You’d get seven billion sore throats?
My disposable income isn’t unlimited, but I could probably swing for a box of cough drops now and then.
Wait. I’M the one who would be getting the sore throats, right? Price I’m willing to pay.
As a modest start, why can’t we find ONE journalist who doesn’t overvalue a second visit to an America-Hating Fuckstick presser to pose the fact out loud to his face? Why doesn’t Colbert bring it up on his program? It’s not like he can get canceled again.
No, I’m saying that ALL you’ll get is a sore throat. What is it that you think that shouting alone will achieve?
Give it time and Trump’s famous deal-making skills.
The journalists who would presume to ask that kind of question have been systematically excluded from the White House Press Pool.
As for Colbert, he’s had no reluctance to have guests talking very critically about Putin and the Russian invasion and terroristic bombardment of Ukraine. Here’s one of my favorites:
Stranger
I haven’t gotten to see Colbert in the UK other than YouTube clips so thanks for that.
I did not know there was an amphibious assault on Odessa, which for the most part has not been targeted (even Lviv way back by Poland has).
I’m not the go-to guy for war tactics, yet Napoleon and Hitler did not factor in “General Winter”. The Nazis in Stalingrad were wearing their Spring gear in - what even for Russia was extremely cold (below -30) - winter.
It once was the case you might expect Putin’s supposed massive invasion to capture the flag in Kiev inside of a couple days - if not for all the mud. Tanks don’t work right and soldiers would rather fight on icy ground than in mud.
So Russia was literally “waist deep in the big muddy and the big fool said to push on” (Pete Seeger).
The price of oil went up, so the funding for materiel and capturing territory square mile by square mile was there. And even though many of draft age (which includes women) fled to places like Georgia and Turkey, there were still enough reinforcements who could do boot camp in a week, this is my rifle, this is my gun, etc… and off they went.
Putin wanted no less than to put back together the CCCP. Let’s start with the nation that wants to be in NATO (when NATO was not West / East).
Now the Baltic States and Finland are in NATO. And Trump has essentially signaled that NATO East is on their own. Article 5 has not yet been tested, yet when it is, the USA will not be part of enforcing it. The Eastern portions of all three Baltic countries (not so much Finland) are largely ethnic Russians who really are discriminated against and find it hard to get passports.
Trump just wants mineral rights (and I suspect soil for the golf courses in Gaza) and while NATO East is trying to enforce Article Five, Greenland is annexed by the USA. Won’t take any invasion. Just file the annexation papers with the UN, pay the clerk, and it’s yours.
May have already been covered here, but some dweeb left a detailed summit schedule in the business center of their hotel, right before the summit. Including names and phone numbers of government officials on both sides. A security nightmare, no matter how scummy I think the people are. Trump-Putin documents left on hotel printer : NPR
Putin doesn’t really want to revive the Soviet Union; he has no interest in either the policy nor the rhetoric of communism, or even the extensive and distributed bureaucracy of a modern decentralized state. What he envisions is another Russian Empire with himself as Tsar and everyone pledging personal fealty to him. He’s invoked the pseudo-history of supposed ‘Russian dominance’ of the Near East, the mythology of the “World Island” with Russia as the ‘geographical pivot’ and successor to Rome and Constantinople as the reigning capital (“The Third Rome”), and the theocratic pretensions of the Russian Orthodox Church as the true inheritor of Orthodox Christianity, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow as the presumptive primus inter pares by ignoring and defying Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and declaring the Russian Invasion of Ukraine a “Holy War” to retake what is ‘rightfully’ that which belongs to Russia Never mind that actual history records things the other way around).
Stranger
Of course, he’s not trying to build a throwback USSR where, like Gorbachev, he’d have to answer to any political entity. He already speaks for Russia - already is the Czar, if you want to call him that or Supreme Leader.
Even when he had term limits and swapped being President with Medvedev, everyone knew who was really in charge. And they changed that silly law about term limits, extended the term to five years and if there is a limit to the number of terms, Putin will change that too,
He just wants the sphere of influence the USSR once had. If he invades Latvia, he doesn’t need Riga. Yet he needs them to fear him as he annexes half their country. And Lithuania and Estonia. No country can stop his military belligerence and none can stop the USA’s (except were they to fight eachother).
Then there’s China. Xi wants Taiwan to be part of his legacy, yet his religious belief system demands he incorporate Taiwan back into China proper.
Holy shit! Including departure and travel times/dates. They’ll play it down, but that is a major security breach.
Economic implosion would work, too, and is considerably more likely. Right now, Russia is able to maintain a more-or-less stalemate on the ground, but only by burning through a variety of resources faster than they can replenish them. Eventually, some of those resources will just plain run out, and Russia will cease to be able to maintain the stalemate, and Ukraine will all of a sudden crush the Russians entirely.
I hope you are correct! It would be wonderful to see.
Administration officials should not need to resort to using the hotel business center. Don’t they have printers of their own? (And I prefer to print little if anything, instead relying on electronic copies.)
Doubtful if they brought printers with them. That would have required pre-planning and attention to detail, two things in short supply in this administration.
Surely there is one on Air Force One? Or in the military base? Don’t they set up an advance command office?
to even use a hotel printer for anything with the least bit of sensitivity is very bad. Printers have queues and memory and it’s not difficult to pick up the WiFi transmissions for things that may not be lunch menus. At this level of access they ought to be fully aware of proper principles; which if you’re going to blow off - at least pick up the damn printouts.and use a cross-cut shredder.
I still can’t get over how paranoid/cautious Putin was to fly a top-of-the-line Ilyushin on what amounts to a train route across Russia just to avoid flying over water (until he had to: ikely along with fighter escorts and decoys) .
Arnold Schwarzenegger describes Trump as ‘a little wet noodle’ during Trump’s meeting with Putin. [YouTube link]
Don’t forget that this is the administration whose guy in charge of the country’s armed forces used a commercial messaging app to discuss military operations.
So a State Department G-whatever has less security awareness than a 90-day Certified Nursing Assistant after an hour-long unit on HIPAA?
(Has Trump killed that too yet? There’s money to be made sending targeted ads to sick people in vulnerable situations!)
They do but these printers are in constant use printing nothing but good news articles about Trump:
So. I don’t understand.
Spend billions and thousands of lives to take over another country. Now the entire world is mad at you, and you have a population in the invaded country (what’s left of them) just waiting for any opportunity they can get to slit your throat.
Much cheaper to build a washing machine factory at home IMHO. Investing in your own country is a bridge to far I guess.