiny: If the IRS was required to audit the then-president as a matter of course, there should be some kind of explanation as to why this didn’t happen.

But let’s also not miss the forest for the trees: The whole point of the congressional exercise, the foundational basis for Neal’s initial outreach to the Treasury Department nearly four years ago, was a Ways and Means Committee investigation into the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program.

The former president, his lawyers, and his GOP allies insisted that there was no “legislative purpose” to the inquiry, and the committee’s work on the issue was little more than a political fishing expedition.

Those complaints have now collapsed. The committee set out to scrutinize the IRS’s presidential audit program and it found a problem with the IRS’s presidential audit program...

The political conversation about Trump’s secrecy has been going on for years. The policy conversation about the IRS and presidential tax returns is just getting started.

It seems unlikely that with the Republicans less than a month away from controlling the House will follow through on any reforms to fix the IRS on this matter. To Republicans, their only idea to reform the IRS is to abolish it before it holds the rich accountable for what they haven't paid in back taxes. You would think that with a Democrat currently in office - hi, Joe! - the Republicans would be eager to make it hurt by forcing Biden to humble himself before the Taxman. But the GOP knows full well that Biden - who has released his tax returns, just like Obama and Dubya and Clinton and so on - won't be bothered or embarrassed by that. Only trump - who wants to hide the reality of his business failings - would be hurt by such reforms.

It's doubtful any reforms are forthcoming, not until there's sensible (Democratic) leadership in both houses again.

What is forthcoming is the likely exposure of trump's "creative accounting" showing up in his federal tax returns. As the recent criminal trial revealed, trump's own company has been caught "cooking the books" as it were at the state level. And trump is facing a New York state civil trial that's revealing even more questionable tax behavior regarding his property values and sources of income.

It's now a question if trump tried pulling the same stunts with the IRS. Given his arrogance, the odds favor trump being that reckless.

Dude. Even the Joker didn't try to fuck with the IRS.

This is how they got Al Capone.

trump is toast.

trump's Criminal Referrals

Today wasn't exactly Christmas, but it's close enough to Saturnalia to feel festive about how the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Insurrection wrapped up their work and submitted their findings.

Facing the reality that the incoming Republican majority of the House would shut them down - and likely repudiate everything they uncovered and documented - the committee gave a summary presentation, and voted on submitting their recommendations of further action against those they found deeply involved in the creation, managing, and execution of the violent riots that tried to disrupt Congress from voting on the Electoral College results.

Andrew Prokop at Vox goes into the details and what the next steps should be:

The committee argues that the former president not only bears responsibility for the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but that his effort to overturn the presidential election was incredibly extensive, corrupt, and illegal...

The committee presents the most comprehensive effort to make the case against Trump we’ve seen so far, with much more evidence about, and understanding of, what actually happened than Congress had back when the House impeached Trump for these events days after they transpired...

The latest version of events reads a lot more like a prosecutorial brief, and, in a sense, it is one — committee members voted Monday to recommend Trump’s referral for prosecution by the Justice Department. They argued he likely committed four crimes: 1) Obstruction of an official proceeding, 2) Conspiracy to defraud the United States, 3) Conspiracy to make a false statement, and 4) Assisting an insurrection. (Helpfully, a federal judge, David Carter, already ruled months ago that evidence suggests Trump committed some of these crimes, and the committee cites his analysis.)

The referral will mean little in practice, because the DOJ has long been investigating these matters on its own, with special counsel Jack Smith now in charge of that probe. But reading the executive summary gives a sense of what some future prosecutor like Smith might say if an indictment of Trump does proceed...

That's one of the sticking points why we as a nation can't celebrate yet: Congress may investigate matters and reveal evidence much like a grand jury, but actual prosecution rests with the Executive branch with the Justice Department. In theory, the Attorney General (Merrick Garland) could ignore the committee's recommendations entirely. If there's any good news here, it's that Garland appointed a Special Counsel in Jack Smith, and he's been aggressively pursuing trump's electoral interference well enough to suggest he'll follow through on some of what the committee's uncovered.

And what the January 6th committee uncovered was just how close our nation came to a straight-up coup d'etat:

When the nation watched Trump’s attempt to stay in power unfold in real time, it often seemed faintly comical. Unhinged figures like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and pillow salesman Mike Lindell played starring roles spreading utter nonsense as establishment Republicans tried to avert their eyes. Judges constantly threw Trump’s lawsuits out of court, and GOP state officials refused to act on his behalf. Fiascos like Giuliani’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference ensued...

