“With apologies for bluntness, the mainstream press fucked around, now the mainstream press is finding out.” - Matt Taibbi
By James Howard Kunstler - August 1, 2025
By now, it must be kind of obvious that Mr. Putin of Russia was staged-up into a demon for the convenience of Hillary Clinton — resulting in a decade of deformed US foreign relations that has dragged us to the edge of a third world war. Nice work, Democratic Party!
I will proffer a harsh truth to you: the best outcome in Ukraine would be for Russia to win the war as expeditiously as possible, neutralize and disarm the place, change-out its illegitimate government, and let it revert to being the frontier backwater it was for eight decades previous, when it was not a problem for the other nations of the region.
Mr. Putin has put up with our country’s psychotic nonsense with remarkable patience. The idea that he seeks to conquer western Europe was a preposterous confection of the neocon crazies in our State Department and Intel “community.”
The long game for the neocon crazies has been to use NATO as the instrument to break up Russia and gain control of its resources. This was after Secretary of State James Baker told Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, in discussions over German reunification, that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” Starting in 1999 with the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, sixteen additional nations were induced to join NATO, encroaching on Russia’s borders, with new military bases and missiles. It was a stupid game.
And it failed. Ukraine was the final gambit. The US destabilized it on purpose in 2014, installed a series of governments we could control, made it a ward of US taxpayers, sprinkled it with bio-weapons labs and money laundries, and gave Mr. Zelenskyy the go-ahead to start shelling the Donbas provinces adjacent to Russia. After years of that, Mr. Putin moved to stop it in 2022. The development of drone weapons, along with US-based satellite targeting tech, has prolonged the war. But, of course, the Russians, too, have modernized their own weapons arsenal to match that. The current state of things is a slow Russian grind to defeat a Ukraine that has run out of available fighting men and is apparently short of all weapons besides its drones.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump promised to end the Ukraine war in a New York minute. That proved more difficult and complicated than he realized. He said lately in so many words that he has “lost patience” with Mr. Putin for failing to join a ceasefire as a prelude to peace talks. Accordingly, Mr. Trump set a fifty-day deadline and then shortened it to twelve-days, running out on August 8-9 (accounting for time zones). Failure to comply will cause Russia to suffer a new round of sanctions. Mr. Putin has shrugged off that threat, saying that time has proven Russia to be sanction-proofed.
Some kind of game is afoot in all this. Neither Trump nor Putin could possibly want to turn this fiasco in Ukraine into a greater war that will destroy what’s left of Western Civilization. You might find this startling, but for all our efforts to anathemize Russia, it is still a part of Western Civ. After its soviet experiment failed, Russia wanted above all to reintegrate economically with Europe, but the neocons here and the globalists of Europe would not allow that. They became determined instead to wreck Russia — a vicious ethos likely to have emanated from the UK, with its lingering imperial delusions. (For Germany, it has brought only economic suicide.)
You might suspect that Mr. Trump has to pretend to be tough with Russia to counter the still-lingering suspicion — germinated by the Hillary Clinton campaign a decade ago — that he is “Putin’s puppet.” By coincidence, strange or not, that trope is now unraveling with the release of the RussiaGate intel archive that the rogue DOJ and FBI squirreled away since the Trump 1.0 term in office. Mr. Patel found a trove of documentary evidence in a burn-bag in a back room at FBI headquarters. DNI Tulsi Gabbard retrieves more previously-hidden evidence by the day from the vast NSA data base. It ought to be clear now that the initial Hillary Clinton campaign prank metastasized into the worst perversion of abusive government power in our country’s history, and is yet on-going.
The major news organs, who were accomplices in RussiaGate, won’t publish or broadcast any of the recent discoveries about exactly how the hoax evolved into a body of delusion that took over the brains of half of the country and led to a string of additional vicious hoaxes including the Covid-19 operation, the stolen election of 2020, and the J-6 prosecutions. Maybe nothing can be done about the perfidious New York Times or Washington Post because the First Amendment allows lies to be printed within the limits of the libel laws. But the TV networks have additional obligations to the public interest under the broadcast regulations and they can lose their licenses. Perhaps they should and will.
For the moment, realize that . . .
[SNIP]
