From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy


The Ukraine emergency is far from over rCo because Donald Trump is the emergency

-Andrew Coyne - G&M - Aug 21/25


Going into the rCLFiasca in AlaskarCY rCo more formally known as the Trump-Putin
summit rCo the only question was how much worse it would be than expected. You knew it would be bad, but you also knew that you had no idea how bad, and that whatever attempts you might make to guess how bad would inevitably fall short of the reality. As IrCOve written before, Donald Trump always defeats the imagination.

The event seemed destined not to disappoint. The very act of meeting, on American soil, with a mass-murdering, child-abducting war criminal, in the flagrante delicto of his campaign of extermination in Ukraine, was an
obscenity in itself. Coupled with the fawning displays of welcome rCo the jets flying overhead, the soldiers stooping to unroll the red carpet, the President of the United States quivering with excitement as he waited for him, the smiles, the handshakes, the intimate car ride for two rCo one had every reason to expect the worst, or rather to expect how much worse it would be than one had expected.

So when the two men emerged from their confab, Mr. Putin smiling coyly, Mr. Trump looking haggard, only to announce that they had been unable to reach an agreement, one felt a little surge of an unfamiliar emotion: hope. Perhaps in the end the meeting would prove to have been merely an embarrassment and a disgrace, rather than a full-on, geopolitical disaster. Maybe Mr. Trump had offered Mr. Putin the moon and the stars, but had run up against Mr. PutinrCOs demands for the moon, the stars and the keys to Fort Knox. Maybe the world might yet be saved by Mr. PutinrCOs overweening intransigence.


How naive we were. Before a day had passed it emerged, via the inevitable background briefings and Trumpian social media posts, that the two men had in fact agreed on a great many things. Mr. Trump had gone into the meeting, in a rare display of baseline sentience, demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine and threatening sanctions and other rCLsevere consequencesrCY if Mr. Putin did not comply; coming out of the meeting not only was there no mention of sanctions, but Mr. Trump had miraculously converted to Mr. PutinrCOs view.

Mr. Putin, indeed, had not given an inch on anything: not an inch on the question of territory (the Russian idea of rCLland swapsrCY is for it to keep all
the Ukrainian land it now controls, in exchange for keeping some of the land
it does not); not an inch on the rCLroot causesrCY of the conflict (the independence of Ukraine, in a nutshell); not an inch on rCLsecurity guaranteesrCY
for Ukraine (Russia proposes that it might agree to provide such guarantees,
so long as it had a veto on anyone else doing so) or NATO membership or the rest.

The only reason anyone had even briefly imagined he might have is because Mr. TrumprCOs chief negotiator, a bottomlessly ignorant real estate tycoon like himself by the name of Steve Witkoff, in the hurried talks leading up to the summit, had misunderstood Mr. Putin on a couple of points, believing him to have offered to withdraw from certain territories, for example, when in fact
he had proposed that Ukraine should. (Mr. WitkoffrCOs confusion is perhaps understandable, as he has been using a translator provided by Mr. Putin.)

Which would be depressing enough, without Mr. Trump, in his public statements post-summit and in telephone calls with European leaders, taking the Putin
line on every point. Well, Mr. Trump has always taken the Putin line, but
there had been that brief interval, in those halcyon days before the summit, when it seemed that Mr. Trump had had certain glimmerings that perhaps Mr. Putin was not being entirely straight with him.

But there he was now, assuring his listeners that Mr. Putin wants peace, that all he wanted was a little more land rCo for what is Russia short of but land rCo
in exchange for which he was prepared to guarantee that he would not take any more. Why, he was even willing to pass a law to that effect! No, the only obstacle to peace was that impossible man, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had had the temerity to rCLstart a warrCY (Ukraine did not start the war) with a country rCL10
times its sizerCY (RussiarCOs population is about three-and-a-half times UkrainerCOs).

With a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky scheduled for the following days, there was the alarming prospect of a Russo-American axis forming,
issuing a series of impossible demands to which an isolated Mr. Zelensky would be forced to accede, or be blamed for the warrCOs continuance. Mr. Trump seemed obsessed with the idea that a peace agreement, on whatever terms, would win
him the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour that has so transfixed him he was
reported to have called up the Norwegian Finance Minister, out of the blue, to sound him out on his chances.

Hence the weekrCOs second great fiasco: the panicky roundup of European leaders,
as the realization sunk in of just how badly things had gone in Alaska, to accompany Mr. Zelensky to his meeting with Mr. Trump rCo a scene that would be written out of an opera bouffe as too implausible.

Indeed, there has never been anything like it, IrCOd wager, in the history of the world. Understand what was involved. The heads of government of five European nations, plus the Secretary-General of NATO and the President of the European Commission, felt it imperative to jump on a plane on a momentrCOs notice and cross the ocean in a desperate bid to prevent the President of the United States from doing something insane rCo like combining forces with Russia against Ukraine rCo that might not only consign Ukraine to the eternal hell of Russian occupation but plunge the rest of the continent into a war with Russia of its own. It wasnrCOt a summit. It was an intervention. An emergency intervention, complete with hand puppets and psychotropic drugs.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. Consider what could have put the Europeans in such an agitated state. There are three possible explanations for Mr. TrumprCOs seeming capture by Mr. Putin. The first is that he has simply been rolled by him, over and over rCo whether because he has some sort of inexplicable man-crush on him, or because of Mr. PutinrCOs adroit application of flattery to the suppurating wounds of Mr. TrumprCOs ego, or because of Mr. TrumprCOs peculiar
susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left rCLwhen you think about
it, the West are really the bad guysrCY arguments favoured by your stoner roommate in first year. Most people grow out of this sort of thing, aside from a few foreign-policy rCLrealistsrCY and the affectedly contrarian; for Mr. Trump,
who has never read anything, it is all new.

The second is that Mr. Putin has something on him. This is no less alarming, and no less plausible. Mr. TrumprCOs long and intimate friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is by now a matter of public record; the contents of the Epstein files are not, but if anyone has had access to them it is a safe bet it is the Russians. It would take a lot to shame a six-times-bankrupt convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, self-admitted serial sexual predator, but apparently pedophilia rCo or whatever else Mr. Trump seems so desperate to hide rCo may finally be the line.

The third, perhaps simplest explanation is that Mr. Trump just happens to
agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one. Mr. PutinrCOs theory of foreign relations is that rCLthe strong do what they can, and
the weak suffer what they must.rCY That is Mr. TrumprCOs theory of everything.

All of these are plausible. Any one of them, if true, would threaten disaster. And it has to be one of them. Whatever may explain Mr. TrumprCOs behaviour, however he may be described rCo a malignant Chance the Gardener, a cretinous Manchurian candidate, with the intellectual and emotional responses of a child and the appetites and morality of a gangster rCo the leadership of much of the democratic world felt compelled to rush en masse to the White House in to deprogram him, or at least to distract him.

Hence that bizarre public performance, until now restricted to Mr. TrumprCOs cabinet meetings, in which the participants competed to flatter Mr. Trump in the most flowery terms. I canrCOt imagine any of them enjoyed it, but if thatrCOs
what it takes to keep him away from the cutlery so be it.

So: immediate disaster averted. But that hardly means the emergency has passed rCo not so long as Mr. Trump is on the scene. Because Mr. Trump is the emergency. Everything else about the war is mired in stasis. The wild card is Mr. Trump.

Mr. Putin has been admirably consistent. He is not going to rCLstop the killing.rCY Killing is the business of war, and Mr. Putin is not going to stop the war until, as Garry Kasparov says, he is stopped.

He is not going to meet with Mr. Zelensky: that would be to grant him the sort of legitimacy that Mr. Trump granted Mr. Putin, something his conscience, unlike Mr. TrumprCOs, would not permit. The suggestion, coming out of the Kremlin, that they meet in Moscow must be viewed in that light.

He is not going to sign on to any sort of meaningful security guarantee. Not that he has been presented with one. The idea, popular in certain quarters, of an rCLArticle V-likerCY guarantee only invites the question: if you are really prepared to offer Ukraine a guarantee equivalent to that provided in the NATO charter, why not just let it join NATO? From which Mr. Putin can draw the appropriate conclusions.

And so we come to the question of territory. It is the fashion to say, almost as an afterthought, that of course Ukraine will have to give up territory in any peace agreement. Not the territory it now controls, perhaps, but at least the territory Russia, by virtue of its illegal war of conquest, has taken from it. Or as the Trumpian ambassador to NATO put it, the territory it has rCLearned.rCY

Even people who profess to despise Mr. Trump will say this sort of thing. It
is intended, I think, to convey a pragmatic sense of the possible, a determination to see the world as it is and not as we would wish it to be. But of course it is every bit the fantasy it supposes the alternative to be.

Leave aside the consequences for the inhabitants of the rCLlandrCY so blithely transferred rCo consequences not imagined or predicted but experienced under Russian occupation to date: murder, torture, imprisonment, rape, child abduction, and so on. Leave aside the broader consequences, for Ukraine and
the world, of so conspicuously rewarding military aggression.

Leave aside the underlying assumption: that Russia cannot be expelled from these territories, even as its forces are being depleted and its economy collapses rCo or how these might be accelerated if the West ever got serious about providing weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia.

No, just think about the condition on which this surrender of land is supposed to be predicated: those fabulous security guarantees. The ones that the United States wants to fob off on Europe, that Europe wants to fob off on the Americans, that Russia offers to take off both their hands.

Even if Ukraine were a member of NATO, frankly, their security would be far from assured. But an alliance that cannot bring itself even to do that, led by a President who thinks Mr. Putin is his best friend, cannot be trusted to do anything.

No, the only real guarantee of UkrainerCOs security is UkrainerCOs army. If we support and sustain that army, Ukraine will have no need to concede any of its territory to Russia. If we do not, we will soon find it is not only Ukraine that is making such concessions.

-Andrew Coyne - G&M Aug 21/25
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:10:11 -0000 (UTC), Tara <tsm@fastmail.ca>
wrote:

The Ukraine emergency is far from over u because Donald Trump is the emergency

-Andrew Coyne - G&M - Aug 21/25

Going into the oFiasca in Alaskao u more formally known as the Trump-Putin >summit u the only question was how much worse it would be than expected. You >knew it would be bad, but you also knew that you had no idea how bad, and that >whatever attempts you might make to guess how bad would inevitably fall short >of the reality. As IAve written before, Donald Trump always defeats the >imagination.

The event seemed destined not to disappoint. The very act of meeting, on >American soil, with a mass-murdering, child-abducting war criminal, in the >flagrante delicto of his campaign of extermination in Ukraine, was an >obscenity in itself. Coupled with the fawning displays of welcome u the jets >flying overhead, the soldiers stooping to unroll the red carpet, the President >of the United States quivering with excitement as he waited for him, the >smiles, the handshakes, the intimate car ride for two u one had every reason >to expect the worst, or rather to expect how much worse it would be than one >had expected.

So when the two men emerged from their confab, Mr. Putin smiling coyly, Mr. >Trump looking haggard, only to announce that they had been unable to reach an >agreement, one felt a little surge of an unfamiliar emotion: hope. Perhaps in >the end the meeting would prove to have been merely an embarrassment and a >disgrace, rather than a full-on, geopolitical disaster. Maybe Mr. Trump had >offered Mr. Putin the moon and the stars, but had run up against Mr. PutinAs >demands for the moon, the stars and the keys to Fort Knox. Maybe the world >might yet be saved by Mr. PutinAs overweening intransigence.

How naive we were. Before a day had passed it emerged, via the inevitable >background briefings and Trumpian social media posts, that the two men had in >fact agreed on a great many things. Mr. Trump had gone into the meeting, in a >rare display of baseline sentience, demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine and >threatening sanctions and other osevere consequenceso if Mr. Putin did not >comply; coming out of the meeting not only was there no mention of sanctions, >but Mr. Trump had miraculously converted to Mr. PutinAs view.

Mr. Putin, indeed, had not given an inch on anything: not an inch on the >question of territory (the Russian idea of oland swapso is for it to keep all >the Ukrainian land it now controls, in exchange for keeping some of the land >it does not); not an inch on the oroot causeso of the conflict (the >independence of Ukraine, in a nutshell); not an inch on osecurity guaranteeso >for Ukraine (Russia proposes that it might agree to provide such guarantees, >so long as it had a veto on anyone else doing so) or NATO membership or the >rest.

The only reason anyone had even briefly imagined he might have is because Mr. >TrumpAs chief negotiator, a bottomlessly ignorant real estate tycoon like >himself by the name of Steve Witkoff, in the hurried talks leading up to the >summit, had misunderstood Mr. Putin on a couple of points, believing him to >have offered to withdraw from certain territories, for example, when in fact >he had proposed that Ukraine should. (Mr. WitkoffAs confusion is perhaps >understandable, as he has been using a translator provided by Mr. Putin.)

