Double Jeopardy: How The West Let Putin Off The Leash
You get the enemy you deserve. So if Vladimir Putin is what the West deserves then what does it say about the West today? It says they’re in the basement watching Netflix after leaving the front door open and giving the burglars a map to where they hide the family jewels.
Translation: The Ukraine catastrophe is a byproduct of the West abandoning proven energy methods in place of utopian Green schemes. Now, too late, it sees the implications of the energy gap created by buying foreign products— the U.S. importing 600 K barrels of Russian oil a day.
But in this climate of nuclear brinksmanship the Media Party can’t report that. Not if you’re invested in the legend of intrepid western-intelligence. So instead of truth we have Ukraine: The Musical where the poor locals being slaughtered by Putin are turned into plot devices, noble victims of the evil Russian tyrant; their own blundering leaders are shown kitted out in flak jackets and helmets, porting what liberal media call “assault weapons”.
In the comic-book narratives beloved by CNN and CBC, the plot lines were fed to a waiting world about a Ghost pilot picking off Russian jets like so many quail. About 13 brave sailors who gave the FU to Russians and were massacred to the man. About soldiers sacrificing themselves to blow up a bridge. Soft-hearted liberals— the core CBC/ CNN crowd— ate it up.
All of it fog-of-war BS. But with Putin’s brigades inexorably bearing down on Kiev and Lviv there’s no time for the skeptical to do fact checking. Or remind how Western experts caught with the pants down and their hands in someone else’s pockets need cover. Fast. So their willing media partners have served up Putin fury by the shovel full. Don’t hold your breath for the truth on how this went wrong.
That’s what happens when you do business in the ninth-most corrupt nation in the world. Truth is fungible. The Canadian deputy PM, whose roots in Ukraine spring from her Nazi-loving grandfather in WW II, is a crusader for truth. The woman who said Putin would make the west fall “in love” with Russia again is now the tip of the righteous Canadian spear. Print it. (Not the photos of Freeland porting a neo-Nazi banner.)
Independent voices such as Mark Steyn , Matt Taibbi and Lee Smith have tried to remind readers that the rapacious 2022 Putin is a product of Western intelligence’s wishful thinking and political negligence 25 years ago. Taibbi— who was working in Russia at the time— reminds us NATO and the dormant press allowed Putin to achieve the daily double: rape the post-Soviet economy with a few hundred oligarchs while establishing a Mafia state within the government.
Here’s Freeland writing in 2000: Some critics have lamented Putin’s support for the bloody second
war in Chechnya, accused him of eroding freedom of the press… and worried aloud that his KGB background and unrepenting loyalty to the honor of that institution could jeopardize Russia’s fragile democratic
institutions. But many of even Putin's fiercest prosecutors seem inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the economy…”
As Taibbi says, “He was going to be our bastard. Now he’s become his own bastard”.
What the Ukraine fiasco also reveals is yet another product of Donald Trump’s upset win in 2016. (A product that must stay unreported by the Media Party.) Having bought into the U.S. State Department’s blandishments about U.S. security from Russia and having paid serious cash to Joe Biden’s son as protection for the rest of the decade, the Ukrainians made a rude discovery.
Instead of Hillary Clinton extending the Obama doctrine—and their protection— for anther four years, they got Trump on the phone asking WTF was going on with the Biden protection grift. Trump had seen video of Biden publicly shaking down the Ukrainians for a billion dollars. Unless they got a prosecutor off of Hunter’s company The Big Guy wasn’t giving them the cheque.
Trump wanted to know what happened. When Democrats moles inside the U.S. bureaucracy (Col. Alexander Vindman, come on down!) got wind of Trump’s inquiries the red light went off on Nancy Pelosi’s Bat Phone. If Trump got to the bottom of Biden’s deal he was likely to find a whole lot of other DC critters’ payola, too.
Faster than you could say Lying Adam Schiff, the Democrats and their friends in the Swamp cooked up an impeachment witch hunt, accusing Trump of interfering in the sovereign business of another state. The stage managers of Never Trump, who’d been shut out by the Mueller Inquisition, rallied the troops for another show trial.
To anyone who could count Senate members the whole enterprise was doomed to fail. Except that distracting people about Trump’s bulldog intrusion into eastern Europe kept them away from unravelling the State Department’s Ukraine policy. The one that has resulted in the current disaster.
The mystery Trump hinted at— and being asked by too few in the Beltway— is why did the supposed old-hand state geniuses allow a corrupt nation where the average income is $200/ month to become a political fulcrum for nuclear war?
Steyn puzzles it out: “The Trump impeachments? Ooh, he telephoned …Ukraine! The "Russia investigation"? Putin wanted Trump to win why exactly? Oh, no problem: because he'll roll back sanctions imposed for Moscow's actions against …Ukraine!
Do we have any witnesses to any of this? Yeah, sure, the really good guy's some Colonel Vindman. He's an immigrant from …Ukraine! On the other hand, Obama made Biden his point-man in ...Ukraine!
Biden told the Ukrainians they had to clean up all the corruption. They took the hint and put Hunter on the board, and Joe, Jim and the rest of the mob family suddenly acquired extensive "business interests" in Ukraine. Oh, and the biggest source of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation is ...Ukraine."
No one pays that much attention to a failed state unless the big players have their fingers in the pie. As Lee Smith remarks of the same big players who’ve left the poor of Ukraine open to the Putin War Machine: “So long as the media continued to bark that the 45th president of the United States is Putin’s stooge, no one would be held accountable for anything.
Except, as it turns out, D.C. political operatives aren’t the only people who can make history. Putin can, too. And the people of Ukraine will come out much the worse for both of their efforts.”
Set that to music.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx