Putin made an unscheduled speech today in which yet again he thanked Wagner for standing down and not going into Moscow. Total weak guy stuff (a strong leader would have promised punishment and retribution).
That one year time frame I gave a few posts ago was my upper bound for how much longer Putin can last in office. His actual remaining time in office might be quite a bit less.
Remember, revolutions in Russia seldom happen in one fell swoop. In 1917, the February Revolution preceded the October Revolution. The attempted coup against Gorbachev in 1991 was followed some months later by the breakup of the USSR, and that was followed in 1993 by Yeltsin’s coup against parliament. The Wagner mutiny is probably just the beginning.
Russian soldiers occupying Ukraine now know that their leader is weak and vulnerable. They know that prominent, influential people on the Russian side are saying that the whole pretext for the war was a pack of lies: Ukraine was of no threat to Russia and did not need to be de-Nazified.
Ask yourself: Would you feel motivated to fight for a weak and vulnerable leader in a war based on a pack of lies?
As such, expect low morale, desertions, surrenders, mutinies, etc. to really ramp up on the Russian side.
Moreover, Putin now is fighting two wars. One in Ukraine where he had already bitten off way, way more than he could chew. And now another one at home, trying to cling to power. He is now vastly more overextended than he was before.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure any of this out. You can be sure the Ukrainians already have. They were already beginning an offensive to retake territory. Expect the offensive to get ramped up: when the enemy is weak, you hit him harder.
And that latter phrase is crucial. Before yesterday, Putin’s power was unquestioned. Nobody dared cross him. Not if they wanted to keep on living, that is.
Now, somebody has crossed him… and Putin was compelled to cut a deal to resolve the situation. Putin is no longer the undisputed master of events in Russia. He has been shown to be weak, shown to be vulnerable.
As such, I would be surprised if Putin lasts much longer than another year.
That is my question: Was the current right-wing Hindu nationalist (read Hindu supremacist) government in India in any way involved in this and other similar crimes in Canada? I am not saying they definitively were, mind you, just that they might have been (such things are entirely in character for such a regime), and the possibility needs to be seriously investigated.
I worried earlier about the threat of petulant centrists helping elect Trump in 2024. Now, this is still a worry (No Labels is still around, after all), but it seems that many other centrists are being realistic about things and appreciate how truly dangerous No Labels really is. Take the canonical centrist Democrat group Third Way, for example. Fully three of the four articles currently featured above the fold on their main page are about the dangers of No Labels.
Which, to reiterate, is definitely good news, but then again No Labels is still around, which is not-so-good news.
Time to reiterate a few points I made earlier in the wake of the New York indictment:
This is still not one of the two most serious things Trump did, crimes that strike at the heart of political democracy, and which therefore are the most critical things to indict Trump over. Yes, mishandling so many classified documents (willingly and deliberately, and then trying to cover it up) is more serious than trying to cover up some hush money payments to a porn star. But it is still not as serious as attempting to tamper with vote counting in Georgia or inciting a fascist putsch at the Capitol, not by a long shot.
The pending indictment breaks another precedent. An ex-president will soon be indicted over Federal charges. This proves that the Department of Justice is not pulling levers behind the scenes to protect Trump. Well, not quite: I am sure they are still pulling levers behind the scenes, but not enough to completely protect Trump.
They would, in other words, have indicted anyone other than an ex-president far sooner, over far less convincing evidence.
Moreover, the broken precedents makes it more likely that another indictment over what happened on 6 January 2021 will come eventually.
What this all means is that when it comes to a trial, they are highly likely to convict, because they have already done Trump the favor of being double super sure that the case against him is ironclad.
And then what? Most likely, house arrest. Sorry, Nice Liberals: the system is not very likely to lock up someone that powerful in a normal prison. Plus, house arrest neatly solves the problem of Secret Service protection, to which all ex-presidents are entitled under the law. It will probably become part of their mission to supervise the conditions of his house arrest, perhaps in conjunction with Federal marshals.
This is how a member of the center-right might want to see Florida politics, because it lets him play pin the blame on the liberals, but it really doesn’t explain what happened very well.
The Florida Democrats already tried the hardcore centrist strategy. In 2022, in fact. And we all know how well that worked out. Charlie Crist, their candidate for governor, had previously served as the Republican governor of Florida.
The Florida Democrats fail, not because they tack to the right or to the left, but simply because they are grossly incompetent as an organization.
