Opinion
By Jeff Childers
02-07-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your hump-day roundup includes: Tucker Carlson confirms controversial interview of Russian President Putin; a roundup of bad news about Ukraine as the country gets completely hollowed out and dependent on foreign partners to show a semblance of life; the most significant part of the Florida Grand Jury’s report; and lonely California county makes history with a declaration of emergency you never saw coming.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥 We begin today’s post with one of the most remarkable developments yet in one of the most remarkable years on record — and we’re just two months in — when yesterday, Tucker Carlson broke radio silence and from the roof of his Moscow hotel, with Red Square visible off in the distance over his left shoulder, ended the first controversy over his Russian trip by admitting he was, in fact, in town to interview the world’s most hated person, public enemy number one, war criminal and real-life Emmanuel Goldstein, you know him, you hate him, President Vladimir Putin.
CLIP: Tucker Carlson announces and defends his interview of President Putin of Russia (4:28).
Tucker’s short message may have ended the controversy over who he planned to interview, but it launched a brand-new controversy over whether it was the worst disaster that ever happened including Hiroshima, Pompeii, and that skinny guy dressed like a girl who Bud Lite put on its beer bottles that one time.
Most Americans have not heard a single word from the Russian president since our Proxy War with Russia began. Their delicate brains have been tenderly protected from the evil magical spells that would surely emanate from even an interpreted version of a Putin speech. And since nobody has heard from him, and because everyone assumes there we have a free media in this country, most people believe Putin has remained silent all this time.
Don’t worry, CIA. America is ready to hear Russia’s side. We can judge for ourselves whether it’s propaganda or whether Putin makes any good points. If he lies, you can point it out to us after. Maybe try publishing an official CIA statement this time, instead of using a fake news media cutout, we’ll respect you more for it.
But I digress. It is probably safe to say Tucker’s upcoming interview is simultaneously the most anticipated interview in decades (at least) and at the same time is also the most feared and hated interview ever anticipated to be published since Satan held a post-eviction press conference right outside the Garden of Eden.
Rather than recap the long, deplorable list of hysterical fake news journalists wailing and flinging rhetorical feces over the very idea of Tucker’s interview — we don’t even NEED to see it! — how dare he! — I’ll show you instead this famous clip of Putin owning a delusional NBC journalist who interviewed him in 2021, before the Proxy War:
CLIP: NBC interviews Putin, asks ‘gotcha’ question, gets handled (0:51).
But if you need some troll repellent, here’s CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour admitting yesterday that, of course, all the international journalists have been trying to score a Putin interview, and not only that, they’ll keep trying:
Fox fired Tucker for criticizing election integrity and exposing the Democrats’ January 6th witch hunt. Now, less than a year after involuntarily becoming a free agent, Tucker is now moments away from airing an interview the entire world will watch, racking up numbers that are could rocket beyond anything seen before in history. Tucker’s website will undoubtedly be swamped by new visitors. Who knows whether this will be enough to replace the income the commenter lost along with his prime-time reporting contract, but it is sure to be significant.
Whatever else it might be, the Putin interview is a masterful marketing move, both by Tucker and by Elon Musk, whose Twitter platform is providing Tucker an unfiltered place to publish his interview (and advertise his show). And the potential effect or influence on the Proxy War debate cannot possibly be estimated. It could be nothing but it could be massive, which is the reason why the corporate media is terrified.
🚀 This morning we need to check with the Proxy War, given the highly-anticipated Tucker-Putin interview, as well as yesterday’s happy news about the failed Senate border bill, originally intended to facilitate a massive $60 billion Ukraine aid package, an amount neatly ‘compromised’ down from the $100 billion that Joe Biden insisted just last month was necessary, and not a penny less! Anyway.
In the understated words of one war watcher, Ukraine’s precarious position is “becoming increasingly untenable.” Frankly, it is a disaster. It is a disaster we all knew was coming from the first moment U.S. State Department maven Viktoria Nuland waddled into the fray. It would not even be unreasonable to call the situation ‘apocalyptic,’ since there are (at least) four horsemen of disaster facing Ukraine, all fatal, none resolvable, and every one galloping at full speed towards some kind of grim final conclusion.
The Red Horse—Ukraine is Losing. In what looks like a coalescing global offensive, Russia is attacking all along the contested line, and none of the news anywhere is good news for Ukraine. I don’t monitor the day-to-day village-level news like the warbloggers, but there is a solid consensus that Ukraine is losing everywhere. From a New York Times article published yesterday (linked below):
As the story suggests, Ukraine’s losses are being blamed not on its incompetent leadership or the lack of a comprehensive war plan, but on Ukraine’s lack of resources, namely too few fighters and too few artillery shells.
