Americans are masters of amnesia, memory management, and historical ignorance. Amnesia, enabled by knowledge-free minds and a license for the highest officials to treat the truth as a potter would treat clay. Amnesia restricts the opportunity to learn from the lessons history offers.

In the wake of the Korean War (49,000 United States soldiers killed), Washington pledged no war on the mainland of Asia ever again. A decade later, we were knee-deep in Vietnam rice paddies. (59,000 American Soldiers killed)

Our country has forgotten how ugly the Vietnam War was. Textbooks in American history gave it little space; teachers downplayed it; television soon disregarded it as retro. Vietnam experience was the honing of methods to photoshop history. Vietnam was a warm-up for the post-9/11 era.

The post-9/11 memory management program has cleansed us of Presidential deceit, incompetence, systemic torture, censorship, the shredding of the Bill of Rights, and the perverting of national public discourse. The War on Terror is now an insignificant speck in our rearview mirror.

The fiasco in Iraq and the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan did not dissuade us from intervening in Syria. All three projects failed to turn an alien society into a Western democracy using the gun as a tool of choice.

In Syria, Washington partnered with the local al-Qaeda subsidiary, the same group responsible for the 9/11 attack. The Kabul evacuation showed that we learned nothing from the Saigon finale. A simple lesson, how not to evacuate, was erased from the Washington memory.

The next stop along the line was Ukraine. Washington’s ignorance of Russian security provoked its invasion of Ukraine. They mistook Putin’s anger for bluster and believed the Russian armed forces to be a paper lion. Both assumptions proved to be fatal miscalculations.

Washington’s latest failed endeavor will be ending soon. Washington eventually will stumble upon an acceptable Ukrainian off-ramp. But will they take any solace from a ruined Ukraine?

No, the foreign policy establishment will not allow remorse or thoughtful debriefing. Nobody of significance will denounce the next humanitarian or politically correct war. Eventually, the unhinged Washington cabal will propel us into an avoidable, catastrophic conflict.

Next stop, Beijing?

Liar, Liar
Blogger Caitlin Johnstone claims, “The single most egregious display of war propaganda in the 21st century occurred last year when the entire Western political/media class began uniformly bleating the word unprovoked in reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

We have heard that Putin was power-hungry and unwilling to tolerate an independent, pro-Western Ukraine on its border. Putin wants to conquer Ukraine, and NATO is needed to cover his colonial venture.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Steven Pifer says, “For the Kremlin, a democratic, Western-oriented, economically successful Ukraine poses a nightmare. Ukraine would cause Russians to question why they cannot have the same political voice and democratic rights that Ukrainians do.”

The Truth
Russian leaders regard Ukraine in Moscow’s sphere of influence and a vital Russian security buffer zone. George Kennan, the father of the American Cold War containment policy, warned about the 1998 US Senate ratification of NATO expansion. “Is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake.”

After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, extensive arms shipments began. Kyiv, the U.S., and NATO conducted joint military exercises, and the CIA initiated secret paramilitary training programs. In essence, the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations began to treat Ukraine as a NATO member in all but name.

Catching the Liars
September 6, 2023, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg inadvertently let the truth be known. “President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021 and sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And as a pre-condition for not invading (sic) Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that.” Consequently, “he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”

In 1996, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright when asked, “We have heard that half a million children have died [because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And–you know, is the price worth it?” she replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

Ukraine Is On Fire
President Joe Biden, is it worth it? 9,614 Ukrainian civilian deaths, 17,535 injured, 120,000 Ukrainian soldier deaths, 170,000 to 180,000 injured troops, 70,000 Russian soldiers killed, and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.

A person who is manipulative, dishonest, void of remorse, non-empathetic, and exploitative may be a psychopath. Does this definition fit those incapable of taking responsibility for the carnage they inflict? 

Are the humanitarians that clamor for more destruction and death to save the world exempt? These human rights advocates work to extend US power as a force for good. Are they just soldiers in the march to imperial dominance? 

President Obama, in a recent post, urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya. I remember a cackling Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State in the Obama administration, boasting about the 2011 Muammar Gaddafi public execution. “We came, we saw, he died.” By the way, during his murder, he was sodomized with a bayonet. Yes, those humanitarians.

Before the Gaddafi government overthrow, Libya was the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa. It was a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, and subsidized electricity, water, and gasoline. It had the lowest infant mortality rate and the highest life expectancy on the continent, with one of the highest literacy rates.