I have told this story before, and I will now tell it again: I have done some volunteer work for the Florida Democrats. It entailed making get-out-the-vote calls. They gave me a spiel to use which had been invalidated by recent news stories. I contacted them for an updated spiel. They had none. I had to spend the first thirty minutes of my shift coming up with a spiel on my own. This is just about the absolute last thing you want your volunteers to do. You want to put out a unified, coherent message!
And it gets worse. The list they gave me was out of date as well. I called people who had already voted early or absentee. I called people exasperated because they had requested to be on the do not call list, some of them multiple times. This is very basic stuff. If someone tells you to stop calling them, you honor their request. You do not want to piss people off by continuing to call them!
Florida could be a competitive swing state today, as it once was not too long ago, were only the Florida Democrats capable of campaigning their way out of a wet paper bag.
The Russians call it “terrorism,” of course. And, guess what? They are right! By pretty much any measure, such things are terrorism.
They are also totally to be expected in a wartime situation. During World War II, there were routine acts of terrorism in the belligerent nations. Often, their enemy nations were involved in some fashion.
War is unpredictable. Always has been, probably always will be. Putin was supremely foolish to believe that something as high risk (and as much a stretch strategically) as attempting to invade and subjugate all of Ukraine would go smoothly, according to plan, and expose the Russian heartland to only minimal risk.
So far as this undermining support for the war in Russia, probably not, sorry. Hitler thought the Blitz would do that to the United Kingdom, and it had precisely the opposite effect, despite imposing much more hardship and danger on the British public than the few insignificant pinpricks that we have seen so far against Russia. Putin’s line has after all long been that this whole “special military operation” is about Russia’s security, and now that Russia is getting attacked well inside its borders, this whole “we are fighting because our security is in danger” line now has more traction.
What it will do is boost morale inside Ukraine even more. It is always good news when a war goes far worse for one’s enemy than that enemy ever believed possible.
But yes, it’s all quite ugly. News flash: war itself is ugly. Don’t like the ugliness of war? Don’t start one! If you have started one, stop it! Putin could totally kneecap Ukraine’s causus belli by negotiating a ceasefire and withdrawing back across Russia’s internationally recognized borders.
Until that happens, however, as Garrison Keillor once quipped: “If you didn’t want to go to St. Cloud, then why did you get on that train?”
The guy the West wanted to win, Kılıçdaroğlu, lost. Erdoğan, Turkey’s longstanding president with an authoritarian streak, won yet another term in office.
But here’s the thing. Kılıçdaroğlu sounded positively Trump-like in his non-concession “concession” speech, going on as he did about how the election had been stolen from him. And his anti-refugee stance (he promised to summarily expel all refugees from the country) also comes across as more than a little bit Trump-like.
In other words, it really doesn’t look like the narrative in the Western media of a brave liberal democrat challenging an evil entrenched authoritarian is all that accurate. Maybe if the opposition hadn’t chosen such an obviously flawed figure as their standard-bearer, they would have fared better?
Trump has far better chances of winning in 2024 than some informed observers seem to think.
It all rests on what the group No Labels does. They have been rightly castigated as being mostly a benefit to Trump, and boy could they ever.
You see, despite how the media loves to fawn over them as the rational and reasonable ones, centrists have a really seamy and dare I say even militant underside. They know what they want, they want it really bad, and they will act on those wants, even to the ultimate detriment of their preferences.
It is exactly the same criticism often made of the Left, but it applies to centrists even more. Those of us on the left are at least constantly being lectured to about the dangers of refusing to compromise. But the same chattering classes that never tire of sermonizing the Left tend to see the Center as intrinsically “responsible.”
Witness what happened to Humphrey in 1968 (lost votes on the left) and McGovern in 1972 (lost votes in the center). There’s no shortage of voices blaming Humphrey’s lost on voters to the left sitting it out. By contrast, when it comes to McGovern those same voices… blame left/liberal voters for having selected McGovern in the first place! In other words: if you don’t support our preferred candidate, it’s all your fault, and if we don’t support your preferred candidate, it’s also all your fault.
Many centrists are so beset with feelings of entitlement, and so coddled and pandered to by the media, that they are largely shielded from being confronted with the downsides of their own political behavior. And many of them to this day have trouble seeing their hypocrisy.
It is in this light that the seriousness of a threat by a centrist No Labels candidate can fully be seen.
To the above you can add that Republicans tend to be more extreme and inflexible in general, meaning it will be much easier for a centrist to peel votes away from the Democrats. No Labels itself is aware of this; here is one of their initial projection maps showing how they hoped to win. Note how most of the states they think they can flip went for Biden in the last election:
They probably won’t do that well, of course. All it would take is them failing to flip Texas and Florida and boom! Second Trump term.
