As Americans, we are not one in any way, shape or form.

We are diverse, inclusive, at times exclusionary, conflicted, self-righteous and, more often than not these days, divisive. In our fast-evaporating sense of who we are, or once were, we have left our beacon of hope for the world at large adrift in a sea of uncertainty.

It was once easy to tout the United States as the symbol of desirable values, a sort of Rhodes port of entry for democracy. Oh, how we have stumbled as a nation, and precipitously, in recent years.

We continue to be warm, insensitive, confused, confusing, at times at one with ourselves, at times just a human bunch of some 331.9 (as of a 2021 count) million souls trying to make sense of what we have been given, the United States of America, and our place in the world beyond.

We are, and have always been, far from being one, and way far from being perfect. Yet our Constitution and our daily lives once allowed us to be just that, imperfect, with guaranteed freedoms … at least until the next crazed teenager or over-armed adult decided to pick us off with an automatic shotgun one by one in some unsuspecting mall, school or Home Depot.

As Americans, we are easy to hate, difficult to love, and as often as not misunderstood. Where some of us attempt to break down barriers, those of us across the street, or across our national divide, have been happy to build borders, walls and barriers. At times, it would seem that we are completely unknowable, political pundits aside.

There are still many of us alive today who remember the torn country that we were during the Vietnam War. We remember how it felt to be American then. It was confused and confusing all at once, day after day. The rest of the world did not like us at all, to put it kindly.

So, give a thought for Russians now.

Just for a minute, put yourself in the skin of a Russian today.

Russia is right now the Big Bad Wolf in headlines worldwide, and justifiably so. Russians, after all, elected Putin president once again by a vast majority as recently as 2018. Yet, remember that the Vietnam War, our Vietnam War, was prolonged under 5 Presidents until it eventually folded in April 1975.

This is hardly good news for the people of Ukraine. For a World Power to recognize its mistakes can take decades.

Are Russians as conflicted as we were during the Vietnam War? I imagine they are. Are their opinions of their country fraught? They must be. Can Russians protest within Russia? Not at all. Thousands upon thousands have been removed from the streets and silenced in a way that is unthinkable here in the United States.

I was, in more ways than one, reminded of our United States – yes, those same conflicted United States above – on a recent arrival in Madrid.

The EU is still a much newer concept in co-living than our American Union. Within the European Union, things are even now falling into place. The EU as we know it today had its beginnings with the Maastricht Treaty of 1993. The European Union is a work in progress. The United Kingdom was a reluctante partner for awhile, until they decided in 2019 to Brexit. However, their example is far from being the norm. Other countries are lining up to join the Union.

According to Wikipedia:

There are seven recognised candidates for membership of the European Union: Turkey (applied in 1987), North Macedonia (2004), Montenegro (2008), Albania (2009), Serbia (2009), Ukraine (2022), and Moldova (2022). Additionally, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and Kosovo (whose independence is not recognised by five EU member states) are considered potential candidates for membership by the EU.^[1][2] Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Georgia have formally submitted applications for membership, while Kosovo has a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with the EU, which generally precedes the lodging of a membership application.

 Ukraine sees things differently than the UK. Ukraine doesn’t have the UK’s options of history and geography. Putin didn’t decide to invade the United Kingdom, after all.

Putin choose a defenseless neighbor, still not a member of a nascent European Union, to try to exert his late-blooming and misbegotten manhood by invading a benign neighbor to prove somehow his macho worldview. As is now evident to anybody paying attention worldwide, Putin misjudged, and exiled his eternal reputation to the gutter.

Back to landing in Madrid. At Barajas, there were Russians dragging and pushing way-overweight bags along their way, any which way, far from Russia. That was understandable. Until it wasn’t.

For Russians with money, Madrid is just one of many escapes from the horror of the motherland to a neighbor that still extends a welcoming embrace.

The sight of Russians at Atocha, Madrid’s train station, toting Louis Vuitton bags filled with recent purchases, was unsettling. Louis Vuitton in times of war? Drinking beer, happy with their day of shopping, joking around, the Russians at Atocha disquieted me.

The disquiet continued.

On the Metro in Rome, I sat next to a bunch of loud Russians wisecracking among themselves, laughing and seemingly happy on their way to view the ruins of the Coliseum. They were oblivious to any discomfort they might have been communicating to their fellow passengers concerned about their country’s invasion of a helpless neighbor, Ukraine.

