Needless to say, the usual suspects are rallying around “Biden”, who most certainly got the distraction “he” craved. (Perhaps the distraction to end all distractions….)
…As Trudeau mutters and sputters mightily about freedom…
Best case, the sanctions hurt Putin’s corrupt supporters to the point that, some time next year, they overthrow him.
He spent more time rattling his plastic sabre against domestic oil producers than he did Putin.
Can’t say I’m surprised.
Analysis of sanctions show some are duplicates and others are ineffective.
So we can conclude that Biden policies (ecologic, economic, border, Covid, CRT, …) are more punitive and serious to Trump supporters than against Putin.
I will have to catch up by articles tomorrow as I AM Working when Sundowner can only be injected to stand up and put incoherent words together.
Biden’s speech poses a lot of threats, which may or not be effective in action, but he is incompetent enough to get us into a shooting war with Russia (in the winter….), and I have no confidence that is not his Handler’s intent in the first place.
This post by J. E. Dyer is not a fisking of Biden’s speech, but of some reactions to it in the media.
We now proceed to wait-and-see mode on practically everything, as the intelligence coming out of the combat theater will be uniformly unreliable at this point. We can at least say with some confidence that Kyiv has not fallen, and it doesn’t appear that Russia has established full control of the Odessa environs, much less the entire southern coast.
Various unrealistic claims have been made about the number of Russian weapon systems destroyed, shot down, etc. by the Ukrainian armed forces, and there’s no point in overloading on salt to go with them. I wouldn’t assert that the Ukrainian defense minister is deliberately lying, but the chaos of combat is probably clouding the vision of battle damage assessors. Some of the numbers don’t seem to add up because there’s been no evidence of the kind of combat that would produce such losses – but there are big chunks of Ukraine into which we have little visibility, at least in real time.
As others have mentioned, watching activity around Lviv, in the west, will be informative. Engaging Lviv early on would be a key indicator of how far Putin wants to take this. It was interesting Wednesday night to see Fox’s reporting about signs of Russian activity around Lviv: Day 1 would count as very early engagement.
U.S. intel from reconnaissance aircraft will be much attenuated now that we can’t fly in Ukrainian air space. It’s possible that that will be a net benefit, however, as it may at least keep the Biden administration from using intel in “innovative” ways to basically troll Russia with.
Herewith the first “C’mon man” for C’mon Man Thursday. (Each gem has been selected from among the bait I reacted to, so you’ll see the response, largely speaking for itself.)
…[references Tweet from Shawn Dreyfus with a screen-cap of CIA statements: “The CIA is bragging about gathering intelligence in Ukraine, a friendly country, and watching satellite images. Meanwhile, it accomplished zero point zero.”]
…
The takeaway here is more than just the inanity of publicly celebrating this result-free campaign of “innovative” use. With this packaged disclosure, the Biden administration is revealing that it basically did these things so it could announce afterward that it did them, with a trumpet fanfare.
That’s farcical. It appeared pretty likely that’s what was going on at the time, but I held fire (as I suspect others did) because explaining what the administration was doing at that point would help nothing, and in any case would take more words than it takes Biden’s team to just confess the plan outright. The Biden team has obligingly done so.
C’mon man.
Next up, the Washington Post’s attempt to shame “conservative media hosts,” which basically turns into a classic self-own.
[no link, but you can guess what they said]
Well, it IS his fault if he was so right about the Russian attack and yet did everything essential to facilitate it, while doing nothing that only the US could do to stop it.
Whom was he supposed to be warning about the attack, if not himself?
Targets of bureaucratic and geo-political excess skewered by Laumer include hair-splitting diplomatic protocol (often represented by required dress — the early late evening hemidemisemi-formalwear, for example), meaningless awards (the fig leaf with clusters), the Cold War (the alien race known as the Groaci are direct analogues to the USSR in many stories), and a panoply of excruciatingly nuanced facial expressions, catalogued by number in the official CDT handbook, and exemplified in the following quote:
“A most perceptive observation, Chester,” Earlyworm said, bestowing a 24-w (Gracious Condescension) leavened with a hint of 7-y (Expectation of Great Things in Due Course) on the lucky bureaucrat, at which his fellow underlings around the table were quick to bombard him with approbation, ranging from Faintlady’s 12.7-x (Knew You Had It In You, Fella) to Felix’s more restrained 119-a (We’re All Pulling For You, Lad), to which he responded with a shy 3-v (Modest Awareness of Virtue).
