Stockman said what now. https://t.co/2PgVNS83K6
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) April 2, 2022
Look what’s bubbling up from the fetid swamps of Gritty Repub Realism, while the rest of us were distracted…
https://t.co/jtjPchbPWH pic.twitter.com/cHOQtLJEn7
— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) April 2, 2022
Jacob Heilbrunn, at Poltico: “Trumpian Conservatives Hold an ‘Emergency’ Meeting Over Russia”:
J.D. Vance was on the warpath. “Using American power to do the dirty work of Europe is a pretty bad idea,” he told a crowd on Thursday, warning against the U.S. getting more involved in Ukraine. “We don’t have that many non-insane people in Washington. I need you to be some of them.”
Vance wasn’t speaking at a campaign stop in Ohio, where he is running for the U.S. Senate, but at the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown Washington. The audience consisted of over one hundred mostly younger conservatives, and he was sounding the alarm about not just foreign intervention, but about other conservatives — the worrisome resurgence of the Republican establishment.
The event was the “Up From Chaos” conference, a self-described “emergency” meeting organized by the Trumpian wing of the GOP to grapple with the political fallout from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The young men, almost all of them soberly dressed in dark suits, and women, almost uniformly wearing dresses, listened attentively as one speaker after another warned about the perils of intervention for their very own lives. A return to the thinking that led to Iraq and Afghanistan could result in nothing less than World War III over Ukraine, they were warned.
And so, as Putin’s deadly and unprovoked assault drags on, the GOP is also going to war — against itself. As so often, the battle revolves around the America First doctrine first espoused by former President Donald Trump in April 2016, during the Republican primaries, at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, where he promised that he would perform a U-turn in American foreign policy by shunning military intervention abroad…
According to Wikipedia, ‘America First‘ was a rallying cry for the execrable Woodrow Wilson, before it was revived by Hitler-sympathetic GOP ‘businessmen’ at the start of World War II. Can’t see as much has changed, since then!
Dr. Seuss on “America First,” July 1941: pic.twitter.com/vyeFd96e6M
— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) January 5, 2021
The participants generally described themselves as “realists” and “restrainers,” and the meeting featured what amounted to realist royalty — politicians and thinkers, ranging from GOP Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.), Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Matt Rosendale (Mont.) to Michael Anton, Sohrab Ahmari, Mollie Z. Hemingway, and, of course, Vance. It was organized by the American Conservative magazine and American Moment, whose self-described mission is to “identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,” and which features Vance on its board of advisers. Their explicit aim is to create a young counter-establishment to the hawkish national security network that has flourished in Washington over the past several decades, one that could funnel ideologically reliable appointees into a future Trump, DeSantis, Cruz or Hawley administration.
It was notable that at the conference, speaker after speaker targeted the GOP hawks more often than they spoke about Ukraine itself. Indeed, Kyiv itself was essentially MIA — serving more as a proxy for a dispute about America nationhood than about the country’s own fate as it’s mercilessly pummeled by Putin. The basic argument, outlined in a manifesto titled “Away From the Abyss” appearing in the new Compact magazine, is that aiding Ukraine is tantamount to hurting Ukraine. In resisting deescalation, the U.S. and its allies, so the thinking goes, run the risk of encouraging hapless Ukrainians to battle to the last man, all in the hopes of pursuing a Western-led regime change policy toward Moscow that might well trigger a global cataclysm…
Several of the panelists either avoided talking about Putin or largely elided the brutality of his attempted subjugation of an entire people. But more than a few appear to harbor a conciliatory view of Putin’s prowess that was first enunciated by Patrick J. Buchanan eight years ago in a column in the American Conservative. Buchanan asked, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” The question was pretty much rhetorical. Buchanan’s argument was that America, not Russia, was the bad guy in the world. According to Buchanan, “President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire ‘the focus of evil in the modern world.’ President Putin is implying that Barack Obama’s America may deserve the title in the 21st century. Nor is he without an argument when we reflect on America’s embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.”…
Dr. Seuss on "America First" and "Adolph the Wolf". pic.twitter.com/iXq30uEqjy
— Jeffrey Levin ?? (@jilevin) December 31, 2020
Baud
And I thought Pat was just a racist.
Kent
I have a lot of right-wing fundamentalist Christian Republicans in my family so I’m pretty in tune with their thinking.
Astonishingly a lot of this is about gay/trans panic and hatred of LGBT rights.
For real.
A whole bunch of the Putin-love has to do with the fact that Putin and the Russian state properly hates on LGBT people in a way that they aren’t allowed to anymore in the US. That is what this is about, plain and simple.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Heh. Now it all makes sense.
zhena gogolia
God I hate them
eclare
No wonder they turned on Dr Suess
schrodingers_cat
I am so old that I remember when Edward Snowden was lionized as a hero on this blog and other leftie blogs. Shall we stop pretending that the problem is only on the right. Russian active measures have found a nice home on the left as well.
Putin helped BS campaign in 2016 and 2020. Red roses trash Biden administration daily on Twitter and in the Congress too.
JML
David Stockman is an admitted liar. Fuck that guy with a pine tree.
(and I knew as soon as I started seeing “America First” nonsense that Pat Buchanan and his Nazi BS would be rearing it’s eternally ugly head. Not at all surprised that that’s the wing Vance is truly from)
Baud
Wait, so did all these guys praise Biden for getting us out of Afghanistan?