That’s not wrong. One warblogger estimated Ukraine is only firing one artillery shell to every ten Russian shells. Another estimated there are more dead Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches at this point than live fighters. The point is, Ukraine is not winning, anywhere on the battlefield. Which brings us to the next horse.
The Silver Horse—War Manufacturing. Unlike Ukraine, Russia has successfully transformed its economy into a growing war economy with strong military manufacturing capability. Russia is now building more artillery shells than the rest of the world combined. But, because it lazily relies on foreign aid for military materiel, Ukraine has not built out much of any military manufacturing infrastructure.
Ukraine took the easy way, and in doing so made itself vulnerable to the vicissitudes of unreliable foreign partners, all of whom have different reasons and politics than Ukraine for being involved.
The White Horse—Internal Division. The Times’ non-paywalled article cited above described Zelensky’s latest political trial balloon, which looks like nothing less than a threat of a good-old Soviet-era purge. In other words, Zelensky is facing a large, well-equipped internal enemy, an enemy the media has nominated to be represented by the leader of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Valeriy Zaluzhny.
Now, for Zelensky to survive, like the Trotsky-ites of old, the Zaluzhny-ites must go.
But Zelensky isn’t Stalin, and things aren’t shaping up well for the little proto-dictator. Two weeks ago, Zelensky publicly asked Zaluzhny to resign, and Zaluzhny refused. Zelensky then offered the General money and prestige in the form of his pick of plum assignments, such as the country’s Ambassadorship to Great Britain, if he would step down, and again, Zaluzhny refused.
After back-and-forth headlines for two weeks, on Friday compliant corporate media dutifully reported that President Zelensky had “officially informed” the Biden Administration of Zelensky’s “decision” to give Zaluzhny his walking papers, fired, pink slipped, terminated effective immediately without severance, buh bye.
Well, it’s now Wednesday, and General Zaluzhny remains at the helm of Ukraine’s military, tweeting up a storm from his official offices. Apparently he’s now also refused to be fired, which is nothing less than a soft coup. It may be Zelensky hasn’t yet followed through with termination all the way, or some other politics may be in play, or he simply has no viable replacement for Zaluzhny and didn’t think about that before, but no matter how thinly you slice the situation, it looks terrible for the former comedian.
It has become painfully obvious to the meanest intelligence that General Zaluzhny must be well-protected, enjoying support from a large and politically-powerful cohort within Ukraine’s government, and that Zelensky’s power and ability to form a government has waned to an embarrassingly low point and is more or less in a ditch. Which is probably why Zelensky has now retreated to babbling about a broad “reorganization,” which provides a smokescreen and coward’s cover for why General Zaluzhny is still taking up space in his office.
“A reset, a new beginning is necessary,” Mr. Zelensky ironically told Italian media outlet Rai News on Sunday night. “I have something serious in mind, which is not about a single person but about the direction of the country’s leadership.”
The direction of the country’s leadership. Zelensky seemed oblivious to the fact his quote could be directed right back at him. After all, who represents the country’s leadership more than he does? Maybe Ukraine’s reset and its new beginning need to start where the buck stops — at the penis pianist.
It need hardly be said that the middle of a war — especially a war that’s not going well — is the worst possible time to replace your top general and purge your government of all his supporters. Even mentioning the move smacks of desperation and futility and sinking ships.
Paraphrasing Lincoln, who famously paraphrased the Bible, a Ukraine divided against itself cannot stand.
The Yellow Horse—Wavering Foreign Support. The days when it was treason to question the Proxy War have long passed. The United States is also now distracted by its own problems, problems that are right on its own borders, not to mention a newer, younger, more attractive proxy war shaping up in the Middle East. To the neocons, the Middle East is a 22-year-old hot yoga instructor, and Ukraine is a middle-aged divorcee with a psychotic ex-husband, thirteen cats, and three drug-addled grown children who all live at home.
You could even argue the Biden Administration would secretly be happy to dump the Ukraine problem on Republicans, to avoid being tarred with a shameful, inevitable defeat on the battlefield during an election year. In that sense, Team Biden cares not that the S.S. Ukraine is already sinking into the abyss, so long as a late-fired, ‘Republican obstruction’-torpedo catches the blame.
The bottom line is Ukraine is on the ventilator. Russia isn’t waiting around to see whether the Americans will get back to propping the luckless Eastern European country up like a real-life Weekend at Zelensky’s.
