03-03-2022, 11:32 PM
(03-03-2022, 09:48 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(03-03-2022, 07:33 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: With Donald Trump off the world stage, Putin started to run out of time. As I see it this invasion might have come earlier were Trump still President. Do you consider either complicity or slavish devotion as strong positions? President Biden has learned a few things from Obama (yes, I realize that you despise him, but that is irrelevant). One is to trust the experts at intelligence -- that is, the CIA.
Your side decided first that Donald Trump was the right nominee despite all the warning signs -- no loyalty to any but himself, a disdain for ethical principles, a perverse idea of what the Presidency is (a hint: our President does not have dictatorial or despotic powers), and an adoration for tyrants. how often must I tell you that the next effective conservative President will act much more like Obama than like Trump. Obama never left any question of where his loyalties lay... a hint: at that he was indistinguishable from Ronald Reagan.
I think Putin is taking full advantage of Biden being in office myself.
Predatory personalities, a/k/a sociopaths, always size up others (except for loved ones, benefactors, and accomplices) for weaknesses. Such people may be rapists, swindlers, or outright robbers. If there is a system they seek to circumvent its accounting controls. Among leaders of real or imagined powers they seek the means of conquering other countries, seizing assets ultimately for personal benefit, and turning once-free people into thralls. Vladimir Putin has just left no question of what he is.
This is not to say that sociopathic leaders like Putin assess the situation well. The opportunity that they see may be a complete phantom. I look at the former military clique of Argentina that saw the Falkland Islands as too difficult for British forces there to defend and a female leader as evidence of weakness and lack of resolution. She would quickly come to her senses and accede to the Inevitable -- that the Falkland Islands would become a part of Argentina.
Those military leaders were your basic bad boy's club full of men who do not think highly of women. Margaret Thatcher would prove them very wrong. But adding to the poor judgment of those leaders they had angered mothers of young adults whom that regime had "disappeared". In the aftermath of a national disgrace those women suddenly found that they could challenge a weakened dictatorship about its murders. The regime toppled.
Vladimir Putin has tended to use brute force against real and imagined enemies. Run afoul of him, and there might be some polonium-210 in your beverage. Oh, one can use brute force with some sophistication, as the former Commie Bulgarian secret police did to the dissident writer Georgi Markov. An agent in London carrying an umbrella (umbrellas are common in London) jabbed him with a specially-designed umbrella that pierced his skin just enough to introduce a ball of ricin into him. Ricin at 22 micrograms per kilogram of weight introduced subcutaneously is lethal.
Quote:Putin knows that Biden isn't up to the task and he knows Biden is in no condition to lead the world during war.
Hitler "knew" that the elderly drunkard Churchill and the cripple Franklin Roosevelt weren't up to waging war against him. The result of his assessment was his demise.
Quote:I hope one of the other European leaders are able to step up and take his place in that role. So, how much lower can Biden sink in the polls before he completely loses power over the country?
It's a coalition. By the way -- no President of the United States has ever been overthrown due to unpopularity in a coup. We know enough to put up with an ineffective President on the assumption that the next election will solve that 'problem'. You are in no position to assume further slippage in the polls. Impeachment and removal is possible for gross misconduct by the President if Congress so deems. By the way -- Trump should have been impeached and removed for the attempt to blackmail the President of Ukraine (the current one) into smearing Trump's likeliest opponent.
Quote:As far as Obama, Obama showed me that he was a loyal Democrat and mainly interested in getting reelected and that's about it. I didn't think much of Obama as a leader but I didn't despise him at the time. I don't care about what happens to him today anymore than you care about what happens to Trump or your old nemesis GW.
At least Dubya has had the decency to stay out of politics. Trump attempted to nullify the election that he lost in a violent insurrection against Congress.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.