But the committee’s investigation and the executive summary of its report put forward a very different interpretation of events. Rather than flailing and silly, they argue that Trump was deadly serious all along. They say his conduct was generally part of a larger plan. They say there’s some evidence it was premeditated. And they don’t buy the argument that Trump may have believed his own lies — they say he was knowingly prevaricating.

First, the committee argues that when you look at Trump’s conduct after the election in totality, it does look like a larger plan. Early in the executive summary, the committee lists among its key findings that Trump:

* Spread false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 election

* Plotted to overturn the outcome of the election

* Corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence, US Justice Department officials, state officials and legislators, and members of Congress to help him overturn the election

* Oversaw an effort to send fake electoral certificates to Congress

* Submitted and verified false information as part of his court challenges to the outcome

* Summoned thousands of his supporters to Washington, inflamed them on January 6, and then delayed intervening to rein them in once many of them stormed the Capitol

All this, the executive summary asserts, amounts to a “multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election.” That is: this wasn’t ordinary politics, it was a criminal conspiracy...

Second, the committee argues that Trump’s decision to falsely declare victory on election night was “premeditated.” They cite evidence that Tom Fitton of the conservative group Judicial Watch advised Trump to do this days before the election, and that outside allies like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone predicted Trump would do this. (Speculation that Trump would do this was also widespread in the media...)

I personally doubt trump needed others like Fitton, Bannon or Stone to push him to lie about winning. It's BEEN in trump's nature to never admit he loses, so lying about it was going to happen anyway. What the committee found was trump's closest advisors were going along with that lie, hence the criminal conspiracy.

Third, there’s the issue of prevarication. The committee argues Trump was not just mistakenly believing conspiracy theories about election fraud, but was rather “purposely and maliciously” lying to the public. One striking table in the executive summary lists 18 incidents in which Trump was privately informed a specific claim he was making about election fraud was false, only for Trump to subsequently repeat that false claim in public. These include claims about thousands of dead people voting in Georgia, “rigged” voting machines, and reported malfeasance at vote count sites. Again and again, he was told these claims were inaccurate, but he just kept making them.

Whether Trump was knowingly lying in claiming election fraud is an important question to sort out, because it gets to the question of his intent and has implications for the strength of criminal charges against him. If Trump knew he was lying as he made his false claims, that could help any future prosecutors make their case. The committee again and again takes the position that their evidence supports the view these were knowing, deliberate lies...

We've known - I speak in the plural 'we' about my fellow Americans, both Republican and Democrat alike - for years that trump lies, and he lies at a level of gaslighting that no other public figure has done in ages (it's been proven his political opposites like Obama and Hillary don't lie as much as trump does). The horrifying thing is that trump's supporters ignore the lying, happily buying his lies because it's the Narrative they need to justify their fear and their hate.

It's been a problem all these years, because trump's gaslighting made it difficult to ever hold him accountable, as his political allies kept passing the buck on where trump's lying needed to stop. As David Frum notes at The Atlantic (paywall), it's been a problem that's been avoided for too long:

There has never been any mystery about what happened on January 6, 2021. As Senator Mitch McConnell said at Trump’s second impeachment trial, “There’s no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

Thanks to the work of the congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, Americans now have ample detail to support McConnell’s assessment. They know more about when and how Trump provoked the event. They have a precise timeline of Trump’s words and actions. They can identify who helped him, and who tried to dissuade him.

But with all of this information, Americans are left with the same problem they have faced again and again through the Trump years: What to do about it? Again and again, they get the same answer: “It’s somebody else’s job.”

Frum points out, at every turn investigating trump's potentially criminal behavior trying to hold him accountable, the government failed to do so. Mueller's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 elections revealed a lot of criminal behavior by others - and to successful plea agreements and jury trials - but when it came to holding trump to account for his acts of obstruction, Mueller refused to indict a sitting President - blame that damned OLC memo arguing for immunity - and tried to pass the buck to Congress to impeach him instead. The Democratic-controlled House refused.

Soon after that, Congress had a chance to hold trump accountable for his attempted extortion of Ukraine to force that country to falsely claim "investigation" of Hunter Biden to give trump mudslinging material against Joe Biden in 2020. They had him both making the threats and trying to hide the evidence, but the failings of impeachment - the partisan divide making Republicans refuse to impeach their own - meant trump walked away from that.