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Nope and the neither did the “peace activists” who constantly whine about the defense expenditure and “forever wars”.
Ohio Mom
@Baud: Yeah, and they are holding a grudge against the Republican Party for GW getting us mired there in the first place.
piratedan
@schrodingers_cat: well, tbh… he didn’t have universal acclaim and there were quite a few knock-down drag out fights here about it. To be honest, the fact that the vast majority of the community came around is something of the reason why I stay here. I may not agree with everyone on everything, but many of us are open to being persuaded if we’re hammered with enough logic.
Alison Rose ???
@Kent: I wish the Putin groupies would all just move to Russia, then. They could let their homophobe flag fly proudly and never have to read about antiracist babies again!!!! They may not love the weather or the cuisine, but surely those are small prices to pay.
Baud
On the left, there is a push to reduce the Defense budget. I wonder if these guys will even go that far.
Baud
@Alison Rose ???:
If they moved to Russia, they couldn’t free ride on all the wealth and social benefits liberals produce.
Alison Rose ???
@Baud: “Hawley administration” oh dear Lord just kill me now
debbie
If anything bad suddenly happens to these clowns, it will be the spirit of Ronald Reagan reaching through the celestial miasma and throttling them.
zhena gogolia
@Alison Rose ???: there was a full blown snowstorm in Moscow today
Alison Rose ???
@Baud: You and I know that, but bonne chance getting any of them to admit it. Liberals are just a bunch of useless gays who hate white people.
Baud
@Alison Rose ???:
I mean, not just.
Calouste
I think there’s a detail missing there, like “almost all of them white”.
debbie
I dare any of these assholes to read this 16-year-old Ukrainian girl’s diary of the war:
From the original tweet: Read this story till the end. During WWII some children were making diaries from concentration camps & occupied cities by nazis. History is repeating. This is a diary of Katya, a 16 years old girl from Mariupol, whose mother died in the basement
Baud
Man, I’m tired of these Will Smith memes.
Mike in NC
We had four frickin’ years of chaos under the Orange Turd’s regime. Republicans have no sense of irony. And Sarah Palin is launching a campaign to be Alaskan US Rep. Can’t wait for her to hang out with other dreck like Mo Brooks, Lauren Bobert, and Madison Cawthorn.
Kent
Russian active measures and infiltration into the German Green Party and other German enviro groups was instrumental in getting Germany to abandon nuclear power in favor of Russian natural gas.
Just about the biggest own-goal in German history. Well, at least post-war German history.
Wyatt Salamanca
McConnell descends to new depths of dickishness:
h/t https://thehill.com/news/senate/3256880-mcconnell-leans-hard-on-gop-senators-to-oppose-jackson/
debbie
@Wyatt Salamanca:
I wonder if he used the n word. //
RaflW
Calling Rand Paul a “realist” is practically murdering the English language in plain sight.
Kent
It really is about LGBT rights. I ran across one fundie talking about Obama’s push for gay marriage is what led to the Orange Revolution or some other such bullshit. Despite the fact that it happened with George W. Bush was president and Obama was just a junior Senator who was actually oppose to gay marriage at that time.
They are really truly in thrall with Russia because of their hatred of LGBT rights. And oppose Ukraine because it was too LGBT friendly. For real. That is a whole lot of it.
And of course the racism as well.
eclare
@Alison Rose ???: IIRC some indicted Proud Boy type did move to Belarus. Fine by me!
Baud
@eclare:
He “moved” because he was going to be arrested for Jan 6.
SamIAm
@schrodingers_cat:
Private Schrodinger’s Cat reporting for circular firing squad duty!
The article is about the threat from the Reichwing but you never miss a chance to jump on your hobby horse about “Rose Twitter”.
Twitter is rotting your brain. It doesn’t reflect any real world constituency.
Let’s focus on the real threat coming from the right and not some socialist bogeyman
eclare
@Kent: I’ve wondered about Germany’s decision to abandon nuclear. I mean I agree it has definite issues, but it had been working well there for decades, so you just shut it down? Never made sense to me, especially since Angela was a chemist and clearly understood science.
That makes sense. Russia does know how to play a long game.
Captain C
@Wyatt Salamanca:
Someday we’re going to find out that the Moscow Turtle was into child porn and/or kid diddling, aren’t we?
MattF
From Sergej Sumlenni. Briefly, the original Russian plan for Ukraine was mass murder. First troops, then police, then executions, then mass graves. If you were wondering exactly why Ukraine resists Russia.
eclare
@Baud: Let him rot there and never be able to vacation anywhere other than Siberia again. I hear it’s lovely in the winter.
Martin
I think the situation here has been spelled out pretty clearly by Biden and Zelenskyy and a few others that we are now facing a fundamental choice between democracy and not-democracy. And this isn’t just Russia vs Ukraine. Germany has seen interference in their ability to govern. France has. The UK has. The US has. From Russia, from China, from North Korea. We tried to do this without isolating the opponents of democracy, but clearly that’s not working. And so democracies are now banding together and drawing some pretty bright lines. Those lines aren’t just for Russia. The GOP needs to decide what side they want to be on.
I’ve been saying for a while here that the GOP is trapped. Their culture war is losing in the US. They can’t win national elections. Demographics isn’t destiny, but it is if you define your party by demographics – which the GOP does. Democracy is killing them, and they are more loyal to the culture than to democracy. That’s indisputable. In order to preserve their culture, they have to become an enemy to democracy. That’s the cause and effect.
