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« Reply #1 on: November 29, 2018, 03:55:33 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Digest 11-29-2018
From The Federalist Patriot
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Fast-forward to today. What’s changed? Well, in one sense nothing: Russia is still as belligerent as ever — not its people, that is, but its bull-in-a-china-shop government and military. That’s evidenced by the Kremlin’s latest violation of international law, in which the Russian Navy fired on three Ukrainian naval ships in the Azov Sea, wounding six and capturing ship-and-crew. The Azov is a major trade conduit for Ukraine, which shares the shallow sea as co-territorial water with Russia under a 2003 treaty between the two nations. Russia’s blatant act of war prompted Ukraine to impose martial law on a sizable portion of its territory in anticipation of imminent conflict with Russia. But what else has changed? A lot.
For one thing, we no longer have feckless, impotent leadership atop a listing U.S. Ship of State. As if to accent the contrast, President Donald Trump stated flatly, “I don’t like [Russia’s] aggression. I don’t want that aggression at all.” He also threatened to cancel his upcoming meeting with Putin during the G20 summit in Buenos Aires. This threat may not sound like strong action at first blush, but it would lessen Putin’s esteem in the international community and further isolate him from the rest of the civilized world. The move would also put pressure on him at home, where his popularity continues to slide. Presumably, however, Trump received some assurances, because the two have set a meeting for Saturday at noon.
Nor do we have feckless U.S. leadership at the UN. Our favorite United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, echoed President Trump’s strong words through an even more blunt condemnation of Russia’s actions at an emergency assembly of the UN Security Council: “Sunday’s outrageous violation of sovereign Ukrainian territory is part of a pattern of Russian behavior. As President Trump has said many times, the United States would welcome a normal relationship with Russia. But outlaw actions like this one continue to make that impossible.” Ambassador Haley also noted that Russian-instigated attacks against Ukraine in recent years have left more than 100,000 Ukrainians dead.
What else has changed? Other nations have started to wake up to the fact that the U.S. is not as easily rolled as it was only a few years ago. The sea-change in this international leadership was readily apparent not only in Ambassador Haley’s unvarnished but accurate characterization of Russian aggression, but also in Trump’s rebuke to Europe for not ponying up its fair share of support for NATO. Punctuating Europe’s “skin in the game” against Russian belligerence, the president dropped this gem off the top turnbuckle: “And by the way, Europe shouldn’t like that aggression. And Germany shouldn’t like that aggression. They’re absolutely not doing enough — Germany. … Many of those countries are not doing enough toward NATO. They should be spending much more money.” Perhaps for starters they could FedEx a few hundred antiship missiles to the Ukrainian Navy, which would take care of any unlawful-boarding problems toot-sweet.
The broader danger posed by Russia’s leader is analogous to a dying star, which makes a spectacular showing — then the lights go out. In this analogy, Ukraine is simply the canary in the coal mine, signaling the impending supernova. Putin senses that his control and popularity, once very strong, are slipping — fast. In the wake of his exceedingly unpopular pension reforms earlier this year, for instance, his approval rating plummeted to its lowest point ever. In the past, when his ratings tanked he boosted them by “defending” Russia through strong military actions that demonstrated Russian primacy and strength to its people. Those people have since become inoculated to this ploy, especially in light of the widespread economic poverty affecting all but society’s wealthiest — like Putin, for instance.
Facing this growing unrest, Putin is once again showing he is willing to take any action available to him to regain his stature and to turn Russia’s sorry ship around. Desperate or not, however, unless Putin’s hostile acts are met by an effective response he will continue to stir turmoil around the planet, in vain hopes of regaining former glory.
Less than a century ago, Stalin wiped out anywhere from seven to 12 million Ukrainians through his genocidal, engineered famine — exact figures are impossible to render, owing to the sheer magnitude of the famine. But the more Putin continues to evolve into the image of his brutal predecessor, the closer those deaths will move to the forefront of Ukrainians’ minds. Meanwhile, maybe this time the U.S. will act decisively so the world does not have to relive such horrors.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/59732-ukraine-red-storm-rising-dot-dot-dot-again
OPINION IN BRIEF
Ed Feulner: “Supporters of socialism like to point to Norway and other prosperous Scandinavian countries to make their case. But these countries are ‘operating generous welfare states programs propped up by underlying vibrant capitalism,’ as columnist David Harsanyi has written, so it’s disingenuous to use them as case studies. Undiluted socialism produces quite a different result. Consider Cuba, a vibrant and modern island nation before Fidel Castro and his cronies ran it into the ground. Or take Venezuela with its empty food shelves. It was once one of the wealthiest nations in South America. Today it’s a wreck. The Atlantic explains why: ‘The experiment with "21st-century socialism” as introduced by the late President Hugo Chavez, a self-described champion of the poor who vowed to distribute the country’s wealth among the masses, and instead steered the nation toward the catastrophe the world is witnessing under his handpicked successor [Nicolas] Maduro, has been a cruel failure.’ … Americans have an ‘impulse,’ all right, but it’s not toward socialism. It’s toward liberty. Power-hungry politicians may not like that, but they thwart it at their peril.“
SHORT CUTS
Upright: "We were told that we simply must bail out General Motors during the financial crisis because if we failed to, that would lead to a bloodbath of job losses and cascading business failures. But the job losses were always going to come: Paying people to build things that consumers don’t really want isn’t a sustainable business model. That’s a reality you cannot bail your way out of.” —Kevin Williamson
Race bait: “I think it’s important to remember that identity politics doesn’t just apply when it’s black people or gay people or women. The folks who really originated identity politics were the folks who said Three-Fifths Clause and all that stuff. That was identity politics.” —Barack Obama
Globalist fantasies: “The Washington consensus, whatever you want to call it, got a little too comfortable. … They’re only looking at GDP numbers and they’re looking at the Internet, and everything’s looking pretty great, particularly after the Cold War. After what you guys engineered, you had this period of great smugness on the part of America and American elites, thinking we got this all figured out.” —Barack Obama
Hot air: “I just want to ask the question for folks at home, folks like us. We got kids. We don’t want to be slowly burned to death on our own planet here. Is the human race running — in the simplest terms — running out of time to take the measures necessary to rein in this rise in global temperatures?” —CNN’s Jim Sciutto
Non Compos Mentis: “I don’t care what Obama did. I care what Trump is doing right here right now!” —"The View’s" Sunny Hostin displaying Trump Derangement Syndrome over the border-crisis response
And last… “The teachers union has a stranglehold on many of the politicians in this country, both at the federal level and at the state level, and they are very resistant to the kind of changes that need to happen. They are very protective of what they know, and they’re protective, really protective of adult jobs and not really focused on what’s right for individual students.” —Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos
https://patriotpost.us/articles/59738-thursday-short-cuts
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