Via valued commenter Schrodinger’s Cat, an excerpt from Juan-Amnesty McSoreLoserPants’ NYT op-ed, the topic of which is how Obambi has made America Putin’s bitch:
For Mr. Putin, vacillation invites aggression. His world is a brutish, cynical place, where power is worshiped, weakness is despised, and all rivalries are zero-sum. He sees the fall of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He does not accept that Russia’s neighbors, least of all Ukraine, are independent countries. To him, they are Russia’s “near abroad” and must be brought back under Moscow’s dominion by any means necessary.
Allow me to interpret:
For Mr. McCain, diplomacy is inferior to aggression. His world is a brutish, cynical place, where power is worshiped, weakness is despised, and all rivalries are zero-sum. He sees the decline of American influence in the wake of the disastrous Bush administration as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He does not accept that
America’s neighbors* any country in the world, least of all [fill in the blank], are independent countries. To him, they are America’s “near abroad” and must be brought back under Washington’s dominion by any means necessary.
And thank you, liberal NYT, for giving the cranky fuck — who never met a war he didn’t rush to mong** and who was cynical and unpatriotic enough to thrust that babbling, empty-headed, moose-shooting twit from Alaska onto the national stage — a platform from which to denounce the guy who has been trying to clean up Bush’s mess for half a decade.
*Updated for truth — H/T: Kay (not the front-pager)
**H/T: Jim, Foolish Literalist (I think)
Villago Delenda Est
Grandpa Walnuts needs to SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Big R
For giving the cranky fuck what?
Betty Cracker
@Big R: “…a platform from which to denounce the guy who has been trying to clean up Bush’s mess for half a decade.” Run-on sentence runs on. Not my best work. ;-) Em dashes to the rescue!
cleek
i like that the comments are 99% “shut up, you out of touch old man”
Big R
@Betty Cracker: Ah,I thought the platform was for the empty-headed, moose-shooting twit, but now I parse the sentence correctly.
Bob In Portland
So is that one man’s opinion or is that propaganda? Is it a bad choice or the correct choice under the circumstances?
Mike in NC
Looking forward to 17 exclusive appearances by McDouche and his surrogates on the Sunday morning gabfests this weekend.
raven
Did you know he was a POW?
SiubhanDuinne
@cleek:
I’ve frequently noticed that the NYT‘s readership is, by and large, more sensible than its writers and editors.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
Do tell.
Villago Delenda Est
@raven: Being a POW, and being subject to “advanced propaganda production techniques” didn’t cause him to vehemently disapprove of the various crimes committed in that vein by the deserting coward assmalistration. On the contrary, he was mute about those crimes, similar to the crimes he endured in the Hanoi Hilton.
For this, he is damned.
Ruckus
@raven:
Petty Ordinary Witless?
schrodinger's cat
Thanks Betty!
Media WatchCat has a pissed.
Karen in GA
@raven: I never heard that. I totally call bullshit.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
Are you trying to say that being a POW didn’t make him a better person?
Keith
Without reading the whole thing, I will assume the op-ed ends with “He is…the most interesting man in the world.”
Gin & Tonic
I’m old enough to remember when politics stopped at the water’s edge.
Ruckus
@Karen in GA:
From raven or from walnuts?
Cause I believe walnuts only knows bullshit. Can’t recall anything else ever coming out of his mouth.
raven
@Villago Delenda Est: He know we were one or two arc-lights away from winning when the gutless pinko press made us pack up our shit and shove slicks off carriers into the South China Sae!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Has anyone seen the old coot confronted with the Georgian example when he starts prattling about how our “feckless*” foreign policy encouraged Putin? Or did Putin decide to carve up that country because Bush “vacillated” in New Orleans? I did note Peggy Noonan say that Putin is “sometimes” encouraged by “weakness”.
*a thousand dollars to the favorite charity of the reporter who asks him to define that word next time he spits it out.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ruckus: He didn’t learn from it, obviously. So I think becoming a better person has been precluded.
Elizabelle
@cleek:
I’ve got one in there!
catclub
The CIA report (plus the latest coverup crimes) could turn out to be a very big deal. Charlie Pierce certainly thinks it should be.
ETA: Just reading Ritholtz on all the unprosecuted crime of the mortgage debacle does not make me happy about prospects for the CIA case.