These Russians didn’t seem to care about the nuances of co-existence. Nuances be damned was what I, unfortunately, understood.

These joyous Russians were, for me, somehow complicit in Putin’s imperious view of the world.

We can do what we want, they seemed to be saying as they joshed around, just as their elected leader, Putin did, toasting a glass of champagne high in celebration of his invasion of Ukraine not even a month later.

I was disturbed by the attitude of the Russians that I saw in Italy and Spain.

Could it be that Russians, at large, really support Putin? I found myself wondering.

Could it be that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine might represent the true mindset of the majority in Russia?

I know, I know, that Russians are as diverse as we are. See above.

I know that many have been swept off the streets, disappeared forever.

Yet, could it be that Putin really represents Russia? I found myself thinking in Rome.

Could it be that Russians in general could care less about Ukraine?

Just maybe, I found myself thinking.

Is Putin the true champion of a Russia anathema to our Western view of civilization? That’s what I really wondered.

Could that be true?

Just maybe, I found myself thinking again.

The post Is Putin Russia, and Russia Putin? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Can one person change the course of life for millions of others?

Radically.

We have Putin as our most conspicuous contemporary example.

Just a few moments ago in our elastic present-day concept of time here at home, we had the hotel magnate, Trump, as our elected leader, influencing our daily lives like a twin Putin autocrat.

Thanks to that very same hotelier, we now have Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett firmly ensconced on our Highest Court, pretending to be impartial, damaging lives left, right and center.

So let me reframe the question.

Can one person change the course of life for the good of millions of others?

Right away, all of the above are disqualified.

Putin, apparently whimsically – and just because as a simple Russian bureaucrat elevated to the highest post of his land well beyond his abilities – misunderstood the zeitgeist and ordered Russian troops to invade and decimate neighboring Ukraine. Unwittingly, he relegated Russia to minor player status on the world stage going forward.

His US counterpart, Trump, tried to upend the real world here at home and declare his opponent’s election invalid. Unlike in Nicaragua, where a Trump think-alike, Ortega, has been able to maintain and enhance his power through manipulating elections since 1979, Trump failed to falsify Biden’s Presidential triumph. At least for now. Fingers crossed.

There are now six Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, 6 out of 9. That might be par for the course in Italy or France; not here in the United States. Immigration from largely Catholic Latin America has given us a Catholic population in our 50 states of about 20%. Yet according to the Pew Research Center, we identify ourselves as a country predominently Protestant, 43%, unaffiliated, 26% and Jewish, 2%. Six Catholics on the highest Court of the land is way out of proportion to our religous identity as a nation.

Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the most recent Catholic arrivals to the Supreme Court, gave us ample reason to doubt their true personas in their Congressional hearings. A psychology professor, Christine Blasey Ford, accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault years before. Our elected Republican senators shut their ears. They voted him in anyway. OK, they seemed to say, Boys will be boys. They were fast to overlook the implications of his traditional conservative Catholicism, or perhaps eager to espouse it.

In 2020, the Washington Post reported that, while in law school, Coney Barrett

lived at the South Bend home of People of Praise’s influential co-founder Kevin Ranaghan and his wife, Dorothy, who together helped establish the group’s male-dominated hierarchy and view of gender roles.

In June of this year, London’s Guardian had this to say on the very same People of Praise co-founder:

… the People of Praise, a secretive charismatic Christian group that counts the supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, was described in a sworn affidavit filed in the 1990s as exerting almost total control over one of the group’s female members, including making all decisions about her finances and dating relationships.

Were our elected Republican senators interested in any of this? Did they care? Not at all. Coney Barret was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice on Oct 26, 2020 with 52 of 53 Republicans voting in favor. Maine’s Susan Collins was the sole dissenting Republican.

Could we now, just possibly, be seeing People of Praise influencing a Supreme Court decision on abortion? Yes, we could.

You are totally within your rights to shout out loud about that right now. As Marcellus once said in in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Back to the original question.

Can one person change the course of life for the good of millions of others?

Lest we forget, the answer is yes, yes and yes again.

There are still some Americans who might fit the bill. Franklin D. Roosevelt comes to mind. How about our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln? Or our 44th, Barack Obama?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our 32nd President, was elected to the office four times, something no longer possible. He led us through the Great Depression and World War 2. He launched the New Deal, a transformation of American society that included the creation of the Social Security Administration, which today continues to provide essential daily benefits for more than 70 million Americans.

