Red Line Crossed: Russia’s Retaliation Looms After U.S.-Aided Assault

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by Jeff Childers

NBC ran a troubling story yesterday headlined, “Russia blames U.S. for ‘barbaric’ Ukrainian attack on Crimea, summons ambassador.” The sub-headline explained, “The Kremlin vowed retaliation Monday after the deadly strike on the Russian-occupied peninsula.”

Russia’s ambassador soberly informed the U.N Security Council yesterday that “The fact the U.S. is involved in this crime is beyond any doubt.” He warned darkly, “The involvement of the United States, the direct involvement, as a result of which Russian civilians are killed, cannot be without consequences.”

Pursuant to Biden’s new policy allowing Ukraine to fire U.S.-supplied weapons into Russian territory, on Sunday Ukraine fired U.S. ATACMS missiles at the Crimean city of Sevastopol. The missiles were equipped with cluster bombs, which are designed only to kill unarmored personnel, meaning people, not tanks or planes or bases or anything.

Just about every country on Earth, except a very few like North Korea and the United States, believes using cluster bombs is a war crime.

Most of Ukraine’s missiles aimed at the Russian city were intercepted by Russia’s air defenses. But one exploded over a crowded beach, causing scores of deaths and hundreds of injuries, including dozens of children.

The pictures are awful.

Ukraine fanatics will argue whataboutism, or say it’s only fair since Russia attacked them first, or something similarly myopic. The main difference is Russia is a near-peer, first world, nuclear armed adversary. As much as Ukrainian die-hards would love to see the U.S. and Russia trade nukes, that will teach them!, the rest of us would prefer not to have to start building bunkers and stocking bugout bags.

Make no mistake. We will pay a price for this. According to the UK Daily Mail, Russia summoned the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, Lynne Tracy, and warned her that the attack would “not go unpunished. Retaliatory measures will definitely follow.” Americans will likely die so that the Ukrainians can temporarily enjoy a little Schadenfreudey, Pyrrhic victory against unarmed non-combatants on a beach in Russia.

It’s been nearly 48 hours. But Biden, Blinken, and Nod, I mean Jake Sullivan, have been unaccountably silent, all while the furious Russians accused the U.S. at the United Nations. More bizarrely, none of corporate media’s articles about the story quoted U.S. officials.

The reporters aren’t even asking questions.

The reason the Russians blame us is not only because they were U.S. missiles, or because Biden authorized Ukraine to launch them into Russian territory. Russia more blames us because the high-tech missiles launched by the Ukrainians were guided to their target by U.S. satellites. The missiles can only be programmed with GPS targeting data using our computers, and can only be launched electronically by U.S. technicians located outside Ukraine, maybe even inside the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

There is a rumor, which sounds like a joke, that there is a lonely Ukrainian soldier at the Pentagon who doesn’t speak English but is trained to click the final button to launch the missiles, so that the U.S. can claim it technically wasn’t us. The Russians don’t seem to appreciate the nuance.

I keep asking, where is Congress? Those chickenhawks should either officially declare war, or else shut this down before things get any hotter. Whatever game Biden thinks he’s playing, maybe tic-tac-toe, it isn’t worth it.

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First, if you invade another country, it should come as no surprise if that country takes the opportunity to attack YOUR country. That being said, this is a dangerous escalation that is the sole responsibility of Robin Ware/Robert L. Peters/JRB Ware/Pedo Peter/idiot Biden, whose stupid and short-sighted energy policies combined with his unmistakable weakness and incompetence enabled and encouraged Putin to launch an attack he would never have dared to launch when Trump was President.

Ukraine fanatics will argue whataboutism, or say it’s only fair since Russia attacked them first, or something similarly myopic. The main difference is Russia is a near-peer, first world, nuclear armed adversary. As much as Ukrainian die-hards would love to see the U.S. and Russia trade nukes, that will teach them!, the rest of us would prefer not to have to start building bunkers and stocking bugout bags.

Make no mistake. We will pay a price for this.

Providing cluster bombs to the Nazi’s so that they can then bomb a beach with civilians will come with consequences. All this is doing is leading us into a nuclear exchange that will wipe us all out all for these friggin Nazi’s? Insanity.

Which, of course, Robin Ware/Robert L. Peters/JRB Ware/Pedo Peter/idiot Biden would exploit to try and suppress voting and enable more election fraud. All this is so unnecessary and preventable, but Democrat bungling and incompetence made it inevitable.

Putin is angry about the consequences of his own f*cking invasion. He chose this course of action, not Ukraine or those that have come to its aid.

Would never have been an invasion without election fraud and Robin Ware/Robert L. Peters/JRB Ware/Pedo Peter/idiot Biden incompetence.

If we end up at war with Russia, remember this truth from Watergate days:
It isn’t the crime, its the cover-up.
joe, Mitt, and others were up to their necks in get rich quick schemes in Ukraine.
They money laundered and skimmed.
But then Russia felt threatened by Ukraine’s aggression.
So, instead of cutting their losses and, maybe, suffering the consequences should Russia expose their crimes, they doubled down and kept up their corruption while buying off Zelensky and covering the whole thing up with a small war.
Now that small war is growing larger.
The scrambling to hide their crimes is ongoing.
But can they sue for peace with Russia in time to prevent a wider war?
I expect that IF that’s going to happen, we’ll see the signal: Zelensky will flee Ukraine.
But, the uniparty is so pro-war that joe might think getting closer to the brink might cause American voters to want to keep him instead of “changing horses in midstream (war.)”