MattF
Specifically, McCain’s been an avid advocate of eastward NATO expansion (including Georgia (!!), not to mention Ukraine, and aggressive missile deployments. Fortunately, all of our NATO allies think these are terrible ideas.
danielx
@Keith:
Clearly that’s what the schedulers for the Sunday am talk shows think, since I don’t think he’s missed being on the tube on Sunday morning since January of 2009.
With very rare exceptions, all McCain’s pronouncements distill to “get the fuck off my lawn” and “somebody needs to be bombed ASAP, and sooner if they happen to be brown people”. Also. Too.
Elizabelle
Meanwhile, in other general witlessness, Glenn Kessler awards Democrats 4 pinocchios for their anti-Koch Brothers ad. It’s got this little blurb:
I cannot tell you the particulars, because I did not want to enter that rathole this morning.
Suffice it to say, we’ve got Kessler’s “work product” on the WaPost website now, under “other top stories”, and John McCain’s staffers’ “work product” parked on the NYTimes editorial page.
And Ezra Klein ain’t gonna save us from this world o journalisming.
JGabriel
John McCain:
I don’t doubt that there’s a little bit of the Hobbesian “nasty, brutish, and short” quality to life in in Putin’s Russia.
I am surprised, though, that McCain thinks that’s an argument in favor of emulating Putin’s behavior.
It kind of tells us what kind of president McCain would have been. It’s such a relief that he didn’t win in 2008.
raven
GO ILLINI!
Elizabelle
@JGabriel:
One of the NYTimes reader comments noted that Putin’s world sounds a lot like Dick Cheney’s world.
And it weren’t me that said that.
Kay (not the front-pager)
There. Fixed it for ya.
Calouste
@JGabriel:
The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the American voters for not electing another warmongering Republican.
Gene108
The narrative of American politics has been – since Truman lost China to the Communists – that liberals and/or Democrats make America weak and thus insecure at home and abroad by emboldening our enemies.
Bush, Jr, in 2000, spouted off about regiments or brigades (cannot remember the exact troop level) not having sufficient equipment to deploy. Rebuilding our military readiness was a major theme of the 2000 campaign for a Republicans.
I think Reagan did this, with regards to Carter not ramping up defense spending to Vietnam War era levels, but I was not tuned into politics in 1980, as I was struggling to write lower case r’s.
The same theme was used after 9/11/01, when Republicans reflexively wanted to pin 100% of the blame for allowing it to happen on the Clinton Administration.
You now are seeing this narrative come back to life, aided by our media that seems to have learned nothing from the problems Bush&Co caused by taking a “tough” stance on “bad guys”, like North Korea, which decided to restart its nuclear weapons program and denoted a nuclear device, in 2006, that they halted in 1994, thanks to Clinton’s “appeasement” approach.
Xantar
Ewwww….Did not need that image in my head.
Oh wait, you said mong? I was thinking of mung.
For the love of FSM, do not look it up on Urban Dictionary.
What? There was a New York Times post talking about McCain? Huh. Let me know when something relevant happens.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
And proven!
Jay C
@cleek:
Agreed: Here’s my offering:
I mean, McCain IS right in his assessments of Russian policy under Vladimir Putin (and I’m sure that most players in the Administration from Obama and Kerry on down would agree with him): it’s just that the notion – that he denies and then dances around – that “strength” and “credibility” derive solely from the willingness to use military force has, shall we say, a bit of downside? Which factor President Obama, at least, appears to take the time to consider: Grampa McCrankypants, who only has to worry which TV talk-shows he gets to bluster on can afford to toss the BS around.
chopper
@Gin & Tonic:
ah, I remember the old days, back before January of 2009. I wore an onion on my belt…
Villago Delenda Est
@Gene108: Nearly every last one of the military upgrades seen during the Reagan administration were initiated by Carter. Reagan just took credit for them.
Reagan’s actual initiatives, such as the “Peacekeeper” missile and the Strategic Defense Initiative, were nothing by MIC money sinks, producing nothing of any actual military use whatsoever. SDI is the greatest boondoggle in the history of DoD boondoggles, and this was known from the day after Reagan’s speech announcing it, another example of Reagan confusing what he saw in the movies with reality.
EconWatcher
In fairness, I don’t think it was cynicism and lack of patriotism that led McCain to pick Palin. It was her tight sweater.
Elizabelle
@Gene108:
Note the URL tag the NYTimes gave to McCain’s op ed:
Why is it always the Republicans who are “realists”?
Meanwhile, Gail Collins has a top emailed column on Paul Ryan’s anti-lunch screed.
