Saving the Republican Party

As I'm sure you've noticed, Our President is batshit crazy — and he's been getting worse.  As impeachment pressures grow, his general demeanor is deteriorating and his rants and rage-tweets are increasingly bizarre.  Up to this point, Republican efforts to rationalize Tr*mp's irrationality have been strained, but effective enough to mollify his base.  The Zelensky phone call opened some cracks in GOP unity– even at Fox News – but none large enough to do real damage.

The Erdogan phone call, however, is different.  Tr*mp's base may not understand much, but they understand treachery and betrayal; they recognize a stab in the back when they see it.  After years being told of the bravery and loyalty of the Syrian Kurds – consistent "good guys" in all the media – Tr*mp's abandonment of America's allies against ISIS has to feel like a gut-punch to his admirers.  Real damage has been done, and none of the President's arguments for American self-interest or realpolitik is likely to reverse it.

In other words, Tr*mp's chance at a second term took a serious hit over the past few days; and since a narrow win in the Electoral College looked like his best  path to victory, the situation is dire.  A serious drubbing by Democrats in 2020 will endanger Republican control of the Senate as well.  What's a Bible-thumping stooge of the plutocracy to do?

Here's an idea: sidestep that embarrassing impeachment inquiry and invoke the 25th Amendment. With all due sympathy for his "illness," dump Tr*mp and give the presidency to Pence.  Our Vice-President has kept a low enough profile over the past three years to maintain his undeserved reputation for moral probity.  He could win.

It won't happen, of course.  Pence doesn't have the chutzpah to start the ball rolling, and the sycophants, enablers, and co-conspirators in the Cabinet would be too terrified to follow through.  Still, should you happen to run into Charles Koch any time soon, pass the idea along: he just might like it.

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You don't have to read Ukrainian to figure out Volodymyr Zelensky's basic approach to dealing with Our President.  The "reconstructed transcript" of their telephone conversation omits any mention of the incomparable sexiness of America's First Daughter, but nobody will be too surprised if it shows up in a later edition.  The joint press appearance at the UN offered more of the same: Did Zelensky feel "pressured" by Tr*mp?  Of course not!

In the meanwhile, it's hard to argue that Biden won't be hurt by his son's lucrative employment by an Ukrainian oligarch.  Hunter's sinecure may have had no impact on America's foreign policy whatsoever, but the optics are terrible.  The "electability" argument for Biden's nomination has suffered a severe hit.

It will be a mistake if Democrats ignore Tr*mp's numerous other abuses of power to zero in on the Ukraine affair.  Those other abuses, including the numerous instances presented in the Mueller Report, demand greater scrutiny over the course of the impeachment inquiry: ignoring them is tantamount to endorsing them.

On the lighter side, congressional testimony on Ukraine by Rudy Giuliani promises to rank among the funniest absurdist comedies in TV history, and may require creating a new category for the Emmy Awards.  Granted, one shouldn't be laughing a senile dementia – but as a (Medicare) card-carrying geezer, I'll claim special dispensation to LMAO.

Briefs

The Phone Call
Maybe I'm overoptimistic, but this time it feels different.  Unlike the convoluted complications of the Mueller Report, the Tr*mp-Zelensky phone call is easy to understand — easy for people with only casual interest in the news to think about.  It might be enough to convince Pelosi and the Red State Democrats that impeachment isn't so bad an idea.

Iran
No matter where the drone attack on the Saudi oil installations was launched, everybody knows Iran was responsible.  That, of course, is what the Iranians intended: their layer of deniability was paper thin.  They showed the Saudis how vulnerable they are, and upped the ante on Tr*mp, who now is forced to choose between tanking his re-election chances with a war nobody wants, or looking like a wimp to his base.  Yes, Our President has been having a bad week.

Israel
If Avigdor Liberman manages to keep the ultra-Orthodox parties out of the ruling coalition, he'll have done one good thing in his life.  Benny Gantz is moderate only by comparison to Bibi (and, maybe, Liberman), so if he successfully forms a ruling coalition, it won't make much difference to anybody outside of Israel – nor to the Palestinians.  Still, it does provide the prospect of Bibi going to jail.