The GOP has to decide which side they want to be seen associating with. And the west is making it very clear to everyone what it means to be on each side of this. No more bullshit. No claiming to be in favor of democracy while backing Putin. Time to decide.
Mezz
I enjoyed the work of Dr. Seuss referenced here.
Those cartoons and a fleet of others you can find in a terrific book called _Dr. Seuss Goes to War_ ed. Richard Minear, intro. Art Spiegelman (yes that Art Spiegelman).
[Sorry don’t want to link to Amazon etc]
Lots of smart “America First” and Lindbergh burns in the Seuss book. Also lots of anti-Japanese racism, so be advised.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kent: It’s bad enough that these people embrace these hateful values for themselves. It’s worse that they feel entitled to force them on the everyone else. Like, what’s it to them????
billcinsd
@schrodingers_cat: yes centrists are a huge problem too.
Kropacetic
@schrodingers_cat: Your professed love of pie should be an inspiration to us all, it’s rare to see such passion these days.
Mezz
@Mezz:
And I also *super* appreciated the reference to the “execrable Woodrow Wilson.”
Cheers to that!!
debbie
@Martin:
The GOP is trapped by a whole lot of stupid:
Cacti
@Baud: Pat Buchanan’s greatest regret was that he was born too late to serve in the SS Viking brigade.
Kropacetic
@debbie: Continuing the Republican trend of “everything bad under Bush was really Obama, everything good under Obama was really Trump…
I, to this day, can’t believe Trump was brazen enough to spend his whole campaign deploring the state of the economy to the declare its remarkable recovery the minute he took office, before he had done a damn thing. Power of positive thinking I suppose?
persistentillusion
@Mike in NC: If any of the aforementioned are allergic to Botox, both they and the Tundra Twit could die.
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
OK, I’m open to being shown the light on this one.
As best as I could tell back then, Snowden went overnight from being a hero on the left (and by ‘the left’ I am talking about places like here, not ‘rose Twitter’ which I still have no idea how to find) to being a villian. I totally missed whatever transition there was; from my perspective, it was Oceania having always been at war with Eastasia. So whatever arguments were made at the time that he was not a hero, I missed them. Well, other than those that I’ll bring up in a moment.
So here’s a quick summary of my understanding of Snowden:
1. He exposed a massive illegal domestic surveillance operation on the part of our government. (That’s good, right?)
2. He revealed other secrets that people claim surely led to the death of one of our spies somewhere. (That would be bad if true. But when pressed for evidence, none has ever been forthcoming IME.)
3. He fled to Russia rather than spend the next 20 years of his life in Federal prison. (That’s supposedly bad. Never been sure why.)
OK, your turn.
Baud
@Kropacetic:
Big Picture Pathologist
@JML: I’m sure anyone from the Reagan administration* probably has or had issues with honesty, but I’d like to know which particular lie Stockman admitted to so I can take his writings at Antiwar.com** with a grain of salt
*Honestly this could apply to any GOP presidential admin
**I don’t know what the feeling here is on the AW site is but if nothing else they’re principled in opposing foreign entanglements regardless of who the prez is. But despite their libertarian trappings they often let right-wing ideas and columnists get some exposure
Geminid
@Cacti: I heard Don Imus get Pat Buchanan good once:
Imus: “You know, Buchanan lost a relative in a concentration camp.”
Straight man: “I didn’t know that.”
Imus: “Fell out of a guard tower.”
Old School
@debbie:
That was tough to read. That poor girl.
debbie
@Kropacetic:
Delusional thinking, more powerful than fentanyl.
mdblanche
@eclare: I seem to recall Angela making the decision in a panic after Fukushima.
Chetan Murthy
@Big Picture Pathologist: I don’t remember the precise lie he told, but there was some famous one when he was Reagan’s director of the OMB. That’s what I remember.
Cacti
@lowtechcyclist: Wait, some of you clods still think Moscow Eddie Snowden was something other than a Russian asset committing espionage and then heading home to papa bear?
debbie
@Old School:
All of them going through that is just too much. All kinds of photos coming out about civilian massacres in Buccha (sp?). I think I need to be reminded of that Geneva Conference thing.
Gravenstone
It’s enough to give a fellow whiplash trying to follow the reasoning of these clowns. One minute it’s “throw a (small) country against the wall to remind everyone we’re in charge”. The next it’s “we can’t stop Ukraine from being thrown against the wall because it’ll upset our great White hope Pooty Poot”. Often the same useless idiots making both arguments.
Bex
@Calouste: Well, their hero Hitler didn’t allow women to wear what they called trousers.
Kropacetic
Pithier, yes, but lacking precision.
@lowtechcyclist: My personal problem with the lionization of Snowden is that people fundamentally should have already known what he revealed.
The “illegal” surveillance program was described and enacted under the inaptly named US PATRIOT Act. Sure, Snowden filled in some details, but we should have already known this was going on. Frankly, the significance of those details likely sailed right over many, many heads.
Nothing has since been done to make our systems of surveillance more transparent or accountable. Snowden accomplished nothing.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: My problem with Snowden is that he vacuumed up every last secret NSA file he could- and that was a lot- and delivered them to Russia. If he had revealed just the program that he felt was a violation of our civil rights, I’d consider him a “whistleblower.” But Snowden chose to go way beyond that, so to me he is a traitor.
