This Ukraine Business Is Very Strange

Biden's national security handler Jake Sullivan seems to be wandering into Tom Clancy territory, writing thrillers about hypothetical wars:

Sullivan told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" that Russian forces are positioned so that an invasion could take place before the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics, which end on February 20.

. . . Sullivan on Friday had warned Americans in Ukraine to leave and said that military action could begin with an aerial bombardment that could kill civilians.

He reiterated those calls to Tapper on Sunday, saying that a military attack would likely begin with missile and bomb attacks.

"Those are never as precise as the army -- any army -- would like them to be. We don't even know how precise the Russian army would like them to be," Sullivan said. "Innocent civilians could be killed regardless of their nationality. It would then be followed by an onslaught of a ground force moving across the Ukrainian frontier. Again, where innocent civilians could get caught in the cross fire or trapped in places they could not move from. So that is why we are being so clear and direct to American citizens that while commercial transport options are still available, they should take advantage of them."

So not only are the Russians about to invade, but hey, they're about to commit atrocities. Starring Jake Sullivan as Harrison Ford, or maybe Harrison Ford as Joe Biden. Or something. Meanwhile, nothing's changed in Ukraine:

What did we just witness? I refer to the two-month frenzy that seized the Western media, in which Vladimir Putin was massing 175,000 troops on Ukraine’s border for an invasion to begin right about now. The Washington Post led on December 3, 2021, with those big numbers and was duly followed by others. A gigantic massing of forces was taking place. Putin was threatening an invasion and had mobilized his forces to accomplish the final breakage of Ukraine. President Joe Biden was a believer, ordering evacuations from embassies in Ukraine and Belarus. He told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in late January that blood would almost certainly flow in the streets of Kiev, the national capital; “prepare for impact” sometime soon, probably in February.

And then a surprising thing happened. The Ukrainian president, the guy whose lead we were apparently following, said, in effect, cut it out. Not true. You’re panicking people in Ukraine, hurting its economy, and besides the Russian troop movements were really nothing out of the ordinary.

. . . This contretemps between the leader of the Free World and the president of the Ukrainian “great power” was very disturbing to the Washington establishment. They thought that Zelensky had flubbed his performance. He was apparently unaware of his proper role. “We’re his most important ally and he’s poking us in the eye and creating daylight between Washington and Kyiv,” said a senior administration official. “It’s self-sabotage more than anything else.”

The story suggests the current manufactured crisis is the result of policy confusion created by Biden's handlers at the start of his administration:

The new team at the White House, closely following a script announced by the Atlantic Council, declared that Crimea and the Donbas must be put back on the table. That meant, explained a Biden official, a “very extensive and almost constant focus on Ukraine from day one.” In the view of Democrats, Donald Trump had been a shameless appeaser of Putin; indeed, he was Putin’s puppet. This narrative, to be sure, was dubious in the extreme, as Trump the ostensible appeaser surrounded himself with advisors—H.R. McMaster, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, James Mattis, and John Bolton—who regularly blasted Russia in scalding tones. But though the narrative may have been wrong, it was theirs. The Democrats believed it. Where Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken largely followed Trump’s line on China, they broke sharply with him over Ukraine.

. . . Russia’s callup of reserves—which both now and in April was interpreted by U.S. intelligence as reflecting plans for a gigantic invasion—was in direct response to . . . important developments: . . . a new U.S. posture toward Ukraine-related issues that was far more aggressive than Trump’s, and the declaration by Ukraine’s military that they were working on a plan to drive the Russians out of [Donbas and Crimea]. When Biden said in December that the United States would not commit forces to Ukraine in the event of a war, it took the legs out from under this plan.

So why keep stirring up a crisis-that's not-a-crisis? That seems to be what's going on:

Biden officials have repeatedly claimed for more than a month that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was “imminent,” prompting protests in the country from officials who complained that the reality on the ground on Ukraine’s eastern border did not match the rhetoric out of the White House and that the latter was tanking Ukraine’s economy – making an invasion more likely.