Which would be depressing enough, without Mr. Trump, in his public statements >post-summit and in telephone calls with European leaders, taking the Putin >line on every point. Well, Mr. Trump has always taken the Putin line, but >there had been that brief interval, in those halcyon days before the summit, >when it seemed that Mr. Trump had had certain glimmerings that perhaps Mr. >Putin was not being entirely straight with him.

But there he was now, assuring his listeners that Mr. Putin wants peace, that >all he wanted was a little more land u for what is Russia short of but land u >in exchange for which he was prepared to guarantee that he would not take any >more. Why, he was even willing to pass a law to that effect! No, the only >obstacle to peace was that impossible man, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had had the >temerity to ostart a waro (Ukraine did not start the war) with a country o10 >times its sizeo (RussiaAs population is about three-and-a-half times >UkraineAs).

With a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky scheduled for the following >days, there was the alarming prospect of a Russo-American axis forming, >issuing a series of impossible demands to which an isolated Mr. Zelensky would >be forced to accede, or be blamed for the warAs continuance. Mr. Trump seemed >obsessed with the idea that a peace agreement, on whatever terms, would win >him the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour that has so transfixed him he was >reported to have called up the Norwegian Finance Minister, out of the blue, to >sound him out on his chances.

Hence the weekAs second great fiasco: the panicky roundup of European leaders, >as the realization sunk in of just how badly things had gone in Alaska, to >accompany Mr. Zelensky to his meeting with Mr. Trump u a scene that would be >written out of an opera bouffe as too implausible.

Indeed, there has never been anything like it, IAd wager, in the history of >the world. Understand what was involved. The heads of government of five >European nations, plus the Secretary-General of NATO and the President of the >European Commission, felt it imperative to jump on a plane on a momentAs >notice and cross the ocean in a desperate bid to prevent the President of the >United States from doing something insane u like combining forces with Russia >against Ukraine u that might not only consign Ukraine to the eternal hell of >Russian occupation but plunge the rest of the continent into a war with Russia >of its own. It wasnAt a summit. It was an intervention. An emergency >intervention, complete with hand puppets and psychotropic drugs.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. Consider what could have put the Europeans in >such an agitated state. There are three possible explanations for Mr. TrumpAs >seeming capture by Mr. Putin. The first is that he has simply been rolled by >him, over and over u whether because he has some sort of inexplicable >man-crush on him, or because of Mr. PutinAs adroit application of flattery to >the suppurating wounds of Mr. TrumpAs ego, or because of Mr. TrumpAs peculiar >susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left owhen you think about >it, the West are really the bad guyso arguments favoured by your stoner >roommate in first year. Most people grow out of this sort of thing, aside from >a few foreign-policy orealistso and the affectedly contrarian; for Mr. Trump, >who has never read anything, it is all new.

The second is that Mr. Putin has something on him. This is no less alarming, >and no less plausible. Mr. TrumpAs long and intimate friendship with Jeffrey >Epstein is by now a matter of public record; the contents of the Epstein files >are not, but if anyone has had access to them it is a safe bet it is the >Russians. It would take a lot to shame a six-times-bankrupt convicted felon, >adjudicated rapist, self-admitted serial sexual predator, but apparently >pedophilia u or whatever else Mr. Trump seems so desperate to hide u may >finally be the line.

The third, perhaps simplest explanation is that Mr. Trump just happens to >agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one. Mr. >PutinAs theory of foreign relations is that othe strong do what they can, and >the weak suffer what they must.o That is Mr. TrumpAs theory of everything.

All of these are plausible. Any one of them, if true, would threaten disaster. >And it has to be one of them. Whatever may explain Mr. TrumpAs behaviour, >however he may be described u a malignant Chance the Gardener, a cretinous >Manchurian candidate, with the intellectual and emotional responses of a child >and the appetites and morality of a gangster u the leadership of much of the >democratic world felt compelled to rush en masse to the White House in to >deprogram him, or at least to distract him.

Hence that bizarre public performance, until now restricted to Mr. TrumpAs >cabinet meetings, in which the participants competed to flatter Mr. Trump in >the most flowery terms. I canAt imagine any of them enjoyed it, but if thatAs >what it takes to keep him away from the cutlery so be it.

So: immediate disaster averted. But that hardly means the emergency has passed >u not so long as Mr. Trump is on the scene. Because Mr. Trump is the >emergency. Everything else about the war is mired in stasis. The wild card is >Mr. Trump.

Mr. Putin has been admirably consistent. He is not going to ostop the >killing.o Killing is the business of war, and Mr. Putin is not going to stop >the war until, as Garry Kasparov says, he is stopped.

He is not going to meet with Mr. Zelensky: that would be to grant him the sort >of legitimacy that Mr. Trump granted Mr. Putin, something his conscience, >unlike Mr. TrumpAs, would not permit. The suggestion, coming out of the >Kremlin, that they meet in Moscow must be viewed in that light.

He is not going to sign on to any sort of meaningful security guarantee. Not >that he has been presented with one. The idea, popular in certain quarters, of >an oArticle V-likeo guarantee only invites the question: if you are really >prepared to offer Ukraine a guarantee equivalent to that provided in the NATO >charter, why not just let it join NATO? From which Mr. Putin can draw the >appropriate conclusions.

And so we come to the question of territory. It is the fashion to say, almost >as an afterthought, that of course Ukraine will have to give up territory in >any peace agreement. Not the territory it now controls, perhaps, but at least >the territory Russia, by virtue of its illegal war of conquest, has taken from >it. Or as the Trumpian ambassador to NATO put it, the territory it has >oearned.o

Even people who profess to despise Mr. Trump will say this sort of thing. It >is intended, I think, to convey a pragmatic sense of the possible, a >determination to see the world as it is and not as we would wish it to be. But >of course it is every bit the fantasy it supposes the alternative to be.

Leave aside the consequences for the inhabitants of the olando so blithely >transferred u consequences not imagined or predicted but experienced under >Russian occupation to date: murder, torture, imprisonment, rape, child >abduction, and so on. Leave aside the broader consequences, for Ukraine and >the world, of so conspicuously rewarding military aggression.

Leave aside the underlying assumption: that Russia cannot be expelled from >these territories, even as its forces are being depleted and its economy >collapses u or how these might be accelerated if the West ever got serious >about providing weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia.

No, just think about the condition on which this surrender of land is supposed >to be predicated: those fabulous security guarantees. The ones that the United >States wants to fob off on Europe, that Europe wants to fob off on the >Americans, that Russia offers to take off both their hands.

Even if Ukraine were a member of NATO, frankly, their security would be far >from assured. But an alliance that cannot bring itself even to do that, led by >a President who thinks Mr. Putin is his best friend, cannot be trusted to do >anything.

No, the only real guarantee of UkraineAs security is UkraineAs army. If we >support and sustain that army, Ukraine will have no need to concede any of its >territory to Russia. If we do not, we will soon find it is not only Ukraine >that is making such concessions.

-Andrew Coyne - G&M Aug 21/25

Once again Andy
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers

God bless his soul.
--
Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain
Don't get political with me young man
or I'll tie you to a railroad track and
<<<talk>>> to <<<YOOooooo>>>
Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?
dares: Ned
does not dare: Julian shrinks in horror and warns others away

--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

On 8/22/2025 7:05 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:10:11 -0000 (UTC), Tara <tsm@fastmail.ca>
wrote:

The Ukraine emergency is far from over rCo because Donald Trump is the emergency

-Andrew Coyne - G&M - Aug 21/25


Going into the rCLFiasca in AlaskarCY rCo more formally known as the Trump-Putin
summit rCo the only question was how much worse it would be than expected. You
knew it would be bad, but you also knew that you had no idea how bad, and that
whatever attempts you might make to guess how bad would inevitably fall short
of the reality. As IrCOve written before, Donald Trump always defeats the
imagination.

The event seemed destined not to disappoint. The very act of meeting, on
American soil, with a mass-murdering, child-abducting war criminal, in the >> flagrante delicto of his campaign of extermination in Ukraine, was an
obscenity in itself. Coupled with the fawning displays of welcome rCo the jets
flying overhead, the soldiers stooping to unroll the red carpet, the President
of the United States quivering with excitement as he waited for him, the
smiles, the handshakes, the intimate car ride for two rCo one had every reason
to expect the worst, or rather to expect how much worse it would be than one >> had expected.

So when the two men emerged from their confab, Mr. Putin smiling coyly, Mr. >> Trump looking haggard, only to announce that they had been unable to reach an
agreement, one felt a little surge of an unfamiliar emotion: hope. Perhaps in
the end the meeting would prove to have been merely an embarrassment and a >> disgrace, rather than a full-on, geopolitical disaster. Maybe Mr. Trump had >> offered Mr. Putin the moon and the stars, but had run up against Mr. PutinrCOs
demands for the moon, the stars and the keys to Fort Knox. Maybe the world >> might yet be saved by Mr. PutinrCOs overweening intransigence.


How naive we were. Before a day had passed it emerged, via the inevitable
background briefings and Trumpian social media posts, that the two men had in
fact agreed on a great many things. Mr. Trump had gone into the meeting, in a
rare display of baseline sentience, demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine and
threatening sanctions and other rCLsevere consequencesrCY if Mr. Putin did not
comply; coming out of the meeting not only was there no mention of sanctions,
but Mr. Trump had miraculously converted to Mr. PutinrCOs view.

Mr. Putin, indeed, had not given an inch on anything: not an inch on the
question of territory (the Russian idea of rCLland swapsrCY is for it to keep all
the Ukrainian land it now controls, in exchange for keeping some of the land >> it does not); not an inch on the rCLroot causesrCY of the conflict (the
independence of Ukraine, in a nutshell); not an inch on rCLsecurity guaranteesrCY
for Ukraine (Russia proposes that it might agree to provide such guarantees, >> so long as it had a veto on anyone else doing so) or NATO membership or the >> rest.

The only reason anyone had even briefly imagined he might have is because Mr.
TrumprCOs chief negotiator, a bottomlessly ignorant real estate tycoon like >> himself by the name of Steve Witkoff, in the hurried talks leading up to the >> summit, had misunderstood Mr. Putin on a couple of points, believing him to >> have offered to withdraw from certain territories, for example, when in fact >> he had proposed that Ukraine should. (Mr. WitkoffrCOs confusion is perhaps >> understandable, as he has been using a translator provided by Mr. Putin.)

Which would be depressing enough, without Mr. Trump, in his public statements
post-summit and in telephone calls with European leaders, taking the Putin >> line on every point. Well, Mr. Trump has always taken the Putin line, but
there had been that brief interval, in those halcyon days before the summit, >> when it seemed that Mr. Trump had had certain glimmerings that perhaps Mr. >> Putin was not being entirely straight with him.

But there he was now, assuring his listeners that Mr. Putin wants peace, that
all he wanted was a little more land rCo for what is Russia short of but land rCo
in exchange for which he was prepared to guarantee that he would not take any
more. Why, he was even willing to pass a law to that effect! No, the only
obstacle to peace was that impossible man, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had had the
temerity to rCLstart a warrCY (Ukraine did not start the war) with a country rCL10
times its sizerCY (RussiarCOs population is about three-and-a-half times
UkrainerCOs).

With a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky scheduled for the following >> days, there was the alarming prospect of a Russo-American axis forming,
issuing a series of impossible demands to which an isolated Mr. Zelensky would
be forced to accede, or be blamed for the warrCOs continuance. Mr. Trump seemed
obsessed with the idea that a peace agreement, on whatever terms, would win >> him the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour that has so transfixed him he was
reported to have called up the Norwegian Finance Minister, out of the blue, to
sound him out on his chances.

Hence the weekrCOs second great fiasco: the panicky roundup of European leaders,
as the realization sunk in of just how badly things had gone in Alaska, to >> accompany Mr. Zelensky to his meeting with Mr. Trump rCo a scene that would be
written out of an opera bouffe as too implausible.

Indeed, there has never been anything like it, IrCOd wager, in the history of
the world. Understand what was involved. The heads of government of five
European nations, plus the Secretary-General of NATO and the President of the
European Commission, felt it imperative to jump on a plane on a momentrCOs >> notice and cross the ocean in a desperate bid to prevent the President of the
United States from doing something insane rCo like combining forces with Russia
against Ukraine rCo that might not only consign Ukraine to the eternal hell of
Russian occupation but plunge the rest of the continent into a war with Russia
of its own. It wasnrCOt a summit. It was an intervention. An emergency
intervention, complete with hand puppets and psychotropic drugs.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. Consider what could have put the Europeans in
such an agitated state. There are three possible explanations for Mr. TrumprCOs
seeming capture by Mr. Putin. The first is that he has simply been rolled by >> him, over and over rCo whether because he has some sort of inexplicable
man-crush on him, or because of Mr. PutinrCOs adroit application of flattery to
the suppurating wounds of Mr. TrumprCOs ego, or because of Mr. TrumprCOs peculiar
susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left rCLwhen you think about
it, the West are really the bad guysrCY arguments favoured by your stoner
roommate in first year. Most people grow out of this sort of thing, aside from
a few foreign-policy rCLrealistsrCY and the affectedly contrarian; for Mr. Trump,
who has never read anything, it is all new.

