Putin's Bitch

The lies are so flagrant that you have to assume that it’s intentional. If it is not intentional, the people purveying them must be functional imbeciles.

America’s mainstream media just spent four years denouncing the Trump administration for doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding. In truth, the Obama administration was bending over forwards for Putin. Now, the Biden administration is doing exactly what Putin wants in terms of the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany.

The Biden administration shut down the Keystone pipeline because AOC threw a hissy fit. It then declared, during the Colonial pipeline shutdown through Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm that pipelines were the best way to transport fuel. Now it has removed the Trump administration sanctions that would have impeded Germany’s ability to become dependent on Russia for energy.

About this, the media has absolutely nothing to say. Hypocrisy, you say. The media falls silent. Having gotten into the business of purveying deranged and distorted disinformation designed to promote the radical left, the media declares that Republicans have been lying. With the Democratic Party and social media a pall has fallen on America’s vaunted tradition of free and open debate and discussion.

With a few notable exceptions. Glenn Greenwald, a good leftist, but  man with integrity has called out the double standard that is being applied to Republicans and Democrats. (via Maggie’s Farm) Dare we mention that if you apply different standards to different political parties, you are dividing the country. Remember that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Greenwald opens his column by reminding us of the hue and cry about Trump and Russia. It is a story of unabashed unapologetic media corruption:

That the Kremlin had taken over American political institutions through its blackmail control of former President Donald Trump was a media conspiracy theory as pervasive as it was deranged. This once-exciting script was excavated from the CIA’s Cold War basement, dusted off by their operatives, and then kicked off by the intelligence community’s purposeful dissemination of the now-debunked Steele Dossier. And once this fairy tale was launched, there were seemingly no limits on the depths to which media figures would sink to promote it.

It was so flagrant that a minimum of perspicacity tells us that everything the Trump administration was accused of doing, the Obama administration actually did. Now the Biden presidency is returning to the halcyon days when America was Putin’s bitch.

In the world of reality, the exact opposite was happening. When it came to actual vital Russian interests — as opposed to the symbolic gestures hyped by the liberal cable and op-ed page circus — Trump and his administration were confronting and undermining the Kremlin in ways Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had, to his credit, steadfastly refused to do.

Indeed, the foreign policy trait relentlessly attributed to Trump in support of the media’s Cold War conspiracy theory — namely, an aversion to confronting Putin — was, in reality, an overarching and explicit belief of President Obama’s foreign policy, not President Trump’s. During the 2012 presidential election, Obama and the Democratic Party famously and repeatedly mocked GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s warnings about the threat posed by Russia as a “relic of the Cold War.”

When you have descended to propaganda, reality does not matter. Nor does rational judgment. 

What was the Obama record? Greenwald offers a sober assessment of its cowardly weakness:

Consistent with that view, Obama rejected bipartisan demands to send lethal weapons to Ukraine throughout 2015 and into 2016. Even when Russia reasserted control over Crimea in 2014 after citizens overwhelmingly approved it in a referendum, Obama did little more than impose some toothless sanctions (though he did preside over, if not engineer, regime change efforts in Ukraine that swept out the pro-Moscow leader and replaced him with a pro-U.S. lackey). Obama worked directly with Putin to forge an agreement with Russia’s allies in Tehran to lift sanctions against Iran and bring them back into the international community, and then publicly praised the Russian leader for the constructive role he played in orchestrating that agreement.

And, enraging the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy community, Obama even refused to follow through on his own declared “red line” to attack Russia’s key ally in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad. Indeed, even after Russia asserted governance over Crimea, and even after Russia is said by intelligence agencies to have hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s computers, Obama, in 2016, sought to form a partnership with Russia in Syria to jointly bomb targets regarded by the two governments as “terrorists.”

As for Trump, Greenwald continued, he set a new, far less accommodating policy toward Russia:

Again and again, Trump acted contrary to the Kremlin’s core interests. After publicly threatening Russia over Syria, Trump twice bombed Putin’s key Middle Eastern ally — something Obama refused to do — prompting applause from the always-hawkish Hillary Clinton and even from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who had starred in a 2012 DNC video mocking Romney for viewing Russia as a serious threat). Trump withdrew from the Iran Deal over the Kremlin’s vocal objections.

Trump also reversed Obama’s Ukraine policy, sending the exact lethal arms to anti-Russian elements that Obama warned would be directly threatening to the Kremlin and thus excessively provocative. Trump filled his administration with long-time anti-Russia hawks who would never have been welcomed in the Obama administration (including CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, NATO Ambassador Richard Grenell, and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley).

