America's dishonest and inflated idea of itself

Sometimes the headlines defy a comedic response.

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A Pentagon spokesman said Russian operatives were planning a "false-flag" operation, to allow Moscow to accuse Ukraine of preparing an attack. Russia has dismissed the claims.
It comes after a week of US-Russian talks aimed at defusing tensions.
Ukraine on Friday accused Russia of being behind a cyber-attack on dozens of official websites.
...
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded by describing the reports as unsubstantiated and "confirmed by nothing".

The U.S. has been practicing false-flag operations since at least 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin and Operation Northwoods, if not long before.
So I guess we should know, since we're the experts at false-flags.

America's lack of self-awareness is on full display with the current standoff between the U.S. and Russia. Let's start with this article.

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"Putin is an aging autocrat, obsessed with the legacy of his rule, and that of the failure of the Soviet Union," says Eronen. "Russia has been ravaged by Covid-19, and the future of its hydrocarbon export economy looks bleak."

Almost everything in that paragraph applies to the modern United States.

some believe that the allies have reason to feel bullish when they meet with the Russians on Wednesday.
"We need to join forces and not be afraid. Putin is afraid -- not us. He is afraid of his own people, afraid of democratic elections," says Rasa Juknevičienė, Lithuania's former defense minister. She believes that now is the time to accelerate Ukraine's accession to NATO.

Yes, Putin IS afraid of NATO. That's the problem!
Why is it that people think in terms of 6-year olds when it comes to bullying people? Why are people so damn stupid?
If you intimidate and scare a child they will cower. But if you intimidate and scare an adult they will try to hurt you first.
And if the adult you are trying to bully and back into a corner has nuclear weapons, well...that's just a bad idea.

The West goes into this week with so many strategic advantages over Russia, it should on paper be relatively easy to force Putin's hand toward deescalation in the east of Europe.

This person doesn't seem to have any idea what the term "deescalation" means. You don't deescalate a situation by tightening the screws on someone.

What this really comes down to is the idea of sphere of influence.
The U.S. and NATO has decided that Russia has no right to have a sphere of influence.

Vladimir Putin has massed troops on Russia’s border with Ukraine and implied that he may invade unless he receives a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO. The Biden administration rejects that demand out of hand. Powerful nations, it insists, cannot demand that their neighbors fall under their spheres of influence. As Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken put it last month, “One country does not have the right to dictate the policies of another or to tell that country with whom it may associate; one country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.”

It’s a noble principle, just not one the United States abides by.

The United States has exercised a sphere of influence in its own hemisphere for almost 200 years, since President James Monroe, in his seventh annual message to Congress, declared that the United States “should consider any attempt” by foreign powers “to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

Listening to Mr. Blinken, you might think the United States long ago deposited this prerogative over the foreign policies of its southern neighbors in history’s dustbin. It has done no such thing. In 2018, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, called the Monroe Doctrine “as relevant today as it was the day it was written.” The following year, his national security adviser, John Bolton, boasted that “the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”

It's downright laughable for the U.S. to declare that the concept of sphere of influence doesn't exist anymore, and that the U.S. doesn't practice it.
Hell, we practice it on a global scale, but especially with Latin America. Just consider our embargoes against Cuba and Venezuela.

Russia even tried to demonstrate this explicitly, but American politicians and the news media played as if they were too dumb to understand.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said he could “neither confirm nor exclude” the possibility of Russia sending military assets to Latin America if the U.S. and its allies don’t curtail their military activities on Russia’s doorstep.

“It all depends on the action by our U.S. counterparts,” the minister said in an interview with Russian television network RTVI, citing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warning that Moscow could take unspecified “military-technical measures” if the U.S. and its allies fail to heed its demands.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan dismissed the statements about a possible Russian deployment to Cuba and Venezuela as “bluster in the public commentary.”

I think it's a certainty that if we send more troops to Ukraine, that Cuba and Venezuela will be getting Russian troops.

Asked about Ryabkov keeping the door open to basing troops and equipment in Latin America, Sullivan responded: “I’m not going to respond to bluster in the public commentary.”
He noted that the issue wasn’t raised during this week’s talks and added that “if Russia were to move in that direction, we would deal with it decisively.”

Why would we have to deal with that at all? After all, isn't it Cuba's and Venezuela's choice of who it has relations with and in what form?
Or are we just huge hypocrites?

Ryabkov said a refusal by the U.S. and its allies to consider the key Russian demand for guarantees against the alliance’s expansion to Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations makes it hard to discuss the confidence-building steps that Washington says it’s ready to negotiate.

“The U.S. wants to conduct a dialogue on some elements of the security situation ... to ease the tensions and then continue the process of geopolitical and military development of the new territories, coming closer to Moscow,” he said. “We have nowhere to retreat.”

That last sentence should send a chill down your spine.
We've pushed nuclear-armed Russia into a corner. Stationing troops in Ukraine WILL cause a response, not a deescalation. Allowing Ukraine into NATO will start a war.
Simple as that.

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@humphrey
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usefewersyllables's picture

Projection.

I’ve often observed that the person screaming the most loudly about a thing is also likely to be the most guilty of that thing. Applies equally to each team in our political Kabuki, so why would it not also be a centerpiece of our policies?

That is all…

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Twice bitten, permanently shy.

@usefewersyllables

Projection is one of the most repeated tactics demonstrated by the deep state, along with hammering false statements, repeating them over and over.

The DNC laughed in their emails about the fact that they were having state officials close polling places in the 2016 primaries in order to disadvantage Sanders voters. Then they screamed whoever leaked those emails had attacked "our sacred democracy."

They hammer that Russia is a dictatorship, but when the State Dept. got caught funding the anti-Putin activist Navalny, they said Navalny's greatest achievement was getting various political parties in Russia to vote together in coalitions against Putin. In other words, Russia has several political parties who listen to foreign sponsored speakers and decide how to vote.

The combination of those two acts of projection, which included the accusation that Russia hacked the DNC emails, whereas the NSA had only found that private contractors had been given illegal access to surveillance data, revealed that the greatest crime imaginable by our establishment was INTERFERING IN OUR ELECTIONS at the same time they were openly INTERFERING IN RUSSIA'S ELECTIONS.

But the most egregious projections we're being hammered with right now are that we had the right to force Russia to remove their weapons from Cuba, but they have no right to force our missiles from Ukraine, and the fact that we have heard for a year that the Jan. 6 break-in at the capitol was an INSURRECTION, a COUP, an attack on OUR SACRED DEMOCRACY, and that the sniper fire killing of 100 people and fire bombing that removed the Ukrainian government was a peaceful demonstration of the will of the people. NOT TO MENTION OUR STATE DEPT. BRAGGED ABOUT FUNDING AND ARMING IT. IS THAT NOT INTERFERING?

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Bisbonian's picture

"Indians" tossing tea in Boston Harbor.

“One country does not have the right to dictate the policies of another or to tell that country with whom it may associate; one country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.”

Wow, what planet has this guy been living on?

We've pushed nuclear-armed Russia into a corner. Stationing troops in Ukraine WILL cause a response, not a deescalation.

I'll say it again...in my eight years of playing one of Dr. Strangelove's bit players, every time we provoked them, they responded.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X