The 2005 United Nations World Summit unanimously adopted the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). It states that countries have a fundamental sovereign responsibility to protect their citizens. If they fail to do so, that responsibility falls to the United Nations system, which may take steps to protect those vulnerable people, violating the sovereignty of the relevant country if needed. So, under the UN auspices, other countries can use all means necessary, including military intervention, to prevent large-scale loss of life. 

The Humanitarians promoted R2P as a commitment to ensure that the international community never again fails to halt the mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. 

However, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the former president of the UN General Assembly, warned in 2009 that R2P could be misused “to justify arbitrary and selective interventions against the weakest states.” 

Jean Bricmont, a Belgian theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, calls it Humanitarian Imperialism. In other words, it uses the concept of human rights to sell war. He concludes they justify the “ideology of intervention, discovering new ‘Hitlers’ as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.” 

Realistically, it’s compassion for the worthy victims as unworthy victims get ignored. Military intervention receives approval for Iraqis, Afghans, or Libyans. But Palestinian and Yeminis human rights are ignored. Human rights become relevant when discussing Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. But irrelevant in Guantanamo, Saudi Arabia, Gaza (an open-air prison), or victims of drone attacks.

In 2011, the R2P doctrine failed miserably. The 2011 mission removed Gaddafi, but post-Gaddafi Libya has fallen into chaos. Migrants from Nigeria, Senegal, and Eritrea have been beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libyan electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields, and dams fell into disrepair. Recently, torrential rains overwhelmed two decrepit dams. Walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the major cities, leaving up to 20,000 dead and 10,000 missing.

Journalist Chris Hedges recently wrote that the intervention sold as humanitarian may have been politically motivated. https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/17/humanitarian-imperialism-created-the-libyan-nightmare/

Hedges reports that Libya was a target of intervention because it had large oil reserves and was independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.

Hedges also brings to lite that France also had a reason. Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser to Clinton, reported that the French president sought “a greater share of Libyan oil” increased French influence in the region, an improvement in his domestic political standing, a reassertion of French military power, and an end to Gaddafi’s attempts to supplant French influence in “Francophone Africa.”

Utopian social engineering litters history. The murderous French Jacobins and the Soviet communists come to mind. Should the globalists, neoliberals, and imperialists be added to this infamous list? 

The Dissolution of The Soviet Union
In late 1989, the communist regime in East Germany collapsed. Etched in my memory is the image of its citizens tearing down the Berlin Wall. In August 1991, a Soviet Coup failed to seize control of the country from the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup was unsuccessful but became the catalyst for the collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In September 1991, the Soviet Government recognized the independence of the Baltic states. (Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia) In early December, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus withdrew from the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan would soon join the egress. The dissolution of the USSR followed. Boris Yeltsin became the head of a new Russian government.

US President at the time, President George H.W. Bush, lent his support to Gorbachev and pushed for the preservation of the Soviet Union. In January 1992, he delivered his “Chicken Kyiv” speech questioning the Ukrainian path to independence. Instead of supporting Ukrainian independence, he promoted staying in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev reforms. It was not popular and not well received. A US President endorsing Soviet rule in Ukraine? How things have changed.

New Russia
George H.W. Bush resisted the temptation to exert American influence. His approach helped carry the world safely through this tumultuous time. Bush then sought the support of opposition leader and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Bush provided Yeltsin with intelligence and advice, enough for Yeltsin to emerge from the Soviet breakup as a hero.

Russia had an opportunity to build the foundation of a free enterprise system. During these years, the Bush presidency had treated Russia fairly and respectfully. There was no gloating or condescending attitude. Bush had successfully navigated the end of the Cold War and built a good relationship with Russia. However, the voting public believed his focus on Russia had distracted him from domestic responsibility.

Bush paid a high price for his attention to the Soviet/Russian transition. His political fortunes at home suffered. A US recession and a Republican Party primary challenge from Patrick Buchanan contributed to his 1992 reelection defeat. Bill Clinton, a governor from Arkansas with limited foreign affairs experience, defeated Bush in the November presidential election. Things were about to change!

Clinton and The Making of an Oligarchy
The Clinton administration squandered the idealism and goodwill of the Russian people. When President Clinton took office, 70% of Russians looked favorably at the United States. By 2000, only 37% held such a view.

The Russian people emerged from 70 years of Communist rule only to be robbed by the Russian oligarchs. The compliant Clinton Administration enabled a corrupt regime to nurture an Oligarchy. The Bill Clinton presidency presided over the greatest robbery of the 20th Century.