Frum then points out the accountability trump faced with voters - with 81 million siding with Biden - only led to trump pulling every criminal scheme he and his advisors could think of to overturn those results. In Frum's view the rejection by voters should have been the end of trump, but trump found political allies among wingnut Republicans in Congress to assist him with the January 6th riots, and who are publicly defending trump to this day.

Frum doesn't even mention the ongoing scandal that was trump's open violations of the Emoluments Clause, because the legal argument of "who had authority to file charges" delayed the matter long enough for trump to avoid it. Again, an accountability moment set aside by a legal system that didn't want to dig too deep into trump's greed and malice, much to the detriment of our nation's ethics.

And so the circle was complete. Criminal prosecution? No, it’s up to Congress. Congressional impeachment? No, leave the decision to the voters. Refusal to accept an election defeat? Back to criminal prosecution.

To repeat McConnell’s phrase, it’s “practically and morally” very difficult to hold a wayward president to account. An American president is bound by law and operates through legal institutions, but a president also has sources of personal authority that are not beholden to the law and are exercised outside institutions. Trump drew more deeply than most presidents on nonlegal, non-institutional authority.

trump dodged accountability because no previous President broke the rules the way trump did. Our system of federal checks and balances relied on a practice of "Good Faith" between parties that no longer means anything, and with branches of government - the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial - unable to determine who does what.

And now Frum - much like the rest of America - is wondering if this Select House Committee's findings will be taken seriously by the one federal office - the Justice Department - finally left holding this ever-passed hot potato.

There are serious signs - evidence of DOJ grand juries examining a number of trumpian crimes - that justice may indeed be coming for donald trump. But it needs to be swifter than ever before, because trump will keep finding ways to avoid his fate and mock our laws again and again.

The real celebrating should kick in when these criminal referrals on trump's violent lies turn into criminal charges, and a perp walk in handcuffs for the ages.

Get to it, Justice.

Putin's Mistakes

The New York Times published a massive report on the failures and destruction of Putin's ill-advised invasion of Ukraine. The article itself may disappear soon behind a firewall, so there's not much time to read it all at leisure. So here's some of the highlights written by Michael Schwirtz, Anton Troianovski, Yousur Al-Hlou, Masha Froliak, Adam Entous and Thomas Gibbons-Neff:

President Vladimir V. Putin’s war was never supposed to be like this. When the head of the C.I.A. traveled to Moscow last year to warn against invading Ukraine, he found a supremely confident Kremlin, with Mr. Putin’s national security adviser boasting that Russia’s cutting-edge armed forces were strong enough to stand up even to the Americans.

Russian invasion plans, obtained by The New York Times, show that the military expected to sprint hundreds of miles across Ukraine and triumph within days. Officers were told to pack their dress uniforms and medals in anticipation of military parades in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

But instead of that resounding victory, with tens of thousands of his troops killed and parts of his army in shambles after nearly 10 months of war, Mr. Putin faces something else entirely: his nation’s greatest human and strategic calamity since the collapse of the Soviet Union...

The Times investigation found a stunning cascade of mistakes that started with Mr. Putin — profoundly isolated in the pandemic, obsessed with his legacy, convinced of his own brilliance — and continued long after drafted soldiers like Mikhail were sent to the slaughter.

At every turn, the failures ran deeper than previously known:

In interviews, Putin associates said he spiraled into self-aggrandizement and anti-Western zeal, leading him to make the fateful decision to invade Ukraine in near total isolation, without consulting experts who saw the war as pure folly. Aides and hangers-on fueled his many grudges and suspicions, a feedback loop that one former confidant likened to the radicalizing effect of a social-media algorithm. Even some of the president’s closest advisers were left in the dark until the tanks began to move. As another longtime confidant put it, “Putin decided that his own thinking would be enough.”

The Russian military, despite Western assumptions about its prowess, was severely compromised, gutted by years of theft. Hundreds of billions of dollars had been devoted to modernizing the armed forces under Mr. Putin, but corruption scandals ensnared thousands of officers. One military contractor described frantically hanging enormous patriotic banners to hide the decrepit conditions at a major Russian tank base, hoping to fool a delegation of top brass. The visitors were even prevented from going inside to use the bathroom, he said, lest they discover the ruse.

Once the invasion began, Russia squandered its dominance over Ukraine through a parade of blunders. It relied on old maps and bad intelligence to fire its missiles, leaving Ukrainian air defenses surprisingly intact, ready to defend the country. Russia’s vaunted hacking squads tried, and failed, to win in what some officials call the first big test of cyberweapons in actual warfare. Russian soldiers, many shocked they were going to war, used their cellphones to call home, allowing the Ukrainians to track them and pick them off in large numbers. And Russia’s armed forces were so stodgy and sclerotic that they did not adapt, even after enduring huge losses on the battlefield. While their planes were being shot down, many Russian pilots flew as if they faced no danger, almost like they were at an air show.

