Biden Doubles Down on Appalling

It went so well the last time, so why not try it again.

The last time Vice President Kamala Harris, the administration’s resident imbecile, went to  Europe, for the Munich Security conference, we can say, if we want to be excessively generous, that her august presence and her kindergarten mind did not give Vladimir Putin second thoughts about invading Ukraine. 

Now, the Biden administration is sending Harris back to Europe to shower the victims of Biden administration policy with empathy. Just what the world needs now. Just what the United States needs if it wants to look like a world class clown posse.

Anyway, Secretary of State Antony Blinken-- a man denounced by John McCain years ago as a national disgrace-- suggested that Ukraine might very well win this war with Russia. As though America were not going to embarrass itself sufficiently by being represented by Kamala on the world stage, Blinken is going to visit some of our NATO allies to explain that he, coward in chief, has their back.

Evidently, the administration wants to encourage the Ukrainians to keep fighting, to the last brick of the last building.

But, ask yourself this? Is there any chance at all that Ukraine will prevail in the current war? Is there any chance that the Red Army will retreat to Russian territory? Is there any chance that NATO will ride to rescue the stand up comedian who has bravely led his nation? (By the way, do you honestly imagine that Putin will ever, ever concede to a leader who once was on Dancing with the Stars?)

Anyway, if Ukraine cannot possibly prevail in the current conflict, what are its leaders doing? Surely, they are courageous, but still, there comes a time.... Wars are about winning, not about fighting to the last man in battles that one cannot win. Just a thought for today.

Effectively, the Biden administration thinks that the war is being played out in the international banking system and the propaganda media. Isn’t Ukraine winning the propaganda war? Perhaps, it is. Surely, no one sympathizes with Russia under the current circumstances.

Besides, Ukraine is a shining beacon of liberal democracy, the kind that Francis Fukuyama has told us is going to overtake the world-- in 1989.

Josh Hammer offers some perspective on Ukraine, in the Spectator:

Amidst Putin’s reckless revanchism, Ukraine’s defiant president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has seized the opportunity to play a naturally sympathetic Western audience like a fiddle. How else to characterize the Ukrainian government’s opportunistic analogizing of Russia’s damaging of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial with the actual World War II–era genocide committed at Babi Yar — a genocide committed by German Nazis, that is, with no shortage of complicity from all-too-eager local Ukrainians? How else to describe the mysterious blue-checked Twitter account “@Ukraine,” which blasts out mawkish videos highlighting the ubiquity of Western support for the besieged country? Indeed, the Ukrainian cause replaced John Lennon’s “Imagine” as the apotheosis of liberal internationalist fantasizing.

To make such sober, hard-headed observations is not to engage in “whataboutism” or “both sides-ism,” let alone pro-Putin apologia. It is simply to note that the situation at hand is more complicated, and more nuanced, than the specious “retrograde Russian imperialism versus enlightened Western liberal democracy” dichotomy falsely proffered by a gullible Western press. It’s time to revisit some basics.

Want some more? OK, here goes, via Hammer:

Ukraine is just as corrupt and just as oligarchic as Russia, if not more so. At the time of Ukraine’s 2014 color revolution (itself clandestinely abetted by liberal NGO types), which deposed the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, the nation ranked as one of the absolute most corrupt nations in the world. There are neo-Nazi paramilitary units, such as the Azov Battalion, active in Ukraine. Ukraine, lest amnesic Westerners forget, is also the country of Hunter Biden and Burisma. Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk was, for years, a massive donor to the Clinton Foundation. And Zelensky himself, of course, was at the center of President Donald Trump’s first (entirely bogus!) impeachment. It seems there is something fundamentally rotten about modern Ukraine that no enterprising investigative journalist has yet uncovered.

If that does not suffice, examine the thoughts of the highly estimable Caroline Glick:

To be sure, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish. But as Germany's Die Welt reported in 2020, Zelenskyy owes his election to the support he received from Ukraine's then-Minister of the Interior Arsten Avakov. Avakov, who served under Zelenskyy until last July, has been the most powerful patron of Ukrainian Nazis since the Maidan Revolution in 2014.