Trump has aspired since 1987 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Check out his dealings with former Soviet official Tofik Arifov, the Bayrock Group, and Russian mobster Felix Sater, who managed Bayrock during the Trump SoHo project

Last edited 5 days ago by Greg

What does that have to do with Robin Ware/Robert L. Peters/JRB Ware/Pedo Peter/idiot Biden allowing a war to start because he is weak and corrupt? Why hasn’t he put sanctions on Yelena Baturina?

Donald Trump Is Not the Victim of ‘Lawfare.’ He’s a Crook. Republicans used to be very aware of this.

One of the reasons Republicans were so reluctant to accept Donald Trump’s nomination in 2016 is that he was quite obviously a crook. “His business record reflects the often dubious norms of the milieu: using eminent domain to condemn the property of others; buying the good graces of politicians — including many Democrats — with donations,” editorialized National Review. Marco Rubio lambasted him as a “con artist.” The Wall Street Journal editorialized about Trump’s deep ties to the mafia and his fulsome praise of its work. (After Trump won the nomination, the Journal spiked a second editorial about his mob links.)

Ted Cruz warned that an upcoming probe into Trump University, a scam Trump used to bilk unsuspecting fans by promising business secrets, would expose him to legal sanction. “If this man is the nominee, having the Republican nominee, on the stand in court, being cross-examined about whether he committed fraud, you don’t think the mainstream media will go crazy on that?”

The precise scenario Cruz predicted is finally occurring. The Republican response, however, is very different. The suspicion with which they once viewed Trump’s business career has dissipated. He is no longer a sleazy mobbed-up con artist but an innocent victim of overzealous prosecutors. The word Republicans now use almost uniformly to describe the former president’s travails with the justice system is “lawfare.”

“Lawfare” means using the law as a weapon to get Trump. Conservatives ranging from the Trumpiest wing of the movement to the most Trump-skeptical — the ones who used to attack him as a crook — have all employed this term to describe the entire range of Trump’s legal problems, from his New York fraud conviction to his indictments in New York and Atlanta to both of Jack Smith’s federal cases.

The advantage of this catchall term is that it allows Trump’s defenders to ignore the specifics of Trump’s misconduct, or at least to analyze it in a highly selective way. There are indeed a couple instances in which Trump has faced legal challenges that are questionable (the attempt to disqualify him from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment) or downright weak (Alvin Bragg’s indictment over hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels). Conservatives tend to focus obsessively on these cases, and “lawfare” is a permission structure that allows them to use these cases to ignore or discredit the others, where Trump’s behavior is impossible to defend.

It is a similar rhetorical strategy to the way Republicans dismissed the entire Russia scandal as “Russiagate” (or, in Trump’s preferred phrasing, “Russia, Russia, Russia”). The Russia scandal consisted of innumerable strands and accusations, some of which (most famously the Steele dossier) did not pan out. But the sweeping frame allowed Trump’s defenders to ignore the voluminous evidence of guilt. No need to defend Trump pardoning the campaign manager who had a Russian intelligence agent as a partner when you can just denounce Russiagate as a hoax.

By positing that Trump is the victim of a plot, all evidence of his guilt can be turned around into evidence of the sweeping nature of the conspiracy to smear him. Eventually, Republicans came to believe Trump had been the victim of a deep-state plot to frame him. Trump appointed a prosecutor, John Durham, to prove this conspiracy theory, only for Durham’s efforts to fail.

The right’s “lawfare” claim has some of the same elements. It posits that a wide array of jurists and prosecutors are working secretly in concert at Joe Biden’s behest. Of course, this theory requires one to ignore massive amounts of criminal behavior by Trump. (Nobody forced him to, say, refuse to relinquish classified documents and then order a cover up!) It likewise requires you to ignore the fact that Trump’s main legal antagonist, the Justice Department, has charged or investigated numerous Democrats, including the president’s son.

The common thread between the right’s conspiratorial view of the Russia scandal and his legal problems is that Trump is, in fact, a very dishonest and corrupt person. The misconduct at the root of both dramas is not fantastical or unique. Russians have frequently manipulated or gained leverage over foreign politicians, though relatively few of them have been American. It is likewise not uncommon for politicians to commit crimes. The impression that all politicians are crooks — which Trump has exploited to justify his own corruption — is surely a wild exaggeration, but the stereotype exists in part because many of them are.

What’s unusual about Trump is not that a politician got into legal trouble, or even that a professional scammer went into politics, but that a political party allowed a crook to rise to its top. That, in turn, reveals the deeply unhealthy state of the GOP, not any extralegal steps being taken by his opponents.

Before he won the Republican nomination the first time, Republicans were perfectly aware that his decades of bilking customers and counterparties, lying to everybody, and surrounding himself with known criminals posed a series legal risk. Now that that risk has gone from theoretical to actual, and it is being shared by the Republican Party, they seem to believe it’s not fair to hold him legally accountable.

But no plot was necessary here. The law finally catching up to a lifelong crook is utterly predictable.

Last edited 4 days ago by Greg

The only reason the bastard hasn’t been convicted in the classified documents case, the January 6 case, and the Georgia election interference case is because he has spent at least $76 Million of your donations evading trials.

Last edited 4 days ago by Greg