In December 1991, President Yeltsin lifted price controls. At the end of 1992, Yeltsin launched a three-month long, nationwide program to distribute investment vouchers to every Russia. (150 million people) They could sell the vouchers to speculators or use them to buy shares in the 5,000 state-owned industries. Most Russians, struggling with hyperinflation, were eager to sell them for below market value.

Come-up-from-nothing hustlers and former Soviet government insiders provided cash for vouchers. In turn, the speculator used them to buy shares in the state-owned industries. It was the world’s largest garage sale with the vouchers as the ticket.

By 1994, when the voucher program ended, 70 percent of the Russian infrastucture had been privatized in control of these savory characters. The economy had collapsed, and consumer prices increased almost 2000 times. The hyperinflation devastated the Russian people.

In 1995, the Yeltsin administration unleashed another scheme called Loans For Shares. The richest oligarchs loaned the government billions of dollars in exchange for massive shares in valuable Russian state enterprises. The plan was to allow the government to buy back the shares at market value. It did not happen. Instead, the oligarchs walked away with the most profitable Russian corporations for pennies on the dollar.

By December 1995, the last of the most profitable industrial enterprises went to auction. The list included a mining company, two steel companies, two shipping companies, and five oil companies. The Yeltsin regime predetermined the auction winners. The prices the oligarchs paid for these corporations were a steal.

By early 1996, Yeltsin was one of the most despised figures in Russia. The GDP had declined by 50 percent, hyperinflation, rampant corruption, skyrocketing violent crime, the collapse of medical services, food and fuel shortages, nonpayment of wages and pensions, and a plunge in life expectancy.

1996 Yeltsin Reelection
Polls showed Russians favoring Gennadi Zyuganov, a return to Communism candidate. Yeltsin held a single-digit approval rating but had the oligarchs and Bill Clinton as backers. The Russian oligarchs were flush with money from Yeltsin programs. Beholden to his administration, in the spirit of one hand washing the other, the oligarchs repaid their debt to Yeltsin by contributing enormous amounts of money and effort towards his election.

The US did its part to ensure Yeltsin won the first Russian “free and fair “ election. The Clinton administration would have been embarrassed to let Russia return the communists to power. Clinton deployed a team of American political consultants to Moscow to ensure a Yeltsin reelection.

The political consultants would often use Dick Morris, a Bill Clinton principal political aide, as a liaison to the President. In a 2016 interview, Morris described his role. “Clinton would meet with me every week. We would review the polling that was being done for Yeltsin by a colleague of mine, who was sending it to me every week. He, Clinton, and I would go through it and Bill would pick up the hotline and talk to Yeltsin and tell him what commercials to run, where to campaign, and what positions to take. He basically became Yeltsin’s political consultant.”

The Clinton Administration boosted the Russian economy by lobbying the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to infuse billions of dollars into Russia. They lobbied for Russian loans under false pretenses. According to political economist Nicholas Eberstadt, American Enterprise Institute, the marketing was “so implausible and absurd that only a Western government official, or an international civil servant, could possibly believe them.” The IMF money, not stolen or traded for favors, propped up the Russian bond market. This money leads to a profitable bubble for those in the Yeltsin circle.

Ex-Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot recalled that the US actions enabled Russian corruption. He concludes that “the United States used its resources in a genuine belief that it was saving Russia from backsliding into Communism. What emerged was an oligarchy, a humiliating decrease in living standards for the vast majority of Russians, and a rapid decrease in Russian life-spans. Our interventions in 1996 made us a party to all of it.”

John Lloyd, former Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, explained that by allowing the oligarchs, in the name of the free market, to grab Russian resources and siphon anything of value into their own offshore bank accounts, the United States poisoned the Russian transition to a market economy. In the minds of ordinary Russians, Lloyd concludes, in Russia, capitalism became equated with theft.

Putin – A New Sheriff in Town
In August 1999, Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as prime minister. In 1991, Putin, an officer with the KGB, was so displeased with their role in the coup he resigned from his position. For the eight years between his resignation from the KGB and his appointment as Prime Minister, Putin watched his country destroyed by the corruption of the Yeltsin administration and the oligarchs he created.

By the time Putin took control in 1999, his mission was to destroy the Russian oligarchy and return political power back to the state. He accomplished his goal. Ordinary Russians applauded Putin’s pursuit of the oligarchs. After all, they believed the oligarchs were to blame for the nightmare of the Yeltsin years.

Russians regard Putin as the man who saved post-communist Russia. They admire his loyalty, have confidence in his leadership and support his more autocratic style.