In early February, Biden officials appeared to announce a retirement of the use of the word “imminent” given the growing discontent in Ukraine, bizarrely claiming that the discord between Washington and Kyiv was a product of how the word translated into Ukrainian.

But there's been no consistency. The story continues:

“I used that [the word imminent] once,” Psaki said on February 2. “And then we stopped using it because I think it sent an — a message that we weren’t intending to send, which was that we knew that President Putin had made a decision.”

“I would say the vast majority of times I’ve talked about it, we said, ‘He could invade at any time.’ That’s true; we still don’t know that he’s made a decision,” Psaki claimed.

Biden himself said during the fateful “minor incursion” press conference that he believed Putin had decided to invade again.

At best, the explanation is incompetence. However, if no invasion takes place by the middle of this week, people need to start asking serious questions about who's in charge.

There's No Single Manifesto, But

Yesterday was Saturday of a holiday weekend in the US, and with little else going on, I spent a good part of the day following events in Canada. What struck me was images like the photo above, which isn't from either Windsor or Ottawa, but in this case, Cornwall, ON, more than an hour from Ottawa and much farther from Windsor. But I kept running into other demonstrations and disruptions in places like Fort Erie, ON or the Michigan side of the Blue Water Bridge north of Detroit.

Meanwhile, although the Windsor police have cleared the trucks blocking the Ambassador Bridge, it is very unclear whether the bridge is actually open to traffic, since demonstrators continue to mill around in the area, and the police seem reluctant to escalate the situation. This is a key factor, which I'll get to. The same circumstance seems to apply in Ottawa, where as far as I could determine yesterday, a party atmosphere continued to prevail, and crowds of the curious, part-time supporters, and partiers caused traffic jams into the city.

Legacy media seems to toe the Trudeau-Ford line, that these are illegal occupations and sieges fomented by a fringe group of disgruntled truckers. As I said above, there's no single Freedom Convoy manifesto, but I think one trucker interviewed in Ottawa correctly interpreted the subtext of the movement, the issue isn't vaccinations or passports -- he estimated that 90% of the truckers in the convoy are vaccinated -- the issue is a new and intrusive level of government interference that was originally sold as temporary, but which the state is increasingly reluctant to dismantle.

As other demonstrators and supporters have pointed out, masks are unnatural, but after two years, there's little official interest in relaxing mask rules. And as a practical matter, since vaccinations have proven far less effective than originally claimed, a regime of revaccination every few months is gradually being imposed on top of continued masking. The goalposts are still being moved, in large part because the original "public health" measures were never specified or approved by anyone, but they look to continue indefinitely even as the ostensible "public health" crisis diminishes.

These are reasonable concerns, and they're being picked up worldwide. The Trudeau-Ford strategy so far is to declare, as Trudeau has, that the COVID rules and the protests are two different things, and the protests are now illegal, but by implication, the COVID rules are not. The COVID rules "suck", as he put it, but everyone needs to go home.

This isn't going to work. It looks like each time a border blockage is cleared, another one pops up, and more ordinary citizens are motivated to take to the streets, as they did in Cornwall and Fort Erie. I've got to say that I hadn't followed Trudeau very closely up to now, but his video appearances show a babyfaced, privileged, callow-looking individual in a retro Beatles hairdo making impotent threats of "severe" consequences for people who do nothing but mill about in the streets with Canadian flags. (Maybe his stylist could get him to update his look and try a mullet.) Not good.

Although Canadians sympathize with the anti-mandate demands of Freedom Convoy, they increasingly hate the protests themselves. A new Maru Public Opinion poll found that 56 per cent of Canadians don’t have an iota of sympathy for Freedom Convoy — and two thirds wouldn’t mind seeing their blockades cleared by military force.

But Canadians are also turning their ire on a “weak” government response and an intransigent prime minister whom they blame for “inflaming” the situation. The Maru poll, which was conducted from Feb. 9 to 10, found that only 16 per cent of Canadians would vote for Trudeau based on his actions of the last two weeks.

