Yeah, Uncle Joe should not have said, speaking of Vladimir Putin, “This man cannot remain in power”. Okay, it appears to have been an adlib, which is slightly less worse than being scripted, and it’s precisely the sort of thing the clearly non-senile Barack Obama used to say as well. But you’d think American presidents…
Tag: Russia
Andrew Sullivan gets it wrong twice!
Over at Andrew Sullivan’s substack blog, the Weekly Dish, Andy has a strange post, strangely titled The Strange Rebirth Of Imperial Russia, expressing bewilderment over the fact that Russian bad ass Vladimir Putin actually seems to be longing for the good old days, when Imperial Russia styled itself the “Third Rome”, independent of, and superior…
Dan Drezner, last seen regressin’ to the mean like a motherf*cker
O rare Dan Drezner!1 Oy vey, Dan Drezner! Just last week I was falling all over myself with praise for Dan’s all too acute post The war in Ukraine is going badly for everyone, which Dan then followed up with another depressingly acute corker, What is the plan behind sanctioning Russia?, pointing out that the…
Mitt Romney wasn’t “right” about Ukraine. George Kennan was.
What goes around comes around. Or is it the other way around? In either case, I’m talking about bullshit. The latest in recirculated manure comes from Chris Cillizza, writing at Newsweek, It’s time to admit it: Mitt Romney was right about Russia. Back in 2012, the Mittster opined that “Russia, this is, without question, our…
Anne Applebaum sees so much, and misses so much
I originally planned to respond to Anne Applebaum’s new article in the Atlantic, The Bad Guys Are Winning with a super-snarky post, snappily titled “The Ample Ass-Covering of Anne Applebaum Reupholstered,” bouncing off a long-ago post of mine, The Ample Ass-Covering of Anne Applebaum, written back in 2008, when she came back from Afghanistan, telling…
Terrible Dan Drezner. Terrible Dan Drezner!
Hey, I promised, and a blogger always keeps his word—well, within the limits of reason, of course. And, anyway, Dan is at his terrible worst in this one—his terribleist, one might say—in an abysmal missive abysmally titled The progressive case against NATO is weird. When a pundit, particularly a scholarly one such as Dan, uses…
I wonder if Daniel Drezner even knows what “pessimism” means
Well, I certainly do. I mean, I wonder about a lot of things, and one of the things I wonder about is Dan’s article in the WashPost from a month or two back, which he called “The most pessimistic article I have read in 2021”, a “depressing read” (says Dan) found in a recent issue…
Joe Biden does something right, and no one notices
Okay, all Uncle Joe and his State Department did was recognize that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline connecting Russia with western Europe was a done deal (95% done, in fact) and thus will not impose sanctions on the Europeans for defying us, but in today’s xenophobic mindset, where everyone, but everyone, likes to hate…
The “Solar Winds” Fraud: Special Hot Air Edition
It’s an ill wind that blows no good, and the latest fake news regarding “Solar Winds”, the Russian super hack that wasn’t, is a good example. It’s just coincidence, I’m sure, that a sudden leak regarding Russian perfidy should emerge just as Joe Biden was taking office. The odds were already roughly 1,000,000,000,000,000 to 1…
War! What is it good for! APPROPRIATIONS!
Some time ago—well, thirty years ago, more or less—I read a reminiscence on the journalism biz by Michael Kinsley, recalling the words of journalistic wisdom he received as a tyro from a legendary pundit whose name I have forgotten: “Always sell the same piece at least three times.” By that standard, I’m a motherfucking journalistic…