Very Briefly

✪ The decision by Congress to allow families of 9/11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia may lead to lawsuits against the US for consequences of CIA and military activities; I'm fine with that. 
✪ Investigators have provided extensive proof that a Russian Surface-to-Air Missile was responsible for the downing of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine; uh huh.   
✪ Speaking of SAMs, isn't it time to start providing shoulder mounted SAMs to the Syrian rebels, even at the risk of them getting into the hands of Fateh al-Shah (al-Nusra)?   
✪ To the dismay of vestigial Blairites, Jeremy Corbyn continues to lead the Labour Party sharply to the left; so, whither the Democrats? 
✪ So now Peres is dead, along with Rabin, Arafat, and the Oslo Accord; Nobel prize points for trying, I guess. 
✪ David Wildstein's testimony at the Bridgegate trial of Christie toadies Baroni and Kelly continues to provide a laugh a minute as corruption in state and local politics scarcely takes a breather; up next, the Cuomo administration.

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

"The circus is gone, but the clowns stayed."

— Leonid Zakharov, resident of Crimea

A while back, you may recall, Tatar activists blew up the main power lines through which the Crimean Peninsula got most of its electric power from Ukraine.  Ukrainian president Petro Poroschenko has shown scant inclination to remove the Tatar activists from areas around the downed lines so that they might be repaired.

Crimea is a part of Russia once again, but apart from the power crisis, not much has changed.  The same incompetent local officials are still in power, just as corrupt as ever.  Not much has changed in the Ukraine either.  The rebel provinces are still in rebellion, and corruption remains rampant, albeit many of the bribes now are collected by putatively pro-Western officials rather than Russian puppets.  Obama sent Biden to Kiev to complain, indicating that Obama has more important things on his mind.

*  *  *  *  *

Venezuelan elections have gone badly for the Chavistas, and the presidency of the comically incompetent Nicolás Maduro is threatened.  If he survives, and his United Socialist Party maintains significant influence in Venezuelan politics, it will be because the fractious members of the winning Democratic Unity coalition will be fighting too hard over who gets to steal what from the public coffers.

The two most prominent leaders of Democratic Unity, Leopoldo López and Henrique Capriles, already were at each other's throats before all the votes were counted.  (López, jailed by the Chavistas for fomenting anti-government riots, was represented in the media by his wife.)  A major obstacle to reconciliation is the low price of oil, significantly limiting government funds available to be looted.

Ukraine

Hey!  What's happening in Ukraine, which has been out of the news for a week or so?  Answer: nothing good.  The alleged "cease-fire," you may recall, never even started, and the people of eastern Ukraine still are suffering.

The root of the Ukraine problem was the needless and provocative expansion of NATO into the former Soviet sphere of influence.  What was the point?  Well, it seems likely that western capital, seeking new markets, was hesitant to move into eastern Europe without its private army coming along.  A NATO commitment to the former Soviet republics, no doubt, improved the "business climate."  Ukraine under Yanukovych was looking eastward, and it's hard to believe that the Maidan "revolution" (coup) arose spontaneously.

Granted, the Yanukovych government in Ukraine was thoroughly corrupt — but there's not much evidence that the Poroschenko government is noticeably better.  In the meanwhile, the Ukrainian conflict has provided NATO (read USofA) with ample justification for locating tanks, aircraft, and other weapons in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.  It is understandable that the Baltic states feel threatened by Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, but it also is understandable that the Russians feel threatened by the plan to locate NATO missile batteries in Poland.  Are the missiles "purely defensive" (and aimed at Iran), as advertised?  (Can you kill a man with a deer rifle, even though he's not a deer?)

Why would anybody want to be president of the USofA these days?  Socrates probably was right when he posited that anybody who actually wants power shouldn't have it.  Whoever we wind up with, though, will be faced with a world of trouble, in large part created by his or her predecessors.