Stretched thin by its grand ambitions, Russia seized more territory than it could defend, leaving thousands of square miles in the hands of skeleton crews of underfed, undertrained and poorly equipped fighters. Many were conscripts or ragtag separatists from Ukraine’s divided east, with gear from the 1940s or little more than printouts from the internet describing how to use a sniper rifle, suggesting soldiers learned how to fight on the fly. With new weapons from the West in hand, the Ukrainians beat them back, yet Russian commanders kept sending waves of ground troops into pointless assaults, again and again. “Nobody is going to stay alive,” one Russian soldier said he realized after being ordered into a fifth march directly in the sights of Ukrainian artillery. Finally, he and his demoralized comrades refused to go.

Mr. Putin divided his war into fiefs, leaving no one powerful enough to challenge him. Many of his fighters are commanded by people who are not even part of the military, like his former bodyguard, the leader of Chechnya and a mercenary boss who has provided catering for Kremlin events. As the initial invasion failed, the atomized approach only deepened, chipping away at an already disjointed war effort. Now, Mr. Putin’s fractured armies often function like rivals, competing for weapons and, at times, viciously turning on one another...

People who know Mr. Putin say he is ready to sacrifice untold lives and treasure for as long as it takes, and in a rare face-to-face meeting with the Americans last month the Russians wanted to deliver a stark message to President Biden: No matter how many Russian soldiers are killed or wounded on the battlefield, Russia will not give up.

One NATO member is warning allies that Mr. Putin is ready to accept the deaths or injuries of as many as 300,000 Russian troops — roughly three times his estimated losses so far...

The more setbacks Mr. Putin endures on the battlefield, the more fears grow over how far he is willing to go. He has killed tens of thousands in Ukraine, leveled cities and targeted civilians for maximum pain — obliterating hospitals, schools and apartment buildings, while cutting off power and water to millions before winter. Each time Ukrainian forces score a major blow against Russia, the bombing of their country intensifies. And Mr. Putin has repeatedly reminded the world that he can use anything at his disposal, including nuclear arms, to pursue his notion of victory...

The article goes into greater detail about how Russian folly, under-planning, lack of flexible battlefield command, and straight-up hubris exposed both Putin and his military for the empty shells they are. Putin in particular gets raked over the coals regarding his disgust of Western nations as "weak and broken" alongside his paranoia those same Western nations were plotting Russia's utter ruin. Well, congratulations to Mr. Putin: It's not the West that's ruining Russia, it's himself.

Mr. Putin rose to power as a deft politician. He could flash charm, humility and a smile, painting himself as a reasonable leader to Russians and foreigners. He knew how to control his facial muscles in tense conversations, leaving his eyes as the only guide to his emotions, people who know him said.

But during his presidency, he increasingly wallowed in a swirl of grievances and obsessions: the West’s supposed disregard for the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany; the fear that NATO would base nuclear missiles in Ukraine to strike Moscow; modern-day gender politics in which, Mr. Putin often says, Mom and Dad are being replaced by “Parent No. 1 and Parent No. 2.”

There is well-known quote, misattributed to Abraham Lincoln but was really by Robert Ignersoll (who was talking about Lincoln at a speech in 1883), that goes "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." Putin was given power, and held onto it for thirty years, and it exposed his character as misogynist, mistrustful, and corrupt.

Once again, Mr. Putin seemed convinced that future generations of Russians could be threatened by the West. He had spent years preparing for precisely such a clash, devoting hundreds of billions of dollars to Russia’s military, supposedly to modernize it and strip out the corruption that had sapped it in the 1990s.

But while Russia made significant headway, Western officials said, a culture of graft and fraud persisted under Mr. Putin that emphasized loyalty above honesty, or even skill. The result was a hodgepodge of elite troops and bedraggled conscripts, advanced tanks and battalions that were powerful only on paper.

“Everyone was stealing and lying. This was a Soviet, and now Russian, tradition,” said Col. Vaidotas Malinionis, a retired Lithuanian commander who served in the Soviet military in the 1980s. Looking at satellite images of the army camp where he served, he said the old barracks and mess hall were still there, with no sign of modernization, and a few buildings had fallen down. “There has been no evolution at all, only regression,” he said.