Washington does not understand why Putin remains so popular – go figure! The Clintons blames Russian interference on her 2016 presidential election defeat – how ironic. History reveals a lot, it did not begin with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The U.S. – USSR has never been at war with one another. They fought on the same side in WW1 and were allies during WW2. As a matter of fact, the Soviet Union defeated the Nazis in WW2 with help from the UK, US, and other Allied forces. Throughout history, the U.S. and the Russian relationship has ranged from good-willed cooperation to competitive rival.

Russia played a significant role in the American Revolutionary War. Catherine the Great decided to remain neutral in the conflict. Her sympathy and continued trade with the Colonists benefited both Russian commercial interests and the American rebels.

During the American Civil War, Tsar Alexander ll of Russia announced his support of the Union and urged reunification. The Tsar dispatched part of its fleet to New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington. These actions may have prevented Britain and France from intervening. Great Britain was sympathetic to the Confederacy and was dependent upon its exports.

In 1956, after Egypt’s leader Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the Suez Canal Crisis exploded. Israel, France, and the U.K. reacted by invading Egypt. The Soviet Union threatened to enter the fray. They demanded an immediate withdrawal of troops. The U.S., under the presidency of Eisenhower, supported the Nasser-Soviet position. Eisenhower then forced a ceasefire and withdrawal of all the invading forces. His support for the Egypt-Soviet side may have prevented a WW3 scenario.

Then, in 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev, through back-door diplomacy, avoided direct confrontation over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. They worked together to solve a potential nuclear exchange between the two superpowers.

During the Reagan and Gorbachev years, the U.S. and USSR began a de-escalation of the Cold War. Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The treaty required that their countries, by 1991, would eliminate arsenals of ground-launched, midrange nuclear missiles.

George H.W. Bush, Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin continued this working spirit, signing the START treaty, a pledge to reduce their arsenals significantly by 2009. Followed by the Open Skies Treaty, transferring the former Soviet nuclear arsenals to Russia with a $400 million United States commitment to help dismantle nuclear weapons.

The Cold War had ended, nuclear armaments were reduced, the U.S. and Russian relationship was amiable, and NATO was an organization that Russia was interested in joining. What? Putin believed NATO to be a non-threatening organization and a possible vehicle for Russia to join the European community.

In 2000, Putin had a very naive take on the hegemonic politics coming from the West. His attitude was on display during a Davis Frost interview. He told Frost that “Russia is part of the European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world.”

George Robertson, a former UK Labour defense secretary and Nato leader, recalled his conversation with Putin in 2000. “Putin said: ‘When are you going to invite us to join Nato?’ Robertson said: ‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’ And he said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’” Russia is still standing in line as those other countries, that don’t matter, have become members of Nato.

What changed? NATO
In 1990, a reunified Germany joined NATO under the West German existing membership. Germany’s acceptance into NATO was accompanied by US Secretary of State James Baker promising the Soviets that NATO would not expand one inch.

Well, following the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union, the Baker promise was broken. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic became NATO members. Then Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania chose to join NATO in 2004.

Seven years after the Frost interview, a more veteran Putin let his frustration rip. At the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy, Putin said, “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Worner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?”

At the 2008 Bucharest Summit, NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine, both ruled as part of the Soviet Union and both with borders to Russia, could join NATO. Putin called NATO’s promise of membership for Georgia and Ukraine “a direct threat” to Russian security. The Bucharest summit result heightened the Kremlin’s fears of encirclement. It also meant that Russia would lose the strategic buffer zone that enabled Russia to prevail over Western invaders twice in two centuries, Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler from 1941 to 1945.

Nato continued its creep toward Russian Borders. Two countries on the Adriatic Sea, Albania and Croatia, joined in April 2009, Montenegro in 2017, North Macedonia in 2020, and Finland in 2023.

The U.S. and NATO, intoxicated by its unipolar moment, continued ignoring the warnings from Russia and NATO member countries. Former French President Jacques Chirac said, “Russia should not be humiliated,” and German Ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel believed that Moscow had “legitimate security interests”. All concerns fell on deaf ears.

Washington and NATO systematically isolated Russia from Europe while claiming that Putin’s desire to restore the Soviet empire was the problem.

Why Can’t We Be Friends? NASA beamed this song to the linking of Soviet cosmonauts and U.S. astronauts for the 1975 Apollo–Soyuz Test Project.

Today’s working class feels the built-in pay cuts that inflation brings. Reality hits when they compare their wages to the increasing prices at the grocery store, the gas pump, and the monthly rent. Every Friday feels like a robbery has occurred. No, it is just the long arm of the Washington monster reaching into their pockets.