World Tour

Ukraine
It's getting to look a lot like a Russian win in Ukraine.  The most recent "cease-fire" never even got started, much less held.  There are those in Congress calling for the USofA to arm the Poroshenko Ukrainians, but that would do nothing to end the conflict or bolster the Poroshenko government — all it would do is confirm Putin's narrative that Russia is in conflict with an aggressive West led by the usual enemy (us).  The only remaining sanction that might make a difference is to deny Russian banks access to SWIFT, but that's something of a "nuclear option," and the USofA cannot do it unilaterally.

Libya
It's a mess, best avoided if at all possible, bearing in mind that just because some bunch of international criminals say they're part of Islamic State doesn't mean there's any real coordination.  If the Egyptians want to screw around there, let them, unaided by the USofA.  It's their border, and their citizens, not ours — and we always can be counted on to make things worse.

Nigeria
While the Goodluck Jonathan government is too corrupt and inept to stop Boku Haram, no likely alternatives have presented themselves.  Chad, we're told, is making some progress, and Niger and Cameroon are stirring, but only time will tell.  As long as oil prices remain low, nobody in the West will be bothered to do anything about Africa.

Israel and Iran
Netanyahu continues to agitate for a US military attack on Iran, but even American Jews are starting to have serious doubts about the sanity of Likud policies.  Hopefully, the era of knee-jerk Congressional obedience to AIPAC is ending.  Working cooperatively with Iran should not be any more difficult that working cooperatively with Saudi Arabia or, say, Turkey.  Face it, we don't give a shit about spreading democracy.

Argentina
Let's just hope Cristina Fernandez de Kirshner's government can hold it together.  The bourgeoisie are wavering, but she still has the support of the working classes, and our State Department already is overstretched.  Yes, we're all curious to know who killed the special prosecutor, but we don't need another crisis in Latin America.

Syria and Iraq
If Obama prefers not to use the modifier "Islamic" when referring to Islamic extremists, I suggest he just refer to them as "those shitheads."  Throughout history, various groups have used religion to justify all kinds of awful behaviors, and will continue to do so.  Come to think of it, "those religious shitheads" just may be more to the point.

Obama's Foreign Policy

Second guessing Our President on foreign policy seems to be the new national pastime, but none of the second-guessers seems to have an answer to the question, "Well, then what would you do?"  I sure don't.

McCain and Graham like to dance around like Yosemite Sam and sing their "Get tough" song, but really — invade Iraq again?  Go to war with Russia, perhaps?  Sometimes the options come down to few or none.

Arm and train the "moderates" in Syria?  First you'd have to find some, and you probably couldn't find enough to have any impact on the situation over there.  Apart from the Kurds, the Iraqis are pretty much worthless when it comes to fighting ISIL, and Haider al-Abadi looks to me like Nuri al-Maliki lite.  Okay, it would be very nice if the Kurds didn't have to rely on Soviet era weapons, but arming them with something better risks pissing off the Iranians and the Turks.  (The Iranians and the Turks?  No wonder Obama seems more than a little burnt out lately!)

How about arming and training the western Ukrainians?  It yet may happen, but didn't we fight enough proxy wars against Russia last century?  And think how successful those were!

As you know, I'm not a big fan of Barack Obama, but as far as foreign policy goes, I suggest he's muddling through as best he can — and no worse than anybody else could manage, under the circumstances.  Let's all just take a step back, and let him muddle.

Trouble Spots

Singar Mountain
Only rarely do I hear about a religious group I've never heard of before, so the Yazidis certainly caught my interest.  According to Wikipedia, they probably are a product of Middle Eastern syncretism, with aspects of Sufi, Zoroastrian, and other religious traditions.  Frankly, I don't think the author of the article knows very much, or has many dependable sources, since the Yazidis are supposed to be kind of secretive.

