Liberals loved to insist the End of America is near whenever the nation’s mask slips far enough to reveal it’s true face.

Dirty truth is that the USA will keep on trucking, right over millions more people. Only difference will be that they’re our neighbors this time, rather than colonized peoples on the other end of the Earth.

I believe it was the British that burned DC down

I’m sure the Democrats will have a unified and muscular response that puts the best interests of their constituents first.

I heard Reza Pahlavi is wildly popular in Iran right now and Iranian locals are enthusiastic about seeing the Shah returned to power. Is this true?

What’s the lie about Ukraine?

Yaroslav Hunka scandal leaps to mind. But farther than that, it was the same old “it’s not going to be a quagmire”, “it’s not just about propping up the US arms industry”, “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” line we’ve been hearing in every international theater.

Even the bit about Trump being “Putin’s Puppet” falls apart on any amount of historical interrogation. Trump was selling anti-tank missiles to Kiev as far back as 2018, three years before the Donbas invasion. He’d laid a bunch of sanctions on the country the first year he took office.

Then, as soon as Biden took office, he’s the one weak on Ukraine, according to the GOP.

Both parties egged their own supporters on by insisting the other party wasn’t Pro-Ukraine enough. Both parties insisted the other faction was “Communist”. Both insisted the other was a fifth column, trying to disarm the US from within. It was always and forever bullshit.

Nobel Peace Laureate

Wish that brand wasn’t covered in the slime of the last recipient.

Terrorism

Tackle your hunger

83 is already 7 years of bonus time

You could ask Dianne Feinstein the same question. God only knows what keeps Chuck Grassley ticking.

These people are fucking pathological.

Elderly people are stubborn as old nails. They don’t just move out of the way on their own.

The better question is what’s keeping them affixed to their positions. Enormous amounts of money go to defending incumbents with full on dementia. And party loyalists consider their aging leadership sacrosanct.

On top of all that, Senators get the best health care benefits in the world. Keeping your job is - in some ways - a predicate for your very survival.

They made an observation of their own experiences

Gotta develop a more historical outlook or you’re doomed to repeat historical mistakes.

Under no other president did I fear for the lives of so many Americans.

I mean, were you around during the Cuban missile crisis?

Trump’s a total piece of shit, but I do think there’s some serious recency bias.

The Drug War under Reagan, the War on Terror under Bush, numerous tense years during the height of the Cold War - Stalin getting the H-bomb, Egypt closing the Suez, MacArthur getting forced out of North Korea, the Tet Offensive and subsequent protests, epidemics from AIDS to Polio…

Things have been bad in the US on and off for a while.

Don’t forget that GWB is one of the people responsible for the post-911 over-reaction that allowed all of this to happen.

True, true. But I could argue there was someone even more responsible than Bush…

In 1995, Biden introduced the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act, which contained proposals that were later recycled into the 2001 Patriot Act.

He also helped write the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which he argued was a precursor to the Patriot Act.

Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data

Aleksandr Kogan (born April 6, 1986) is a Moldovan-born American scientist

Education University of California, Berkeley (BA)

University of Hong Kong (MA, PhD)

:-/

The chief executive of Lukoil, Vagit Alekperov, is a former Soviet oil minister who has said the strategic aims of Lukoil are closely aligned with those of Russia. “I have only one task connected with politics, to help the country and the company. I’m not close to Mr Putin, but I treat him with great respect,” he told the New York Times.

In 1990, Alekperov was appointed deputy minister of the Oil and Gas Industry of the Soviet Union and became the youngest deputy energy minister in Soviet history

At this time, Western oil companies began actively seeking partners in Russia. During a visit to British Petroleum facilities in the United Kingdom in 1990, Alekperov personally headed the Russian delegation at the negotiations. Rondo Fehlberg, an executive at BP, told NY Times that Alekperov took control of the agenda during that 1990 trip, sternly asking the BP executives to explain how a modern oil company should be set up.

…

During at least three meetings in Turkey and London in 2014 and 2015, executives associated with Alekperov’s firm Lukoil allegedly questioned persons at the Alexander Nix associated firms SCL Group, which is closely associated with Aleksandr Kogan, and Cambridge Analytica, which is closely associated with Steve Bannon, who supported Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for President of the United States, and Robert Mercer, who supported Ted Cruz’s campaign for President of the United States, about how United States election data about American voters could be used to target them according to Christopher Wylie

…

In 2000, Lukoil acquired the distribution and marketing operations of American oil company Getty Oil. This resulted in the control of a network of gas stations in the United States, as well as the first time Lukoil entered the American oil market.

