Is this The Go To Guy for Bunge’s foreign policy talking points?

Andrew Bacevich is interviewed here on Democracy Now (a leftist 501C3 organization) three days ago.

Baecvich spoke glowingly of Xi’s peace initiative for the “Ukraine-Russian War”; not the Russo-Ukrainian war, BTW. And of course the 20 year anniversary of the global infamy of the Iraq war was the main draw. Goody, goody! Double plus good!

Andrew Bacevich on China’s Rise as Global Superpower & Decline of U.S. Empire After Iraq Invasion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=317sSDF6nQA

As an aside, funny how YouTube algorthyms work; it sent this video after I listened to Anders Puck Nielsen give an appraisal on the state of the Russo-Ukraine war. From
reality/truth to fiction?

How is the war going? — Late March 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWKwPeSnvTE&t=25s

Prussia was appallingly high-handed with smaller German states in 1866, but it was accomplished with little bloodshed. None of the Bismarck era wars lasted longer than nine months.

Agreed, though I wasn’t even thinking of the smaller German states per se. If anything his occupation policies were much worse among non-German occupied populations like the Danes in 1864, the French in 1870-3, and the Poles throughout. People don’t talk about things like reprisal killings, ethnic cleansings, or the wholesale massacre of villages by the Bismarckian era regime too much, but they probably should.

But again, by the standards of Shicklegruber, Wilhelm, Stalin,g or even Putin the numbers involved were quite small.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/03/24/nolte-woke-poisoned-hollywood-has-doomed-once-unbeatable-movie-industry/

The post is a very good collection of most of the irregularities long known, although there were a couple of situations listed that were new to me.

I do recommend reading it; however, please note this comment (which I suspect is boilerplate triggered by some automatic internet app that watches for mentions of selected names).
https://www.frontpagemag.com/auditing-bidens-victory/#comment-45403

Steven Miller says
March 24, 2023 at 5:27 am

You write: “When Pennsylvania’s ballots were counted, the total number exceeded by 202,000 the number of registered voters. Steven Miller, a professor of mathematics at Williams College, found that around 90,000 of the absentee ballots purportedly requested by Republican voters had either been requested by persons other than those GOP voters or had been completed and sent in by those voters but never counted. This number exceeded Biden’s winning Pennsylvania margin. (He was awarded 3.46 million votes to Trump’s 3.38 million.)”

I am the person referenced above, and this is not what I found. What I was asked to do was to assume that the people surveyed by third parties were representative of Republican voters with requested ballots and responding accurately to questions, and if these assumptions held to confirm the extrapolated number of ballots that might have been sent in but not counted. This is very different than finding 90,000 ballots were not counted – this is all conditional on the two assumptions being correct, and if they are not then the conclusion may not hold. Additionally, this analysis says nothing about what might have happened to requests from Democrats, Independents and others.

This is typical of all journalistic restatements of studies: they leave out the nuances of the procedure.

And the “corporations” don’t have to all be businesses.

Note that these excerpts are referring only to the Republican Party; the Democrats have a different way of selecting their “corporate-owned” candidate, but the results are much the same.
The voters THINK that THEY are selecting a candidate in the primary, but it ain’t necessarily so. And they only get a choice among the people who make it into the primaries, which the article points out as something they have no control over at all.

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/getting-the-candidate-we-deserve/

Time to redesign the GOP presidential nominating process.
by Jeffrey H. Anderson
…
The current process is an outgrowth of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
…
The resulting system of direct primaries and caucuses was supposed to empower voters, but things haven’t played out quite as expected. Political science professors Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller write in The Party Decides (2008) that “elected officials, top fundraisers, interest group leaders, campaign organizers, and ordinary activists” work to “scrutinize and winnow the field before voters get involved.” This winnowing is sometimes called, somewhat delicately, the election before the election; sometimes more plainly the “money primary.”

These power brokers unite “behind a single preferred candidate, and sway voters to ratify their choice.” Their “control of campaign resources (money, knowledge, labor)” usually seals the deal, especially on the Republican side. The new system also greatly empowers the press, which decides how to portray candidates, what issues to amplify or mute, and when to assign momentum. As Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick observed in Dismantling the Parties (1978), written just a few years after the new system replaced the old,

Advocates of the direct primary intended to wrest control from the bosses and return it to the people; presumably they did not intend to vest power in Walter Cronkite and other media moguls or to speed the development of a personalist politics with standards and practices more relevant to entertainment than to public affairs.”

…
It wasn’t the conservatives who picked Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. They were the picks of the donors, the consultants, the establishment—and the press corps.

I don’t totally agree with these statements.
IF the power brokers DO unite “behind a single preferred candidate,” then they can probably “sway voters to ratify their choice.”
That’s how we got those three losing candidates.

As has been universally acknowledged, Donald Trump was not the first choice of any of those groups, either in 2016 or 2020 (although I think he did pick up some of the donors who benefitted from his policies).

2016 may have been the first and only GOP primary where the voters DID get their preferred candidate!

That resonates with the post on the protests (mostly peaceful, it appears) in Israel over the proposed changes in the selection of judges: where the judiciary selects itself, and the people have very little to say about it in their elections.

Also on the subject of

No argument I’ve ever made, Neo, has ever been as bad as the people around here who equate Putin and Russia to Hitler and Nazi Germany. It’s historically ignorant emotional blackmail.

I meant to add this in to my giant omnibus post, but delay in getting to the computer meant the edit window elapsed. So I’ll make it here.

In addition to my prior points, what is interesting is

Firstly: It’s worth remembering a very basic point. Hitler didn’t START OFF as the Hitler of Infamy we know today, springing forth fully formed with his bloody track record. And indeed, I’d note that as far as comparisons go, Hitler actually killed far fewer people in his quest to gain and then consolidate power over his home country and retake its “core territory” up to 1938 than Putin did, even though you and I both agree that Putin is nowhere near as bad as Hitler was. Certainly YET.

Secondly: the “Putin/Hitler Comparisons” weren’t MERELY used by those of us that condemn the man and recognize him as a bad, bad man but ALSO by at least one major Pro-Kremlin outlet, who tried to compare Putin to the “Good Hitler” in 2014, ie a mythical Hitler who stopped after seizing Czechoslovakia and did not start WWII.

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-crimea-and-the-good-hitler/25322600.html

For obvious reasons this was never particularly popular as a line of defense and was dropped fairly quickly, especially because people like myself and a host of others recognized that

A: Hitler was never “Good”, even if he would not have been condemned as being so bad had he not taken the greatest plunge in 1939.

and

B: That by its very nature, Hitler and Putin were unlikely to actually STOP their behavior at some kind of defined, limited line that they could be seen as “Good” at. Neither were Bismarck and even Bismarck’s own bloody bill has been underestimated.