The second is that Mr. Putin has something on him. This is no less alarming, >> and no less plausible. Mr. TrumprCOs long and intimate friendship with Jeffrey
Epstein is by now a matter of public record; the contents of the Epstein files
are not, but if anyone has had access to them it is a safe bet it is the
Russians. It would take a lot to shame a six-times-bankrupt convicted felon, >> adjudicated rapist, self-admitted serial sexual predator, but apparently
pedophilia rCo or whatever else Mr. Trump seems so desperate to hide rCo may >> finally be the line.

The third, perhaps simplest explanation is that Mr. Trump just happens to
agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one. Mr. >> PutinrCOs theory of foreign relations is that rCLthe strong do what they can, and
the weak suffer what they must.rCY That is Mr. TrumprCOs theory of everything.

All of these are plausible. Any one of them, if true, would threaten disaster.
And it has to be one of them. Whatever may explain Mr. TrumprCOs behaviour, >> however he may be described rCo a malignant Chance the Gardener, a cretinous >> Manchurian candidate, with the intellectual and emotional responses of a child
and the appetites and morality of a gangster rCo the leadership of much of the
democratic world felt compelled to rush en masse to the White House in to
deprogram him, or at least to distract him.

Hence that bizarre public performance, until now restricted to Mr. TrumprCOs >> cabinet meetings, in which the participants competed to flatter Mr. Trump in >> the most flowery terms. I canrCOt imagine any of them enjoyed it, but if thatrCOs
what it takes to keep him away from the cutlery so be it.

So: immediate disaster averted. But that hardly means the emergency has passed
rCo not so long as Mr. Trump is on the scene. Because Mr. Trump is the
emergency. Everything else about the war is mired in stasis. The wild card is
Mr. Trump.

Mr. Putin has been admirably consistent. He is not going to rCLstop the
killing.rCY Killing is the business of war, and Mr. Putin is not going to stop
the war until, as Garry Kasparov says, he is stopped.

He is not going to meet with Mr. Zelensky: that would be to grant him the sort
of legitimacy that Mr. Trump granted Mr. Putin, something his conscience,
unlike Mr. TrumprCOs, would not permit. The suggestion, coming out of the
Kremlin, that they meet in Moscow must be viewed in that light.

He is not going to sign on to any sort of meaningful security guarantee. Not >> that he has been presented with one. The idea, popular in certain quarters, of
an rCLArticle V-likerCY guarantee only invites the question: if you are really
prepared to offer Ukraine a guarantee equivalent to that provided in the NATO
charter, why not just let it join NATO? From which Mr. Putin can draw the
appropriate conclusions.

And so we come to the question of territory. It is the fashion to say, almost
as an afterthought, that of course Ukraine will have to give up territory in >> any peace agreement. Not the territory it now controls, perhaps, but at least
the territory Russia, by virtue of its illegal war of conquest, has taken from
it. Or as the Trumpian ambassador to NATO put it, the territory it has
rCLearned.rCY

Even people who profess to despise Mr. Trump will say this sort of thing. It >> is intended, I think, to convey a pragmatic sense of the possible, a
determination to see the world as it is and not as we would wish it to be. But
of course it is every bit the fantasy it supposes the alternative to be.

Leave aside the consequences for the inhabitants of the rCLlandrCY so blithely
transferred rCo consequences not imagined or predicted but experienced under >> Russian occupation to date: murder, torture, imprisonment, rape, child
abduction, and so on. Leave aside the broader consequences, for Ukraine and >> the world, of so conspicuously rewarding military aggression.

Leave aside the underlying assumption: that Russia cannot be expelled from >> these territories, even as its forces are being depleted and its economy
collapses rCo or how these might be accelerated if the West ever got serious >> about providing weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia.

No, just think about the condition on which this surrender of land is supposed
to be predicated: those fabulous security guarantees. The ones that the United
States wants to fob off on Europe, that Europe wants to fob off on the
Americans, that Russia offers to take off both their hands.

Even if Ukraine were a member of NATO, frankly, their security would be far >>from assured. But an alliance that cannot bring itself even to do that, led by
a President who thinks Mr. Putin is his best friend, cannot be trusted to do >> anything.

No, the only real guarantee of UkrainerCOs security is UkrainerCOs army. If we
support and sustain that army, Ukraine will have no need to concede any of its
territory to Russia. If we do not, we will soon find it is not only Ukraine >> that is making such concessions.

-Andrew Coyne - G&M Aug 21/25

Once again Andy
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers

God bless his soul.

Wait! Didn't I make this very same argument here months ago? Nobody can negotiate with Putin.

Just take out the Russian power grid in about an hour. Hit them really
hard in the night. Keep it that way, dark, until the Russians vacate
Ukraine and Crimea and start paying back with free oil and gas
reparations, for the next decade.
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 10:04:06 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/22/2025 7:05 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:10:11 -0000 (UTC), Tara <tsm@fastmail.ca>
wrote:

The Ukraine emergency is far from over u because Donald Trump is the emergency

-Andrew Coyne - G&M - Aug 21/25


Going into the oFiasca in Alaskao u more formally known as the Trump-Putin >>> summit u the only question was how much worse it would be than expected. You
knew it would be bad, but you also knew that you had no idea how bad, and that
whatever attempts you might make to guess how bad would inevitably fall short
of the reality. As IAve written before, Donald Trump always defeats the
imagination.

The event seemed destined not to disappoint. The very act of meeting, on >>> American soil, with a mass-murdering, child-abducting war criminal, in the >>> flagrante delicto of his campaign of extermination in Ukraine, was an
obscenity in itself. Coupled with the fawning displays of welcome u the jets
flying overhead, the soldiers stooping to unroll the red carpet, the President
of the United States quivering with excitement as he waited for him, the >>> smiles, the handshakes, the intimate car ride for two u one had every reason
to expect the worst, or rather to expect how much worse it would be than one
had expected.

So when the two men emerged from their confab, Mr. Putin smiling coyly, Mr. >>> Trump looking haggard, only to announce that they had been unable to reach an
agreement, one felt a little surge of an unfamiliar emotion: hope. Perhaps in
the end the meeting would prove to have been merely an embarrassment and a >>> disgrace, rather than a full-on, geopolitical disaster. Maybe Mr. Trump had >>> offered Mr. Putin the moon and the stars, but had run up against Mr. PutinAs
demands for the moon, the stars and the keys to Fort Knox. Maybe the world >>> might yet be saved by Mr. PutinAs overweening intransigence.


How naive we were. Before a day had passed it emerged, via the inevitable >>> background briefings and Trumpian social media posts, that the two men had in
fact agreed on a great many things. Mr. Trump had gone into the meeting, in a
rare display of baseline sentience, demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine and >>> threatening sanctions and other osevere consequenceso if Mr. Putin did not >>> comply; coming out of the meeting not only was there no mention of sanctions,
but Mr. Trump had miraculously converted to Mr. PutinAs view.

Mr. Putin, indeed, had not given an inch on anything: not an inch on the >>> question of territory (the Russian idea of oland swapso is for it to keep all
the Ukrainian land it now controls, in exchange for keeping some of the land
it does not); not an inch on the oroot causeso of the conflict (the
independence of Ukraine, in a nutshell); not an inch on osecurity guaranteeso
for Ukraine (Russia proposes that it might agree to provide such guarantees,
so long as it had a veto on anyone else doing so) or NATO membership or the >>> rest.

The only reason anyone had even briefly imagined he might have is because Mr.
TrumpAs chief negotiator, a bottomlessly ignorant real estate tycoon like >>> himself by the name of Steve Witkoff, in the hurried talks leading up to the
summit, had misunderstood Mr. Putin on a couple of points, believing him to >>> have offered to withdraw from certain territories, for example, when in fact
he had proposed that Ukraine should. (Mr. WitkoffAs confusion is perhaps >>> understandable, as he has been using a translator provided by Mr. Putin.) >>>
Which would be depressing enough, without Mr. Trump, in his public statements
post-summit and in telephone calls with European leaders, taking the Putin >>> line on every point. Well, Mr. Trump has always taken the Putin line, but >>> there had been that brief interval, in those halcyon days before the summit,
when it seemed that Mr. Trump had had certain glimmerings that perhaps Mr. >>> Putin was not being entirely straight with him.

But there he was now, assuring his listeners that Mr. Putin wants peace, that
all he wanted was a little more land u for what is Russia short of but land u
in exchange for which he was prepared to guarantee that he would not take any
more. Why, he was even willing to pass a law to that effect! No, the only >>> obstacle to peace was that impossible man, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had had the
temerity to ostart a waro (Ukraine did not start the war) with a country o10
times its sizeo (RussiaAs population is about three-and-a-half times
UkraineAs).

With a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky scheduled for the following
days, there was the alarming prospect of a Russo-American axis forming,
issuing a series of impossible demands to which an isolated Mr. Zelensky would
be forced to accede, or be blamed for the warAs continuance. Mr. Trump seemed
obsessed with the idea that a peace agreement, on whatever terms, would win >>> him the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour that has so transfixed him he was
reported to have called up the Norwegian Finance Minister, out of the blue, to
sound him out on his chances.

Hence the weekAs second great fiasco: the panicky roundup of European leaders,
as the realization sunk in of just how badly things had gone in Alaska, to >>> accompany Mr. Zelensky to his meeting with Mr. Trump u a scene that would be
written out of an opera bouffe as too implausible.

Indeed, there has never been anything like it, IAd wager, in the history of >>> the world. Understand what was involved. The heads of government of five >>> European nations, plus the Secretary-General of NATO and the President of the
European Commission, felt it imperative to jump on a plane on a momentAs >>> notice and cross the ocean in a desperate bid to prevent the President of the
United States from doing something insane u like combining forces with Russia
against Ukraine u that might not only consign Ukraine to the eternal hell of
Russian occupation but plunge the rest of the continent into a war with Russia
of its own. It wasnAt a summit. It was an intervention. An emergency
intervention, complete with hand puppets and psychotropic drugs.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. Consider what could have put the Europeans in
such an agitated state. There are three possible explanations for Mr. TrumpAs
seeming capture by Mr. Putin. The first is that he has simply been rolled by
him, over and over u whether because he has some sort of inexplicable
man-crush on him, or because of Mr. PutinAs adroit application of flattery to
the suppurating wounds of Mr. TrumpAs ego, or because of Mr. TrumpAs peculiar
susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left owhen you think about
it, the West are really the bad guyso arguments favoured by your stoner
roommate in first year. Most people grow out of this sort of thing, aside from
a few foreign-policy orealistso and the affectedly contrarian; for Mr. Trump,
who has never read anything, it is all new.

The second is that Mr. Putin has something on him. This is no less alarming,
and no less plausible. Mr. TrumpAs long and intimate friendship with Jeffrey
Epstein is by now a matter of public record; the contents of the Epstein files
are not, but if anyone has had access to them it is a safe bet it is the >>> Russians. It would take a lot to shame a six-times-bankrupt convicted felon,
adjudicated rapist, self-admitted serial sexual predator, but apparently >>> pedophilia u or whatever else Mr. Trump seems so desperate to hide u may >>> finally be the line.

The third, perhaps simplest explanation is that Mr. Trump just happens to >>> agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one. Mr.
PutinAs theory of foreign relations is that othe strong do what they can, and
the weak suffer what they must.o That is Mr. TrumpAs theory of everything. >>>
All of these are plausible. Any one of them, if true, would threaten disaster.
And it has to be one of them. Whatever may explain Mr. TrumpAs behaviour, >>> however he may be described u a malignant Chance the Gardener, a cretinous >>> Manchurian candidate, with the intellectual and emotional responses of a child
and the appetites and morality of a gangster u the leadership of much of the
democratic world felt compelled to rush en masse to the White House in to >>> deprogram him, or at least to distract him.

Hence that bizarre public performance, until now restricted to Mr. TrumpAs >>> cabinet meetings, in which the participants competed to flatter Mr. Trump in
the most flowery terms. I canAt imagine any of them enjoyed it, but if thatAs
what it takes to keep him away from the cutlery so be it.

So: immediate disaster averted. But that hardly means the emergency has passed
u not so long as Mr. Trump is on the scene. Because Mr. Trump is the
emergency. Everything else about the war is mired in stasis. The wild card is
Mr. Trump.

Mr. Putin has been admirably consistent. He is not going to ostop the
killing.o Killing is the business of war, and Mr. Putin is not going to stop
the war until, as Garry Kasparov says, he is stopped.

He is not going to meet with Mr. Zelensky: that would be to grant him the sort
of legitimacy that Mr. Trump granted Mr. Putin, something his conscience, >>> unlike Mr. TrumpAs, would not permit. The suggestion, coming out of the
Kremlin, that they meet in Moscow must be viewed in that light.