One thing we do know is that when confronted by the Islamic State with the proposition of "convert to Islam or die," they are greatly inclined to die.  Personally, I wouldn't fault anybody for a little hypocrisy when confronted with such a choice, but then I don't have any god to offend, much less a "Peacock Angel."  The alternative of "tribute," as in "the Koran, tribute, or the sword" (as they taught me in junior high school) apparently is unavailable to Yazidis, since a lot of orthodox Muslims (and some Christians as well) identify the "Peacock Angel" with the nefarious Shaitan (Satan), making them devil worshipers.

It seems that the recent military reconnaissance of Singar Mountain by United States forces, which reported that the state of emergency was over, only reconnoitered the north side of the mountain, where it was safe for helicopters: no problem there.  The south side, Yazidi voices tell us, is still a humanitarian catastrophe.

Eastern Ukraine

Putin's "humanitarian convoy," last I heard, was still on its way.  The International Red Cross was a bit confused as to whether or not it had blessed the operation.  Kiev had seized the crossing point Russia intended to use from pro-Russian forces; nobody knows what's in the trucks.

I have no faith in Putin, or in anything he says.  I have no faith in anything Plutocrat Poroschenko says.  I do, however, have concerns for the innocent people of Eastern Ukraine.  Ordinary people, just trying to live their everyday lives, do not deserve to be caught up in geopolitics — but, of course, they always are.

Ferguson, Mo.

Maybe there are more young black men committing crimes than young white men — I honestly don't know.  They certainly get arrested and jailed a lot more often, while young white men get a free ride.

What I do know is that if a cop is struggling with a kid for control of his hand gun, the kid doesn't wind up shot in the back from 35 feet away.

South Sudan

Nothing much has improved in South Sudan, and nobody is paying attention.  Pay attention!

Elections

It is kind of pathetic how Abdel Fatteh el-Sisi (aka Abdul Fattah al-Sisi and some other transliterations from the Arabic) extended the voting period because hardly anybody was bothering to vote for him.  Well, that's what happens when everybody knows the outcome in advance.  (Hell, I could be hanging out at the souq with my homies, drinking qasab.  Why bother?)

Chocolate King Petro Olekseyevich Poroshenko seems to be the new leader of Ukraine.  Okay, he's just another oligarch, but he seems to be pro-EU and his main factory is in Russia.  Go figure.

Europeans don't much bother to vote in elections for the European Parliament, but the populist anti-EU crew seems to have been more active than in the past.  Except for Hungary, I don't see the right-wing crazies winning any governments in Europe — albeit, adopting the Euro so early was a total screw-up.  It is easy to understand why, say, the UK and Germany don't want their labor markets overrun by Romanians and such like, but when you make your bed, you have to lie in it.

On and on...

When the world gets especially depressing, as it is now, it is very hard for we chronic depressives to update our blogs.  I guess it's time for more "short subjects."

Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling

Two racists in the news, one a hero to Fox commentators and the other a recipient of awards from the NAACP, are a lot less depressing than some of the other shit going on.

Bundy has stolen over a million dollars in grazing fees from the American public over the past ten years, but because he's stolen it from the government, it was okay by Fox.  When he started blowing off about how blacks would be better off in slavery, Fox thought it best to back off.  Oops!

Sterling, who changed his name from Tokowitz, probably is a self-hating Jew as well as a racist.  Well, who cares?  It's just sports, after all, and the NBA has kicked him to the curb.  It took a little too long for the NAACP to suspend his latest recognition after the shit hit the fan, but he'd given the group a hell of a lot of money.  Gag me with a spoon.

Apartheid

John Kerry's use of the work "apartheid" was right as rain.  All Mahmoud Abbas has to do is dissolve the Palestinian Authority, and leave Israel in total control.  That would be apartheid, no matter what AIPAC has to say about it.

Ukraine

Honestly, I'm not sure why the Kiev "authorities" should have any more authority than than the pro-Russian "groups" in the east.  Neither bunch was elected, and they're both occupying government buildings.

That is not to say that the Yanokovich kleptocrats were especially legitimate, given how they  looted a couple of billion bucks from a country that didn't have it to spare.  Well, money is money, and nothing else much matters.

