Here's Kevin!

 

Kevin McCarthy (GOP, Cali) is prepping for his role as featured, recurring goof-ball in the January 6^th Committee televised ‘poli-com’ premiering soon. Kevin will play the outspoken neighborhood dolt reminiscent of Eddie Haskell but without the inherent wit or intelligence. 

In his role as foil for the likes of Adam Schift and Liz Cheney, Kevin will be punching far above his weight-class intellectually. His innate bone-headed ineptitude will be the staple of his character. Whether he testifies before the Committee or not is yet to be determined but his sustained bleating of ‘witch-hunt’ will become his catch-phrase in press scrums, there is little doubt.

That such a shop-worn utterance will mark his nearly every media interview must be expected. Kevin, by dearth of his limited intelligence will find his catch-phrase and the narrow mind-set behind it a challenge, nevertheless.

However, as comic as the catch-phrase might be to some, it will be the intermittent faux-pas and ironic bon mots which will accentuate his role of spoil-sport dope. Much as his blurting out of Russia’s owning of a fellow GOP Congress member disconcerted Paul Ryan, Kevin will bring his Dunning Kruger ‘A’ game as half-wit and nincompoop in a daft attempt to thwart the Committee and frustrate its members.

Riotous hi-jinx will ensue!

Cue the laugh-track.

 

Gun Laws

 

Texas Congressman, Dan Crenshaw was squawking to CNN’s Dana Bash that he was against 'red flag' laws (both on the federal level as well as the state level) because 'such laws would require enforcing the law before it was broken' (!) What utter gibberish.

'Red flag laws' are prohibitions, first and foremost; one cannot vote or buy booze or automobiles or life insurance or a house, before a minimum legal requirement is met. The minimum requirement for each is determined on both the state and the federal level. Similar prohibition already applies to gun sales; one must of a certain minimum age to legally buy and sell a firearm or ammunition.

In a similar way to the right to vote, the right to bear arms is restricted until a minimum requirement is met. (By the way, there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to own a firearm. Chief Justice Warren Burger proclaimed as fraud that notion.)

There is no sensible reason that one prohibiting stipulation be that the potential purchaser of a firearm must be of sound mind and character. Nutters and spouse-beaters need not apply.

For example, if one is required by law to go door to door announcing oneself as a pedophile, then said person would be prohibited from buying a gun. Similarly, if one was convicted of a violent crime (e.g. murder, rape, armed robbery, assault, etc.) then that one would be also be prohibited from the legal purchase of a firearm.

Apologists for ammosexuals and opponents to new gun laws will sputter that gun laws won’t deter the determined criminal. Duh… A quite wonderful (snark) argument for undermining the basic tenets of the Rule of Law. Following that fallacious logic: Why write the Magna Carta when the nobles knew that King John was going to transgress and break the law to assert himself? Why engrave ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ on stone tablets if people would continue to kill each other through the ages?

For reasons too obvious to state, we must have laws and regulations in a civilized society. Ask Hammurabi.

Let us be stalwart in our efforts to enact sensible gun legislation and deny the NRA such specious arguments as the aforementioned against common sense and public safety.

Call, write and pester your law-makers to bring the USA up to the level of the UK, New Zealand, Japan, Canada and countless other nations where the mass slaughter of children and citizens is not a regular occurrence.

Putin's Folly

 

Mr Putin’s fundamental folly is that he wanted more than life itself to return to the vainglorious eras of the Russian Empire and the USSR. His folly was two-fold; first, to think that anything of the kind of was remotely possible and second, that a return to the Soviet era would not necessitate the inherent presence of M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction). 

Putin has provided us further evidence of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Vlad has over-estimated his talents, his resources and has misplayed his hand based on those faulty estimates of his own infallibility and genius. He has committed the age-old caveat about under-estimating your opponent. The invasion of Ukraine has been far more than he bargained for militarily, economically and diplomatically.

He and his sycophantic general staff have botched up their ‘special combat operation’ at ever phase and in every aspect of war: tactics, strategy, logistics and operations.

As example; tactically, the surrounding/investment of Kyiv should have been accomplished in the first few hours of the very first day of the war. The task bogged down from the very git-go; under-supplied and traveling only on roads and highways. (Lessons taught by the Germans ‘Blitzkreig’ were not learned, obviously.)

Strategically, sighting on Kyiv, such an obvious target, and announcing for weeks beforehand that attacking Ukraine and taking Kyiv was the Russian plan was both asinine and amateurish. For the vaunted Russia military - which defeated both Napoleon and Hitler - to bungle so badly is baffling.