He is not going to sign on to any sort of meaningful security guarantee. Not
that he has been presented with one. The idea, popular in certain quarters, of
an oArticle V-likeo guarantee only invites the question: if you are really >>> prepared to offer Ukraine a guarantee equivalent to that provided in the NATO
charter, why not just let it join NATO? From which Mr. Putin can draw the >>> appropriate conclusions.

And so we come to the question of territory. It is the fashion to say, almost
as an afterthought, that of course Ukraine will have to give up territory in
any peace agreement. Not the territory it now controls, perhaps, but at least
the territory Russia, by virtue of its illegal war of conquest, has taken from
it. Or as the Trumpian ambassador to NATO put it, the territory it has
oearned.o

Even people who profess to despise Mr. Trump will say this sort of thing. It
is intended, I think, to convey a pragmatic sense of the possible, a
determination to see the world as it is and not as we would wish it to be. But
of course it is every bit the fantasy it supposes the alternative to be. >>>
Leave aside the consequences for the inhabitants of the olando so blithely >>> transferred u consequences not imagined or predicted but experienced under >>> Russian occupation to date: murder, torture, imprisonment, rape, child
abduction, and so on. Leave aside the broader consequences, for Ukraine and >>> the world, of so conspicuously rewarding military aggression.

Leave aside the underlying assumption: that Russia cannot be expelled from >>> these territories, even as its forces are being depleted and its economy >>> collapses u or how these might be accelerated if the West ever got serious >>> about providing weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia.

No, just think about the condition on which this surrender of land is supposed
to be predicated: those fabulous security guarantees. The ones that the United
States wants to fob off on Europe, that Europe wants to fob off on the
Americans, that Russia offers to take off both their hands.

Even if Ukraine were a member of NATO, frankly, their security would be far >>>from assured. But an alliance that cannot bring itself even to do that, led by
a President who thinks Mr. Putin is his best friend, cannot be trusted to do
anything.

No, the only real guarantee of UkraineAs security is UkraineAs army. If we >>> support and sustain that army, Ukraine will have no need to concede any of its
territory to Russia. If we do not, we will soon find it is not only Ukraine >>> that is making such concessions.

-Andrew Coyne - G&M Aug 21/25

Once again Andy
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers

God bless his soul.

Wait! Didn't I make this very same argument here months ago? Nobody can >negotiate with Putin.

Just take out the Russian power grid in about an hour. Hit them really
hard in the night. Keep it that way, dark, until the Russians vacate
Ukraine and Crimea and start paying back with free oil and gas
reparations, for the next decade.

Don't fight unless you are willing to do whatever it takes to win. If
it is clear you can't win, also don't fight.

In recent decades wars of the major powers have been unwinnabe, mostly
because we lack the will to do whatever it takes. We shrink from
that. Killing more people slowly and then giving up is preferable.
--
Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain
Don't get political with me young man
or I'll tie you to a railroad track and
<<<talk>>> to <<<YOOooooo>>>
Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?
dares: Ned
does not dare: Julian shrinks in horror and warns others away

--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

On 8/22/2025 11:04 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 10:04:06 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/22/2025 7:05 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:10:11 -0000 (UTC), Tara <tsm@fastmail.ca>
wrote:

The Ukraine emergency is far from over rCo because Donald Trump is the emergency

-Andrew Coyne - G&M - Aug 21/25


Going into the rCLFiasca in AlaskarCY rCo more formally known as the Trump-Putin
summit rCo the only question was how much worse it would be than expected. You
knew it would be bad, but you also knew that you had no idea how bad, and that
whatever attempts you might make to guess how bad would inevitably fall short
of the reality. As IrCOve written before, Donald Trump always defeats the >>>> imagination.

The event seemed destined not to disappoint. The very act of meeting, on >>>> American soil, with a mass-murdering, child-abducting war criminal, in the >>>> flagrante delicto of his campaign of extermination in Ukraine, was an
obscenity in itself. Coupled with the fawning displays of welcome rCo the jets
flying overhead, the soldiers stooping to unroll the red carpet, the President
of the United States quivering with excitement as he waited for him, the >>>> smiles, the handshakes, the intimate car ride for two rCo one had every reason
to expect the worst, or rather to expect how much worse it would be than one
had expected.

So when the two men emerged from their confab, Mr. Putin smiling coyly, Mr.
Trump looking haggard, only to announce that they had been unable to reach an
agreement, one felt a little surge of an unfamiliar emotion: hope. Perhaps in
the end the meeting would prove to have been merely an embarrassment and a >>>> disgrace, rather than a full-on, geopolitical disaster. Maybe Mr. Trump had
offered Mr. Putin the moon and the stars, but had run up against Mr. PutinrCOs
demands for the moon, the stars and the keys to Fort Knox. Maybe the world >>>> might yet be saved by Mr. PutinrCOs overweening intransigence.


How naive we were. Before a day had passed it emerged, via the inevitable >>>> background briefings and Trumpian social media posts, that the two men had in
fact agreed on a great many things. Mr. Trump had gone into the meeting, in a
rare display of baseline sentience, demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine and >>>> threatening sanctions and other rCLsevere consequencesrCY if Mr. Putin did not
comply; coming out of the meeting not only was there no mention of sanctions,
but Mr. Trump had miraculously converted to Mr. PutinrCOs view.

Mr. Putin, indeed, had not given an inch on anything: not an inch on the >>>> question of territory (the Russian idea of rCLland swapsrCY is for it to keep all
the Ukrainian land it now controls, in exchange for keeping some of the land
it does not); not an inch on the rCLroot causesrCY of the conflict (the >>>> independence of Ukraine, in a nutshell); not an inch on rCLsecurity guaranteesrCY
for Ukraine (Russia proposes that it might agree to provide such guarantees,
so long as it had a veto on anyone else doing so) or NATO membership or the
rest.

The only reason anyone had even briefly imagined he might have is because Mr.
TrumprCOs chief negotiator, a bottomlessly ignorant real estate tycoon like
himself by the name of Steve Witkoff, in the hurried talks leading up to the
summit, had misunderstood Mr. Putin on a couple of points, believing him to
have offered to withdraw from certain territories, for example, when in fact
he had proposed that Ukraine should. (Mr. WitkoffrCOs confusion is perhaps >>>> understandable, as he has been using a translator provided by Mr. Putin.) >>>>
Which would be depressing enough, without Mr. Trump, in his public statements
post-summit and in telephone calls with European leaders, taking the Putin >>>> line on every point. Well, Mr. Trump has always taken the Putin line, but >>>> there had been that brief interval, in those halcyon days before the summit,
when it seemed that Mr. Trump had had certain glimmerings that perhaps Mr. >>>> Putin was not being entirely straight with him.

But there he was now, assuring his listeners that Mr. Putin wants peace, that
all he wanted was a little more land rCo for what is Russia short of but land rCo
in exchange for which he was prepared to guarantee that he would not take any
more. Why, he was even willing to pass a law to that effect! No, the only >>>> obstacle to peace was that impossible man, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had had the
temerity to rCLstart a warrCY (Ukraine did not start the war) with a country rCL10
times its sizerCY (RussiarCOs population is about three-and-a-half times >>>> UkrainerCOs).

With a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky scheduled for the following
days, there was the alarming prospect of a Russo-American axis forming, >>>> issuing a series of impossible demands to which an isolated Mr. Zelensky would
be forced to accede, or be blamed for the warrCOs continuance. Mr. Trump seemed
obsessed with the idea that a peace agreement, on whatever terms, would win
him the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour that has so transfixed him he was >>>> reported to have called up the Norwegian Finance Minister, out of the blue, to
sound him out on his chances.

Hence the weekrCOs second great fiasco: the panicky roundup of European leaders,
as the realization sunk in of just how badly things had gone in Alaska, to >>>> accompany Mr. Zelensky to his meeting with Mr. Trump rCo a scene that would be
written out of an opera bouffe as too implausible.

Indeed, there has never been anything like it, IrCOd wager, in the history of
the world. Understand what was involved. The heads of government of five >>>> European nations, plus the Secretary-General of NATO and the President of the
European Commission, felt it imperative to jump on a plane on a momentrCOs >>>> notice and cross the ocean in a desperate bid to prevent the President of the
United States from doing something insane rCo like combining forces with Russia
against Ukraine rCo that might not only consign Ukraine to the eternal hell of
Russian occupation but plunge the rest of the continent into a war with Russia
of its own. It wasnrCOt a summit. It was an intervention. An emergency >>>> intervention, complete with hand puppets and psychotropic drugs.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. Consider what could have put the Europeans in
such an agitated state. There are three possible explanations for Mr. TrumprCOs
seeming capture by Mr. Putin. The first is that he has simply been rolled by
him, over and over rCo whether because he has some sort of inexplicable >>>> man-crush on him, or because of Mr. PutinrCOs adroit application of flattery to
the suppurating wounds of Mr. TrumprCOs ego, or because of Mr. TrumprCOs peculiar
susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left rCLwhen you think about
it, the West are really the bad guysrCY arguments favoured by your stoner >>>> roommate in first year. Most people grow out of this sort of thing, aside from
a few foreign-policy rCLrealistsrCY and the affectedly contrarian; for Mr. Trump,
who has never read anything, it is all new.

The second is that Mr. Putin has something on him. This is no less alarming,
and no less plausible. Mr. TrumprCOs long and intimate friendship with Jeffrey
Epstein is by now a matter of public record; the contents of the Epstein files
are not, but if anyone has had access to them it is a safe bet it is the >>>> Russians. It would take a lot to shame a six-times-bankrupt convicted felon,
adjudicated rapist, self-admitted serial sexual predator, but apparently >>>> pedophilia rCo or whatever else Mr. Trump seems so desperate to hide rCo may
finally be the line.

The third, perhaps simplest explanation is that Mr. Trump just happens to >>>> agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one. Mr.
PutinrCOs theory of foreign relations is that rCLthe strong do what they can, and
the weak suffer what they must.rCY That is Mr. TrumprCOs theory of everything.

All of these are plausible. Any one of them, if true, would threaten disaster.
And it has to be one of them. Whatever may explain Mr. TrumprCOs behaviour,
however he may be described rCo a malignant Chance the Gardener, a cretinous
Manchurian candidate, with the intellectual and emotional responses of a child
and the appetites and morality of a gangster rCo the leadership of much of the
democratic world felt compelled to rush en masse to the White House in to >>>> deprogram him, or at least to distract him.

Hence that bizarre public performance, until now restricted to Mr. TrumprCOs
cabinet meetings, in which the participants competed to flatter Mr. Trump in
the most flowery terms. I canrCOt imagine any of them enjoyed it, but if thatrCOs
what it takes to keep him away from the cutlery so be it.

So: immediate disaster averted. But that hardly means the emergency has passed
rCo not so long as Mr. Trump is on the scene. Because Mr. Trump is the >>>> emergency. Everything else about the war is mired in stasis. The wild card is
Mr. Trump.

Mr. Putin has been admirably consistent. He is not going to rCLstop the >>>> killing.rCY Killing is the business of war, and Mr. Putin is not going to stop
the war until, as Garry Kasparov says, he is stopped.

He is not going to meet with Mr. Zelensky: that would be to grant him the sort
of legitimacy that Mr. Trump granted Mr. Putin, something his conscience, >>>> unlike Mr. TrumprCOs, would not permit. The suggestion, coming out of the >>>> Kremlin, that they meet in Moscow must be viewed in that light.

He is not going to sign on to any sort of meaningful security guarantee. Not
that he has been presented with one. The idea, popular in certain quarters, of
an rCLArticle V-likerCY guarantee only invites the question: if you are really
prepared to offer Ukraine a guarantee equivalent to that provided in the NATO
charter, why not just let it join NATO? From which Mr. Putin can draw the >>>> appropriate conclusions.

And so we come to the question of territory. It is the fashion to say, almost
as an afterthought, that of course Ukraine will have to give up territory in
any peace agreement. Not the territory it now controls, perhaps, but at least
the territory Russia, by virtue of its illegal war of conquest, has taken from
it. Or as the Trumpian ambassador to NATO put it, the territory it has >>>> rCLearned.rCY

Even people who profess to despise Mr. Trump will say this sort of thing. It
is intended, I think, to convey a pragmatic sense of the possible, a
determination to see the world as it is and not as we would wish it to be. But
of course it is every bit the fantasy it supposes the alternative to be. >>>>
Leave aside the consequences for the inhabitants of the rCLlandrCY so blithely
transferred rCo consequences not imagined or predicted but experienced under
Russian occupation to date: murder, torture, imprisonment, rape, child >>>> abduction, and so on. Leave aside the broader consequences, for Ukraine and
the world, of so conspicuously rewarding military aggression.

Leave aside the underlying assumption: that Russia cannot be expelled from >>>> these territories, even as its forces are being depleted and its economy >>>> collapses rCo or how these might be accelerated if the West ever got serious
about providing weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia.