I'm not sure how many Canadians actually watch the TV news and wish the Mounties would start cracking heads. But a bigger problem is that the Mounties themselves, and the other police services, don't want to crack heads either. I would guess they feel very uncomfortable with the position Trudeau and Ford want to put them in, the goon squad waiting in the wings with tear gas and rubber bullets. My sense is that their actual position is roughly the same as police leadership south of the border: they don't have the resources to end such large-scale demonstrations even if they wanted to do it.

They can't conduct or process mass arrests. Rank and file officers sympathize with the demonstrators. Violent police action would be an immense setback for community relations. A couple of well-publicized episodes of head-cracking in Ottawa last week, I would guess, focused the chain of command on how badly things could turn out for them, and I suspect department policy was quickly, clearly, and forcefully articulated to officers as a result. Arrests of any sort in such demonstrations seem to run in the single digits nationally, and this isn't going to change.

The impression I have is that both Ford and Trudeau are on the losing side of a political battle that has lost its public health justification, don't have the sense to temporize, and are frozen at the controls. Biden is in a similar bind south of the border.

So Much Happening, So Little News

It's a holiday weekend in the US on top of the Super Bowl, so naturally Biden's handlers are sending cryptic messages about how Putin may or may not be ready to invade Ukraine. The one person who doesn't seem to be bothered is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“The Ukrainians presented a very hard position,” said Russian envoy Dmitry Kozak, noting that it was impossible to reconcile conflicting interpretations of an accord, known as the Minsk agreements, designed to halt the fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists.

. . . On Thursday, Kozak chided the Europeans for failing to bring Ukraine into compliance.

“My impression was that the Western diplomacy had no impact on the Ukrainian position in the talks,” Kozak said.

The mood in Washington seems strangely disconnected:

“There is a credible prospect that a Russia military action would take place even before the Olympics,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at the daily briefing.

The Winter Olympic Games are currently underway in Beijing and end on February 20.

Sullivan shared his more alarming assessment of the situation in Ukraine with the press as President Joe Biden prepared to leave for the weekend to the Camp David presidential retreat.

He said he could not pinpoint the day or the hour of a potential invasion and admitted he did not know of the scope of the invasion, either.

“It could be more limited, it could be more expansive, but there are very real possibilities that it will involve the seizure of a significant amount of territory in Ukraine and the seizure of major cities, including the capital city,” he said.

Or maybe not. Doesn't sound like this guy, who's got the latest intelligence, knows any more than anyone else, especially if he doesn't seem to be aware that the Olympics have already started.

Meanwhile, Canadian police may or may not be clearing the truckers' blockade from the Ambassador Bridge, and other police may or may not be crackng down on the demonstrators in Ottawa. The impression I have from Canada is that Trudeau has been largely AWOL throughout the crisis.

We likely won't hear much before the middle of next week. The less anyone does about anything in the meantime, the better.

"Big Gretchen 'Ro!"

Ever since Rush Limbaugh's passing, I've been wondering who'll replace him. The most obvious candidate has been Tucker Carlson, but his problem (which Limbaugh himself recognized) is that as a Trinity College alum (to be clear, the "little Ivy" liberal arts school in Hartford, CT), he's too Episcopalian and too prep, and indeed, as the son of a deep state actor and media bigwig, too connected to the existing system.

The current Canadian Freedom Convoy story is beginning to illustrate what Limbaugh alone at his best was able to bring to the party: an out-of-control sense of humor. There's something uniquely Canadian about the response to the Freedom Convoy that resonates with the US picture of Canada, however distorted this may be, but the overwhelming fact is that, as the "occupations" of Ottawa, Windsor, and Coutts continue with Trudeau and other civil authorities making impotent threats, the situation has become hilariously entertaining.

And as Ezra Levant noted, Trudeau's mess is creeping over the bridge. One of the best commentators so far has been a YouTuber, Robert Gouveia, Esq, an attorney with a DUI practice in Arizona. Originally I found him unfocused and prolix, but he's been polishing his game, and his coverage of the Freedom Convoy has the Limbaugh touch that's been missing -- indeed, Limbaugh was missing the Limbaugh touch himself for the last years of his life. Last night's commentary was a tour de force:

He has nicknames for many of the key players as Limbaugh would have had: Ottawa City Councillor Carol Ann Meehan is "Meltdown Meehan"; Michican Gov Whitmer is "Big Gretchen 'Ro". Press Secretary Psaki is "Vice President Psaki". He lingers lovingly over the name of Windsor, ON Mayor Drew Dilkens. And he falls back on his legal expertise to outline the basic strategies available to the truckers to fight the traffic citations the authorities are trying to issue them. It's likely that the citations will cause a backlog in the municipal courts equivalent to the backup of traffic on the Ottawa streets.

Yesterday I cited two of two of Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals, "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon," and "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." This continues to be the case. Coverage from both US and Canadian legacy media continues oblivious to the humor of the situation, while sympathizers in the US can't wait to join the game. It appears that, with the Ambassador Bridge blocked between Detroit and Windsor, truckers have been trying to use bridges in the Buffalo area as an alternate, but demonstrators on the US side are now preparing to block this route as well.

If nothing else, this is superb entertainment. If potential successors to El Rushbo emerge from it, so much the better.

The Freedom Convoy In The US Mirror

What I hear from Canada via e-mail about the Freedom Convoy suggests to me that the whole story isn't as cut and dried as its supporters, especially in the US, might believe, and I'm not in a position to comment on it directly. On the other hand, the two countries are close whether either likes it or not, and events like the Freedom Convoy inevitably affect both sides of the border -- how much did a 2020 trucker protest in Washington, illustrated above, inspire the Canadian truckers in 2022?

By thr same token, US Homeland Security is now warning of a potential US Freedom Convoy starting at the Super Bowl and proceeding to Washington next week:

According to senior law enforcement officials and documents obtained by Yahoo News, the warning circulated to law enforcement nationwide on Tuesday by DHS states that the agency “has received reports of a convoy of truckers planning to potentially block roads in major metropolitan cities in the United States in protest of, among other things, vaccine mandates for truck drivers.”

My first teactioni is that, in the same way Putin doesn't need actually to invade Ukraine to weaken Biden, US truckers don't need to spend the time and opportunity cost to blockade Washington. The fear they might emulate the Canadians is enough, and the two countries are different enough that what's so far working brilliantly in Canada -- the truckers making monkeys out of the Mounties and Ottawa police -- won't go over in the US, as sheriffs and police chiefs have consistently put politicians here on notice that they do not enforce temporary executive orders, health regulations, and the like.

But as the Canadian comnmentator Ezra Levant puts it,

Imagine what a trucker rebellion would do in the U.S. Supply chain mess. Inflation. Unemployment. Visual proof of Biden's economic failure on TV every night. Alienating working class voters Biden needs so desperately this November.

Trudeau's mess is creeping over the bridge.

But the truckers are already changing the political climate. Half a dozen Democrat states just ended mask mandates. Democrats are looking for a graceful exit for Fauci.

The fear is enough, and the problem for Biden is the parallelism with Trudeau, whose mess, as Levant puts it, is remarkably similar to Biden's: they're both extremely reluctant to cross their hard-line, anti-working class elitist base, while at the same time they and the public health authorities behind them have lost credibility that any of their measures, ranging from lockdowns to mask mandates to vaccines to curfews to boosters, has been effective against the pandemic. But the mandates have primarily hurt the working-class side of their base, while the elites on both sides of the border continue visibly to flout those same mandates in all too many cases.

Biden's dilemma is of his own making.

President Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force on Wednesday side-stepped decisions by Democrat governors to lift mask mandates across the country, recommending most Americans remain masked in public indoor settings.

“At this time we continue to recommend masking in areas of high and substantial transmission,” Centers for Disease Control Dr. Rochelle Walensky stated during a press briefing. “That’s most of the country right now.”

. . . White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients and include [sic] Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci focused most of their message on the importance of getting vaccine booster shots to increase immunity to the virus.

Fauci hinted at the likelihood of some people requiring a fourth booster shot.

