I mistakenly said in a (now-deleted) post that the US State Department has begun evacuating US citizens. They did NOT say that on the State Department call. They told US citizens they need to get out of the country as soon as possible by whatever means possible, but that the US government would NOT be responsible for evacuating them – they were on their own. This follows weeks of the US government shrugging off the need for US citizens to evacuate.
It was only six months or so ago that the US pulled all of its military resources out of Afghanistan without even a thought as to what would happen to the US citizens and military informants remaining there, leaving the country to be sacked by a third-world militia within days. They have now repeated this strategy – I refuse to call it a “mistake” in Ukraine. One has to wonder if they had to override the advice of the Pentagon in this instance too. What do they get out of behaving this way?
They have also started to dismiss non-essential embassy staff. Presumably “essential” staff has remained behind to start destroying documents and then they will make it out if they can.
Biden said only a few days ago that he did not expect to have any serious retaliation against Russia. This caught Ukraine completely off-guard. The Biden administration has now flip-flopped and is apparently considering deploying boots on the ground, warships, and planes. This would be the first hot war with a superpower that the US has engaged in since WW2.
I do not want to be dismissive of the situation the Ukrainian people are in, but there are good reasons to watch what is unfolding closely.
(1) The Democratic Party has had a hard-on for starting war with Russia for two presidential election cycles now. Hillary Clinton planted the idea in the public consciousness when her campaign started circulating a fake dossier claiming Trump was a Russian asset. The CNN and MSNBC mouth-breathers spent years breathlessly suggesting Putin had complete control of the White House (and yet remarkably did nothing to exploit it). This has since been debunked and Clinton’s people have been charged with lying to the FBI. But these folks became utterly obsessed with the cold war becoming hot for years. Now they have a guy in the White House themselves and he barely waited a year to make this twisted dream a twisted reality. Kind of funny, isn’t it?
(2) It seems to be quite the political strategy on the left to try to break the world during an election year. I said this in a post last week, when I was arguing that the GOP needs to move away from Trump because he has been a pawn in all this BS. A more shrewd and politically experienced leader would have known immediately they were getting played by Fauci. This was certainly true for DeSantis. In that post, I said people need to be on the lookout for how they are going to break the world this time around. Well, this is an excellent candidate. Covid became an emergency in February 2020. World War III is right on schedule for February 2022. Both have the potential to turn ordinary Americans into safetyist wingnuts who just want to hide from everything that is happening around them. Both have the ability to screw up social institutions in fundamental ways. Both have the ability to give the executive emergency powers.
I hope something happens that causes everyone to stand down from this conflict, but we might be in for a ride in this country… again.
Days of Sunshine 