No, just think about the condition on which this surrender of land is supposed
to be predicated: those fabulous security guarantees. The ones that the United
States wants to fob off on Europe, that Europe wants to fob off on the >>>> Americans, that Russia offers to take off both their hands.

Even if Ukraine were a member of NATO, frankly, their security would be far
from assured. But an alliance that cannot bring itself even to do that, led by
a President who thinks Mr. Putin is his best friend, cannot be trusted to do
anything.

No, the only real guarantee of UkrainerCOs security is UkrainerCOs army. If we
support and sustain that army, Ukraine will have no need to concede any of its
territory to Russia. If we do not, we will soon find it is not only Ukraine
that is making such concessions.

-Andrew Coyne - G&M Aug 21/25

Once again Andy
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers

God bless his soul.

Wait! Didn't I make this very same argument here months ago? Nobody can
negotiate with Putin.

Just take out the Russian power grid in about an hour. Hit them really
hard in the night. Keep it that way, dark, until the Russians vacate
Ukraine and Crimea and start paying back with free oil and gas
reparations, for the next decade.

Don't fight unless you are willing to do whatever it takes to win. If
it is clear you can't win, also don't fight.

In recent decades wars of the major powers have been unwinnabe, mostly because we lack the will to do whatever it takes. We shrink from
that. Killing more people slowly and then giving up is preferable.

Past success does not guarantee future success but sometimes you have to
do what works.

Back in the day, if Putin had invaded Crimea, Bush and Rumsfeld would go
into Russia with shock and awe and take over the whole European and
Russian air space in about an hour or two. Then, send in the US Marines Special Forces to secure the Kremlin backed up by bunker busters.

Nobody, I repeat, nobody, can move troops across the world like the US
Army!

There are already thousands of US troops and fly boys stationed in
Europe and Asia. In a conventional war, defeating Russia would be like a
walk in the park, just like in Iraq.

Look what happened to Saddam Hussein and Baghdad Bob!
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 12:03:37 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/22/2025 11:04 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 10:04:06 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/22/2025 7:05 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:10:11 -0000 (UTC), Tara <tsm@fastmail.ca>
wrote:

The Ukraine emergency is far from over u because Donald Trump is the emergency

-Andrew Coyne - G&M - Aug 21/25


Going into the oFiasca in Alaskao u more formally known as the Trump-Putin
summit u the only question was how much worse it would be than expected. You
knew it would be bad, but you also knew that you had no idea how bad, and that
whatever attempts you might make to guess how bad would inevitably fall short
of the reality. As IAve written before, Donald Trump always defeats the >>>>> imagination.

The event seemed destined not to disappoint. The very act of meeting, on >>>>> American soil, with a mass-murdering, child-abducting war criminal, in the
flagrante delicto of his campaign of extermination in Ukraine, was an >>>>> obscenity in itself. Coupled with the fawning displays of welcome u the jets
flying overhead, the soldiers stooping to unroll the red carpet, the President
of the United States quivering with excitement as he waited for him, the >>>>> smiles, the handshakes, the intimate car ride for two u one had every reason
to expect the worst, or rather to expect how much worse it would be than one
had expected.

So when the two men emerged from their confab, Mr. Putin smiling coyly, Mr.
Trump looking haggard, only to announce that they had been unable to reach an
agreement, one felt a little surge of an unfamiliar emotion: hope. Perhaps in
the end the meeting would prove to have been merely an embarrassment and a
disgrace, rather than a full-on, geopolitical disaster. Maybe Mr. Trump had
offered Mr. Putin the moon and the stars, but had run up against Mr. PutinAs
demands for the moon, the stars and the keys to Fort Knox. Maybe the world
might yet be saved by Mr. PutinAs overweening intransigence.


How naive we were. Before a day had passed it emerged, via the inevitable >>>>> background briefings and Trumpian social media posts, that the two men had in
fact agreed on a great many things. Mr. Trump had gone into the meeting, in a
rare display of baseline sentience, demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine and >>>>> threatening sanctions and other osevere consequenceso if Mr. Putin did not
comply; coming out of the meeting not only was there no mention of sanctions,
but Mr. Trump had miraculously converted to Mr. PutinAs view.

Mr. Putin, indeed, had not given an inch on anything: not an inch on the >>>>> question of territory (the Russian idea of oland swapso is for it to keep all
the Ukrainian land it now controls, in exchange for keeping some of the land
it does not); not an inch on the oroot causeso of the conflict (the
independence of Ukraine, in a nutshell); not an inch on osecurity guaranteeso
for Ukraine (Russia proposes that it might agree to provide such guarantees,
so long as it had a veto on anyone else doing so) or NATO membership or the
rest.

The only reason anyone had even briefly imagined he might have is because Mr.
TrumpAs chief negotiator, a bottomlessly ignorant real estate tycoon like >>>>> himself by the name of Steve Witkoff, in the hurried talks leading up to the
summit, had misunderstood Mr. Putin on a couple of points, believing him to
have offered to withdraw from certain territories, for example, when in fact
he had proposed that Ukraine should. (Mr. WitkoffAs confusion is perhaps >>>>> understandable, as he has been using a translator provided by Mr. Putin.) >>>>>
Which would be depressing enough, without Mr. Trump, in his public statements
post-summit and in telephone calls with European leaders, taking the Putin
line on every point. Well, Mr. Trump has always taken the Putin line, but >>>>> there had been that brief interval, in those halcyon days before the summit,
when it seemed that Mr. Trump had had certain glimmerings that perhaps Mr.
Putin was not being entirely straight with him.

But there he was now, assuring his listeners that Mr. Putin wants peace, that
all he wanted was a little more land u for what is Russia short of but land u
in exchange for which he was prepared to guarantee that he would not take any
more. Why, he was even willing to pass a law to that effect! No, the only >>>>> obstacle to peace was that impossible man, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had had the
temerity to ostart a waro (Ukraine did not start the war) with a country o10
times its sizeo (RussiaAs population is about three-and-a-half times >>>>> UkraineAs).

With a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky scheduled for the following
days, there was the alarming prospect of a Russo-American axis forming, >>>>> issuing a series of impossible demands to which an isolated Mr. Zelensky would
be forced to accede, or be blamed for the warAs continuance. Mr. Trump seemed
obsessed with the idea that a peace agreement, on whatever terms, would win
him the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour that has so transfixed him he was >>>>> reported to have called up the Norwegian Finance Minister, out of the blue, to
sound him out on his chances.

Hence the weekAs second great fiasco: the panicky roundup of European leaders,
as the realization sunk in of just how badly things had gone in Alaska, to
accompany Mr. Zelensky to his meeting with Mr. Trump u a scene that would be
written out of an opera bouffe as too implausible.

Indeed, there has never been anything like it, IAd wager, in the history of
the world. Understand what was involved. The heads of government of five >>>>> European nations, plus the Secretary-General of NATO and the President of the
European Commission, felt it imperative to jump on a plane on a momentAs >>>>> notice and cross the ocean in a desperate bid to prevent the President of the
United States from doing something insane u like combining forces with Russia
against Ukraine u that might not only consign Ukraine to the eternal hell of
Russian occupation but plunge the rest of the continent into a war with Russia
of its own. It wasnAt a summit. It was an intervention. An emergency >>>>> intervention, complete with hand puppets and psychotropic drugs.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. Consider what could have put the Europeans in
such an agitated state. There are three possible explanations for Mr. TrumpAs
seeming capture by Mr. Putin. The first is that he has simply been rolled by
him, over and over u whether because he has some sort of inexplicable >>>>> man-crush on him, or because of Mr. PutinAs adroit application of flattery to
the suppurating wounds of Mr. TrumpAs ego, or because of Mr. TrumpAs peculiar
susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left owhen you think about
it, the West are really the bad guyso arguments favoured by your stoner >>>>> roommate in first year. Most people grow out of this sort of thing, aside from
a few foreign-policy orealistso and the affectedly contrarian; for Mr. Trump,
who has never read anything, it is all new.

The second is that Mr. Putin has something on him. This is no less alarming,
and no less plausible. Mr. TrumpAs long and intimate friendship with Jeffrey
Epstein is by now a matter of public record; the contents of the Epstein files
are not, but if anyone has had access to them it is a safe bet it is the >>>>> Russians. It would take a lot to shame a six-times-bankrupt convicted felon,
adjudicated rapist, self-admitted serial sexual predator, but apparently >>>>> pedophilia u or whatever else Mr. Trump seems so desperate to hide u may >>>>> finally be the line.

The third, perhaps simplest explanation is that Mr. Trump just happens to >>>>> agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one. Mr.
PutinAs theory of foreign relations is that othe strong do what they can, and
the weak suffer what they must.o That is Mr. TrumpAs theory of everything.

All of these are plausible. Any one of them, if true, would threaten disaster.
And it has to be one of them. Whatever may explain Mr. TrumpAs behaviour, >>>>> however he may be described u a malignant Chance the Gardener, a cretinous
Manchurian candidate, with the intellectual and emotional responses of a child
and the appetites and morality of a gangster u the leadership of much of the
democratic world felt compelled to rush en masse to the White House in to >>>>> deprogram him, or at least to distract him.

Hence that bizarre public performance, until now restricted to Mr. TrumpAs
cabinet meetings, in which the participants competed to flatter Mr. Trump in
the most flowery terms. I canAt imagine any of them enjoyed it, but if thatAs
what it takes to keep him away from the cutlery so be it.

So: immediate disaster averted. But that hardly means the emergency has passed
u not so long as Mr. Trump is on the scene. Because Mr. Trump is the >>>>> emergency. Everything else about the war is mired in stasis. The wild card is
Mr. Trump.

Mr. Putin has been admirably consistent. He is not going to ostop the >>>>> killing.o Killing is the business of war, and Mr. Putin is not going to stop
the war until, as Garry Kasparov says, he is stopped.

He is not going to meet with Mr. Zelensky: that would be to grant him the sort
of legitimacy that Mr. Trump granted Mr. Putin, something his conscience, >>>>> unlike Mr. TrumpAs, would not permit. The suggestion, coming out of the >>>>> Kremlin, that they meet in Moscow must be viewed in that light.

He is not going to sign on to any sort of meaningful security guarantee. Not
that he has been presented with one. The idea, popular in certain quarters, of
an oArticle V-likeo guarantee only invites the question: if you are really
prepared to offer Ukraine a guarantee equivalent to that provided in the NATO
charter, why not just let it join NATO? From which Mr. Putin can draw the >>>>> appropriate conclusions.

And so we come to the question of territory. It is the fashion to say, almost
as an afterthought, that of course Ukraine will have to give up territory in
any peace agreement. Not the territory it now controls, perhaps, but at least
the territory Russia, by virtue of its illegal war of conquest, has taken from
it. Or as the Trumpian ambassador to NATO put it, the territory it has >>>>> oearned.o

Even people who profess to despise Mr. Trump will say this sort of thing. It
is intended, I think, to convey a pragmatic sense of the possible, a >>>>> determination to see the world as it is and not as we would wish it to be. But
of course it is every bit the fantasy it supposes the alternative to be. >>>>>
Leave aside the consequences for the inhabitants of the olando so blithely
transferred u consequences not imagined or predicted but experienced under
Russian occupation to date: murder, torture, imprisonment, rape, child >>>>> abduction, and so on. Leave aside the broader consequences, for Ukraine and
the world, of so conspicuously rewarding military aggression.

Leave aside the underlying assumption: that Russia cannot be expelled from
these territories, even as its forces are being depleted and its economy >>>>> collapses u or how these might be accelerated if the West ever got serious
about providing weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia. >>>>>
No, just think about the condition on which this surrender of land is supposed
to be predicated: those fabulous security guarantees. The ones that the United
States wants to fob off on Europe, that Europe wants to fob off on the >>>>> Americans, that Russia offers to take off both their hands.

Even if Ukraine were a member of NATO, frankly, their security would be far
from assured. But an alliance that cannot bring itself even to do that, led by
a President who thinks Mr. Putin is his best friend, cannot be trusted to do
anything.

No, the only real guarantee of UkraineAs security is UkraineAs army. If we
support and sustain that army, Ukraine will have no need to concede any of its
territory to Russia. If we do not, we will soon find it is not only Ukraine
that is making such concessions.

-Andrew Coyne - G&M Aug 21/25

Once again Andy
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers

God bless his soul.

Wait! Didn't I make this very same argument here months ago? Nobody can
negotiate with Putin.

Just take out the Russian power grid in about an hour. Hit them really
hard in the night. Keep it that way, dark, until the Russians vacate
Ukraine and Crimea and start paying back with free oil and gas
reparations, for the next decade.

Don't fight unless you are willing to do whatever it takes to win. If
it is clear you can't win, also don't fight.

In recent decades wars of the major powers have been unwinnabe, mostly
because we lack the will to do whatever it takes. We shrink from
that. Killing more people slowly and then giving up is preferable.