Lunch on the Barricades
NYT blurb:
WTF is wrong with these people?
chopper
@Xantar:
Now I’m imagining walnuts pushing on a pregnant woman’s belly.
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
Because reporters want to picture themselves as the next Ernie Pyle or Edward R. Murrow, gallantly reporting from the front.
Villago Delenda Est
@EconWatcher: It was her ass. Have you seen this video of McWalnuts checking out the booty?
Gene108
You guys think that this “America is weak” talk has nothing to do with proposed DoD cuts?
We cannot reduce military spending in times of peace, because that would just give the green light for the next Hitler il Sung bin Laden to attack us or our allies.
Gin & Tonic
@Villago Delenda Est: SDI was worse than a money sink, it ended up leading very close to a Soviet pre-emptive nuclear strike. Read up on Able Archer and the environment that prevailed at the time (1983.) Some analysts believe the world was closer to nuclear war then than during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And it probably doesn’t need to be said that the Perle-Wolfowitz axis was the cause.
Villago Delenda Est
@Elizabelle:
The school lunch program was instituted after WWII because so many draftees were found to be so undernourished that they were problematic, at best, for fighting in WWII.
It used to be a matter of national security, but since it doesn’t directly funnel tax dollars to General Dynamics or Boeing (or the former flag officers they hire) well, it’s no longer a matter of national security!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Good lord. The man who thinks the problem with the Iraq War was we didn’t invest enough blood, treasure and time is a “realist”. And of all the Establishment media establishments, the NYT is probably the best of the worst, the least infected by whatever weird daddy issues it is McCain triggers in The Village.
schrodinger's cat
@Gene108: American’s military is better equipped than its next 10 rivals put together and even that is not enough for war mongers like McCain.
Cacti
@schrodinger’s cat:
American’s military is better equipped than its next 10 rivals put together and even that is not enough for war mongers like McCain.
As one astute NYT commenter pointed out, if McCain had been POTUS would have or have had shooting wars with Syria, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Russia since 2008.
Gene108
@Villago Delenda Est:
But Reagan ramped up military spending, which made “everyone” feel safer.
If Obummer proposed to double defense spending, instead of dialing it back, America would not be projecting weakness to the world.
Villago Delenda Est
@Gene108: Yeah, I know. How come that “throwing money at the problem” works for Defense but nothing else?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Cacti: S/he forgot Libya, and the continued occupation of Iraq, and some kind of bone-headed entanglement in Egypt in support of… someone, those who clearly share our values. Since these are counterfactuals, I guess we can leave the questions of personnel and congressional funding aside.
schrodinger's cat
The conflict in Ukraine is not about the US or about Obama for that matter. It takes a special kind of arrogance to make it all about yourself, like a bawling toddler. McCain is guilty of that but so are so many of our media betters.
Gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
Military spending is an addiction. Sure you can get good and drunk off 10 beers, but wouldn’t having 11 just get you a better high?
Sure we can protect our two large coastlines by having 11 of the 22 aircraft carriers deployed in the world today, but wouldn’t a 12th just make us be even safer?
When you think about defense spending like this the mindset of many people becomes clearer.
Cacti
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
S/he forgot Libya, and the continued occupation of Iraq, and some kind of bone-headed entanglement in Egypt in support of… someone, those who clearly share our values. Since these are counterfactuals, I guess we can leave the questions of personnel and congressional funding aside.
Almost seems like there might have been a reason that Senator McCain never held any significant command positions in his Navy career, despite being the son and grandson of Admirals.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
As you well know the reason is not throwing the money in the right direction.
The general health of the nation and it’s citizens is not an issue, the health of wealthy bank accounts is.
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat:
There, fixed that for you. I’m sure Media WatchCat approves.
MattF
@Jay C: I think ‘bluster’ is the key concept here. Somehow, it’s assumed that the Russkies won’t recognize it when they see it. “Aha,” they’ll say…”Senator McCain is threatening us. Now, the last 472 times he threatened us, it was bluff and hot air. But this time I think he really means it.”
Yep, that’ll work.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cacti: I’d love to read his fitness reports from his stint as a air wing commander. I’ll bet there’s some real dirt in there. His naval career ended after he was given a command. That does not speak well of him.
Compare/contrast with John Kerry’s fitness reports from his tour in ‘Nam, which are public information.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@schrodinger’s cat: Narcisso-jingoism, in the political version of the DSM. Remember in ’04/’05, when all events in the Iraqi civil war between Shias, Sunnis and hostile tribal groupings were just about embarrassing poor President Bush?