Operationally, the Russians left themselves open to the ever-alert monitoring of communication by the Western allies. Generals used unsecured cell-phones which Ukraine and NATO could accurately geo-locate. Ooops. Jam up communications and see how far a modern army gets when they’re deaf and blind.

Logistics seems to have been absent from the curriculum of military colleges in Russia. It was as though the general staff never considered that a modern mechanical operation might need… fuel! WTF? Columns of mobile armor sat motionless for days and weeks for lack of petrol. Fuel was so scarce that soldiers were suffering frost-bite because they couldn’t even run the heaters in their vehicles. Not to mention that they were sitting ducks sitting dead still on the highways.

The old maxim; ‘An army travels on its stomach’ was another lesson Putin was ignorant of. The news is rife with tales of Russian conscripts looting grocery stores sacking the larders of babushkas and mugging citizens for food.

The word ‘cock-up’ does not begin to describe the military bone-headedness of the invasion of Ukraine. Any war-gamer or amateur military historian could do a better job than Putin and his general staff have done. 

Sadly, the military screw-ups are bloody and deadly. The effects of diplomatic isolation and economic strangulation, not so much. However, those less deadly effects will have to be endured for many years by the entire world, not just those on the battlefield of Ukraine.

This is Putin’s legacy: Folly, disaster and calamity.

Putin's Debacle?

 

All of the military experts and talking head noobies are scratching their heads about Putin’s battle plan in Ukraine.

What’s he up to?

What does he want?

It all? Piecemeal and in utter ruins?

Does he see Ukraine’s total annihilation and destruction as a fitting punishment for not fulfilling Vlad’s fever dream of empire? 

Entering the mind of a madman is always a dangerous proposition but questions must be raised.

What modern, mechanized army launches an invasion in February/March, after a brief thaw when the ground is marshy, sodden and impassible even for tread vehicles?

As for the infantry, the word ‘slog’ comes to mind.
This is not ‘lightening war’, that’s for certain.

As one military analyst described, ‘The Russian assault on Kyiv is a single lane wide and stuck in traffic.

A forty-mile long convoy, stalled for lack of fuel, replacement parts and solid ground; that is the stuff of cautionary tales for military history classes.  

The Russian slo-mo invasion will be featured on a YouTube channel that animates history’s greatest military blunders. It’s like Hannibal crossing the Alps but leaving the elephants behind. It’s the obverse of a ‘bridge too far’; it’s as if no one amongst the General staff actually thought any of this through.

Tanks? Check…

Missile launchers? Check…

Conscripts? Check…

Fuel? … duh…

 

Putin Bungles It

Ooops.

A slight miscalculation.

Putin got two vital things wrong; he overestimated the effectiveness of his unmotivated armed forces and he underestimated the resolve of his enemy. He obviously ‘mis-under-estimated’ the depth and breadth of response from NATO, the EU and the United States. Even Switzerland has taken sides against Putin’s madness.

Dispirited Russian forces seem to take running out of petrol as a sign to surrender and tuck tail. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, are determined to defend their nation to the death rather than welcome the Russians with bouquets and warm wishes.

‘Go Fuck yourself’ is the recurring war-cry from even old Ukrainian women. The granny who offered sun-flower seeds to the Russian soldier she scolded for being in her country is well-known. The troops on Snake Island who told the Russian war-ship to go fuck itself outside Odessa are international heroes.

What this arm-chair analyst got wrong was to base my assessment on the notion that Putin would act ‘rationally’. War, itself, is an irrational endeavor but war-planning follows well-established tenets; tactics, strategy, operations. Writers such as Clausewitz, Liddel-Hart and Sun-Tse are assiduously studied and adapted as changes of technology are adopted and utilized. It is generally considered irrational to try to swallow an entire nation in one go. (‘Biting off more than one can chew’ is a faux-pas in war just as it is a no-no at the dinner table.) 

To recap:

Putin snatched the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in order to maintain Russia’s only naval access to the Mediterranean. Crimea was the site of numerous wars and battles; including the eponymous one in which Florence Nightingale gained fame. Since ancient times when the Greeks colonized the area, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, Crimean Peninsula and the Kerch Strait have been regarded as the area of constant dispute and the place of opposing political interests. 

Due to its strategic and historic importance, it was concluded that the Russians would demand a land bridge along the shores of the Black Sea to address the necessity of supplying the Russian base in Sevastopol. The Russians had built the Crimean Bridge at a cost of 230 billion rubles but as magnificent as that bridge might be, it was not enough to meet the constant need of re-supply which the various Russian military bases required. In the world of war, launching military action to establish that land-bridge would have been considered ‘rational’.

In that rationale, threatening to invade and occupy Ukraine was seen as a feint, a ruse, a political arm-twisting to create leverage whereby Ukraine might be willing (under duress) to grant Russian forces access from Rostov oblast (province) through the Donbas region to the Crimean Peninsula.

The rational war plan would be for the Russian forces in Crimea to move north into Ukrainian territory, taking Kherson and then procede east toward Mariupol as forces move from Russia through Donetsk, linking up with the forces based in Crimea, all the while being supported by Russian war ships in the Black Sea. This would have been a war plan that would have been seen as ‘rational’. The effort to subdue Ukraine by attacking on 3 sides seems to have accomplished nothing of strategic value for the Russians.

If, on the other hand, Putin’s plan had been to take Kyiv and decapitate Zalenskiy’s government as has been widely speculated, then the thrust from Belarus with the aid of Belarussian forces, would have been done all in one ‘go’ without the simultaneous attacks along the eastern and southern Ukrainian borders except as diversionary tactics.  This could have been accomplished in a 90-minute Wehrmacht-like blitzkrieg before Ukraine had steeled itself for invasion.

That was not how it has played out, of course. Apparently, Putin, in a massive fit of hubris, decided to take the entire nation of Ukraine in one giant bite. So far, he is choking on his own greed as the Ukrainians offer stiff resistance, thwarting the Russian troops all along the border between the two nations. One is inclined to ask what Putin is up to.

Former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul told Chuck Todd on meet the Press that “He (Putin) sounds completely disconnected from reality. He sounds unhinged”. Others have remarked that Putin is not who he once was. Mark Galeotti, an author and expert on Russia, wrote that it is “now clear he (Putin) is truly divorced from reality. This is a tragedy.” Putin’s baseless and bizarre description of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government as a band of ‘drug addicts’ and ‘neo-Nazis’ could be cited as an example of Putin’s change. (It should be noted that Zalensky is Jewish.)

All in all, Russia’s battle plan has been a massive cock-up. Former U.S. Marine Corps officer, Rob Lee, a war policy researcher at King's College London, wrote in February 28^th that ‘the Russian military is committing some very basic mistakes from the strategic to tactical levels.” Such mistakes, as was inferred are fundamental ones which anyone of a military mind would have fore seen and avoided. However, Putin is most asssuredly a megalomaniac who would have ram-rodded such a hubristic cluster-fuck of a plan over the more clear-sighted objections his generals.

Ooops. 

More on Brinkmanship

 

Saw one of CNN’s advisors on military affairs proclaim what the Russian strategy would be re: the ‘peace-keeping’ forces expected in Donetsk and Luhansk. He surmised that Putin would push to expand and create a buffer zone well past the boundaries of the People’s republics.

His appraisal sent me squawking at the box and bellowing my own prognostication at my wife. As it happens, my nerves were calmed when I later saw a different military advisor whose assessment mirrored my own.

Putin’s aim with all this is to gain a corridor through Ukraine to the Russian bases on the Crimean Peninsula (that bit he stole last time from Ukraine). He is assembling troops enough to accomplish that by force of arms but that is a sort of window dressing

He’s practicing brinkmanship – the old Cold War modus operandi – by which one state threatens then backs off from the brink with a stronger negotiating hand, diplomatically speaking.

Putin is banking on the notion that Europe does not want another European war. Indeed, the UN and NATO were supposed to have eliminated expansion by conquest from the language of global politics; all but eliminating the possibility of Europe at war.

Enter brinkmanship. Think ‘Neville Chamberlain if the Sudetenland hadn’t yet been invaded’.  Think of Soviet presence in Cuba without the nuclear missiles. Think of a green gorilla in a tutu.
Sorry…

Russia’s amassing of forces along the Ukraine border, threatening military invasion, declaring prior sovereignty of territory, denying the sovereignty of an independent Ukraine, being stridently bellicose and generally operating outside of the norms of the 21^st century is Putin’s exercise in brinkmanship.

Putin was raised in the world of Real Politik and the global chessboard concept of willful domination and power. This is Putin practicing brinkmanship; Brinkmanship Putin-style.

Push can assuredly come to shove, but Putin is relying on the EU and NATO to dither, hem, haw, gather support, spell out sanctions and schedule summits, while mustering troops and setting battle plans. All of that global finagling allows for the build-up of forces to create greater tension; greater anticipation. That tension is the core of brinkmanship.