“In fact,” Earlyworm interjected a Cold Return to Objectivity (91-s) into the lightning interplay of ritual grimacing …
I read the Retief books last year or the year before. Brilliant! Might have gotten a nudge in that direction from comment threads here. Can’t recall.
I had set down at my desk to do some work, and tried to listen to the radio. Biden was blathering on a couple of different stations, so I put a CD on.
Biden speech drinking game:
Take a drink every time Biden:
– Stammers over the name of someone in his own cabinet
– Squints and stares into the middle distance for several seconds
– Creepily whispers
I saw and heard part of it. He was, for him, fairly coherent. Of course, it was early in the afternoon.
‘sound and fury, signifying nothing, told by an idiot’ to think that putin can be sated with economic disencentives is foolish,
Word salad to the rescue…
” ‘No one expected sanctions to prevent anything’: Biden’s baffling response after freezing all Kremlin assets in America…”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10547459/Biden-holds-emergency-Situation-Room-meeting-meets-G7.html
Meanwhile, according to David Goldman:
“Biden throws Putin into Xi’s briar patch.
“US has pushed Putin into an alliance with China that could rank as America’s biggest strategic blunder of the century”
https://asiatimes.com/2022/02/biden-throws-putin-into-xis-briar-patch/
Needless to say, the usual suspects are rallying around “Biden”, who most certainly got the distraction “he” craved. (Perhaps the distraction to end all distractions….)
…As Trudeau mutters and sputters mightily about freedom…
And where would we be without John Kerry…
https://justthenews.com/government/john-kerry-concerned-russia-ukraine-war-will-negatively-climate-crisis
What possible purpose could there be, in listening to anything this corrupt fraudulent pResident might have to say?
He’ll do what he’s going to do and thanks to those who support him, we’ll all have to endure through the suffering.
Ah, John Kerry. Every once in a while that sepulchral face surfaces.
Might as well laugh as cry. The Babylon Bee says Biden warns Putin that we may deploy the deadly trans Admiral.
https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-warns-russia-that-if-they-dont-stop-he-will-deploy-deadly-trans-admiral
Best case, the sanctions hurt Putin’s corrupt supporters to the point that, some time next year, they overthrow him.
He spent more time rattling his plastic sabre against domestic oil producers than he did Putin.
Can’t say I’m surprised.
Analysis of sanctions show some are duplicates and others are ineffective.
So we can conclude that Biden policies (ecologic, economic, border, Covid, CRT, …) are more punitive and serious to Trump supporters than against Putin.
I will have to catch up by articles tomorrow as I AM Working when Sundowner can only be injected to stand up and put incoherent words together.
Here’s a transcript of Biden’s press conference.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/02/24/remarks-by-president-biden-on-russias-unprovoked-and-unjustified-attack-on-ukraine/
Biden’s speech poses a lot of threats, which may or not be effective in action, but he is incompetent enough to get us into a shooting war with Russia (in the winter….), and I have no confidence that is not his Handler’s intent in the first place.
This post by J. E. Dyer is not a fisking of Biden’s speech, but of some reactions to it in the media.
https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2022/02/24/toc-ready-room-24-feb-2022-putin-in-ukraine-cmon-man-thursday-edition/
And more.
More reactions, this time in the Leftist press.
https://notthebee.com/article/these-are-not-serious-people-check-out-all-the-woke-cultists-reactions-to-the-ukraine-invasion-
One sample – but then, Friedman has been delusional for years.
https://media.notthebee.com/articles/article-6217c64700bf1.jpg
@AesopFan:
He’s certainly a phenomenon, that Tom Friedman.
Dyer had a reaction to this in her post, which I omitted – but NTB has a better take on it anyway.
https://notthebee.com/article/former-secretary-of-state-and-current-climate-envoy-john-kerry-is-concerned-about-russia-attacking-ukraine-because-it-will-distract-from-climate-change
Somebody cue Mr. Magnan from Retief’s Corps Diplomatique Terrestriene.
https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-announces-he-will-move-to-unfollow-putin-on-twitter
Somehow I never thought of those books by Keith Laumer as prophetic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jame_Retief
I read the Retief books last year or the year before. Brilliant! Might have gotten a nudge in that direction from comment threads here. Can’t recall.
Another Retief:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Retief
Where is the Pope?
Pope Shmope.
The present Pope has so little moral authority that he’d be better off raising and equipping some divisions.
My only real take-away from the speech was the occasional aggression of some of the press during Q&A. Not sure but this did not seem to be just Fox.
I also thought his drumming on about sanctions will turn off some on the Left foaming at the mouth on behalf of Ukraine.