Abraham Lincoln was our President during our first and only – up to now – Civil War. Not only did he preserve our Union – an achievement that continues to reverberate for all 330 million + of us living in the United States today, but he also just happens to be the President who abolished slavery. At the time, the ending of slavery immediately affected the lives of four million African-Americans living in servitude. Since then, the abolition of slavery has daily touched the lives of millions and millions of others, as a constant reminder of our need, and necessity, to acknowledge and embrace each other, and to celebrate our similarities and differences.

So how many lives did Abraham Lincoln impact for the good? The number in incalculable and uncountable.

Oh and by the way, Abraham Lincoln was something called a moderate Republican, a species now apparently extinct.

Barack Obama served as our President from 2009 to 2017. In our lifetime, we have been witness to Obama’s supreme gift to our nation, the establishment of Obamacare. Thanks to Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services reports that we have:

35 Million People enrolled in Coverage Related to the Affordable Care Act, with a historic number of 21 Million people enrolled in Medicaid Expansion Coverage.

In terms of doing good for the greater benefit of society, that counts.

It would seem that we are in a constant back-and-forth between those who want to do good to the benefit of all of us alive on earth, and those who are equipped with an aberrant gene that is programmed to do us harm.

Unfortunately for those of us living in the United States today, we are confronted with, and confounded by, a hotelier equipped with the aberrant gene, a hotelier who would seem to be planning further assaults on our democracy.

See fingers crossed above.

Our DT, our Wizard of Doom to democracy, is still with us.

At any moment, he could rise from the ashes.  At any moment, he could still consume us, devour us, and swallow our collective notion of peaceful coexistence in one night-sweat gulp.

The post Doing the world a world of good appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Edwin Starr sang it loud in 1970.

War, huh (good God y’all)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it, say it, say it
War (uh-huh), huh (yeah, huh)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, listen to me

You can see the full lyrics here. Starr was lucky to live in the USA where War not only got widespread airplay, but spent three weeks at number 1 on the Billboard charts. Starr’s intense anti-Vietnam War anthem hit a cord.

Imagine such a thing happening in Russia today, where any public criticism of the Kremlin line in its bloodthirsty and unprovoked war in Ukraine guarantees its citizens up to 15 years of jail time, no redress admitted. In Russia, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is fake news.

Edwin Starr’s War is just one in a long line of anti-war, protest and solidarity songs that are enshrined in our collective conscience. Joan Baez did her part with We Shall Overcome. Marvin Gaye gave us all a wake-up call with What’s Going On. John Lennon pushed us to Imagine. Dolores O’Riordan summed up the Northern Ireland conflict with Zombie. Jimi Hendrix sang there are many here among us who think that life is just a joke when he electrified Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower. Putin foretold.

Putin miscalculated on many fronts, military, intellectual, strategic and cultural. His generals and foot soldiers are dying in unprecedented numbers on his self-determined battlefield. His true support comes only from those Russians and Belarussians brainwashed or ignorant of the facts, a situation that Putin facilitated by shutting down any and all media outlets that might have found him accountable. In terms of Russia’s importance in the world, Putin has sent his country back to the Soviet dark ages. And he completely underestimated the connectivity that defines the world outside of Russia in 2022.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is being photographed, televised, YouTube’d and tweeted in real time. Russia has no escape from the atrocities in which it is now complicit. Putin has no escape here. He is forever going to be damned for leading his country to disaster and for lending his reputation, or what is left of it, to a Russia diminished.

Putin was once an able chameleon, biding his time in a background role on the world stage. But now, thanks to his recklessness and inflated ego, he finds himself an emperor without clothes in a real world that has coalesced, and how, against him. It turns out that Putin is just the latest version of the Russian tyrant, dictator, despot and oppressor that we once knew as Stalin. Stalin died by natural causes. Putin can only wish for the same.

How do you protest such evil in song?

At a moment when so many people are dying daily in Ukraine, it may seem inconsequential, but it’s not.

Pink Floyd put out their first new song in 28 years to protest Putin’s self-delusional brain fart in attempting to redefine a Russia-centric world. Floyd’s song was called Hey Hey Rise Up, and featured Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Boombox singing in Ukrainian. And even though it spent a short time atop the Apple US Chart, the song didn’t resonate.