Urza
@Dorothy A. Winsor: What’s it to them? Well, if we have a pluralistic, open, multiracial, multi-ethnic society that can accept LGBQT people, and that society actually works, it disproves everything the hater believe is possible. Also they don’t know how to live without being in the hierarchy preferably with some type of lower class citizen to hate on and blame for their problems. I swear if they ever got their way we could be certain if they no longer have the current enemies they would revert to hating on Catholics and Irish and Greeks and whatever other minority group is to hand.
Baud
@Urza:
They had an analogous problem with heliocentrism.
Sure Lurkalot
@Baud:
Ike decried the capital expense of, as well as the focus of science to, the MIC. Instead, we took on the role of policemen of the world, all the while selling arms and technology to actors good and bad. Ike wanted us to invest in peace and people and we paid him no heed.
So, yes, I’m one of those on the left who would prefer we not devote so much money to the military and would very much like our defense agencies to be subject to audit.
Alison Rose ???
People are amazing:
A toymaker raised $145,000 for Ukraine by creating a Lego-based Zelenskyy figurine
Cacti
@Urza: One of the strangest things about the current fascists is their completely non-historical view of Hitler as some sort of champion for a universal brotherhood of white culture.
The actual Hitler despised non-Germanic whites, and Slavic peoples in particular.
Kropacetic
As am I. However, I will point out the obvious, that these right wing isolationists deserve no heed.
West of the Rockies
@debbie:
I’m not feeling sorry for the Russian army anymore. Maybe sympathy will return. Intellectually I understand some are young, stupefied conscripts. Right now though their mindless brutality has eclipsed–at lease presently for me–sorrow for their plight.
Baud
@Cacti:
Whiteness has always been fluid.
Baud
@Sure Lurkalot:
Sure, but you don’t see anything like that on the right. It’s all rhetoric.
Kropacetic
Right, because it was invented by “white” people to serve as a tool of control and subjugation.
Starfish
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t buy that Snowden was always compromised. There was a type of person that the various intelligence leakers have been. They have been people in their twenties who have been both arrogant and idealistic.
I am not saying that who Snowden is now is the same as who he was then, but I think that Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner all started in similar places.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@lowtechcyclist: Did you miss the part where he campaigned for Dump.
Moreover he didn’t reveal anything new. The penny ante telephone metadata was originally revealed 7 years earlier, but nobody cared at the time. Not even the so called left.
The previously revealed mole hill (that no one cared about) was blown up into a mountain 7 years after the fact because the media was desperate to manufacture a club to use to bash Dems.
Ishiyama
Snopake is what we used to use.
Starfish
@Mike in NC: I am skeptical of the viability of her campaign. (The rich people she scammed last time are not going to give her money.)
Kropacetic
Fact.
Anne Laurie
Nah, it’ll be ‘harvesting children for adrenochrome’, or some Q-craziness of that ilk. (Anyone got pics of #MoscowMitch and Peter ‘Bathory’ Thiel together?)
Remember, when it comes to the GOP Death Cult, it’s always projection!
Redshift
“What amounted to” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. No name on that list deserves to be called any kind of royalty, and “realist” is pure disinformation that shouldn’t be given credence by any responsible outlet.
Ken
@Mike in NC: I can’t help but think that a large chunk of “the political fallout from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine” is that some people and their PACs suddenly aren’t pulling in as much money as they used to.
Ruckus
@Calouste:
I think there’s a detail missing there, like “almost all of them white”.
It’s not missing, if it’s all/almost all white it’s because that’s all they want to see and allow in.
Anne Laurie
Pat noped out of Vietnam because of a ‘bad knee’ — which, as was noted during his ‘glory days’, didn’t keep him from jogging for exercise over the next 30+ years. He’d have been a proud propagandist for the German Reich, but I sincerely doubt he’d have risked his flabby arse on the front, or even back, lines.
Kropacetic
@Ken: Wait, are you suggesting that Russia is financing a huge chunk of the bad-faith political action happening in the US? Maybe even across the world?
The people should be informed!!! Certainly this threat over our national sovereignty will be met with a unified response from our leaders in both parties…
Sure Lurkalot
@Kropacetic: Totally agree.
Doug R
@schrodingers_cat: Bernie’s been better about pushing back against Russia than most of his supporters.
He doesn’t like how putin’s crony capitalism destroying socialism.
Geminid
@Starfish: I’ve never tried much to figure out Snowden’s motivations. I can see how at first he might have been an idealist like Manning and Winner were. I don’t think those two would have done what Snowden did, though, even if they had access the scope of material that he did.
Calouste
@Ruckus: It’s also missing because the journalist writing the piece either didn’t notice or didn’t think it worth mentioning.
Anne Laurie
“The Education of David Stockman”
Second google link, right under his Wikipedia entry.
Stockman was an admitted liar / zealot in the 1980s, and he doesn’t seem to have changed since then.
Starfish
@lowtechcyclist: The shift happened to Guy Fawkes masks and gamergate style bullshit. There is some portion of the left that was “here are the libertarian assholes,” and everyone got tired of them eventually
He stayed supporting Assange for far too long.
Brachiator
@Martin:
The nationalist parties in France and other countries have been caught off guard, but they seem to be replacing Putin love with caution.