That was about the same time the Warmonger in question told friendly pundits that he would solve that civil war by getting the head Shia guy, the head Sunni guy, and the head Kurd guy in a room, and tell them to “cut the bullshit”. Some forty years earlier, Ted Baxter proposed a similar solution to the Cold War. Can’t find a video. Those friendly pundits still regard John McCain as foreign policy wiseman.
Chris
Russia treats the former Soviet republics like America used to treat Latin America (and heck, still does – the Venezuela coup was 2002). It’s ugly, yes, and it’s absolutely standard great power behavior. American “weakness” doesn’t come into it.
Bob In Portland
Read it and weep. Or clap. Whatever your taste.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: Ah, Bob Romanov chimes in on the thread!
Mike in NC
The State Department needs to yank the old man’s passport so he can’t visit any more of the many countries he wants us to invade and occupy for 100 years.
Chris
@Elizabelle:
“Realist” is actually a school of thought in international relations, and in my experience, its members hate, hate, hate, HATE being associated with modern conservatives. Especially post 2008.
cleek
@Gene108:
oddly, Obama’s DoD budget proposal is higher than what Congress had set as the maximum allowable (thanks to the sequester).
this must never be mentioned.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris: I wouldn’t want to be associated with former Trotskyite neo-con assclowns, either. Especially Doug Feith.
Cacti
@Villago Delenda Est:
Ah, Bob Romanov chimes in on the thread!
Our resident LaRouchie has come to preach the gospel of progressive Russian imperialism.
Repent, and be converted ye heathens!
Elizabelle
How slippery! The NYTimes has changed the subhead of McCain’s op ed.
It’s now:
It used to be:
Their readers are not taking the Times’ first subhead well at all, so they amended it.
I know they did, because I copied that phrase for my reader comment while looking at the headline.
Elizabelle
@Chris:
Well that’s a realistic assessment!
Bob In Portland
@Cacti: I’ll accept your apology whenever you see the light.
Villago Delenda Est
@Elizabelle: The munchkins of Minitru are hard at work, rectifying the copy of the Times to reflect that the truth has changed!
NorthLeft12
@Kay (not the front-pager): Thanks Kay. I would add that Putin seems to stick to countries to interfere with which are actually his neighbours, rather than the globe spanning view that virtually every US President since [insert name here] has had.
Of course McCain would complain that since Russia is bigger it has more neighbours to mess with.
Someguy
I don’t care if Russia doesn’t stop moving west until Putin has a dacha at Land’s End, and the Spanish rename San Juan Compostella as St. Igor’s.
It’s not our problem and the only people who think we need to make it our problem are neo-cons compensating for their chronic needledick condition.
Bob In Portland
In the meantime, feel free to read this.
Jay C
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yeah: “public information” just always leads to the obvious conclusion……
raven
Bob In Portland
Hey dickhead, if you have something to say, say it. Fuck your dopey ass links.
NorthLeft12
@Gene108: If memory serves, Jimmy Carter made some pretty significant military expenditure increases very early in his presidency. He got the ball rolling and Reagan accellerated it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jay C: Only when you’re willfully ignoring actual fact for ideological reasons, which is what shitstains like “Doctor” Jerome Corsi do…for a living/grift.
raven
@Villago Delenda Est: And Tweety giving those fuck’s a microphone over and over.
catclub
@Cacti: Also Canada.
raven
You wanna link, I gotta link
Ukraine Crisis: Six Reasons Why U.S. Use Of Military Forces Is Unthinkable
Elizabelle
To his credit, I believe that Senator McCain is blameless in the disappearance of Malaysian 370.
That is one aircraft he did not destroy. Or lose. Or hijack. Whatevers ….
Ruckus
@Elizabelle:
Fixed it for you. Never doubt that McCain could cause the loss of an airplane.
Gin & Tonic
In the meantime, as diplomacy seems to be ineffective, it seems that capital is expressing its views, as MICEX and RTS are both down in the neighborhood of 20% over the last month.
tybee
@Ruckus:
if he knocks down one more allied aircraft, he’ll be a north vietnamese ace.
Bob In Portland
The Treaty of Fort Hunt
mike in dc
So, Bob, what do you think of the “no status quo option” referendum, and the beginning of Russian expansion into Eastern Ukraine(which has a substantial Russian population but not necessarily a majority there)?