The Maidan Revolution, which brought down Ukraine's pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, is widely viewed as having been a liberal revolution. But the truth is more complicated. The Maidan Revolution would not have succeeded without the support of the Azov Battalion neo-Nazi militia.

Avakov, who began his seven-and-a-half-year tenure as Interior Minister in 2014, integrated the Azov Battalion into the Ukrainian National Guard. Avakov made Vadym Troyan, one of the heads of the Azov Battalion, his deputy.

Although Avakov's successor Denys Monastryrsky is a member of Zelenskyy's party, he is widely considered to be Avakov's man. At a minimum, Monastryrsky has made no move to purge Azov Nazis from Ukraine's National Guard. Media reports over the past week have shown them taking significant roles in the fighting in Mariupol and Kharkiv.

And, aside from the fact that we are financing the Russian invasion by buying Russian oil, while everyone is distracted by Ukraine, the Biden administration is also allowing Russia to dictate the terms of a restored Iranian deal. We are effectively preparing to rescue the mullahs, to help them to gain nuclear weapons and thereby to upset the balance of power in the Middle East.

Glick reports:

If Biden and his partners were most concerned about morality they wouldn't be keeping the gas lines and oil shipments coming from Russia, and so financing Putin's war. So too, they wouldn't be impoverishing the Russian people to bring down Putin in the service of morally compromised Ukraine while letting Russia dictate the terms of the nuclear negotiations with Iran in Vienna.

And indeed, it is in the West's continued collusion with Russia in Vienna, that the claim the sanctions the US and its allies are imposing on Russia are morality-based fall apart.

Wednesday, former State Department official and Iran sanctions expert Gabriel Noronha published a long post on Twitter where he reported the details of the nuclear deal that the US is poised to conclude next week in Vienna with Iran. Noronha sourced his report to career officials at the National Security Council, the State Department and the European Union who divulged the contents of the all-but-completed agreement to him in the hopes of getting Congress to block Biden from moving forward before it is too late.

Noronha's sources described a total collapse of all the U. positions, replete with a willingness to abrogate all sanctions against Iranian terror masters. Biden's envoy Robert Malley reportedly has agreed to remove Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps from the State Department's list of foreign terror groups. He has also agreed to remove weapons of mass destruction proliferators, and the Iranian institutions that fund and conduct terror, WMD proliferation, repression, mass murder, torture and other crimes.

The sanctions relief that Biden is conceding will provide Iran with a cash injection of more than $90 billion immediately after the deal is concluded and an additional $50 billion annually through oil and gas revenues. The deal of course will also provide the Iranians with US and UN legitimacy as they cross the nuclear finish line and begin producing nuclear warheads within two and a half years.

So, while our attention is focused on Ukraine, the Biden administration is negotiating an appallingly bad deal with Iran. 

See also the comments by Victoria Coates in The Daily Mail.

And, while refraining from commenting on the rather confusing financial situation, we close with a note about who is buying the now very, very cheap Russian assets. The answer should have already popped into mind. People who follow contrary sentiment, and people who know to buy when there is blood in the street, understand that artificially depressed asset prices are a buying opportunity.

Zero Hedge reports:

A couple of days ago, as Russia-linked ETFs plunged following a battery of US and European sanctions against Russia designed to isolate its economy and cut its people off from the global financial system, we asked ourselves: who is buying all these Russian assets? The notion that American distressed investors would pass up the opportunity to pick up Russian assets on the cheap seemed, well, counterintuitive. And while China was likely one source of capital, would western investors really allow the sanctions threat to scare them away from an obvious opportunity to buy?

Fast forward to last night, and a team of reporters at Bloomberg have produced an answer: at risk of potentially violating US sanctions (which have imposed strict limits on secondary market transactions involving certain types of Russian debt), JP Morgan and Goldman are already scooping up Russian corporate bonds, either for their own book, or on behalf of waiting clients.