The UK Tory Party, however, is mainly collaborationist. Boris Johnson has been alternately lying and dragging his feet with respect to support for Ukraine. He bent over backwards to delay any serious sanctions against oligarchs, and has given up trying to explain why he had one oligarch made a Lord.
Had Trump won the election, he and Boris Johnson would likely have mounted a full on assault against the EU, NATO and other international organizations.
The West has been effectively subverted, and this includes a number of people in the mainstream GOP.
I agree that the GOP is trapped. But they don’t see it, or don’t care. They cannot win national elections honestly, but they can cheat and gerrymander the shit out of elections. A noisy cabal is insisting that democracy means rule by white people. The thing is, the GOP base thinks that all of them are included, but it is becoming clear that the plutocrats believe that only selected white people are fit to rule. They just hope that they can seize control before the suckers find out that they have been kicked to the curb.
Raven
They did not need 45 minutes between these games!
Ruckus
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Like, what’s it to them????
It’s conformation of their bullshit. They do realize that many do not in any way agree with them. So they think the only way to justify their bullshit is to force everyone to agree to it. And that was working for a few decades but the web has given a better picture of their bullshit and so now they have to go all in to have any chance to get their bullshit hate recognized as any kind of reality. It’s what conservative means, conserve hate.
Splitting Image
Nobody seems to have linked to Pat Buchanan’s article blaming mean old Britain, and their chief warmonger Winston Churchill, for the entire atrocity of the German war effort, posted by him on the 70th anniversary of Germany invading Poland. So here it is:
Did Hitler Want War?
It’s a little difficult to find these days by Google search, since it is not the only such article. Uncle Pat has a history of making this sort of argument.
As a few people have said above, the definition of “white” is somewhat fluid. However, a simple way of determining whether a given nation is “white” is to root through its history and find a bloodthirsty tyrant, then find out what Pat Buchanan thinks about him. If that tyrant is white, Uncle Pat will be a fan.
Kay
I went to a Tim Ryan event tonight at a UAW hall. Really encouraging. Genuinely good turnout, for one thing – it was a 20 dollar donation (you get a dinner) and every seat was full. Turnout for D events has been anemic here lately, so I was thrilled to see a full room.
Cheryl Stephens also spoke:
She was great. Warm and funny – she was a big hit.
Villago Delenda Est
JD Vance missed his time calling. Madison Square Garden, 1939.
debbie
@West of the Rockies:
Hearing reports of thefts, rapes, tortures, mining corpses has killed sympathy for me too. That this shirt still goes on in the 21st century! ?
mrmoshpotato
Sounds like David Stockman needs to fly to Moscow and volunteer for the Russian army.
Baud
@Kay:
?
Villago Delenda Est
@Kropacetic: Oozy Ghouliani, 80 years ago, would not have been white, for example.
debbie
@Kay:
The one campaign ad I’ve seen of his is China, China, China. I don’t know what to make of that.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Ever notice who the people who always meep about snowden never say a word about Reality Winner. All she did was reveal russia rigged an election, nothing juicy like metadata
Anne Laurie
Certainly that’s how a lot of us ‘sympathizers’ perceived Snowden, at the time. It may even have been true — as you say, malign foreign agents have a history of recruiting too-smart-for-their-own-good young men who think they’re ‘above’ politics. We probably won’t know for many years when/if he switched from ‘idealistic iconoclast’ to ‘enemy collaborator’… but as the world stands now, he’ll never be permitted to leave Putin’s empire alive.
Kropacetic
Probably remembers and doesn’t want to go back. That’s why he needed to prove his, er, utility to Trump.
Starfish
@Geminid: At the time, I tried to avoid reading too much about the details of what he had done because I had a security clearance that I did not want to jeopardize.
Frankensteinbeck
@lowtechcyclist:
Snowden did not expose a massive illegal domestic surveillance operation on the part of our government. I did not like Snowden from day one, because I actually looked at the secrets being dumped. They did not say the things Snowden and Greenwald said they did. Shit like the number of mistakes in a search engine whose results were removed was presented as the number of times the NSA deliberately targeted Americans. Power point slides where somebody has an idea of a way information could be intercepted was described as if the NSA has already broken into everybody’s computer. Law enforcement access to metadata was presented as ‘The NSA reads anyone’s text messages they feel like’. It was wildly exaggerated half-truths and nothing burgers made to sound like the end of the world.
The campaign of misrepresentation came with equally dishonest side stories, like where the FBI came to interview that guy because of his search results. Except it turned out it wasn’t the FBI, it was the local cops. And the NSA wasn’t involved. His web searches were made at work, and his company’s IT monitors their web use and got spooked.
Just a pile of bullshit. Whether or not he started out working for Russia, Snowden did nothing noble whatsoever.
Redshift
@Anne Laurie: Unlike many of the others, I doubt there’s much projection in these areas with McConnell. He’s only interested in power and preserving the unearned conservative lock on the Supreme Court. He doesn’t care about the content of these attacks, he only cares if he thinks they might work, or at least damage Democrats generally.
mrmoshpotato
@Alison Rose ???:
Same. Love Putin’s so much? Move to his country. And they should all take up Russian citizenship too.
Kay
@debbie:
You have to hear the whole thing. I thought it would be “China took our jobs, wah, wah, wah” (I hate that) but it’s not that at all. It’s China is investing in infastructure and education and we’re screaming at each other over “CRT” or whatever they come up with to scream about. It’s a really coherent Democratic message about how countries can’t rest on their laurels and have to move forward and we can’t because Republicans won’t let us.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Captain C:
That isn’t theoretical.