More Short Subjects

 Ukraine

Russian troops at the border!  NATO jets patrolling the Baltic states!  The Donetsk People's Republic!  Be afraid!  Well, don't be that afraid unless you're an Ukrainian who soon will be living with IMF imposed austerity measures while paying more for Russian natural gas.

All I see is a lot of posturing.  There is no way in hell Russia and NATO will slug it out physically over some antiquated manufacturing plants and wheat fields.

India

It looks like Narendra Modi's BJP party will be pushing the Gandhi family's Congress party aside in the current election cycle, despite Modi's previously undisclosed wife and that little matter of the slaughter of Muslims up in Gujarat back in 2002.  Will Modi govern as the consummate capitalist, the Hindu nationalist, or some combination of the two?  We'll wait and see.

Speaking of Gujarat, I like to point out to people that Muslims often are victims as well as perps (and not only to each other.)  In the Central African Republic, the Christians seem to be the real crazies, for example.  Then there's Cambodia, where the Buddhists are the bad guys.  Then again, there's Palestine.  'Nuff said.

Flight 370

I've read that the missing Malaysian airliner has done more for CNN's ratings than anything since Bush bombed Baghdad.  I will admit I'm curious to know what actually happened (my personal crazy hypothesis involves hacking the airliner's software), but sometimes it happens that you just don't get to know what you want to know.

More Ukraine (groan!)

Ukraine, with or without Crimea, is screwed.  Its tiny economy is pretty much on a par with that of Greece, and the IMF can't wait to get in there and impose austerity.  Except for the usual plutocrats, Ukrainians are going to suffer.

So, think about it: if you lived in Crimea, would you be more likely to go for a Russian bailout with continued cheap natural gas, or a whole lot of pain?  Personally, I think I might go with the dreadful Mr. Putin over the parsimonious Ms. Merkel.

Do the "nationalists" in Kiev understand how hooking up with the EU will make Ukrainian poverty so much more obvious to the Ukrainian people?  Yes, much of the blame can be cast on Yanukovych, but it's unlikely that replacing one group of corrupt assholes with another will do much good.

In the meanwhile, the media are not paying enough attention to Syria, Turkey, Venezuela, the CAR, or other places where people are in a hell of a lot more trouble than Crimea.  Pretty clearly, the Russians are going to keep Crimea this time around, the (very) Light Brigade of the USofA and Europe notwithstanding.

After the putsch

I wish I could get away from Ukraine, but that seems unlikely at the moment.  Granted, Yanukovych was a moron, a kleptocrat, and an ineptocrat (I just made that up) as well.  Just the same, it seems pretty obvious that the ouster of Yanukovych was not especially constitutional.

I'm calling the uprising a putsch because "coup d'etat" seems a little too Latinized to me.  I do not think all the "nationalists" are, as Putin would have it, fascists, but I can't be sure of the actual proportion.  Europe is full of fascists these days, so who knows?

The West supports the new government in Ukraine because the friend of my (kind of) friend is (kind of) my friend — and the alternative is (Cold Warriors may gasp now) Russia.  Whatever.  If the Crimeans are dumb enough to want to return to Russian control, I'm inclined to let them have self-determination.  Would they do better as a somewhat more autonomous region of Ukraine?  Given the crappy economic situation Ukraine is in these days, Russia might be the better choice.  Ukraine's current "leaders" already are discussing the kinds of austerity measures they'll be taking to satisfy the IMF.  (Think Greece.)

Clearly, Obama doesn't want to look any more like a wimp than he already does, and the more traditional Republicans want to cast him in that light and find ways to puff out their chests like robins in the springtime — but for all concerned, the best bet is just to let Russia re-absorb Crimea.  Russia already controls Crimea with their military/naval bases, so what's the big difference?

There is no way to know if a new Ukrainian government will be any less inept nor any less corrupt than the Yanukovych regime — nor any less inept nor any less corrupt than the Putin regime — but I think it's for Crimeans to decide which is the lesser of two evils.

Options for Crimea?