But then came Florence + the Machine. By some mechanism of chance, Florence Welch went to Kyiv in late 2021 to film the video for her latest release. This was months before the onslaught of Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. By coincidence, or not, Florence’s song is called Free. Hers is not a protest song at all on the surface. Her song is an upbeat pop/rock dance track. Florence did the video with the actor Bill Nighy as her side portraying her anxiety. The lyrics don’t obsess over political freedom even though the video ends with Florence and her anxiety overlooking a graveyard in Ukraine. But Florence does sign off on the video with a dedication to the spirit, creativity and perseverance of our brave Ukrainian friends, and notes that the video was filmed with Ukrainian filmmakers and artists, whose radiant freedom can never be extinguished. The song may not be protest per se, but the video keeps Kyiv and Ukraine front and center on YouTube. It’s already been seen more than 2,144,546 times.

Keep in mind that not all solidarity songs need to be anti-war. Does anybody remember the Andrews Sisters? They had a huge hit during World War 2 with Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. The Andrews Sisters great contribution to ending the Second World War was in making our soldiers feel valued, loved, important and appreciated in song. The lyrics were secondary. The Andrews Sisters made everyone feel that a future with good times was still possible.

Just a week ago, Ed Sheeran premiered a new song 2step with a video also filmed in Kyiv before the Russian attack began. Sheeren is donating the royalties of his song to Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal. The DEC website reminds us that 18 million people are projected to be affected by Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and that 12 million Ukrainians, more than a quarter of the population, have so far had to flee their homes. Ed Sheeren and Florence Welch show us just how badly Putin miscalculated. Ukraine was already firmly integrated, accepted and understood as European long before Putin’s botched attempt to claim it for himself and Russia.

Unfortunately, nobody in Putin’s coterie of yes-men gave him the message.

The post War, huh (good God y’all) What is it good for? Absolutely nothing appeared first on Occasional Planet.

History is something that binds us all together, and that includes an unlikely pairing of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the affirmative action movement in the United States. To understand the motives of why Putin feels so possessively towards Ukraine and why affirmative action is central to the advancement of minorities, we must draw upon the history of both.

To comprehend why Putin is so interested in protecting his interests in Ukraine, it’s necessary to consider how since the time of Napoleon, more than two hundred years ago, Russia has repeatedly been attacked from its west. There have been three major incursions into Russia from other European countries. First was Napoleon from France in 1812. Second was Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914 and third was Germany again, this time under Adolf Hitler in 1941.

When the Soviet Union was formed in 1922, there was Russia and sixteen other states nearby republics. One of those sixteen was Ukraine, which was one of the founding republics in the U.S.S.R. Other republics that came to form a barrier of protection around Russia were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Estonia, Georgia, Kirghizstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (there were four others that came later).

What early leaders of the Soviet Union, including Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, did was to form a protective shell around Russia. In some ways, it is similar to the United States asserting that it has control of the Americas (North, Central and South) through the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. The U.S. has engaged European countries twice to “protect the independence of Cuba.” First was in 1898 with the Spanish-American War and then in 1962 in staring down Russia in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The key point is that both Russia and the United States have acted in ways to protect themselves from invasion. Each has formed geographic barriers around its borders. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, it left Russia in many ways unprotected.

For many years post-1989, the Ukraine had a government friendly to Russia. However, in recent years, Ukraine has become more independent and interested in developing closer relations with western Europe. Economic trade between western Europe and Ukraine has increased and Ukraine has also asked to become part of the western defense alliance, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

For Vladimir Putin and many others in Russia, this is scary. This is also not the way it should be according to the Russian playbook. Russia’s field of reference is the Soviet Union of old, in which Ukraine and other republics on its western flank protected it from western incursion, or western even influence.

In this light, it makes sense that Putin would want to take control of the Ukrainian government. In his mind, doing so would include the possibility of using military force to do so.

I am not asserting that NATO countries, including the United States, should just stand by and let Russia invade Ukraine without consequences. But it is important to understand that Russia has valid reasons to want to control Ukraine. That is something that is very different from when they placed offensive missiles in Cuba in 1962, a country thousands of miles outside of their “sphere of interest.”

So, drawing upon history, it is important to understand from where Russia comes and why it is important for NATO countries to negotiate with Putin. One component of an agreement might be to include a declaration agreeing not to include Ukraine in NATO now, but to have a sunset provision whereby the issue could be reconsidered in twenty years.