Past success does not guarantee future success but sometimes you have to
do what works.

Back in the day, if Putin had invaded Crimea, Bush and Rumsfeld would go >into Russia with shock and awe and take over the whole European and
Russian air space in about an hour or two. Then, send in the US Marines >Special Forces to secure the Kremlin backed up by bunker busters.

You think those guys would have done that when nixon (also a
republican) would not. You forget that public opinion is very much
against war in all eras in the us. We had quite enough of gw Bush's
execution of wars, thanks.

Nobody, I repeat, nobody, can move troops across the world like the US
Army!

There are already thousands of US troops and fly boys stationed in
Europe and Asia. In a conventional war, defeating Russia would be like a >walk in the park, just like in Iraq.

Look what happened to Saddam Hussein and Baghdad Bob!

--
Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain
Don't get political with me young man
or I'll tie you to a railroad track and
<<<talk>>> to <<<YOOooooo>>>
Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?
dares: Ned
does not dare: Julian shrinks in horror and warns others away

--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

On 8/22/2025 12:47 PM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 12:03:37 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/22/2025 11:04 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 10:04:06 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/22/2025 7:05 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:10:11 -0000 (UTC), Tara <tsm@fastmail.ca>
wrote:

The Ukraine emergency is far from over rCo because Donald Trump is the emergency

-Andrew Coyne - G&M - Aug 21/25


Going into the rCLFiasca in AlaskarCY rCo more formally known as the Trump-Putin
summit rCo the only question was how much worse it would be than expected. You
knew it would be bad, but you also knew that you had no idea how bad, and that
whatever attempts you might make to guess how bad would inevitably fall short
of the reality. As IrCOve written before, Donald Trump always defeats the
imagination.

The event seemed destined not to disappoint. The very act of meeting, on >>>>>> American soil, with a mass-murdering, child-abducting war criminal, in the
flagrante delicto of his campaign of extermination in Ukraine, was an >>>>>> obscenity in itself. Coupled with the fawning displays of welcome rCo the jets
flying overhead, the soldiers stooping to unroll the red carpet, the President
of the United States quivering with excitement as he waited for him, the >>>>>> smiles, the handshakes, the intimate car ride for two rCo one had every reason
to expect the worst, or rather to expect how much worse it would be than one
had expected.

So when the two men emerged from their confab, Mr. Putin smiling coyly, Mr.
Trump looking haggard, only to announce that they had been unable to reach an
agreement, one felt a little surge of an unfamiliar emotion: hope. Perhaps in
the end the meeting would prove to have been merely an embarrassment and a
disgrace, rather than a full-on, geopolitical disaster. Maybe Mr. Trump had
offered Mr. Putin the moon and the stars, but had run up against Mr. PutinrCOs
demands for the moon, the stars and the keys to Fort Knox. Maybe the world
might yet be saved by Mr. PutinrCOs overweening intransigence.


How naive we were. Before a day had passed it emerged, via the inevitable
background briefings and Trumpian social media posts, that the two men had in
fact agreed on a great many things. Mr. Trump had gone into the meeting, in a
rare display of baseline sentience, demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine and >>>>>> threatening sanctions and other rCLsevere consequencesrCY if Mr. Putin did not
comply; coming out of the meeting not only was there no mention of sanctions,
but Mr. Trump had miraculously converted to Mr. PutinrCOs view.

Mr. Putin, indeed, had not given an inch on anything: not an inch on the >>>>>> question of territory (the Russian idea of rCLland swapsrCY is for it to keep all
the Ukrainian land it now controls, in exchange for keeping some of the land
it does not); not an inch on the rCLroot causesrCY of the conflict (the >>>>>> independence of Ukraine, in a nutshell); not an inch on rCLsecurity guaranteesrCY
for Ukraine (Russia proposes that it might agree to provide such guarantees,
so long as it had a veto on anyone else doing so) or NATO membership or the
rest.

The only reason anyone had even briefly imagined he might have is because Mr.
TrumprCOs chief negotiator, a bottomlessly ignorant real estate tycoon like
himself by the name of Steve Witkoff, in the hurried talks leading up to the
summit, had misunderstood Mr. Putin on a couple of points, believing him to
have offered to withdraw from certain territories, for example, when in fact
he had proposed that Ukraine should. (Mr. WitkoffrCOs confusion is perhaps
understandable, as he has been using a translator provided by Mr. Putin.)

Which would be depressing enough, without Mr. Trump, in his public statements
post-summit and in telephone calls with European leaders, taking the Putin
line on every point. Well, Mr. Trump has always taken the Putin line, but
there had been that brief interval, in those halcyon days before the summit,
when it seemed that Mr. Trump had had certain glimmerings that perhaps Mr.
Putin was not being entirely straight with him.

But there he was now, assuring his listeners that Mr. Putin wants peace, that
all he wanted was a little more land rCo for what is Russia short of but land rCo
in exchange for which he was prepared to guarantee that he would not take any
more. Why, he was even willing to pass a law to that effect! No, the only
obstacle to peace was that impossible man, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had had the
temerity to rCLstart a warrCY (Ukraine did not start the war) with a country rCL10
times its sizerCY (RussiarCOs population is about three-and-a-half times >>>>>> UkrainerCOs).

With a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky scheduled for the following
days, there was the alarming prospect of a Russo-American axis forming, >>>>>> issuing a series of impossible demands to which an isolated Mr. Zelensky would
be forced to accede, or be blamed for the warrCOs continuance. Mr. Trump seemed
obsessed with the idea that a peace agreement, on whatever terms, would win
him the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour that has so transfixed him he was >>>>>> reported to have called up the Norwegian Finance Minister, out of the blue, to
sound him out on his chances.

Hence the weekrCOs second great fiasco: the panicky roundup of European leaders,
as the realization sunk in of just how badly things had gone in Alaska, to
accompany Mr. Zelensky to his meeting with Mr. Trump rCo a scene that would be
written out of an opera bouffe as too implausible.

Indeed, there has never been anything like it, IrCOd wager, in the history of
the world. Understand what was involved. The heads of government of five >>>>>> European nations, plus the Secretary-General of NATO and the President of the
European Commission, felt it imperative to jump on a plane on a momentrCOs
notice and cross the ocean in a desperate bid to prevent the President of the
United States from doing something insane rCo like combining forces with Russia
against Ukraine rCo that might not only consign Ukraine to the eternal hell of
Russian occupation but plunge the rest of the continent into a war with Russia
of its own. It wasnrCOt a summit. It was an intervention. An emergency >>>>>> intervention, complete with hand puppets and psychotropic drugs.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. Consider what could have put the Europeans in
such an agitated state. There are three possible explanations for Mr. TrumprCOs
seeming capture by Mr. Putin. The first is that he has simply been rolled by
him, over and over rCo whether because he has some sort of inexplicable >>>>>> man-crush on him, or because of Mr. PutinrCOs adroit application of flattery to
the suppurating wounds of Mr. TrumprCOs ego, or because of Mr. TrumprCOs peculiar
susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left rCLwhen you think about
it, the West are really the bad guysrCY arguments favoured by your stoner
roommate in first year. Most people grow out of this sort of thing, aside from
a few foreign-policy rCLrealistsrCY and the affectedly contrarian; for Mr. Trump,
who has never read anything, it is all new.

The second is that Mr. Putin has something on him. This is no less alarming,
and no less plausible. Mr. TrumprCOs long and intimate friendship with Jeffrey
Epstein is by now a matter of public record; the contents of the Epstein files
are not, but if anyone has had access to them it is a safe bet it is the >>>>>> Russians. It would take a lot to shame a six-times-bankrupt convicted felon,
adjudicated rapist, self-admitted serial sexual predator, but apparently >>>>>> pedophilia rCo or whatever else Mr. Trump seems so desperate to hide rCo may
finally be the line.

The third, perhaps simplest explanation is that Mr. Trump just happens to
agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one. Mr.
PutinrCOs theory of foreign relations is that rCLthe strong do what they can, and
the weak suffer what they must.rCY That is Mr. TrumprCOs theory of everything.

All of these are plausible. Any one of them, if true, would threaten disaster.
And it has to be one of them. Whatever may explain Mr. TrumprCOs behaviour,
however he may be described rCo a malignant Chance the Gardener, a cretinous
Manchurian candidate, with the intellectual and emotional responses of a child
and the appetites and morality of a gangster rCo the leadership of much of the
democratic world felt compelled to rush en masse to the White House in to
deprogram him, or at least to distract him.

Hence that bizarre public performance, until now restricted to Mr. TrumprCOs
cabinet meetings, in which the participants competed to flatter Mr. Trump in
the most flowery terms. I canrCOt imagine any of them enjoyed it, but if thatrCOs
what it takes to keep him away from the cutlery so be it.

So: immediate disaster averted. But that hardly means the emergency has passed
rCo not so long as Mr. Trump is on the scene. Because Mr. Trump is the >>>>>> emergency. Everything else about the war is mired in stasis. The wild card is
Mr. Trump.

Mr. Putin has been admirably consistent. He is not going to rCLstop the >>>>>> killing.rCY Killing is the business of war, and Mr. Putin is not going to stop
the war until, as Garry Kasparov says, he is stopped.

He is not going to meet with Mr. Zelensky: that would be to grant him the sort
of legitimacy that Mr. Trump granted Mr. Putin, something his conscience,
unlike Mr. TrumprCOs, would not permit. The suggestion, coming out of the
Kremlin, that they meet in Moscow must be viewed in that light.

He is not going to sign on to any sort of meaningful security guarantee. Not
that he has been presented with one. The idea, popular in certain quarters, of
an rCLArticle V-likerCY guarantee only invites the question: if you are really
prepared to offer Ukraine a guarantee equivalent to that provided in the NATO
charter, why not just let it join NATO? From which Mr. Putin can draw the
appropriate conclusions.

And so we come to the question of territory. It is the fashion to say, almost
as an afterthought, that of course Ukraine will have to give up territory in
any peace agreement. Not the territory it now controls, perhaps, but at least
the territory Russia, by virtue of its illegal war of conquest, has taken from
it. Or as the Trumpian ambassador to NATO put it, the territory it has >>>>>> rCLearned.rCY

Even people who profess to despise Mr. Trump will say this sort of thing. It
is intended, I think, to convey a pragmatic sense of the possible, a >>>>>> determination to see the world as it is and not as we would wish it to be. But
of course it is every bit the fantasy it supposes the alternative to be. >>>>>>
Leave aside the consequences for the inhabitants of the rCLlandrCY so blithely
transferred rCo consequences not imagined or predicted but experienced under
Russian occupation to date: murder, torture, imprisonment, rape, child >>>>>> abduction, and so on. Leave aside the broader consequences, for Ukraine and
the world, of so conspicuously rewarding military aggression.

Leave aside the underlying assumption: that Russia cannot be expelled from
these territories, even as its forces are being depleted and its economy >>>>>> collapses rCo or how these might be accelerated if the West ever got serious
about providing weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia. >>>>>>
No, just think about the condition on which this surrender of land is supposed
to be predicated: those fabulous security guarantees. The ones that the United
States wants to fob off on Europe, that Europe wants to fob off on the >>>>>> Americans, that Russia offers to take off both their hands.

Even if Ukraine were a member of NATO, frankly, their security would be far
from assured. But an alliance that cannot bring itself even to do that, led by
a President who thinks Mr. Putin is his best friend, cannot be trusted to do
anything.

No, the only real guarantee of UkrainerCOs security is UkrainerCOs army. If we
support and sustain that army, Ukraine will have no need to concede any of its
territory to Russia. If we do not, we will soon find it is not only Ukraine
that is making such concessions.

-Andrew Coyne - G&M Aug 21/25

Once again Andy
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers

God bless his soul.

Wait! Didn't I make this very same argument here months ago? Nobody can >>>> negotiate with Putin.

Just take out the Russian power grid in about an hour. Hit them really >>>> hard in the night. Keep it that way, dark, until the Russians vacate
Ukraine and Crimea and start paying back with free oil and gas
reparations, for the next decade.

Don't fight unless you are willing to do whatever it takes to win. If
it is clear you can't win, also don't fight.

In recent decades wars of the major powers have been unwinnabe, mostly
because we lack the will to do whatever it takes. We shrink from
that. Killing more people slowly and then giving up is preferable.

Past success does not guarantee future success but sometimes you have to
do what works.

Back in the day, if Putin had invaded Crimea, Bush and Rumsfeld would go
into Russia with shock and awe and take over the whole European and
Russian air space in about an hour or two. Then, send in the US Marines
Special Forces to secure the Kremlin backed up by bunker busters.

You think those guys would have done that when nixon (also a
republican) would not. You forget that public opinion is very much
against war in all eras in the us. We had quite enough of gw Bush's execution of wars, thanks.

So, who is going to save Europe from a Putin invasion? Or, if China
invades Taiwan? Who are you going to call when push comes to shove?