European, American and Ukrainian officials warned against underestimating Russia, saying it had improved after its muddled invasion of Georgia in 2008. The defense minister overhauled the armed forces, forcibly retired about 40,000 officers and tried to impose more transparency on where money went...

Then, in 2012, that minister — in charge of dragging the military out of its post-Soviet dysfunction — became embroiled in a corruption scandal himself. Mr. Putin replaced him with Sergei K. Shoigu, who had no military experience but was seen as someone who could smooth ruffled feathers.

“Russia drew a lot of lessons from the Georgia war and started to rebuild their armed forces, but they built a new Potemkin village,” said Gintaras Bagdonas, the former head of Lithuania’s military intelligence. Much of the modernization drive was “just pokazukha,” he said, using a Russian term for window-dressing...

Potemkin Village is an old meme regarding things under both Tsarist and then Soviet (and now Putin) rule: A fake, pretty village built in a pretty part of Russia to show off to foreign dignitaries - and oft-times to Russian leaders who like to think everything under their rule is working - and to hide the reality of poor, rotting villages just out of sight. This manufactured self-delusion is such a part of the Russian psyche that they believe other nations do it as well. My dad - a Navy pilot for 20 years - would tell of a Soviet pilot who defected to the U.S. in the 1960s who ended up stationed at his base, and how that pilot visited the base commissary (grocery store) and couldn't believe it was really stocked with so many goods all the time. Dad would tell how that pilot would sneak back during the night to make sure it was real. I know I digress, but it's an anecdote I needed to share. 

Also hark back to the infamous 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where the Russians were primed to host a glorious event, only to get caught with unfinished buildings, poorly designed rooms, unsafe water, and other logistical nightmares. That's what it's been like under Putin's rule as his oligarchical cronies pilfered and overbilled and underdelivered.

Here's a more relevant anecdote from Putin's deluded empire, how that corruption affected their own military preparedness:

Contractors like Sergei Khrabrykh, a former Russian Army captain, were recruited into the stagecraft. He said he got a panicked call in 2016 from a deputy defense minister. A delegation of officials was scheduled to tour a training base of one of Russia’s premier tank units, the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division, whose history dates to the victories of World War II.

Billions of rubles had been allocated for the base, Mr. Khrabrykh said, but most of the money was gone and virtually none of the work had been done. He said the minister begged him to transform it into a modern-looking facility before the delegation arrived.

“They needed to be guided around the territory and shown that the Kantemirovskaya Division was the coolest,” Mr. Khrabrykh said. He was given about $1.2 million and a month to do the job.

As he toured the base, Mr. Khrabrykh was stunned by the dilapidation. The Ministry of Defense had hailed the tank division as a unit that would defend Moscow in case of a NATO invasion. But the barracks were unfinished, with debris strewn across the floors, large holes in the ceiling and half-built cinder-block walls, according to photos Mr. Khrabrykh and his colleagues took. A tangle of electrical wires hung from a skinny pole.

“Just about everything was destroyed,” he said.

Before the delegation arrived, Mr. Khrabrykh said, he quickly constructed cheap facades and hung banners, covered in pictures of tanks and boasting the army was “stronger and sturdier year by year,” to disguise the worst of the decay. On the tour, he said, the visitors were guided along a careful route through the best-looking part of the base — and kept away from the bathrooms, which had not been repaired.

The punchline?

After the invasion started, the Kantemirovskaya Division pressed into northeastern Ukraine, only to be ravaged by Ukrainian forces. Crews limped away with many of their tanks abandoned or destroyed...

After the invasion, American officials noticed that much of Russia’s equipment was poorly manufactured or in short supply. Tires on wheeled vehicles fell apart, stalling convoys, while soldiers resorted to crowdfunding for clothes, crutches and other basic supplies as the war wore on...

Anybody with a basic understanding of military history will tell you that logistics matter. Your supply chain for your armies better be well-managed and well-stocked, otherwise you're screwed. It's a fact of warfare back to the days of Ancient Sparta well through the World Wars and into modern conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a lesson the Russians apparently failed to learn (again, because they had the same problems in World War I and their Afghanistan conflict of the 1980s) as their leadership's greed got the better of them.

Under Putin, the Russians had no other plan other than "March on Kyiv and claim victory" as their objective:

Unlike its more limited campaigns in places like Syria — or the big hypothetical war with NATO it had long planned for — the invasion of Ukraine was simply “not what the Russian military was designed to do,” putting it in a position it was probably “least prepared” to deal with, said Clint Reach, a researcher at RAND.