In many ways, looking at Russia’s current desires is not that different from the ways in which many white people in the United States look at minorities. In 2019, the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the history of African-Americans, beginning with the estimated first day that slaves from Africa arrived on the American shore of the colony of Virginia.

Lead author of the 1619 Project, Nicole Hannah-Jones, does a remarkable job of connecting the elements of slavery to current problems that African-Americans face. She is joined by a number of other outstanding writers who provide more detail on subjects such as how urban interstate highways have been intentionally designed to divide black neighborhoods, how the work of slaves on southern plantations provided need for investment and eventually the establishment of the New York Stock Exchange. The work of the Times is greatly supplemented by lessons from the Pulitzer Center.

Many white people are now getting upset about Critical Race Theory, which is simply a recognition of how contemporary conditions (good and bad) for African-Americans is a result of the history of blacks in America.

It is because of the discrimination that black people have endured in America, now for more than 400 years, that programs such as Affirmative Action have been needed, and still are. Affirmative Action is a policy or a program that seeks to redress past discrimination through active measures to ensure equal opportunity, as in education and employment.

Affirmative Action is not something that is limited to race. It is used for those who are economically disadvantaged, or for people with disabilities, or for women. It is necessary to balance the playing field.

White people need to understand the history of minorities, just as NATO countries need to understand the history of Russia. To be fair, the reverse is true in each case. On a global level, if we are going to live peacefully and with justice, it is important to understand one another’s history.

The post What Putin and Affirmative Action have in common appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Four and a half years ago, on Sunday, February 23, the 2014 Winter Olympics ended in Sochi, Russia. Four days later, masked Russian troops without insignia took over the Supreme Council (parliament) of Crimea, and captured strategic sites across Crimea, which led to the installation of the pro-Russian Aksyonov government in Crimea.

Could Vladimir Putin do the same thing right after the World Cup ends in Russia this Sunday, July 15? He may not take immediate action, because over the next several days he will have meetings with none other than Donald Trump. Why should Putin take precipitous action without first playing with Trump’s brain a little more to ensure that the acting U.S. President knows what to say and do to affirm his unqualified support?

Trump likes to blame Barack Obama for allowing Russia to take over Crimea and to further encroach upon the Ukraine. However, Obama recognized the age-old theory of “sphere of influence.” Crimea and the Ukraine are in Russia’s orbit, and there is very little that the U.S. or even NATO could or can do about it militarily. What the West did under the leadership of Obama was to initiate a series of economic sanctions on Russia that were particularly painful, because they were specifically aimed at the oligarchs. In other words, the action that the West took hurt the Russians who are personally closest to Trump.

What, if anything, might Putin have up his sleeve after the spotlight of Russia hosting the World Cup dims? Putin is cagey, so it’s difficult to tell. But one possibility is that he will work to convince Trump that the U.S. no longer needs to be in Syria, a move that will strengthen the Russian connection with Bashar al-Assad and ultimately with the leadership of Iran. Putin needs to expand his sphere of influence, and Trump seems to have little interest in parts of the world that he does not see as challenging “America’s greatness.”

Putin also has his eye on the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They had been under Soviet control from the end of World War II until the shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. If Putin could neutralize their independence, he would once again put Russia on the doorstep of Poland. All of this illustrates how important NATO is to the West, and how risky and unpredictable an impetuous U.S. president is to the world.

It is possible that Putin will not take a dramatic political or military move soon. After all, since 2014, he has had remarkable success causing confusion in the West through cyber-warfare. He has infiltrated social media and mainstream media alike. With the three branches of the U.S. government under strict Republican control, very little is being done to blunt Russia’s cyber aggression.

But before the summer of 2018 passes, let’s not forget what we can learn from the recent history of 2014. Once the praise of Russia’s hosting a great international sporting event has passed, it is quite possible that Putin will ramp up his international aggression. Perish the thought with Donald Trump acting more and more like his puppet.

The post Beware of Putin after World Cup and meeting with Trump appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Remember when you might have thought that Donald Trump was a Democrat at heart? We know that he was once pro-choice, that he had little to do with “Republican values” and that doing business in New York required closer relationships with Democrats than Republicans.

When Ted Cruz accused Trump during the 2016 Republican presidential debates of not truly being a conservative because of his “New York values,” was Cruz on to something?

When Trump supported Hillary Clinton’s senatorial races in 2000 and 2006, did he not have a flirting interest in the Democratic Party?

According to Ballotpedia, prior to 2011, Trump donated more money to Democrats than Republicans. But after 2011, Trump contributed only $8,500 to Democrats and $630,150 to Republicans.

His switch to giving primarily to Republicans came four years prior to his announcing his own candidacy for president in June 2015. Was there something that occurred around 2011 that gave Trump cause to distance himself from Democrats and solidify his affiliation with Republicans? And whatever the reason might have been for his switch in political loyalties, did it have anything to do with his personal and financial ties to Russia?

Ah, how much easier it would be to investigate what happened after the first decade of the 21st century if we had access to Trump’s tax returns. But we don’t, and as we all know, that has nothing to do with any decision or non-decision made by the Internal Revenue Service.

What we do know about 2011, is that two years earlier, Democrat Hillary Clinton really angered Russian President Vladimir Putin. On March 6, 2009, she presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a red button with the English word “reset” on it. She and the Obama Administration were concerned by the Russo-Georgian diplomatic crisis and then the Russo-Georgian war. If the U.S. was going to disapprove of Russia’s behavior, it was offensive to Putin, especially when he interpreted the U.S. as scolding Russia like a little child.

CNN reports,

Back in 2011, Putin faced the biggest protests the country had seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. He had served two terms as president, the maximum allowed, and in 2008 had become prime minister, in a maneuver that allowed him to effectively hold power while his ally, Dmitry Medvedev, was president. Then he announced — to much anger, but little surprise — that he would seek a third term as president. Three months later, the opposition erupted in fury when his party won a landslide victory in legislative elections amid allegations of fraud.
Then-Secretary of State Clinton openly sided with the protesters. “The Russian people, like people everywhere,” she said, “…deserve free, fair, transparent elections.”

Putin knew that Clinton would likely run for president of the United States in 2016. He was angry with her and feared possible interference on her part in Russian affairs. It should be no surprise that he would want someone other than Hillary Clinton to be the new U.S. president. Russia had already been actively involved in trying to influence elections in other countries. Specifically, with the Ukraine, they had maneuvered to have American political operative Paul Manafort become a top aide to pro-Russian Victor Yanukovych, who was running to become president of Ukraine.

Manafort succeeded in that task, but he had never been involved in a U.S. presidential race. Why did Donald Trump choose Manafort to be his campaign chairman? This is one of dozens of questions that can mildly be called oddities in the tangled web of close connections between Donald Trump and Russia.

The central question remains. Did Donald Trump’s movement away from the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party have anything to do with his relations with Russia? Did Russia make its financial help to him contingent upon him walking on the other side of the street from Hillary Clinton?

In 2017, we know that in terms of temperament and thinking, he is much closer to Republicans than Democrats. We also know that Barack Obama’s skewering of Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner put Trump in a mood for revenge. But is it possible that he never would have landed in the Republican camp had it not been for his relations with Russia and Putin’s desire to manipulate him? These might be questions that investigative reporters with resources might want to study. Where did Trump’s “New York values,” go and why did they seem to disappear?

The post Did Trump become a Republican because of his Russia troubles? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Rewind to Trevor Noah’s Daily Show this past Halloween. The show is set during the presidential campaign. Not the 2016 one, but the 2020 one as Donald Trump “runs” for reelection. The setting is literally and figuratively underground as Noah surreptitiously tries to continue the comedy program that had had been wildly successful when the press was still free.

As Noah goes from correspondent to correspondent, it is clear that America has become largely inhospitable to African-Americans, Hispanics, women, just about anyone who is not like Donald Trump. The program reveals (in hopefully a hyperbolic fashion) virtually everything that could go wrong in the first term of a Donald Trump presidency.

But one thing has not happened. Nuclear war. It reminds me of the perils that the people of Russia, in fact the people of the entire world, live under so long as Vladimir Putin is president of the world’s second strongest nuclear power. Putin has committed a litany of outrageous violations of human rights, he has invaded sovereign countries, he has taken cyber mischief and espionage to unprecedented levels, but he has not unleashed his nuclear arsenal.

It is no small coincidence that Trump and Putin seem to have a mutual admiration society. They both love to take just about everything to the limit, with little regard for the actual or perceived consequences. Neither seems capable of admitting a mistake. Each seems to think that the entire world is against them. Each is someone whose presence in a room would make everyone else wary.