Engineered by the Federal Reserve Bank, it is a silent extraction. Officials tell them that inflation is coming down. They offer nothing to ease the pain inflicted by their eight percent pay cut last year. But they promise another three percent pay cut via inflation this year on top of the previous year’s pay cut. How sweet of our benevolent leaders as they approve billions of dollars for their neo-Nazi friends in Ukraine. 

The working class is not alone in their battle for equitable money. The upper-middle class faces the same dilemma. The only difference is that their cars are more expensive, homes bigger, and salaries higher than the working class. This demographic lives with the threat of unemployment and financial bankruptcy. With a recession looming, their jobless child living in their basement with a worthless degree, a $216,000 in college debt will be no help when the shit hits the fan. Yes, professional workers are living with the same anxiety.

These groups are bidding their time for a savior to rise. It will not come from the Republican or Democrat Party. Many thought it was Trump in 2016. Their support was a defiance of the Republican Party mixed with the leakage from the Democratic Party. He was not the answer. He only provided a big fat “fuck you” to the Washington vetted. What did that get him, jail time?

“Washington DC is a blood-swollen tick, sucking all the economic progress and freedom away from America’s working people and producing nothing of value in return. Wealth demographics of the Metro DC area prove that the parasite has clearly gotten bigger than the host. defunding the Deep State careerists in the federal executive branch.” https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/were-primed-for-a-spark/

Washington workers are out of touch with America. They exist at the behest of the American working class. They wallow in an economic fascist revolving door. They provide the opportunity for the politically-favored corporations to get sweetheart federal contracts. They conceal their tactics behind propaganda, misinformation, and national security. It provides $100 billion in foreign aid to Ukraine to get hundreds of thousands of 19-year-old Russian and Ukrainian conscripts killed. 

Five of the Metro DC counties are among the ten wealthiest counties in America. Washington DC has no agricultural output, no manufacturing prowess, and no products that provide the comforts and necessities of Americans. The American working class watched Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin profits skyrocket as funds somehow mysteriously trickled into the accounts of the DC Metro elite as the Metro DC footprint expanded with million-dollar mansions. 

The FBI and Big Tech have become their hired hands to hide the profit of war and death. They are used to snuff out and remove any threat to this political and profitable relationship. The Covid lockdown, the Moderna jab, and the Amazon/NSA connection come to mind.

The backing for Trump was about a rebellion against the political establishment. The political results since 2016 have shown that American workers are unhappy. They are looking for a rebel capable of draining the swamp. The 2020 elections confirmed that no one in politics was on the side of the American working people.

Who, in 2024, can capture this crowd? Will their savior come democratically in the next presidential elections, or will it come by force? As we stray further from the government our founders designed, we open the door wider to change by force.

Clark Stanley, a Texan huckster, traveled across the United States dressing up as a cowboy. He would slice open live rattlesnakes, throw them into boiling water, and bottle up the oil that rose to the top. Stanley promoted his Snake Oil as the perfect miracle-cure-all. The oil he produced was not as promised. In the 1800s, he was tried and found guilty of misrepresenting his product.

The sociopathic bargainers of the Washington ruling class are selling Ukrainian Snake Oil. Upon returning from Kyiv, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) concluded that the Ukrainian War was worth it. Recently, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) called the war “the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done.” Justifying a 7:1 ratio of Ukrainian to Russian killed, he states that the U.S. is “losing no lives in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are fighting heroically against Russia.”

Upon newspeak translation, the substance of their jargon is clear. Tax dollars extracted from hard-working Americans and the money created by the Federal Reverse (devaluating the rest of our income) means nothing. The lives of Ukrainian men, women, and children are worthless. The only thing of value is dead Russians. It is a hoax perpetrated by elected officials.

U.S. Senator Blumenthal talks about Ukrainian life like a piece of clothing hanging on a Kohl’s clearance rack. He believes Americans “should be satisfied that we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment.”

Romney is as cold as Blumenthal. “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money.” He continues, “For less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military.”

Whether Snake oil salesmen or Washington carnival hawkers, these war promoters are shamelessly evil. Without our Big Brother Bob Emory green glasses, we may be able to see them for who they are. Washington is a haven for shysters. Clark Stanley, for his part, was fined for misrepresenting the truth. In Washington, misrepresenting the truth gets you reelected.

According to W.C. Fields, “There is a sucker born every minute.” We have been suckers long enough!