Saturday, February 19, 2022

A unifying moment?

It appears all but certain now. Russia, led by former Soviet KGB agent and murderous thug Vladimir Putin, is determined to invade the Ukraine. 

Putin will give you a laundry list of reasons why Russia needs to launch this invasion, but this imminent attack appears to be an attempt by Putin to re-establish the Soviet Union's former glory in his eyes. 

In 2008, Putin used a false-flag operation to justify sending Russian troops into the former Soviet Republic of Georgia to reclaim "disputed" lands, which in the process gave way to some ethnic cleansing of Georgian citizens. 

In 2014, Putin used unsubstantiated claims of genocide as a pretext to annex the Crimea and invade eastern Ukraine. 

And now in 2022, Putin is desperately trying to stage another false flag event to justify to himself and the rest of the world that he is correct in invading a democratically-elected government in Ukraine. Maybe he has something against people who win actual elections.

Make no mistake, Putin is a murderer who has jailed opposition leaders and even poisoned and executed dissidents who have the audacity to speak the truth about the murderous, re-emerging Soviet regime. This is our Munich 1938 moment. 

We can either continue to appease this modern-day Hitler, or more aptly Stalin, or cut him off at the knees. Bury this Soviet resurgence in its infancy. The other option is to appease this thug, like those at Munich did when they shined Hitler's shoes and declared "Peace in our time." 

In the above video, you see how appeasing Hitler's demand for more living space for ethnic Germans, only encouraged the madmen to take more and more land until he eventually held the entirety of the European continent with the exception of the British Isles. If this situation sounds familiar it should because it is a similar argument to the one Putin is making for taking back land for traditional Russian-speaking people. 

If we appease Putin now, we are repeating one of the biggest mistakes in human history. We must not sell out Ukraine like the western powers sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938 to quiet baby Hitler with some more land. And economic sanctions are not enough. If they were, Putin and his regime would have already crumbled, and they have not. Economic sanctions only hurt the Russian people, not the oligarchs running the country, who steal their wealth from the Russian people. While the people will starve as a result of economic sanctions, Putin and his thugs will live high on the hog. 

No. The answer here is for the world, and more specifically NATO to deliver a John F. Kennedy like speech during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and hand Russia a military ultimatum or red line, and tell Putin what the consequences will be for crossing that line and when he does, or if he does, follow through on those consequences. 

Kennedy made it clear that an attack on any nation in the western hemisphere by Cuba would be considered an attack on United States by the Soviet Union and would be met with a military response. That is how this current crisis needs to be addressed, and if you appease Putin, he will only get more aggressive. "The greatest danger of all would be to do nothing," Kennedy said.

In this moment of national peril, one would hope that Republicans and Democrats would put down the arrows they have used against each other, and instead use the arsenal to attack the common foe, a former KGB agent determined to re-establish the Soviet empire. But even now, the Republican Party, the faction of Ronald Reagan, who helped bring down the evil empire in early 1990s, is now defending Putin and his murdering goons. 

This is a line in the sand not only for Putin, but for the Republican Party, which use to claim to be all about national defense and democracy. If you love peace in this country and support democracy here and around the world, hold your treasonous Republican leaders accountable at the ballot box.

Friday, February 4, 2022

13 months late

On the same day that the Republican National Committee (RNC) censured GOP representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinsinger for honoring their oath to the U.S. Constitution, former Republican Vice President Mike Pence said that the former President of the United States "was wrong" about Pence's power on January 6, 2021 to overturn the election.

Pence said a number of important things in his speech before the Federalist Society, a conservative organization, including comments like "the truth is there is more at stake than our party or political fortunes ... if we lose faith in the Constitution, we won't just lose elections, we will lose our country."

I couldn't agree more with Pence's sentiments now, but the question begs, what took him so long to come to this realization? I guess a mob of Republican terrorists storming the U.S. Capitol looking to hang him for treason was not enough. I guess that same mob maiming and beating police officers with flag poles, bats, and fire extinguishers was not enough. I guess the months of watching Donald Trump lie about the election and put our democracy in the greatest peril it has seen since the 1860's was not enough. So again, I ask, why the come to Jesus now?  

Pence is not alone in his failure or cowardice. Most Republicans walk around with a pocket constitution not because they believe in what is delineated in the document, but because they can use it as a political prop. Despite always having it on them, they seem to have forgotten what's written in it for the last five years. In truth, what Pence said today is what every single Republican should have said on November 8, the day after the election was officially declared for current President Joe Biden.

If Republicans had all spoken up for democracy on November 8, 2020, they could have moved beyond the despicable human being who has tried to, and is still trying to this day, to rip the country apart along racial, cultural and party lines. The GOP did NOT do that. Instead, they placated the former Wanna-Be dictator in the White House and let the lie about the election being stolen simmer and eventually boil over on January 6 with violence.

Now these same elected goons that make up the current Republican/American Fascist Party, are trying to pretend that Jan. 6 didn't happen, or that it was not that bad, or it was antifa dressed as Trump supporters. THESE are all lies. And even today, when Pence said some of the right things, he couldn't help himself, and said he was concerned with "some of the irregularities during the election. LIAR. That is Pence still trying to play both sides of the political fence. 

One can't help but struggle to understand these sycophants. If Donald Trump had done nothing while a mob that he revved up and inspired to come after me and threatened to kill me, I would have called him out for what he is, a despicable man, and I would have shouted it from every roof top and even Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax, so even the most uninformed of the uninformed voters heard the truth. BUT NO. Instead, they carry the water and lie for this lifelong loser. 

The reality is that Trumpism is a sickness. It is the kind of sickness associated only with people who have been brainwashed in cults. You will never get some people to return to reality. That is just a fact of the people we lose to cults. But the Republican politicians, for the most part, don't like, or believe in, Trump. Believe it or not, they want to get away from this loser as much as the rest of us. But for some reason, they can't find the inner strength to quit this cult. Maybe it is the naked, craven desire for absolute power.

This means that the responsibility is ours. These Republican cowards, that make up the bulk of Congress, follow Trump because they are afraid of losing their seats in Congress to someone on the far right. The only way to break the Trump fever is to defeat the Republican/ American Fascist Party over and over at the ballot box.

In what is likely to be the most significant midterm election in history, you need to understand that a vote for a Republican is not a vote for lower taxes and conservative values, but instead a vote for authoritarianism, dictatorship and the end of free elections. THAT'S CORRECT! If you vote Republicans into the majority in 2022, the 220-year experiment into American democracy is over. 

MARK MY WORDS. Get informed and get out and vote. There is no more consequential vote you will ever take than this one in 2022.