He’s a chicken hawk.
Villago Delenda Est
@Frankensteinbeck: Absolutely. Glemm Greenwald cannot have a 16 ton weight fall on him a moment too soon.
Urza
@Baud: And there’s still a few around trying to keep that fight going along with flat Earth.
Wag
@Splitting Image: Wow. Pat makes such a convincing case that Churchill forced hitler to kill all those Jews. If no for warmongering Britain, the Final Solution would have been an unrealized nightmare.
Pat is, and always has been, full of shit.
Big Picture Pathologist
@Anne Laurie:
Thanks for this, AL.
Frankensteinbeck
@Redshift:
I truly believe that McConnell is racist as all holy Hell, and that is inextricably wound into his sociopathic power grab. He went scorched earth absolute obstruction specifically the moment a black man was elected president. He was born in an Alabama aristocratic family and is old enough to have personally seen and hold a grudge over desegregation. While I take it for granted that he would block any Supreme Court nominee of Biden’s he could, I am sure the level of vitriol here is because a black woman on the Supreme Court disgusts him.
Kropacetic
If the establishment tells us the Earth is round, we must accept any and all claims to the contrary uncritically.
Redshift
@Brachiator:
Orban in Hungary, too, apparently. I was listening to BBC story today about the election campaign there, and he’s turned on a dime from appearing with Putin days before the war began to telling Hungarians that if the opposition wins, their children will be sent to fight in Ukraine. And depressingly, since his government has suppressed most independent media, it’s probably going to work
Urza
@Cacti: They don’t let slip to the hispanic guy in Proud Boys that he’d be next if they accomplished one of their goals. Or that basically everyone who’s not Germanic or English, maybe Scandinavian, is not wanted by the purists. Should be mandatory DNA tests on every last one of them that speaks or posts anything.
debbie
@Kay:
Yeah, I did kind of roll my eyes and leave the room. I’m glad it’s more than that.
Sanjeevs
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: They don’t like to talk about who outed Reality Winner either
Bill Arnold
@Kent:
Any cites handy for that?
This more general survey (sort of) looks interesting from a 3 minute skim (it’s now on my reading list):
Divide and rule: ten lessons about Russian political influence activities in Europe (Open Access, 08 February 2019, Geir Hågen Karlsen)
Kropacetic
@Kay: One of the biggest surprises of the 2020 primaries was that Tim Ryan actually seemed pretty solid.
topclimber
@Wyatt Salamanca: Moscow Mitch going for the trifecta: racism, misogyny and “Dems love pedophiles.”
Kropacetic
@topclimber: Mitch MqQonnell
Doug R
@lowtechcyclist:
Edward Snowden Did ‘Profound Damage’ to U.S. Security
Redshift
@Frankensteinbeck: Well, yes, I think you’re right about that. He is driven by racism and anyone not “knowing their place” as well as raw power. But unlike some in the GOP, I don’t think the particular nature of these attacks (qanon pedophile stuff) tells us anything about McConnell. He’s just an evil sonofabitch who will use whatever is handy for his evil ends.
Chetan Murthy
@Redshift:
Not exactly “turned on a dime”. He continues to support Putin’s side in this, as much as he can given that his population actually support UA.
lowtechcyclist
I missed the reporting on this. Obviously, that would be treason if true. Link, please?
@Kropacetic:
That should be neither here nor there. Whistleblowers themselves almost never have the capability of changing anything, beyond alerting people to the problem.
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
I have in-laws who did the same. I try to avoid talking politics with them.
Moreover he didn’t reveal anything new. The penny ante telephone metadata was originally revealed 7 years earlier, but nobody cared at the time. Not even the so called left.
Maybe it wasn’t the same stuff, but I remember the Bush Administration losing court cases over surveillance. So somebody on the left must’ve cared.
Such reporting as I saw implied that this was a program conceived as part of the Bush-era GWOT.
So ISTM that the case against Snowden stands or falls on whether he turned a cache of Hoovered-up NSA files over to Putin & Co.
If this surveillance program had already been exposed, then he was ineffective. (And taking on a hell of a lot of personal risk for basically nothing. What a dumb shit.) If he supported Trump, he was stupid, and not someone I’d give the time of day to. If this was the bulk of the case against him, he’d be a largely forgotten footnote by now, rather than someone that seems to still be in the thoughts of a number of frequent posters here.
If Geminid’s assertion that he shared a whole bunch of NSA files with the Russians is true, then sure, he deserves to be spending the rest of his life in a Federal prison. Everything else? He’s not a hero, he’s just a dumbass of no consequence.
Bill Arnold
In close elections in a two-party system, “Socialists” can (and sometimes do) help radical right Republicans win elections.
Doug R
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Yup. I remember the story in Wired dated May 17, 2006.
Those of us paying attention already knew. Plus when the Democrats won big in the 2006 midterms, they reeled in a lot of the abuses. But Snowden fans won’t say anything about that.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140328094710/http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70908
Kay
@Kropacetic:
I’m hoping he’s a “sleeper” upset and national political media assume he’ll lose, or they’ll ruin it :)
“Don’t come! NOTHING going on here! I think Sarah Palin just said something- go cover her”
It’s helpful that the Republican candidates are insane and never shut up so Ryan can just run a general election campaign kind of beneath them.