In other words, the Kremlin picked the “stupidest” of all potential military options by rushing forward and trying to take over Ukraine, said General Budanov, the Ukrainian military intelligence chief.

Russia had not trained its infantry, air and artillery forces to work in concert, move quickly and then do it all again from a new location, officials said. It did not have a clear Plan B after the march on Kyiv failed, and commanders had long been afraid to report bad news to their bosses...

The Russian Army - feared by Western powers for its size and mechanized armor - wasn't trained or prepped for any kind of occupation. The same kind of problem happened with American forces in the Iraq/Afghanistan wars of the 2000-10s, but in the U.S. case we at least had better trained troops, guys who had been drilled and prepped for anything and were able to adjust to battlefield conditions at a moment's notice. 

As a result, the American forces suffered fewer disasters and fewer casualties over a long period of time: About 15,000 troops lost over roughly 19 years.

Russia's forces, in nine months of fighting in Ukraine, have lost over 100,000 troops (the number can be even higher than that). 

I swear to God. If the United States had seen those kind of losses in the first nine months of fighting in Afghanistan in 2002 or in Iraq in 2003, not only would the anti-war protests in our streets continued non-stop, Congress itself - even with Republicans in control of both houses - would have started bipartisan impeachment hearings on Bush and Cheney. There's no way Americans would have accepted such bloody losses through such incompetence and disregard for our troops' lives.

When one Russian unit arrived in eastern Ukraine, it was quickly whittled down to a haggard few, according to one of its soldiers.

During fighting in the spring, he said, his commanders ordered an offensive, promising artillery to support the attack. It never came, he said, and his unit was devastated.

Yet commanders sent them right back into the melee all the same.

“How much time has passed now? Nine months, I think?” he said. “In this whole time, nothing has changed. They have not learned. They have not drawn any conclusions from their mistakes.”

He recounted another battle in which commanders sent soldiers down the same path to the front, over and over. On each trip, he said, bodies fell around him. Finally, after being ordered to go a fifth time, he and his unit refused to go, he said.

In all, he said, his unit lost about 70 percent of its soldiers to death and injury, ruining any faith he had in his commanders...

The low morale is commonplace across Russia nowadays.

The resignation exists in Moscow, too, where opposition to the war is common, but rarely expressed above whispers.

“We’re giving each other looks, but to say something is impossible,” one former Putin confidant in Moscow said, describing the atmosphere in the halls of power.

Putin's autocratic grip on Russia seems unbreakable even as his people suffer. His delusions and hatred prevent him from admitting any truth that he's the one who screwed up.

In late November, at his suburban Moscow residence, Mr. Putin met with mothers of Russian soldiers. It was a distant echo of one of the lowest moments of his tenure: his encounter with the families of sailors aboard a sunken submarine in 2000, when a crying woman in a remote Arctic town demanded, “Where is my son?”

Twenty-two years later, the Kremlin was careful to prevent such outpourings of grief. Around a long table with individual teapots for the handpicked women — some of them state employees and pro-Kremlin activists — Mr. Putin showed no remorse for sending Russians to their deaths.

After all, he told one woman who said her son was killed in Ukraine, tens of thousands of Russians die each year from car accidents and alcohol abuse. Rather than drinking himself to death, he told her, her son died with a purpose.

“Some people, are they even living or not living? It’s unclear. And how they die, from vodka or something else, it’s also unclear,” Mr. Putin said. “But your son lived, you understand? He reached his goal.”

He told another mother that her son was not only fighting “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine, but also correcting the mistakes after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Russia “enthusiastically indulged in the fact” that the West was “trying to control us.”

“They have a different cultural code,” he told her. “They count the genders there by the dozens...”

Those words are not coming from a rational man. Putin is indulging in the fear-mongering common among Far Right apologists who view their Culture War bullshit as real, and are willing to sacrifice the lives of others to justify that fear. Look at how Putin rationalizes that the soldiers he sent to die in Ukraine "would have died some other way" like drinking themselves to death (which, by the way, is a serious problem in Russia already). The cruelty towards his own Russian people can't stay hidden.

The world has been debating Mr. Putin’s willingness to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. People who know him don’t discount the possibility, but they also believe he expects to defeat the West and Ukraine in a long-term, non-nuclear test of wills.

As one senior NATO intelligence official put it, Russian generals “acknowledge the incompetence, lack of coordination, lack of training. They all recognize these problems.” Still, they seem confident of an “eventual victory” because, the official said, “Putin believes this is a game of chicken between him and the West, and he believes the West will blink first.”