Given the absurdity of the administration's passive-aggressive stance on maintaining mandates that most of the country is already ignoring, I think the US truckers are in Putin's position: why should Putin take on the risk and unquestionable expense of actually invading Ukraine, when the simple fear of it will drive Biden into forcing concessions on Ukraine and Europe himself? Why should the US truckers take on the risk and opportunity cost of a national freedom convoy when the simple fear of a Canada-like episode is driving Democrat politicians here away from Biden without the need for one?

Indeed, US politicians understand what their law enforcement authorities tell them -- two of Saul Alinsky's rules are "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon," and "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." So far, this hasn't filtered through north of the border -- but peoplle like Biden, Fauci, and Walensky are extremely vulnerable to this as well. Indeed, I would guess that it's wiser heads among the Democrats are the ones who'll need to impress this on Biden's handlers.

The Dog That Isn't Barking In Ottawa

I haven't commented on the Canadian trucker protests here, because so far, I don't think I've had anything to add beyond what Canadian independent media and other observers worldwide have already said. If they get any of it wrong, that's on them. But as of the middle of last night, one thing has struck me, the dog that isn't barking.

As far as I can see, the Ottawa civil authorities, backed up by the prime minister himself, have issued the following bill of particulars against the truckers:

• They are boorish
• They are violating traffic laws
• They are violating noise ordinances
• They are maintaining dangerous stocks of gasoline and propane
• They are conducting psychological warfare
• They are infiltrated and financed by anti-Canadian Trumpists from across the border
• They are destroying Canadian democracy
• They are un-Canadian
• They are racists, Confederate secessionists, and Nazis.
• UPDATE: Sedition and treason

I may have left some out, but this is the most comprehensive list I can think of as of this writing. I will add others if anyone can suggest more. And I venture no opinion as to the truth or falsity of any allegation; I agree with those Canadians who say that Canada is a sovereign country that is entitled to work out its own political disputes.

The one observation I make is that there's a dog here that isn't barking. Nobody, north or south of the border that I've been able to locate, has said the trucker demonstrations are COVID superspreader events.

As of mid 2020, rightly or wrongly, US public health authorities and legacy media were insisting that Trump rallies be discontinued specifically because they were thought to be superspreader events. Although the same authorities and media tolerated BLM riots, the right at least accused them of hypocrisy by not labeling them as superspreader events. By the same token, throughout 2020 and 2021, even family holiday gatherings were discouraged on the basis that they were potential superspreader events. It took a US Supreme Court order to establish that religious services were not superspreader events.

So why, in Canada which up to now has had among the more stringent COVID regimes in the world, are no public health authorities denouncing the trucker protests as superspreader events? As far as I can tell, Nova Scotia forbade roadside gatherings in support of truckers traveling to Ottawa on a broad "safety" basis, possibly implying that people could get sick that way, or maybe just get hit by a runaway 18-wheeler, but even if there was an underlying public health justification, this was a distant event in a small province.

And there are, as far as I can tell, noise Karens in Ottawa itself, but no mask Karens. I made a quick survey of photos from Ottawa and found that by and large, nobody but police are wearing masks, but of the arrests that have been made, none appears to be for mask violations, nor indeed for singing the national anthem unmasked in a crowd, which would normally be a superspeader event, every bit as dangerous as chanting Let's Go Brandon in a stadium.

I take this as an acknowledgement, both tacit and universal, that the policy dispute over COVID has become exclusively political. The public health jusification has been effectively abandoned, even as political -- not public health -- authorities in even blue US states, the heretofore curfew-loving Canadian province of Quebec, and several European countries are announcing the phaseout of COVID restrictions. In California, Gov Newsom has announced the phaseout of its mask mandate -- he faces reelection this year -- while LA County public health authorities -- not politically accountable -- insist masks will remain.

I make no predictions and make no judgments. I simply observe that even Canada has acknowledged that the debate has become political, not scientific. Prime Minister Trudeau himself has declared the threat is now Nazis and US Trumpists, not a virus. I do, however, agree with the characterization from US observers that the prime minister looks like an elite cupcake.

What Can Men In Black Teach Us About Meritocracy?