Ana
@Baud: Good
Brachiator
@Redshift:
I agree with you, but I would add that McConnell and the GOP no longer care what might damage the country overall.
The pursuit of power and GOP dominance is all that matters.
Kent
@Bill Arnold: No handy sites. I do recall reading it on legitimate news sites though.
The German anti-nuclear movement goes back to before Fukushima but apparently there is evidence of Russian meddling in it just like in the US elections. I don’t know to what extent, whether it was direct funding, or just social media efforts. It definitely served Russian interests for Germany to abandon nuclear energy. To the tune of tens of billions of dollars or more.
Kropacetic
But what about the abuses they didn’t reel in…?
lowtechcyclist
Took me years to figure out that “Reality Winner” wasn’t the name of a racehorse.
Kropacetic
Well, considering they’re making hiring decisions based on the blood-red wave about to spill over the US in November 2022, no worries there.
Still, I’m sure they’ll find plenty of reasons to tear him down. He is, after all, a Communist and a Socialist and a Democrat. Those are all the same thing, by the way, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Kay
Donald Trump still unaware that Meijer is a huge grocery chain in Michigan and literally everyone knows how to pronounce it and goes to a “Meijer” once a week.
also -It’s a Dutch name. And there are tons of Dutch people in western Michigan.
Whatever else he is – a criminal, a rapist, a thief, let’s never forget that he’s also a moron.
Starfish
@lowtechcyclist: I think what Geminid is saying is true.
—Business Insider – 2015
Kropacetic
No one knew pronouncing names could be so complicated.
Kay
@Kropacetic:
And Dutch people are THRIFTY (just ask them, they’ll tell you) so the grocery chain had a little Dutch boy mascot which meant you would save money.
Kropacetic
They’re suckers for paying at all. /Trump
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Kropacetic: You should see Trump and the word Nevada.
Redshift
@Chetan Murthy:
Did I say anything about him not supporting Putin? The point I was replying to was about nationalist parties turning from being open pro-Putin to urging “caution,” which is exactly what Orban is doing here. I have no doubt all of them still support Putin as much as they can get away with.
NotMax
Willing to go out on a limb and state, sight unseen, there was not a tan suit in the place.
//
sdhays
@Mike in NC:
I can just imagine Sarah Palin sidling up to (ex?)-Congressman Cawthorn in 2023 saying, “Soooo, where can I sign up for the cocaine-fueled orgies?”, not having paid enough attention to know that he was saying he didn’t take part in any of that.
NotMax
Because America First worked so well for COVID.
//
Kropacetic
America, first in COVID!!!
TonyG
@Kent: And Putin is a white man and is allied with a “Christian” (Russian Orthodox) church. Plus he likes to prance around with his shirt off (in a very non-gay way, of course). What’s not to like about him?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Speaking of cults in the GOP. take a look at this guys twitter deep dive into the Nordic friendly aliens verses the evil Reptilian aliens conspiracy theory that a lot of these dimwits are into.
The TL:DR version; good Nordic aliens are helping Trump and REAL Americans verses the evil Reptilian aliens who are helping Liberals, Doctors and other wicked people eat all the little white babies.
Kropacetic
Republicans: UwU we need big strong zaddy like this.
Wapiti
@Ken: It will be interesting to see how various fund-raising totals turn out, for those who have to report.
mrmoshpotato
@Villago Delenda Est:
Hi. I’m going to use this. Sue me for copyright infringement. I’LL SEE YOU IN COURT!
sdhays
@Kropacetic: Indeed. For example, surnames spelled “T-R-U-M-P” are pronounced “TRAMP”. English is a funny language.
brantl
@Cacti: Dear Cacti, DIAF.
brantl
@Geminid: I know that’s been said of him, but not proven.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Sarcasm aside, Putin’s Thieves-In-Law gangsta membership signaling fits the Millennialist mythology of Christian rebel warriors fighting The Beast’s Evil system.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
The crowd size at that rally is so sad, I don’t think it matters.
Urza
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I wish they had stolen that one from Stargate, but i’m sadly aware Stargate just stole it from earlier conspiracy theories. Would be hilarious if they started screaming about making the gate public.
Mike E
OT but I watched the 1st season of Das Boot and it was kinda like the movie if it was show-run by the peeps who bought you 24. Heh.
Chris
@Kropacetic:
OMG, thank you.
This is something I was saying, I believe on Balloon Juice as well, already at the time: what the fuck did Snowden reveal that we didn’t already know? We knew the U.S. government was performing warrantless wiretapping on its own citizens, because the New York Times broke that story all the way back in 2005. (I believe that’s the one they sat on until after the 2004 election because they “didn’t want to influence the election.”) Nothing was done since then, so of course it was still going on when Snowden broke his story. Yes, Snowden revealed some specifics about how it was being done, and I’m sure a lot of computer nerds went gaga over that, but the bottom line of what was being done was exactly what we’d already known for most of a decade.
And the hysterics over Snowden’s revelations was one of these parts of the Obama era that had me going “OK, seriously, is everybody insane?” The number of people who suddenly decided that they were shocked, shocked, that there was wiretapping going on in here – again, a story that had been public knowledge for eight freaking years – was reminiscent of the number of people who suddenly decided in late January 2009 that deficits were suddenly the most important thing in the world: either it was true stupidity, or very blatant bad faith.