But, now there is the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The Trump administration was trying to do everything in its power to shut the pipeline down. The Biden administration, after promising to continue the Trump policy, has chosen to drop sanctions against its executives, thus giving it the green light. On Nord Stream 2 Joe Biden just folded like a cheap suit:

Trump found one thing even more threatening to the Kremlin’s vital interests than arming Ukrainians: namely, doing everything possible to destroy Russia’s ability to complete construction of its new underwater natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. That new pipeline is designed to double Russian sales capacity to an EU addicted to cheap Russian natural gas, producing massive revenue for the Russian economy and giving Moscow greater leverage when dealing with its European neighbors. But it provides an even more important benefit: it allows Russia to bypass Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, thus avoiding costly transit fees and the risks of political instability or anti-Russian manipulation by outside forces, including the U.S. government.

The Trump administration caused a halt to the project in 2019 when it imposed sanctions on companies working on it. Trump did everything he could to pressure, cajole and even threaten the Germans to pull out of the deal, warning that it would leave a winter-plagued Europe captive to Russian pressure and insisting that Berlin had the obligation to buy gas from the U.S., not Russia, given NATO expenditures to protect Germans. Trump even tried to pull close to 10,000 U.S. troops out of Germany to pressure the Merkel government, but the pro-war alliance of hawkish Democrats and Liz-Cheney-led neocon Republicans voted to defund that effort.

Clearly, Greenwald continues, a media that was pretending to be fair would have noted these facts. Ours did not:

Any minimally rational or honest media would have taken note of these events and instantly realized that their years-long conspiracy theory about Trump being controlled by Putin was sophomoric nonsense, the opposite of the truth. That a Putin-controlled Russian asset would send lethal arms to Ukraine and do everything possible to sabotage Nord Stream 2 is so blatantly absurd that it could be ratified only by a media aggressively committed to spreading disinformation and lies.

And now the Biden administration, desirous of having a good relationship with the freeloaders in Germany, has reversed Trump administration policy:

All of this became even clearer on Tuesday when President Biden reversed Trump’s blockage of the Russian natural gas pipeline. Axios' Jonathan Swan reported that “the Biden administration will waive sanctions on the corporate entity and CEO overseeing the construction of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline into Germany,” which “indicates the Biden administration is not willing to compromise its relationship with Germany over this pipeline.” Swan wrote what is clearly true: “the completion of Nord Stream 2 would be a huge geopolitical win for Putin and give him substantial new leverage in Europe.”

Then again, perhaps Biden is paying off Putin for pressuring Russian hackers to cease the shutdown of the Colonial pipeline. It is difficult to believe that the Kremlin did not know about the shutdown and that it did not think to leverage that event to win on Nord Stream 2. When it comes to being tough on Putin, Biden is a marshmallow:

What makes Biden’s turnaround even more stunning is that it comes just weeks after the U.S. claims that Russians were behind a quite significant hack-for-ransom into a U.S. gas pipeline that caused serious gas shortages on the East Coast. U.S. officials say that while they have no reason yet to believe that the Kremlin itself was responsible, they do believe that the hackers were Russian citizens and/or operating from Russia.

Greenwald is flabbergasted at the flagrant hypocrisy of it all:

Just imagine what would be happening right now if it were Trump, rather than Biden, who just handed Putin his underwater natural gas pipeline just days after Russian hackers allegedly caused serious gas shortages in the U.S. Jingoistic op-eds would fill the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post warning of Kremlin control of the U.S.; CNN and MSNBC would convene panel after panel of their former FBI and CIA operatives to accuse Trump of treason for subordinating U.S. interests to Russian interests; Rachel Maddow would be on the verge of righteous and indignant tears as she devoted her 20-minute monologue to decrying the tragedy that we were all living under Putin’s rule; and Nancy Pelosi would be holding a press conference to spread more innuendo about Putin’s blackmail control over Trump while demanding a DOJ investigation.

None of that, needless to say, will happen now. Indeed, just hours after Swan reported this sanctions waiver, reporters giggled and swooned after Biden joked about running them all over in his car as a condition to answering their questions about the war in Gaza, then giggled and swooned even more when he floored the car and drove away from them.

The mainstream media is so corrupt, so dishonest, so filled with partisan propaganda that it does not even know what is any more. Except that it knows that it is on the side of the radical left. Please do not call it progressive. Why, just yesterday, the labor union representing the employees of The New Yorker, which used to be a venerable liberal publication, tweeted out a call for the destruction of Israel. In time the tweet, regarding the Palestinian wish for the Palestinian state to extend from the river to the sea, that is, to encompass today’s Israel, was taken down. 

But, let us not forget that when ISIS ruled over territory in Iraq and Syria, something that had not happened during the Bush administration and that was ended by the Trump administration, President Obama refused to use the acronym ISIS. He used the acronym ISIL.

Of course, no one noticed and no one cared, but replacing the S with an L, replaces Syria with the Levant. The difference, the Levant comprises the territory now occupied by Israel. So Obama was promoting the notion that the Islamic State should take over Israel. No one noticed and no one cared. 

But, consider that the new millennial hires at the New Yorker, the New York Times, CNN and MSNBC are ignorant fools who do not have sufficient intelligence to report fairly and objectively. It is a sad state of affairs. It shows the American mind in serious decline. How we are going to dig ourselves out of this mess, I do not know.