In September 2004, ConocoPhillips purchased a 7.6% stake in Lukoil for about $2 billion. According to some commentators, the sale of this deal was planned before in a personal meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and ConocoPhillips’ president and CEO, James Mulva. After the auction, Lukoil and ConocoPhillips announced the creation of a strategic alliance. Later, the American company increased its stake to 20% in Lukoil and sold to the Russian company part of its network of gas stations in the United States and Western Europe. The two oil companies also agreed to jointly develop an oil and gas field in the northern Timan-Pechora area of Russia (Komi Republic) and intended to secure the rights to develop the West Qurna Field in Iraq, one of the country’s largest.

Hey look there’s more…

The EU’s gas love-in with Azerbaijan is a gift for the Russian oil giant Lukoil

Lukoil gas station rebranded BP

UK extends sanctions exemption for Lukoil Bulgaria subsidiaries

Oh what a tangled web we weave.

Also research Cambridge Analytica

Cambridge Analytica Ltd. (CA), previously known as SCL USA, was a British political consulting firm that came to prominence through the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal. It was founded in 2013, as a subsidiary of the private intelligence company and self-described “global election management agency” SCL Group by long-time SCL executives Nigel Oakes, Alexander Nix and Alexander Oakes, with Nix as CEO. Cambridge Analytica was hired by a variety of political actors, including the Trinidadian government in 2010 and the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

Nigel John Oakes (born July 1962) is a British businessman, and the founder and CEO of Behavioural Dynamics Institute and SCL Group

Alexander James Ashburner Nix (born 1 May 1975) is a British businessman who was the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica

Alexander Waddington Oakes (born November 1968) is a British businessman, and the co-founder and an executive of Behavioural Dynamics Institute and SCL Group

So, I’m seeing a country’s name come up over and over again. But it’s not Russia.

The firm maintained offices in London, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

Cambridge Analytica (SCL USA) was incorporated in January 2013 with its registered office being in Westferry Circus, London and consisting of just one staff member, director and CEO Alexander Nix (also appointed in January 2015).[13] Nix was also the director of nine similar companies sharing the same registered offices in London, including Firecrest technologies, Emerdata and six SCL Group companies including “SCL elections limited”.[14] Nigel Oakes, known as the former boyfriend of Lady Helen Windsor, had founded the predecessor SCL Group in the 1990s, and in 2005 Oakes established SCL Group together with his brother Alexander Oakes and Alexander Nix; SCL Group was the parent company of Cambridge Analytica.[15] Former Conservative minister and MP Sir Geoffrey Pattie was the founding chairman of SCL; Lord Ivar Mountbatten also joined Oakes as a director of the company.[12] As a result of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Nix was removed as CEO and replaced by Julian Wheatland before the company closed.[16] Several of the company’s executives were Old Etonians.

Yeah, I’m seeing a whole lot of Brits show up in this article.

I think the situation is more complex than that. These are three expansionist imperial powers in a very loose coalition, perfectly happy to stab the other two in the back if it suits them.

The idea that Putin “owns” Trump is American media fiction. It’s not Devin Nunes sitting in the VP chair and its not Aleksandr Dugin operating as his Homeland Security Advisor. The folks that have their hooks deepest into Trump are 100% American.

Trump didn’t nail up a pic of him and natanyahu on the white house wall a few weeks ago

Trump shaking hands with Netanyahu doesn’t Own The Libs. It’s one of those issues Chuck Schumer races Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson to applaud him on.

Besides they can all be in bed together

I don’t think for a second that anyone believes Democrats are in bed with Putin. And the urgency to take the fight to Russia is a major dividing line between MAGA Republicans and Neocon leftovers. (One that Trump was on the other side of as late as 2019)

It would be safer to say Netayahu is in bed with Putin, pulling strings on his behalf, than that the Trump GOP is aligned with Putin directly and not just playing Ukraine and Russia off against one another for their own benefit.

The office of the president is far too powerful

The office of the Republican president is far too powerful.

The office of the Democratic president is impotent and feeble.

Putin is our defacto president

It’s so funny to see the US intelligence services working overtime for sixteen years to do regime change in Russia. And because they keep fucking it up, the presumption is that we’re in Russia’s thrall.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu takes flights out to DC every few years to give joint chamber speeches at our own capital building. He gives his minions in our legislature explicit marching orders, while his affiliates in AIPAC drop billions of dollars into primary and national congressional races, influence peddle to affect judicial appointments, and lobby states to outlaw criticism of the Israeli state, and we’re just like “Oh yeah, this is normal, nothing to see here”.