Kropacetic
@Chris: But Obama was supposed to fix all that. And what’s a Congress?
Chris
@West of the Rockies:
I’m fed up with being asked to feel sorry for soldiers in war zones, at least when they’re the soldiers of an invading power. They’re the people with the guns. They’re the people doing the vast majority of the killing, maiming, raping, and pillaging. They’re not completely undeserving of sympathy, given the nature of the service, but they are at the very bottom of the list of people who should get it.
Chris
@Kropacetic:
There are things I don’t mind giving Obama shit for, but he gets a lot of leeway from me on the abuses of his security state, because the very first thing he did when coming into office was to try to tackle one of its most egregious abuses (Guantanamo Bay). And he ran right into this fucking wall when it turned out that everybody else in Washington was either dead-set against it or didn’t care.
I can’t exactly fault him for concluding that the war-on-terror-state was simply too entrenched and popular to go up against, and concentrate on the battles that were winnable. If people wanted him to take on the security state, more of them should have shown up in support when he was actually doing it.
Gvg
@schrodingers_cat: I am so old, I remember that some of us didn’t buy Snowden was a hero bullshit from the beginning and pushed back on it. I also remember that we didn’t get run off and that as the story unfolded, his supporters wised up. So I don’t think he was that important.
Raven
What a great fucking game!
Chris
@Starfish:
Has anybody ever looked at Snowden’s Wikipedia page?
It’s so stupidly obvious that I’d never done it until a few weeks ago, but the “career” section and especially the “political views” section are illuminating. He joined the military and CIA in the Bush years and seems to have spouted some shit about “liberating oppressed people” in Iraq, voted third party in 2008, was an NRA nut who responded to rumors of an Obama assault weapons ban by claiming that he and his “gun-toting NRA compatriots” would be “on the steps of Congress” if that happened… and spewed some hair-raisingly racist shit after visiting London about how he was terrified to get out of the car because there were so many Muslims. This, to put it mildly, is not the profile of a person with a deep and abiding concern for civil liberties, the Constitution, or the rule of law.
The sad truth is that the likeliest explanation by far for Snowden is that he’s always been a hard-right-wing asshole, who completely lost his shit just like the rest of them when Obama was elected, and reacted by punishing the government he was leading and the country that dared to elect him.
Kent
Exactly. He’s not a Nancy-boy like Zelenskyy.
Chris
@Urza:
Something I remember noticing with my childhood entertainment was that both Stargate and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys were set in universes where gods (or “gods”) were generally cruel, oppressive, and arbitrary… except, for some reason, the Norse gods, who were generally portrayed as benevolent.
I’d really like to believe that wasn’t channeling the Nord supremacism inherent in the nastier strands of occultism and conspiracy theories, but oy.
Cacti
@brantl: Dear Snowden clod: You were wrong, you were stupid, and now you’re salty about it.
You should be. GFY.
Another Scott
@Chris:
ArsTechnica, also too:
He was a young guy who thought much too much of his intellect, didn’t understand that a network tech is not the same as an intelligence analyst, and thought everyone else should accept that he knows it all and that’s all one needs to know.
He’s a narcissist like TFG and none of his stories to the SCMP about fighting for his freedom in Hong Kong made any sense at all. Then he ran away to Moscow.
Brave, brave, truth-telling whistleblower. (groucho-roll-eyes.gif)
He was a thief, a coward, a liar, and someone who broke his oath and all kinds of rules about access and handling classified information. And now he’s apparently disillusioned that he didn’t understand that VVP really was going to actually go to war in Ukraine just like Biden and Blinken and Austin said. Poor, poor Ed who FAFO has a sad.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chris Johnson
@SamIAm: Oh, she’s right that Putin co-opted Rose Twitter. As someone who was once into Chapo Trap House immediately post-election, I can assure you that she is right that Putin ran some of the left-leaning stuff and had people in there steering ’em as hard as they steer the QAnons.
She is flat wrong in thinking that’s ALL it was. Adam Curtis had Putin’s number years ago. The guy provides aid to the entire political spectrum to produce chaos politics and destabilize everybody. There’s probably even some Rose Twitter that is real and authentic, but when you’re talking Twitter that’s ground zero for Russian influencers and it’s easy to see where Cat loses track. Putin puts a lot of effort into trying to run the Left, nearly as much as he puts into trying to run the Right.
These days he’s got bigger problems so a lot of things are slipping from his control…
Chris
@Another Scott:
God, what a dumbass.
“Are they trying to start a war?” How the fuck would this start a war? You think Iran is going to commit national suicide by starting a war with the eight hundred pound gorilla that they just watched completely destroy the country next door? Over a couple of sabotage programs that, if they didn’t already know about, they certainly knew or assumed that we had some things like that running in their country? Bullshit. The only way a war with Iran happens is if America or Israel start one – which, though it would kill the likes of Snowden to admit it, is something Obama took great pains to decrease the likelihood of.
And I’d heard the “Obama just named a fucking politician to run the CIA” line before too. Funny how that was never a problem with Dubya was doing it (naming politicians to cabinet positions where they run departments they may or may not have any previous experience with is the norm, regardless of party). It just further reinforces my “yeah, he didn’t give a shit about any of this until a black Democrat was in the White House” sense.
evodevo
@Kropacetic: It’s received doctrine among the MAGAts I argue with constantly on Book of Faces lol – and facts and graphs make NO dent in their delusion…