Personally, I doubt it. Too many Eastern European nations are willing to keep Ukraine supplied to ensure a revived Russian Empire doesn't come knocking at their borders. The fact that Russian's military might was never that mighty to begin with - and the reality that sooner or later Russia's gonna run out of missiles and tanks even with the equipment they're getting from their few allies in Iran and China - points to an eventual collapse.

Putin is behaving like he can outlive his enemies, but he's 70 years old and rumors abound he's suffering in poor health. Putin is behaving like he's got enough allies surrounding him to keep him propped up, but he really doesn't: Allies like Belarus, Iran, and China are facing their own problems at home.

Putin keeps making mistakes, trapped by the illusions every dictator suffers from: He believes he is the chosen Great Man of History, that he is the indispensable hero of his nation's story, that he will achieve glory through the sacrifices of others, and that he is never ever wrong.

Everyone else is dying for his mistakes. But it would be an even greater mistake to let him walk away unharmed from the suffering he's caused. Putin needs to answer for his sins, either in a war crimes tribunal or in a Ukrainian jail cell, or in a Russian hospital bed dying from the rot eating at his own body.

Upcoming Projects for 2023

Couple of personal notes intermixed with the blogging: 

Driven by the need to have a printed book to apply Royal Palm Literary Award stickers on the covers, I will be putting together key articles from this blog for publication. I did it before with Surviving the Age of Obstruction back in 2016, and I figure a good follow-up to that would be articles about the rise of trump and the destruction he wrought upon the world for 6-plus years.

...

I shall not use the obvious title "Surviving the Eternal Shitgibbon" since I don't own the trademark on "Shitgibbon," so I DO need a better title to market the damn thing. The subtitle "A Diary of the Trump Years" I think is unavoidable.

I may pull the first book from print, though. It never sold - it had to be the weak title I gave it, and publishing through a bad POD service didn't help - and I want to start fresh.

The other project on my mind is writing a book on American -Isms. Having blogged a bit about libertarianism and pragmatism, I figure I need to define the other major -isms - liberalism, conservatism, socialism, fascism, populism, racism - in our nation's political forums. I want to do this for my niece and nephews, all of whom are in their early 20s and I worry about the disinformation floating out there threatening to suck their brains dry.

So I may be busy this Saturnalian weekend as well as the early months of 2023 getting projects done.

I do know I need to keep blogging here. After all, tomorrow Monday promises to be a busy day.

Thoughts About the 2022 Midterms

A lot of post-midterms articles are out there on the Intertubes, a number of wry observations and urgent recriminations towards Republicans, and I would recommend glancing at Rude Pundit's to get a taste of the schadenfreude getting served over the GOP's historic failures.

I say "failure" even as the Republicans claimed (slim) control of the U.S. House of Representatives - and retained control of a number of Red states - because it's been traditional in the modern era of partisan politics that the party in opposition to the White House - this year the Republicans in opposition to the Democratic President Biden - wins big in the following midterms. This year, the Republicans were expecting a "Red Wave" to counter the 2018 "Blue Wave" that gave Democrats control of the House vs. donald trump.

The polling - mostly from conservative-leaning providers like RCP - were all pointing to a huge 30-seat flip of the House. There were a number of projections Republicans could regain a tightly fought Senate, even in spite of the crazed candidates running in various campaigns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and Arizona (and several others).

Republicans were beating the war drums hard on the economy, railing against signs of a recession as inflation (re: gas prices) soared to levels that hurt any President's standing with voters.

This was also all happening with the 2022 district realignments for the House, where the updated Census numbers required new maps and allowed the parties - yes, Democrats did it too - to aggressively gerrymander those districts to give them advantages. Republicans held the gerrymander advantage due to controlling enough battleground states to outduel the Dems (who also shot themselves in the foot by not gerrymandering New York to their advantage, screw you Andrew Cuomo).

Throw in the Republicans attempts at voter suppression - far greater than what they had in 2018 and 2020 - and there was every likelihood that turnout would drop, hurting Democratic chances.

And with all of that going the Republicans' way... they STILL failed to retake the Senate - which added an extra Democratic seat meaning the 50-50 power-sharing is no longer working and Mitch McConnell can suck it - and their win in the House was by a meager five seats, causing headaches for party leadership they weren't expecting.

It is, according to historians, the worst midterm performance for an opposition party since 1962. There was a similar situation for Democrats in 2002 failing against Dubya, but the 9/11 attacks and the patriotic fervor clearly skewed the situation. There were the Republicans failing against FDR in 1934, but the Great Depression was still happening and a lot of Americans still hated them and Hoover for screwing them over.