Fast forward to now, three days after the Trevor Noah episode. The fear of a Trump presidency is only growing as the polls tighten and we are reminded of how in 1980 Ronald Reagan took a tight race the week before the election and turned it into a landslide victory for himself. Like Trump, the arguments against Reagan were that he was not ready for prime time, that he was not smart enough nor temperamentally fit to serve as president. Somehow as the clock ticked down to Election Day, there was a tsunami of sentiment that these fears were unfounded and Reagan became acceptable and then desired.

Is that what is happening with Donald Trump now? It has been sixteen months since he announced his candidacy and he has said and done everything and more that is outrageous. For those of us who oppose Trump, he has given us an almost daily diet of words and actions that clearly demonstrate that he is the most unqualified person to receive the nomination of a major party in American history.

But this seems to matter to fewer and fewer people. Could the unthinkable happen? On the day after the Cubs (deservedly) won the World Series, Trump seems primed to do what hardly anyone thought possible. I hope that I am wrong. I hope that the polls are flawed. I hope that the American people might be just a little bit wiser than I fear. But should the unthinkable happen, it might be the best we can hope for with a Trump presidency is “Putin-West.” Let’s hope that we never have to find out if that would be true.

The post Best we can hope for from a President Trump – like Putin appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The natural reaction to Russian president Vladimir Putin writing an op-ed piece in the New York Times, in which he critiqued American foreign policy, was that his words were inappropriate, intrusive, and offensive. New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez said the piece made him almost want to throw up. Other Americans were equally put off.

Americans seem to collectively get their spines up when someone from a foreign country offers thoughts on how the United States might improve itself. It is not unlike when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that there was no need for him to incorporate legal thinking from other countries into his deliberations, because everything he needs to know is in the United States Constitution and case law.

Scalia’s literalist decisions have given him a very narrow view of the Constitution.  He calls it a “dead Constitution.”  This seems to exclude common sense from much of his thinking.

Putin’s op-ed was criticized or ignored by many Americans in part because he is not American. In fact, he is the leader of a sometimes opponent of the U.S. Many Americans feel that the U.S. has a corner on wisdom and that it is offensive for others to offer us advice.

Let’s consider some of what Putin said in his op-ed:

Recent events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

Putin is suggesting that it would be helpful to both Russia and the United States if there was more communication between the societies. There is nothing to object to here.  Can we at least given him credit for something as American as apple pie–or even Rodney King?

The word “exceptional” seems to be a real powder keg in Putin’s op-ed. Putin said, “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

This is both a light swat at the United States and a major blow. It is light in that it somewhat challenges what President Obama said in his Sept. 10 2013 speech on Syria:

America is not the world’s policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong. But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth.

The President is saying that America is exceptional because it stands up against atrocities. His words are definitely subject to challenge; there’s no empirical evidence that America stands up to atrocities more than other countries. It was a “feel good” line to the American people.

However, there is a broader use of the term “American exceptionalism,” which may be what Putin was targeting.

Although the term does not necessarily imply superiority, many neoconservative and American conservative writers have promoted its use in that sense. To them, the United States is like the biblical shining “City upon a Hill”, and exempt from historical forces that have affected other countries.

The term does indeed seem to imply superiority. It is continuously used by conservatives, and especially Tea Party members, in the U.S. These are people who clearly see the U.S. as greater than all other countries. They feel that the United States is entitled to superior standing to other countries. The fact that Putin is critical of such a perspective does not make him unique. The leaders of many other countries object to the “we’re better than every other country” meaning of “American exceptionalism.” This is clearly not what President Obama said, and any criticism of Obama by Putin in this regard must be considered to be largely off base. Putin’s punch is directed at the “American exceptionalism and entitlement” spoken and practiced by President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other neo-cons. Many progressives in the United States find the neo-con perspective of exceptionalism to be both unwarranted and dangerous, and they have evidence to substantiate it.

It would be helpful if those on the right, as well as many in the middle, would actually think about what Putin said. Many who do not want America to go to war in Syria may already agree with Putin, but they won’t acknowledge it. One thing is certain; foreign countries will not listen to the leaders of the United States if our leaders don’t listen to them. Hopefully, at some point,  President Obama will recognize that Putin’s words contain the same mixture of honesty and pander as his own words do. What’s important  is to listen to that which is real, and ignore the hype. Obama is certainly smart enough to do this.

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