Nobody, I repeat, nobody, can move troops across the world like the US
Army!

There are already thousands of US troops and fly boys stationed in
Europe and Asia. In a conventional war, defeating Russia would be like a
walk in the park, just like in Iraq.

Look what happened to Saddam Hussein and Baghdad Bob!

Baghdad Bob, the Iraqi spokesman guy who said on live TV, at his own
press conference, as the US tanks rolled into Baghdad: rCLWe besieged them
and we killed most of them!rCY
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:47:04 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/22/2025 12:47 PM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 12:03:37 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/22/2025 11:04 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 10:04:06 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote: >>>>

On 8/22/2025 7:05 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:10:11 -0000 (UTC), Tara <tsm@fastmail.ca>
wrote:

The Ukraine emergency is far from over u because Donald Trump is the emergency

-Andrew Coyne - G&M - Aug 21/25


Going into the oFiasca in Alaskao u more formally known as the Trump-Putin
summit u the only question was how much worse it would be than expected. You
knew it would be bad, but you also knew that you had no idea how bad, and that
whatever attempts you might make to guess how bad would inevitably fall short
of the reality. As IAve written before, Donald Trump always defeats the >>>>>>> imagination.

The event seemed destined not to disappoint. The very act of meeting, on
American soil, with a mass-murdering, child-abducting war criminal, in the
flagrante delicto of his campaign of extermination in Ukraine, was an >>>>>>> obscenity in itself. Coupled with the fawning displays of welcome u the jets
flying overhead, the soldiers stooping to unroll the red carpet, the President
of the United States quivering with excitement as he waited for him, the
smiles, the handshakes, the intimate car ride for two u one had every reason
to expect the worst, or rather to expect how much worse it would be than one
had expected.

So when the two men emerged from their confab, Mr. Putin smiling coyly, Mr.
Trump looking haggard, only to announce that they had been unable to reach an
agreement, one felt a little surge of an unfamiliar emotion: hope. Perhaps in
the end the meeting would prove to have been merely an embarrassment and a
disgrace, rather than a full-on, geopolitical disaster. Maybe Mr. Trump had
offered Mr. Putin the moon and the stars, but had run up against Mr. PutinAs
demands for the moon, the stars and the keys to Fort Knox. Maybe the world
might yet be saved by Mr. PutinAs overweening intransigence.


How naive we were. Before a day had passed it emerged, via the inevitable
background briefings and Trumpian social media posts, that the two men had in
fact agreed on a great many things. Mr. Trump had gone into the meeting, in a
rare display of baseline sentience, demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine and
threatening sanctions and other osevere consequenceso if Mr. Putin did not
comply; coming out of the meeting not only was there no mention of sanctions,
but Mr. Trump had miraculously converted to Mr. PutinAs view.

Mr. Putin, indeed, had not given an inch on anything: not an inch on the
question of territory (the Russian idea of oland swapso is for it to keep all
the Ukrainian land it now controls, in exchange for keeping some of the land
it does not); not an inch on the oroot causeso of the conflict (the >>>>>>> independence of Ukraine, in a nutshell); not an inch on osecurity guaranteeso
for Ukraine (Russia proposes that it might agree to provide such guarantees,
so long as it had a veto on anyone else doing so) or NATO membership or the
rest.

The only reason anyone had even briefly imagined he might have is because Mr.
TrumpAs chief negotiator, a bottomlessly ignorant real estate tycoon like
himself by the name of Steve Witkoff, in the hurried talks leading up to the
summit, had misunderstood Mr. Putin on a couple of points, believing him to
have offered to withdraw from certain territories, for example, when in fact
he had proposed that Ukraine should. (Mr. WitkoffAs confusion is perhaps
understandable, as he has been using a translator provided by Mr. Putin.)

Which would be depressing enough, without Mr. Trump, in his public statements
post-summit and in telephone calls with European leaders, taking the Putin
line on every point. Well, Mr. Trump has always taken the Putin line, but
there had been that brief interval, in those halcyon days before the summit,
when it seemed that Mr. Trump had had certain glimmerings that perhaps Mr.
Putin was not being entirely straight with him.

But there he was now, assuring his listeners that Mr. Putin wants peace, that
all he wanted was a little more land u for what is Russia short of but land u
in exchange for which he was prepared to guarantee that he would not take any
more. Why, he was even willing to pass a law to that effect! No, the only
obstacle to peace was that impossible man, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had had the
temerity to ostart a waro (Ukraine did not start the war) with a country o10
times its sizeo (RussiaAs population is about three-and-a-half times >>>>>>> UkraineAs).

With a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky scheduled for the following
days, there was the alarming prospect of a Russo-American axis forming, >>>>>>> issuing a series of impossible demands to which an isolated Mr. Zelensky would
be forced to accede, or be blamed for the warAs continuance. Mr. Trump seemed
obsessed with the idea that a peace agreement, on whatever terms, would win
him the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour that has so transfixed him he was >>>>>>> reported to have called up the Norwegian Finance Minister, out of the blue, to
sound him out on his chances.

Hence the weekAs second great fiasco: the panicky roundup of European leaders,
as the realization sunk in of just how badly things had gone in Alaska, to
accompany Mr. Zelensky to his meeting with Mr. Trump u a scene that would be
written out of an opera bouffe as too implausible.

Indeed, there has never been anything like it, IAd wager, in the history of
the world. Understand what was involved. The heads of government of five
European nations, plus the Secretary-General of NATO and the President of the
European Commission, felt it imperative to jump on a plane on a momentAs
notice and cross the ocean in a desperate bid to prevent the President of the
United States from doing something insane u like combining forces with Russia
against Ukraine u that might not only consign Ukraine to the eternal hell of
Russian occupation but plunge the rest of the continent into a war with Russia
of its own. It wasnAt a summit. It was an intervention. An emergency >>>>>>> intervention, complete with hand puppets and psychotropic drugs. >>>>>>>
I exaggerate, but only slightly. Consider what could have put the Europeans in
such an agitated state. There are three possible explanations for Mr. TrumpAs
seeming capture by Mr. Putin. The first is that he has simply been rolled by
him, over and over u whether because he has some sort of inexplicable >>>>>>> man-crush on him, or because of Mr. PutinAs adroit application of flattery to
the suppurating wounds of Mr. TrumpAs ego, or because of Mr. TrumpAs peculiar
susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left owhen you think about
it, the West are really the bad guyso arguments favoured by your stoner >>>>>>> roommate in first year. Most people grow out of this sort of thing, aside from
a few foreign-policy orealistso and the affectedly contrarian; for Mr. Trump,
who has never read anything, it is all new.

The second is that Mr. Putin has something on him. This is no less alarming,
and no less plausible. Mr. TrumpAs long and intimate friendship with Jeffrey
Epstein is by now a matter of public record; the contents of the Epstein files
are not, but if anyone has had access to them it is a safe bet it is the
Russians. It would take a lot to shame a six-times-bankrupt convicted felon,
adjudicated rapist, self-admitted serial sexual predator, but apparently
pedophilia u or whatever else Mr. Trump seems so desperate to hide u may
finally be the line.

The third, perhaps simplest explanation is that Mr. Trump just happens to
agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one. Mr.
PutinAs theory of foreign relations is that othe strong do what they can, and
the weak suffer what they must.o That is Mr. TrumpAs theory of everything.

All of these are plausible. Any one of them, if true, would threaten disaster.
And it has to be one of them. Whatever may explain Mr. TrumpAs behaviour,
however he may be described u a malignant Chance the Gardener, a cretinous
Manchurian candidate, with the intellectual and emotional responses of a child
and the appetites and morality of a gangster u the leadership of much of the
democratic world felt compelled to rush en masse to the White House in to
deprogram him, or at least to distract him.

Hence that bizarre public performance, until now restricted to Mr. TrumpAs
cabinet meetings, in which the participants competed to flatter Mr. Trump in
the most flowery terms. I canAt imagine any of them enjoyed it, but if thatAs
what it takes to keep him away from the cutlery so be it.

So: immediate disaster averted. But that hardly means the emergency has passed
u not so long as Mr. Trump is on the scene. Because Mr. Trump is the >>>>>>> emergency. Everything else about the war is mired in stasis. The wild card is
Mr. Trump.

Mr. Putin has been admirably consistent. He is not going to ostop the >>>>>>> killing.o Killing is the business of war, and Mr. Putin is not going to stop
the war until, as Garry Kasparov says, he is stopped.

He is not going to meet with Mr. Zelensky: that would be to grant him the sort
of legitimacy that Mr. Trump granted Mr. Putin, something his conscience,
unlike Mr. TrumpAs, would not permit. The suggestion, coming out of the >>>>>>> Kremlin, that they meet in Moscow must be viewed in that light.

He is not going to sign on to any sort of meaningful security guarantee. Not
that he has been presented with one. The idea, popular in certain quarters, of
an oArticle V-likeo guarantee only invites the question: if you are really
prepared to offer Ukraine a guarantee equivalent to that provided in the NATO
charter, why not just let it join NATO? From which Mr. Putin can draw the
appropriate conclusions.

And so we come to the question of territory. It is the fashion to say, almost
as an afterthought, that of course Ukraine will have to give up territory in
any peace agreement. Not the territory it now controls, perhaps, but at least
the territory Russia, by virtue of its illegal war of conquest, has taken from
it. Or as the Trumpian ambassador to NATO put it, the territory it has >>>>>>> oearned.o

Even people who profess to despise Mr. Trump will say this sort of thing. It
is intended, I think, to convey a pragmatic sense of the possible, a >>>>>>> determination to see the world as it is and not as we would wish it to be. But
of course it is every bit the fantasy it supposes the alternative to be.

Leave aside the consequences for the inhabitants of the olando so blithely
transferred u consequences not imagined or predicted but experienced under
Russian occupation to date: murder, torture, imprisonment, rape, child >>>>>>> abduction, and so on. Leave aside the broader consequences, for Ukraine and
the world, of so conspicuously rewarding military aggression.

Leave aside the underlying assumption: that Russia cannot be expelled from
these territories, even as its forces are being depleted and its economy
collapses u or how these might be accelerated if the West ever got serious
about providing weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia. >>>>>>>
No, just think about the condition on which this surrender of land is supposed
to be predicated: those fabulous security guarantees. The ones that the United
States wants to fob off on Europe, that Europe wants to fob off on the >>>>>>> Americans, that Russia offers to take off both their hands.

Even if Ukraine were a member of NATO, frankly, their security would be far
from assured. But an alliance that cannot bring itself even to do that, led by
a President who thinks Mr. Putin is his best friend, cannot be trusted to do
anything.

No, the only real guarantee of UkraineAs security is UkraineAs army. If we
support and sustain that army, Ukraine will have no need to concede any of its
territory to Russia. If we do not, we will soon find it is not only Ukraine
that is making such concessions.

-Andrew Coyne - G&M Aug 21/25

Once again Andy
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers

God bless his soul.

Wait! Didn't I make this very same argument here months ago? Nobody can >>>>> negotiate with Putin.

Just take out the Russian power grid in about an hour. Hit them really >>>>> hard in the night. Keep it that way, dark, until the Russians vacate >>>>> Ukraine and Crimea and start paying back with free oil and gas
reparations, for the next decade.

Don't fight unless you are willing to do whatever it takes to win. If >>>> it is clear you can't win, also don't fight.

In recent decades wars of the major powers have been unwinnabe, mostly >>>> because we lack the will to do whatever it takes. We shrink from
that. Killing more people slowly and then giving up is preferable.

Past success does not guarantee future success but sometimes you have to >>> do what works.

Back in the day, if Putin had invaded Crimea, Bush and Rumsfeld would go >>> into Russia with shock and awe and take over the whole European and
Russian air space in about an hour or two. Then, send in the US Marines
Special Forces to secure the Kremlin backed up by bunker busters.

You think those guys would have done that when nixon (also a
republican) would not. You forget that public opinion is very much
against war in all eras in the us. We had quite enough of gw Bush's
execution of wars, thanks.

So, who is going to save Europe from a Putin invasion? Or, if China
invades Taiwan? Who are you going to call when push comes to shove?

Like the hippies used to say, if you have a problem call a himbo.
(actually it was a hippy, but it still works).

Nobody, I repeat, nobody, can move troops across the world like the US
Army!

Too bad they don't want to do that.

There are already thousands of US troops and fly boys stationed in
Europe and Asia. In a conventional war, defeating Russia would be like a >>> walk in the park, just like in Iraq.

Look what happened to Saddam Hussein and Baghdad Bob!

