I also thought his drumming on about sanctions will turn off some on the Left foaming at the mouth on behalf of Ukraine.

The present Pope has so little moral authority that he’d be better off raising and equipping some divisions.

Another Retief:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Retief

Somehow I never thought of those books by Keith Laumer as prophetic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jame_Retief

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 …

He’s certainly a phenomenon, that Tom Friedman.

One sample – but then, Friedman has been delusional for years.
https://media.notthebee.com/articles/article-6217c64700bf1.jpg

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/

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?

And more.