My thinking abouit trhe Penn women's swim team has inevitably brought me back to the selection scene at the beginning of the whole Men in Black franchise. For those who aren't familiar with it, the premise of the series is that the space aliens have already arrived, but the government has worked out a super-secret agreement with the aliens to let them stay on the planet if they're careful to stay out of sight. The job of the Men in Black, an ultra-secret, ultra-elite cadre, is on one hand to enforce the agreement with the space aliens, while on the other to act as a cleanup crew in cases where the aliens have inadvertently revealed themselves to ordinary people.

It goes without saying that anyone tasked with making sure the space aliens stay quiet and out of sight, as well as cleaning up situations where they don't, must have extraordinary tact, intellect, skill, and initiative. At the start of the first Men in Black film, Agent J, played by Will Smith, has unknowingly applied to be a member of this team. How he's selected gives an indication of how merit ought to be selected, even if the real world falls far short of this ideal.

Agent J arrives late to the selection session, in which it's explained that the government is looking for "the best of the best of the best". His fellow applicants are clearly the cream of the government's best, Navy SEALs, honors graduates of the academies, Marines, and the like. Agent J, in contrast, performs a series of gaucheries. His first test is to find a way to fill out his application when no desk or table is available to any of the elite applicants. Agent J is the only one to see the coffee table in the middle of the group and noisily pull it to himself, the only possible way to accomplish the task.

At the conclusion of the test, Agent Zed, who's conducting it, announces to the military meritocrats who feel they've made all the right moves, "Gentlemen, congratulations. You're everything we've come to expect from years of government training." Expecting one of their group to be selected, they're instead led off to an "eye test", which Men in Black savants will recognize is a device that wipes their memories of all recent events. Agent J is selected.

Over the past several days, I've thought and thought about this episode vis-a-vis the Penn women's swim team. I would go so far as to say that for them, this is a test very much equivalent to Agent J's selection process, but in their case, there's no Agent J. Or if there is one, the winner is Lia Thomas. The Penn women's swim team is, after all, everything we've come to expect from the Ivy selection process, the best of the best of the best. And their potential employers, or perhaps the Olympic teams they might hope to join, are fully entitled to expect the same. The top-tier law firms will happily recruit them as associates down the road given their flawless records. They will never commit the remotest gaucherie.

Except that, confronted with what must be in at least some cases, the ony serious challenge they may have had in the successful progress of their lives in the form of a wild-card competitor, a male impersonating a female, none has come up with an effective counter strategy -- not even, as our Roman Catholic parish clergy might advise if asked, to pray, seek out a Plan B, and leave the team if that's the path that presents itself. I hear a number like 36 as the total women's team membership presumably including Thomas, the guy.

Of the 36, or maybe 35 women, 16 have gone so far as to enlist a spokesperson to write a letter on their behalf, allowing them to keep quiet and out of sight, a little like the space aliens have been told to behave. This has been met with silence from Penn; they needn't have bothered. Several others, just as anonymous, have written the administration to say that they're tickled pink that Lia has had such a wonderful opportunity, and they're copacetic with the whole program.

Of the 35 women, I have the impression that none is going to find a solution that will be remotely satisfactory for herself, sacrificing a sense of justice or even plain common sense to an illusory idea of a future career that's likely to be just as unsatisfactory. None seems willing to come out of the shadows and identify herself by asking for simple justice, either reporting the indecent exposure to law enforcement or reporting the sexual harassment to the designated campus authority. That way, I have a feeling, leads to issues like ulcers, cancer, or alcoholism down the road. Just sayin'.

The real elites here are the people who are running the show, the ones who must certainly have put Lia Thomas up to the stunt and paved the way for it over a period of years. Remember that Thomas began transitioning nearly three years ago and must certainly have done it with the assurance they'd have a place on the women's team. But even to start nearly three years ago means the assurance had to have been in place well before that. The game was well and truly rigged before most of the women swimmers arrived on campus their first year.

The people who set that plan in motion are the real elites, the ones who control the hazing. The Penn women swimmers are just the best of the best of the best, the hazees. They don't have the remotest idea who the real elites are, nor the remotest idea of how to counter them. They'll spend their lives doing as they're told, which is the point.