Baghdad Bob, the Iraqi spokesman guy who said on live TV, at his own
press conference, as the US tanks rolled into Baghdad: oWe besieged them
and we killed most of them!o

There is something to be proud of. We killed killed killed.
--
Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain
Don't get political with me young man
or I'll tie you to a railroad track and
<<<talk>>> to <<<YOOooooo>>>
Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?
dares: Ned
does not dare: Julian shrinks in horror and warns others away

--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

On 8/22/2025 3:17 PM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:47:04 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/22/2025 12:47 PM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 12:03:37 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/22/2025 11:04 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 10:04:06 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote: >>>>>

On 8/22/2025 7:05 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:10:11 -0000 (UTC), Tara <tsm@fastmail.ca> >>>>>>> wrote:

The Ukraine emergency is far from over rCo because Donald Trump is the emergency

-Andrew Coyne - G&M - Aug 21/25


Going into the rCLFiasca in AlaskarCY rCo more formally known as the Trump-Putin
summit rCo the only question was how much worse it would be than expected. You
knew it would be bad, but you also knew that you had no idea how bad, and that
whatever attempts you might make to guess how bad would inevitably fall short
of the reality. As IrCOve written before, Donald Trump always defeats the
imagination.

The event seemed destined not to disappoint. The very act of meeting, on
American soil, with a mass-murdering, child-abducting war criminal, in the
flagrante delicto of his campaign of extermination in Ukraine, was an >>>>>>>> obscenity in itself. Coupled with the fawning displays of welcome rCo the jets
flying overhead, the soldiers stooping to unroll the red carpet, the President
of the United States quivering with excitement as he waited for him, the
smiles, the handshakes, the intimate car ride for two rCo one had every reason
to expect the worst, or rather to expect how much worse it would be than one
had expected.

So when the two men emerged from their confab, Mr. Putin smiling coyly, Mr.
Trump looking haggard, only to announce that they had been unable to reach an
agreement, one felt a little surge of an unfamiliar emotion: hope. Perhaps in
the end the meeting would prove to have been merely an embarrassment and a
disgrace, rather than a full-on, geopolitical disaster. Maybe Mr. Trump had
offered Mr. Putin the moon and the stars, but had run up against Mr. PutinrCOs
demands for the moon, the stars and the keys to Fort Knox. Maybe the world
might yet be saved by Mr. PutinrCOs overweening intransigence. >>>>>>>>

How naive we were. Before a day had passed it emerged, via the inevitable
background briefings and Trumpian social media posts, that the two men had in
fact agreed on a great many things. Mr. Trump had gone into the meeting, in a
rare display of baseline sentience, demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine and
threatening sanctions and other rCLsevere consequencesrCY if Mr. Putin did not
comply; coming out of the meeting not only was there no mention of sanctions,
but Mr. Trump had miraculously converted to Mr. PutinrCOs view. >>>>>>>>
Mr. Putin, indeed, had not given an inch on anything: not an inch on the
question of territory (the Russian idea of rCLland swapsrCY is for it to keep all
the Ukrainian land it now controls, in exchange for keeping some of the land
it does not); not an inch on the rCLroot causesrCY of the conflict (the
independence of Ukraine, in a nutshell); not an inch on rCLsecurity guaranteesrCY
for Ukraine (Russia proposes that it might agree to provide such guarantees,
so long as it had a veto on anyone else doing so) or NATO membership or the
rest.

The only reason anyone had even briefly imagined he might have is because Mr.
TrumprCOs chief negotiator, a bottomlessly ignorant real estate tycoon like
himself by the name of Steve Witkoff, in the hurried talks leading up to the
summit, had misunderstood Mr. Putin on a couple of points, believing him to
have offered to withdraw from certain territories, for example, when in fact
he had proposed that Ukraine should. (Mr. WitkoffrCOs confusion is perhaps
understandable, as he has been using a translator provided by Mr. Putin.)

Which would be depressing enough, without Mr. Trump, in his public statements
post-summit and in telephone calls with European leaders, taking the Putin
line on every point. Well, Mr. Trump has always taken the Putin line, but
there had been that brief interval, in those halcyon days before the summit,
when it seemed that Mr. Trump had had certain glimmerings that perhaps Mr.
Putin was not being entirely straight with him.

But there he was now, assuring his listeners that Mr. Putin wants peace, that
all he wanted was a little more land rCo for what is Russia short of but land rCo
in exchange for which he was prepared to guarantee that he would not take any
more. Why, he was even willing to pass a law to that effect! No, the only
obstacle to peace was that impossible man, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had had the
temerity to rCLstart a warrCY (Ukraine did not start the war) with a country rCL10
times its sizerCY (RussiarCOs population is about three-and-a-half times
UkrainerCOs).

With a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky scheduled for the following
days, there was the alarming prospect of a Russo-American axis forming,
issuing a series of impossible demands to which an isolated Mr. Zelensky would
be forced to accede, or be blamed for the warrCOs continuance. Mr. Trump seemed
obsessed with the idea that a peace agreement, on whatever terms, would win
him the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour that has so transfixed him he was >>>>>>>> reported to have called up the Norwegian Finance Minister, out of the blue, to
sound him out on his chances.

Hence the weekrCOs second great fiasco: the panicky roundup of European leaders,
as the realization sunk in of just how badly things had gone in Alaska, to
accompany Mr. Zelensky to his meeting with Mr. Trump rCo a scene that would be
written out of an opera bouffe as too implausible.

Indeed, there has never been anything like it, IrCOd wager, in the history of
the world. Understand what was involved. The heads of government of five
European nations, plus the Secretary-General of NATO and the President of the
European Commission, felt it imperative to jump on a plane on a momentrCOs
notice and cross the ocean in a desperate bid to prevent the President of the
United States from doing something insane rCo like combining forces with Russia
against Ukraine rCo that might not only consign Ukraine to the eternal hell of
Russian occupation but plunge the rest of the continent into a war with Russia
of its own. It wasnrCOt a summit. It was an intervention. An emergency >>>>>>>> intervention, complete with hand puppets and psychotropic drugs. >>>>>>>>
I exaggerate, but only slightly. Consider what could have put the Europeans in
such an agitated state. There are three possible explanations for Mr. TrumprCOs
seeming capture by Mr. Putin. The first is that he has simply been rolled by
him, over and over rCo whether because he has some sort of inexplicable
man-crush on him, or because of Mr. PutinrCOs adroit application of flattery to
the suppurating wounds of Mr. TrumprCOs ego, or because of Mr. TrumprCOs peculiar
susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left rCLwhen you think about
it, the West are really the bad guysrCY arguments favoured by your stoner
roommate in first year. Most people grow out of this sort of thing, aside from
a few foreign-policy rCLrealistsrCY and the affectedly contrarian; for Mr. Trump,
who has never read anything, it is all new.

The second is that Mr. Putin has something on him. This is no less alarming,
and no less plausible. Mr. TrumprCOs long and intimate friendship with Jeffrey
Epstein is by now a matter of public record; the contents of the Epstein files
are not, but if anyone has had access to them it is a safe bet it is the
Russians. It would take a lot to shame a six-times-bankrupt convicted felon,
adjudicated rapist, self-admitted serial sexual predator, but apparently
pedophilia rCo or whatever else Mr. Trump seems so desperate to hide rCo may
finally be the line.

The third, perhaps simplest explanation is that Mr. Trump just happens to
agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one. Mr.
PutinrCOs theory of foreign relations is that rCLthe strong do what they can, and
the weak suffer what they must.rCY That is Mr. TrumprCOs theory of everything.

All of these are plausible. Any one of them, if true, would threaten disaster.
And it has to be one of them. Whatever may explain Mr. TrumprCOs behaviour,
however he may be described rCo a malignant Chance the Gardener, a cretinous
Manchurian candidate, with the intellectual and emotional responses of a child
and the appetites and morality of a gangster rCo the leadership of much of the
democratic world felt compelled to rush en masse to the White House in to
deprogram him, or at least to distract him.

Hence that bizarre public performance, until now restricted to Mr. TrumprCOs
cabinet meetings, in which the participants competed to flatter Mr. Trump in
the most flowery terms. I canrCOt imagine any of them enjoyed it, but if thatrCOs
what it takes to keep him away from the cutlery so be it.

So: immediate disaster averted. But that hardly means the emergency has passed
rCo not so long as Mr. Trump is on the scene. Because Mr. Trump is the >>>>>>>> emergency. Everything else about the war is mired in stasis. The wild card is
Mr. Trump.

Mr. Putin has been admirably consistent. He is not going to rCLstop the
killing.rCY Killing is the business of war, and Mr. Putin is not going to stop
the war until, as Garry Kasparov says, he is stopped.

He is not going to meet with Mr. Zelensky: that would be to grant him the sort
of legitimacy that Mr. Trump granted Mr. Putin, something his conscience,
unlike Mr. TrumprCOs, would not permit. The suggestion, coming out of the
Kremlin, that they meet in Moscow must be viewed in that light. >>>>>>>>
He is not going to sign on to any sort of meaningful security guarantee. Not
that he has been presented with one. The idea, popular in certain quarters, of
an rCLArticle V-likerCY guarantee only invites the question: if you are really
prepared to offer Ukraine a guarantee equivalent to that provided in the NATO
charter, why not just let it join NATO? From which Mr. Putin can draw the
appropriate conclusions.

And so we come to the question of territory. It is the fashion to say, almost
as an afterthought, that of course Ukraine will have to give up territory in
any peace agreement. Not the territory it now controls, perhaps, but at least
the territory Russia, by virtue of its illegal war of conquest, has taken from
it. Or as the Trumpian ambassador to NATO put it, the territory it has >>>>>>>> rCLearned.rCY

Even people who profess to despise Mr. Trump will say this sort of thing. It
is intended, I think, to convey a pragmatic sense of the possible, a >>>>>>>> determination to see the world as it is and not as we would wish it to be. But
of course it is every bit the fantasy it supposes the alternative to be.

Leave aside the consequences for the inhabitants of the rCLlandrCY so blithely
transferred rCo consequences not imagined or predicted but experienced under
Russian occupation to date: murder, torture, imprisonment, rape, child >>>>>>>> abduction, and so on. Leave aside the broader consequences, for Ukraine and
the world, of so conspicuously rewarding military aggression.

Leave aside the underlying assumption: that Russia cannot be expelled from
these territories, even as its forces are being depleted and its economy
collapses rCo or how these might be accelerated if the West ever got serious
about providing weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia. >>>>>>>>
No, just think about the condition on which this surrender of land is supposed
to be predicated: those fabulous security guarantees. The ones that the United
States wants to fob off on Europe, that Europe wants to fob off on the >>>>>>>> Americans, that Russia offers to take off both their hands.

Even if Ukraine were a member of NATO, frankly, their security would be far
from assured. But an alliance that cannot bring itself even to do that, led by
a President who thinks Mr. Putin is his best friend, cannot be trusted to do
anything.

No, the only real guarantee of UkrainerCOs security is UkrainerCOs army. If we
support and sustain that army, Ukraine will have no need to concede any of its
territory to Russia. If we do not, we will soon find it is not only Ukraine
that is making such concessions.

-Andrew Coyne - G&M Aug 21/25

Once again Andy
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers
and
delivers

God bless his soul.

Wait! Didn't I make this very same argument here months ago? Nobody can >>>>>> negotiate with Putin.

Just take out the Russian power grid in about an hour. Hit them really >>>>>> hard in the night. Keep it that way, dark, until the Russians vacate >>>>>> Ukraine and Crimea and start paying back with free oil and gas
reparations, for the next decade.

Don't fight unless you are willing to do whatever it takes to win. If >>>>> it is clear you can't win, also don't fight.

In recent decades wars of the major powers have been unwinnabe, mostly >>>>> because we lack the will to do whatever it takes. We shrink from
that. Killing more people slowly and then giving up is preferable.

Past success does not guarantee future success but sometimes you have to >>>> do what works.

Back in the day, if Putin had invaded Crimea, Bush and Rumsfeld would go >>>> into Russia with shock and awe and take over the whole European and
Russian air space in about an hour or two. Then, send in the US Marines >>>> Special Forces to secure the Kremlin backed up by bunker busters.

You think those guys would have done that when nixon (also a
republican) would not. You forget that public opinion is very much
against war in all eras in the us. We had quite enough of gw Bush's
execution of wars, thanks.

So, who is going to save Europe from a Putin invasion? Or, if China
invades Taiwan? Who are you going to call when push comes to shove?

Like the hippies used to say, if you have a problem call a himbo.
(actually it was a hippy, but it still works).

Nobody, I repeat, nobody, can move troops across the world like the US >>>> Army!

Too bad they don't want to do that.

There are already thousands of US troops and fly boys stationed in
Europe and Asia. In a conventional war, defeating Russia would be like a >>>> walk in the park, just like in Iraq.

Look what happened to Saddam Hussein and Baghdad Bob!

Baghdad Bob, the Iraqi spokesman guy who said on live TV, at his own
press conference, as the US tanks rolled into Baghdad: rCLWe besieged them >> and we killed most of them!rCY

There is something to be proud of. We killed killed killed.

Sorry. Baghdad Bob is alive and well living in Cutter. Not sorry. Saddam
is no longer a threat to George Bush, Sr., or anyone.
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2