When Putin relieves that that tension by a slight draw-down or pull-back – when he backs away from the brink - he’ll be in a more favorable position to demand a corridor from the newly recognized Donetsk People's Republic to Russia’s Black Sea bases in Crimea.

That’s what Putin wants. (That and to be seen as a Stalin-esque strong man and hero of Mother Russia, restorer of the Empire.) He’ll risk the lives of thousands or tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians to attain those ends if the ploy of brinkmanship fails. 

Biden is also well-versed in Cold War shenanigans; that he’s making all of Putin’s moves public is brilliant; a stroke of genius. It takes the wind out of Putin’s sails and decreases the tension by making known what would normally be held under wraps.

The EU and NATO, according to the Cold War script, must play a kind of four-dimensional cat and mouse game; play the mouse to Putin’s cat while preparing a bigger cat to bag Putin’s rat. Deception within deception; standard fare from the Cold War. 

Germany halting the process of certifying the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia came as a big blow in the first salvo of sanctions. Germany’s action will force the hand of the other nations to follow suit, cutting off the flow of natural gas from Russia and the cash flow thereof as well. That, in turn, will knock the pins out of Putin’s reliance on the interminable vagaries of real politik diplomacy to prolong tension and forestall an attack order. The threat of loss of revenue to Gazpron may force Putin’s hand. Perhaps Germany should have acted more mouse-like.

We shall see.

The General Assembly is abuzz with speechifiers denouncing in the strongest terms the reprehensible, atavistic behavior of the Russian Federation. Outlaws! Gangsters! Bullies!

All true, of course, but are NATO and the EU willing to respond with a force of arms? 

Putin’s bet is that they are not. However, his bet is also that this show of strength, if it succeeds in Russian gaining some concession for a land corridor along the Ukraine coast to Crimea, will be enough to off-set the economic effects of sanctions sure to be felt by the Oligarchs and the people of Russia. 

There’s a lot riding on that bet.

Putin's Brinkmanship

 

“Brinkmanship’ is from the lexicon of the Cold War. Brinkmanship is the practice of trying to achieve an advantageous outcome by pushing dangerous events to the brink of active conflict. 

Brinkmanship is what Putin is doing with Ukraine. He’s pushing a posture of war, threatening an armed invasion. His stated purpose is to thwart the expansion of NATO and thusly protect Russian interests by this military threat.

The sub-text is that Putin still considers Ukraine a vassal state. Putin’s stated aim is the re-invigoration and re-establishment of the former Russian empire if not the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  This is, in short, why he snatched Crimea; to demonstrate for his nationalistic supporters that he is the strongman – the ‘Man of Steel’ – which they crave. 

As a chess player, Putin is playing to his nationalistic supporters as well as the Western powers and Ukraine. The current situation can be seen as a ‘forking move’; threatening two chess pieces with capture, forcing the opponent to choose which piece to lose. Putin is banking on the nations of NATO, being roundly averse to another devastating European war, would choose the sovereignty of Ukraine as the chess-piece that NATO will sacrifice. 

Putin bet that Ukraine would buckle when confronted with a Russian military build-up on its borders. Putin, further, has bet that the Americans – freshly withdrawn from Afghanistan – would convince its NATO allies that defending Ukraine was not worth the price of blood and treasure that would have to be paid. 

Moreover, Putin’s military display would bolster his support from the people of Russia. That is his plan; by the display of force, Putin hopes to gain politically and militarily while suffering little down-side. 

This is not to assert that Putin’s military threat isn’t real. Brinkmanship fails as a strategy if the threat of military force is not perceived as viable and imminent. Putin’s massing of forces along Ukraine’s borders in Belarus, Crimea and Russia presents a clear and present danger; of that there is no doubt. 

However, President Volodymyr Zelensky has pooh-poohed Russia’s threat and thwarted one prong of Putin’s strategy. The steadfastness of Biden’s administration and the NATO allies (specifically; Germany, France, Great Britain and Poland) have, furthermore, stymied Putin’s grander game of conquest and left him with a ‘Sophie’s Choice’. He must either back-down and show weakness or signal the invasion and suffer military and economic retribution from which he, himself, would not recover. His claims of a draw-down is a subterfuge.

He has been backed into a corner and has placed himself and the Russian Federation between a rock and hard place. (Never let it be said that diplomacy is a dull enterprise.) How Putin will play his end-game in Ukraine will be most interesting.