The Crimean Parliament has moved up its plebiscite to about ten days from now, presumably so that nobody gets a lot of time to think about it.  The boys (and maybe a girl or two) are hoping the Russian speakers will just go for rejoining Russia, and Russia can maintain that "the will of the people" justifies re-annexation.

The other choice, aside from rejoining Russia, will be remaining in Ukraine with more autonomy than Crimea already enjoys — and that autonomy is not insignificant.  Crimeans who don't want to put up with Putin, even among the majority Russian speakers, just might vote that way (but who will be monitoring the vote?)  Funny, though, there's no way to choose independence.  (Think Kosovo.)

Okay, there won't be a hell of a lot of independence in Crimea no matter how the vote goes — not with those Russian military bases there.  So why in hell is Putin making such a big deal out of what is, for Russia, essentially nothing.  The bases will stay, whatever transpires.  The fleet will stay, if only because it pumps a few extra rubles into Sevastopol.

I read the Times this morning (as always), and I think it may have been devoting a few too many column inches to Ukraine.  Granted, not much else was going on.

Crimean Crisis

I cannot pretend to have any idea of what has been passing through the head of Vladimir Putin lately, but if he took off his shirt and rode into eastern Ukraine on a horse, I would not be especially surprised.  In the meanwhile, though, I figured I could point out a few things that are getting scant notice in the media.

It was during the Crimean War that the 600 rode into the "valley of death," because "someone had blundered."  So much for early history: fast forward to 1954.  That was the year that Nikita Krushchev gave the Ukrainian SSR "power" over the peninsula, not that it much mattered, because they all were SSRs anyway.  When the Soviet Union decomposed, there were some problems working out the differences between the majority Russian Crimea and the rest of Ukraine.

Hence, Crimea is a "semi-autonomous" region, hosting Russian naval bases and, so it seems, some ground forces flown in for the occasion.  If it became entirely autonomous (that is, independent), Ukraine would lose most of its major ports — not that it's exporting much, except to Russia.

Ukraine's most significant geopolitical importance is as a place where Russian petrochemical pipelines cross over to the rest of Europe.  Since a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine would inevitably shut down those pipelines, it would create problems for everybody outside the Persian Gulf.  Russia's economy, already in bad shape, depends on commodity exports.  Without oil and gas exports, it would collapse.  Western Europe (including Germany) would slide back into recession.

It would not be such a bad thing if the new (and mostly illegitimate) government of Ukraine let Crimea have its independence following the plebiscite the Crimean leadership is sponsoring.  If they wanted "pan-European" trade, it could be done by rail.

Well, at least the Ukrainians are not killing each other — okay, not much — as compared to ethnic/language/racial groups in other parts of the world.  Yes, Obama will take shit for "doing nothing," but nothing seems like the best alternative right now.

Ukraine

It occurs to me that I don't know the first thing about those young men bouncing paving blocks off the heads of Ukrainian policemen.  Are they the same protestors who started the peaceful demonstrations months ago, upset by Viktor Yanakovych's backing away from closer ties with the rest of Europe; or are they, as Vladimir Putin suggested, "right-wing elements" — to wit, Nazis.

It wouldn't be the first time Ukraine had Nazis — and all of Europe is developing ultra-right parties who might  be described as Nazis.  There's the Front National in France, Golden Dawn in Greece, Geert Wilders' Freedom Party in the Netherlands and that other Freedom Party in Austria, the Northern League in Italy, the NPD in Germany, and more, even in socially liberal Scandinavia.  Just because Putin said it doesn't automatically make it a lie.

Okay, Putin is a truly terrible person.  So is Yanokovych, I suspect.  That doesn't mean the cop killers aren't truly terrible persons as well, escalating the violence.  They have guns, Molotov cocktails and, probably, too much testosterone.  The American media should not be carried away in a gush of hero worship.

As for the United States doing something about what's happening in Ukraine, I don't see the likelihood as any better than the United States doing something in Syria.  It's time to accept the fact that we can't just walk in someplace and do something.  The last time that worked was World War II.