The Republicans ought to be rejoicing in that they control the House, which they can use to investigate Biden's administration family for scandals every day they meet on the Hill, and file every impeachment complaint until all they do is vote on embarrassing Biden and Harris for the 2024 campaign (lacking control of the Senate, no impeachment will go their way: For the Republicans it's all about making the Democrats look corrupt and weak to their own voting base). They are openly planning repeated hearings over Russia's planted evidence Hunter Biden's laptop, as it's the only thing they can do other than force federal shutdowns to break the entire government.

Instead, the Republicans are in-fighting over the poor results. They were expecting a wave and all they got was a trickle. The My Pillow guy Mike Lindell - who is constantly shilling conspiracy theories for trump's Big Lie about "stolen votes" - is challenging for control of the RNC, arguing the current head - Mitt Romney's daughter Ronna McDaniel - failed to inspire better turnout. There were a number of reports of GOP leaders railing against trump's involvement, pushing on them unstable and unpopular candidates like Hershel Walker in Georgia who hurt turnout among needed independent voters.

There are going to be post-mortems, autopsies, follow-up reports, what have you, which the Republicans will ignore like they did after they were stunned in 2012, when they expected four years of Tea Party fauxrage would turn America against Obama. The GOP's response after that loss was to double-down on the Far Right fearmongering to encourage their voting base to stay faithful, and they've been spiraling downward ever since thanks to trump's takeover in 2016.

If the midterms are showing me anything, these are the observations I've made:

Like Bob Burnett points out at Common Dreams, the American electorate is polarized to the point of frozen stasis. In previous eras before the Culture War shifted all of the Conservative votes to the Republicans after 1994, there was an expectation of centrist/moderate party voters crossing the aisle to vote for candidates or issues regardless of party. By 2014, branding won out: Republicans (tm) can no longer find themselves voting for ANY Democrat (tm) (and the same goes for Dems refusing to vote for any GOPer) even when the issues should compel them to vote for the other party that's in favor of those issues.

While this means you can rely on your party base, it means you can't expect any more voters to flip your way. Whatever independent/No Party Affiliate voters are out there, you find yourself praying for them to show up for you to overcome any demographic limitations you've already set for your party with the gerrymandering and suppression. And voter turnout for NPAs is unreliable at best.

The results are also telling me that for the Republicans this is the best they can do for turnout, and they STILL screwed up. This is as far as they can get for voter turnout and numbers going their way. Even WITH the extreme gerrymandering favoring them, even WITH the voter suppression laws they put in place to reduce turnout numbers... the Republicans STILL couldn't pull off a Red Wave of their own.

For every voter the GOP had on their side showing up angry over inflation, the Democrats had voters showing up angry over the loss of abortion rights. For every Red state they held onto, the Republicans lost control of a couple of state legislatures they could not afford to lose.

And this was the midterms. Voter turnout for Presidential election cycles are higher, and 2024 could well be a repeat of 2020 in that regard.

This is also something hurting Republicans in the long run: The inevitable demographic shift of older (Boomer) voters to younger (Gen Z/Millennial) voters is starting to happen. One of the things the Republicans realized in 2012 was that by 2028, simple dying off of the older generations that make up the Conservative voting base will increase just as the kids who grew up watching Republicans burn everything down will get old enough to vote. (The divided Generation X sitting between the two generations is too small a voter bloc - they're the ones not showing up to vote at all - to help Republicans) We are looking at a one-two punch for Liberal-leaning younger voters that could flip even Red states Blue in ways that suppression and gerrymandering can't stop. 

It's one big reason why the Republicans doubled-down anyway: They figured that the 2028 demographic shift was unstoppable, so they worked in the short-term to dominate Congress and the White House to ensure the one thing that could counter that Blue shift - a Far Right Supreme Court - would be in place to prevent the full liberalization of America that would undo everything they've done since Reagan's tenure.

In the short term, the Far Right won. In the long term, the bill for all the damage they've done - the racism, the deficits, the corruption made worse by trump's rise to power - is coming due. This middling, frustrating midterm fiasco for the Republicans is the beginning of the end of the control they've had on the public discourse since 1980.

And it terrifies them. The Far Right Republican base have a pretty good idea what these midterms mean, and the panic showing through their ongoing performative outrage is going to get worse.

The Wingnuts are about to double-down on the previous double-down to turn crazier than they've ever been. Stay safe, people.

And Io Saturnalia!