🔥 As I reported last week, Governor DeSantis’s Covid Grand Jury issued its first interim report. At the time, I said everyone should read it, but of course that isn’t possible or likely, so I’ll continue to highlight the most important and meaningful parts. Without argument, the most important disclosure in the report was its explanation of how the vaccine lie was perpetrated by the government — aided and abetted by a willing, sold-out media.
Of course you remember the phrase “safe and effective.” How could you forget? That phrase fueled every single vaccine mandate. Well … it was always a lie, even before they found out the shots didn’t work, right from the start, and the Grand Jury Report explained exactly how they did it.
This is critically-important: the federal agencies like the CDC and the FDA played a rhetorical shell game on America. And the corporate media helped them hide the definitional pea. First of all, when government officials called the vaccines “safe,” they were using a legal term of art.
In other words, when they said safe, they deceptively relied on a highly-subjective legal definition that doesn’t actually mean “safe” — but never said so.
Here’s how the Grand Jury Report explained it:
In other words, the vaccines were never considered “safe” in general. When Fauci said the jabs were safe, he meant they were “safe” compared to the relative risk posed by the virus (“relative freedom from harmful effect” and “the condition of the recipient”). All the CDC and FDA had to do was decide the virus was more deadly than the bubonic plague — which they did — and then virtually anything could be considered safe, no matter how risky it really was.
Even worse than helping the agencies mislead people with a legalistic definition of an everyday dictionary word, the media never even asked the agencies to explain the risk/reward matrix. So they got away with using a totally-subjective standard that wasn’t tied to anything — certainly not to anything scientific.
The media could have explained all this to us at the time, but they didn’t. They are pathetically useless and I hope every reporter who helped promote this lie gets fired.
So they can spend time in honest self-reflection, of course.
The term “effective” is nearly as bad. When the government said the vaccines were “effective,” they used a weasel definition for that word too. Legally speaking, the term “effectiveness” can be based on a regulatory determination arising from clinical trials, as you would expect, or from “other data.”
‘Other data’ is undefined.
There weren’t any clinical trials proving effictiveness — Pfizer never even tested for that. The regulators relied on “other data” to conclude the shots were effective. The media never asked the agencies to explain what their “other data” was that caused them to determine the vaccines were so “effective.” From the report, citing federal statute:
It was all wordplay, right from day one. They tricked us by secretly using a different definition for common dictionary words, a stealthy different definition than what we thought they meant. They will blame us for not knowing the legal meanings of those words and stupidly assuming they were using lay definitions. But they are experts, you see, so how can you expect them to speak plainly?
They got away with it last time. But now we know. They won’t get away with it any more. The term “safe and effective” has become a hissing and a byword.
🔥 ABC-7 Chicago ran a history-making story yesterday headlined, “Mental health: California county becomes 1st in US to declare loneliness as public health emergency.” It will not surprise you to know that lonely San Mateo County has only democrats on its Board of Supervisors and its citizens voted 72% for Biden in 2020. So.
None of the many stories about this solitary new “state of emergency” recognized the historic nature of the vote. It is the first time in history that any government, no matter how friendless and rejected, has recognized a subjective human emotion to be a public health emergency.
Maybe they should have just gone one step further and made loneliness illegal.
“Loneliness” might be emotionally painful, but it is not based on any recognized medical condition. You can’t spread loneliness, for example, by not wearing a mask (although you might catch loneliness if you wear a mask too much). You can’t reduce loneliness with public health interventions.
Loneliness is not only a feeling, it’s also a highly subjective feeling. Hermits and introverts enjoy being alone. Loneliness comes and goes. Often times, people’s own decisions lead to loneliness, like murderers locked away in the isolation unit. They might be lonely, but that’s the inevitable result of their decisions. Getting a face tattoo might be another less extreme example.
But we’ve had murderers and face tattoo-era forever and no loneliness crisis. The truth is it was the government’s misguided pandemic policy and official fear mongering to enforce compliance with its non-pharmaceutical interventions that seeded a crop of new germaphobics and agoraphobics.
Anyway, San Mateo shows why we must not allow the Constitution to be overridden by any declaration of emergency. Low-intelligence officials like San Mateo’s Board of Supervisors would shred the Constitution in a California minute. Just imagine what they’ll do once they start thinking about feeling rejected.
Portlanders! Take hope. I am considering replacing Portland with San Mateo as the butt of C&C’s low IQ jokes. I’d like to hear from our San Mateo readers: what say you? Is it dumber to live in San Mateo or in Portland? I realize it might be hard to say.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! And tune back in tomorrow morning for another exciting and mildly-disrespectful Coffee & Covid roundup.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida