Cross-posted at Ian Welsh.
POTUS Joe Biden wasn’t just a senile fool who insisted on running for re-election when obviously senile, costing the Democrats the 2024 Presidential election and giving us Trump 2.0; he was also the nominal architect of three mass-death events that rank among this awful Century’s worst.
So yea, I’m back to hammering nails in the dying ghoul’s coffin so people don’t forget what he was and what he (or the administration with his name on it) did.
This time I’m going to be pounding home the extent to which Biden & co. knowingly provoked Russia into invading Ukraine in February 2022, put the kibosh on a peace deal Russia and Ukraine allegedly worked out in April 2022, and squandered massive fortunes pouring money and weapons into the yawning black maw that is Kyiv under Zelensky, and in so doing signed the death warrant of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, mostly the former.
And because the trap that Russian President Vladimir Putin fell into was loaded not only with billions worth of military preparations and massive economic sanctions, but also with the biggest and most brutally effective propaganda campaign of my lifetime (and I lived through the post-9/11 Karl Rove Great War on Terror nightmare as a full-grown ass adult), trying to speak up for a modicum of reason and objectivity got anyone even mildly opposed to the dominant narrative labeled a “Putin puppet” and cast out of polite liberal American society.
That wasn’t new in 2022, of course. By that point we’d enjoyed six years’ worth of RussiaGate panic and the neo-McCarthyism from the establishment shitlibs in charge of the Democratic Party and their “vote blue no matter who” idiot supporters.
Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 presidential campaign kicked off RussiaGate the day after she lost the election to Trump as a great way to distract from how shitty her campaign was and the fact that the Democratic Party put its thumb on the scale in her favor against Bernie Sanders, went full-on commie hunter like the ’64 Goldwater girl she once was against Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. Clinton said on Campaign HQ with David Plouffe (that’s former Obama 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe) that the Russians have “got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate” and called her “the favorite of the Russians.”
Gabbard filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit but then dropped it to get on with “defeating Donald Trump in 2020” (ie the future worthless Trump Director of National Intelligence dropped the suit so she could focus on helping Biden beat her future boss. Oh, the places you’ll go, indeed.).
So I should have been hardened to that kind of crap by 2022, but despite Mueller coming up completely empty (“the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”) and RussiaGate adding up to a giant distraction that helped Trump get away with tons of bribe-taking and other real crimes (emoluments clause anyone?) because the Dems only seemed to care about his antics if it interfered with their Ukraine plans or could somehow be linked to Russia and Putin.
I mean if they tried to impeach Trump for taking bribes from foreign countries, that might hit Dem legislative playas like Nancy Pelosi and Bob Menendez right in the wallets.
Finding out later that that bullshit was a psyop from the get-go fills me with rage and I’d love to go all Borger, Texas on any of the fuckers involved should I ever get the chance.
Remember the Hunter Biden laptop story — you know the bombshell pre-election NY Post article that no one could post on Facebook (Zuckerberg later apologized) or share on Twitter (even via DM) which revealed a great deal of lucrative scumbaggery on the part of Hunter Biden, some of it maybe even involving “the old man”, some of which took place in Ukraine where Hunter enjoyed a $50,000/month gig at a natural gas company despite knowing fuck all about natural gas or Ukraine?
Remember how fifty-one former intelligence officials — including James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Leon Panetta — signed a one-paragraph statement saying the laptop story (later confirmed to be true) has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They concede in the letter itself that they have no evidence.
Politico ran it as “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.”
In 2023, former acting CIA director Michael Morell told the House Judiciary Committee he organized the letter after a call from Antony Blinken, then a Biden campaign adviser, and that a purpose was to give Biden a “talking point” for the debate. FWIW Blinken denies it was his idea. Since I don’t believe a word that double-genociding mofo says, rest assured I’m just including it for the record.
Blinken, of course, became Biden’s Secretary of State and ran Ukraine policy for four years because of course Sleepy Joe was too senile to run a fucking lemonade stand by 2022.
Did anyone happen to catch the study covered by FAIR showing that American corporate media were seven times more likely to quote think tanks with military-industrial funding than those without? Good times were had gaslighting everyone’s liberal family and friends.
I lost friends, relationships with work colleagues and online friendly acquaintances, and my family, and marital relations were deeply strained by this most epic fucking gaslighting campaign (which was presaged by the Atlantic Council’s John Deni in his Dec, 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine” oh yea, Deni is also a research prof at the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute).
And who could forget Ivan Krastev’s Feb. 3, 2022 New York Times op-ed which warned, “Europe Thinks Putin Is Planning Something Even Worse Than War” — and the horror Putin planned?
Why nothing less than a negotiated European security architecture that acknowledges Russian interests. Krastev passionately argued that “an invasion could, in a perverse way, save the current European order.” And God knows, perversity is what the current European order (and its ruling Epstein class) is all about.
The WSJ and NYT truly know their audiences and the goldfish memories they have because both papers beat the war drums while Putin was begging for negotiations (the Russians even drafted a full signature-ready document) and then spent the next three years calling the invasion of Ukraine “unprovoked” and insisting that the rest of the Western MSM media do the same.
But before I can get to hammering on the coffin I’m preparing for Genocide Joe Biden’s reputation and historical standing, I have to cover some historical background.
That ought to chase off all the fucking Americans reading this. Goddamn, it’s crazy-making to be a student of history in the USA in the short-attention-span 2020s. Well, so be it.
This is going to be quick and link-heavy because I’m writing a blog post for a topic that merits multiple books.
NATO Stopped Being a Defensive Alliance in the 1990s Under Bill Clinton
Despite assurances to then Soviet Premier Gorbachev from President GHW “Poppy” Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when Gorby allowed German reunification, NATO moved east even more relentlessly than the Wehrmacht did in 1939-1942.
Just look at this fucking map.
And Bill Clinton (who was busy with other things and barely cared about foreign policy) and his administration (some of whom very much cared about foreign policy and will recur in administration after administration to the present day) were warned by fifty foreign policy veterans (including Robert McNamara, former CIA director Stansfield Turner, Paul Nitze, Jack Matlock, Richard Pipes, and Senators Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Sam Nunn) that NATO’s eastern expansion was “a policy error of historic proportions.”
And then George Kennan, the architect of the containment strategy often credited with “winning” the Cold War, told Thomas “I talk to taxi drivers” Friedman in the New York Times: “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war… I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.” He adds that when Russia reacts, the expanders “will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”
And Russia had every reason to worry after NATO bombed the shit out of Serbia for 78 days with no UN authorization.
Even drunk-ass useless joke of a Russian President Boris Yeltsin piped up and called NATO’s action “naked aggression” and “the gravest mistake of Americans and American diplomacy.”
And in case you’re wondering what this has to do with our boy Biden, never fear, the shithead was in the thick of things as a US Senator from Delaware.
Genocide Joe was early to call for a “lift and strike” policy ie, lift the arms embargo on Bosnia, bomb the Serb positions.
Biden went to Sarajevo with Dole in June 1994 and co-sponsored the Bosnia and Herzegovina Self-Defense Act of 1995 with John McCain, Bob Dole and Joe Lieberman (murderous assholes all) to lift the embargo unilaterally.
He was quoted pithily calling the UN’s rules of engagement “idiotic” and “I believe we should be using airstrikes much more aggressively.”
He was also a Senate leader on NATO enlargement, admitting Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, arguing that a vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe forces countries into their own security arrangements.
It’s fair to say, Joe did what he could, and he had even more to contribute when the first terrible US administration of the 21st Century took office: the dynamic duo of Shrub Bush (as Robin the Boy Wonder) and very hard Dick Cheney (as the Dark Knight).
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney Pushed Hard and Set the Stage
The Bush/Cheney administration treated Russia like a pig being fattened up for slaughter.
Those evil bastards somehow took enough time out from wrecking Afghanistan and Iraq to rip up many of the weapons treaties that had been painstakingly put together by US administrations from Nixon to Bush 1.
This was just three months after newish Russian President Vladimir Putin had been the first to call POTUS GW Bush and promise to back the US in its chosen response to 9/11.
At the time, “Pooty Poot,” as Bush so charmingly called him, called it a “mistake” but otherwise tried to act chill, apparently hoping for warm relations with the US.
They also continued expanding NATO into some truly insane places, too, like the Baltic States — who the hell needs a mutual defense treaty with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? Who are they protecting the US from, and how exactly?
They even extended an invitation to Albania, which would be consummated under Obama.
NATO had become less of a mutual defense organization and more of a “my big American friend is going to beat your Russian ass, go ahead, try something” association.
In no time, the Bush administration proposed deploying ten silo-based interceptors to Poland and a fixed radar to the Czech Republic.
Putin Spoke Up in Munich 2007, But No One Listened
Vladimir shocked the world when he made his (and Russia’s) debut at the 43rd Munich Security Conference and told the assembled Western security establishment that NATO enlargement “is a serious provoking factor that reduces the level of mutual trust” and has “nothing to do with the modernization of the alliance itself or with security in Europe.”
But the bear baring his fangs a little didn’t make Bush & Cheney back off. Instead, they upped the ante by pushing a “Membership Action Plan” (MAP) for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO at the 2008 Bucharest Conference.
Let’s pause to recall that Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Russia via Ukraine in 1941.
France and Germany squawked a bit, so the MAP wasn’t granted; instead, NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members.”
Note that this was the most bullshit possible outcome, putting giant “Invade Me” signs on Ukraine and Georgia without offering them any actual deterrence from “Russian aggression.”
Then German Chancelloress Angela Merkel wrote in her 2024 memoir that it was a “battle cry” to Putin, and quoted him telling her: “You won’t be Chancellor forever. And then they’ll become a member of NATO. And I want to prevent that.”
Four months later, war erupted between Georgia and Russia — it’s little mentioned these days that the EU’s own inquiry into that short and one-sided fray found that Georgia started the shooting by shelling Tskhinvali with heavy artillery on the night of 7–8 August, and there was no massive Russian invasion under way that this was needed to stop.
Years later, WikiLeaks would reveal that then-US Ambassador to Russia and later Biden’s CIA chief, Bill Burns, wrote a cable to DC called “Nyet Means Nyet,” which said that Ukrainian and Georgian NATO aspirations “not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region,” that Russia perceives “encirclement,” and — the line to quote — that Russia feared the divisions inside Ukraine over membership “could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”
And if you’re worried that Sleepy Joe had already drifted into senescence during the Bush years, never fear, many would say he was at the peak of his awful powers, serving as the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for much of their second term, including the key Bucharest conference year.
From that lofty perch, Biden proposed a $1 billion increase in US aid to Georgia and even made a personal visit to Tbilisi just after the battles ended — presumably to wash his hands with the blood of America’s victims.
As sad as he surely was to see the most war-mongering administration until his own leaving D.C., our boy would get even more hands-on with Eastern Europe as Vice-President in the Obama administration.
Cross-posted at IanWelsh.net
Joe Biden is a sick and demented puppy. Bill Clinton was another demented sexual deviant who spent more time covering up who played with his pecker than just about anything else. Hillary Clinton is by far one of the most evil human beings to be involved in politics.
The entire DEM ticket has been riddled with psychopaths and warmongers. No wonder Trump was once a proud supporter of HillBillary Clinton and their sordid sexual fetishes.
Nice recitation of the facts, Nat.
The minute that the “spook letter” was uniformly misquoted as stating that the Hunter laptop was a “Russian DIS-information campaign” when it had merely been called it out as bearing the hallmarks of a “Russian information campaign” I realized that the American news media were no longer interested in such things as facts. “Information” is not transmogrified into “dis-information” based on the source.
Biden describes himself in his own autobiography as a bully who wandered the streets of Wilmington at night picking fights. Angela Merkel is on record that Minsk 2 was designed to fool the Russians into giving the coup government in “Ukraine” time to arm in order to liquidate resistance in Donbas and Crimea. The Russians had little choice other than to call the bluff, which they nearly did without serious bloodshed.