Parsing The Right's Case Against Aiding Ukraine

Recently I ran across two essays that outline what I take to be the right-wing case against aiding Ukraine. I have some suspicion that neither is completely ingenuous, but I'll take their points at face value. The first is by Michael Walsh, 'Not Worth the Bones of a Single Grenadier' at a site called The Pipeline, which seems to carry National Review types like John O'Sullivan. He begins with an argument we'll see again:

Bismarck was right about the Balkans, but he might as well have been speaking of the Ukraine, a troubled land (its name means "borderland"), oft-conquered, rarely independent, generally restive, and almost always miserable. Like the Kurds, the Ukrainians are for reasons of geography basically a people without a country. . .

But the same might be said about half of Europe; Poland wasn't a country at all throughout the 19th century; Belgium didn't emerge until 1830 and has been twice invaded since then by Germany, which itself didn't exist before 1871. Czechoslovakia became independent in 1918, was partitioned by Germany in 1938, reemerged in 1945, but split into two separate states in 1993. Does Walsh propose some sort of exemption for Ukraine from the ongoing process of European national development? Does he think there might be a way to declare a timeout for Ukraine from history?

The Ukraine won its independence after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. As part of the deal, the Ukrainians were persuaded/coerced by Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, among other signatories to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, to surrender the nuclear weapons stationed on their soil. The key point for Russia was that the Ukraine, as a buffer state between itself and the West, should never be allowed to threaten the Russian homeland. . . . The idea was that Russia wouldn't threaten its former Warsaw Pact states and in return NATO wouldn't edge up to Russia's borders.

That may be, but a search in the text for the number "2014" brings no hits before the comments. But according to Wikipedia,

In February 2014, Russian forces seized or blockaded various airports and other strategic sites throughout Crimea. The troops were attached to the Russian Black Sea Fleet stationed in Crimea, which placed Russia in violation of the Budapest Memorandum. . . . After the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and US stated that Russian involvement was a breach of its Budapest Memorandum obligations to Ukraine and in violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity.

For some reason, omitting Putin's 2014 breach, Welsh claims it's the West's fault:

The West, of course, welshed on the deal, and has gradually been impressing other satellite countries near Russia's western border into the service of a now-explicitly anti-Russian (as opposed to anti-Soviet, as it was formerly). North Atlantic Treaty Organization: Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, more recently, the military powerhouses of Montenegro and North Macedonia. More are likely on their way, including Finland and Sweden, historically both enemies of Russia.

But isn't it the case that Putin's 2014 invasion of Crimea, and now his invasion of the rest of Ukraine, has made all these countries nervous not about the old Soviet Union, but about contemporary Russia? This in fact is the substance of Walsh's argument -- the rest of his essay is a general denunciation of Biden in thoroughly predictable terms:

The biggest cheerleaders for the Ukraine in the current war have turned out to be, surprise, Joe Biden and his always-wrong, America Last foreign policy establishment, headed by secretary of state Anthony Blinken, a retread from both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Biden and his noxious family have long used the Ukraine—the most corrupt country in Europe—as their personal piggybank and money laundromat, and in the recent past he has openly boasted about his ability to legally blackmail Ukrainian officials into doing his bidding. His word as a Biden!

The mention of Blinken, though, is worth pursuing, which I'll do in a moment. But let's move to the second essay from the right-wing perspective, Putin’s Last Laugh by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. After reviewing European doomsday predictions about the economic consequences of the war, Dreher sums up:

[W]hen Western leaders responded to Putin's invasion with an open attempt to destroy the Russian economy -- I quoted some of the statements by EU figures here yesterday -- what did they think Russia would do? It's incredible that seemingly intelligent people in the West live under the illusion that because Russia's invasion of Ukraine is illegal and immoral, that Russia should sit back and allow the West to destroy its economy without retaliating.

As far as I can tell, what he's saying is that although Russia broke every norm from the UN Charter to the Budapest Memorandum, Western leaders should have been aware that a guy who would do that would also turn off the gas piepelines. Or something like that. So what's his point, exactly? That because Putin would retaliate, the West should do nothing? He goes on,

So, how can we be surprised that Russia is using its energy weapon against the West? Again: we in the West have been waging economic war on Russia since the invasion (as well as sending Ukraine weapons and intelligence). You may think that waging economic war was and is the right thing to do morally, but you surely cannot be such a hypocrite as to say that Russia has no right to do what it's doing to the West now -- and you surely cannot be such a fool as to believe that this was not inevitable.

So he acknowledges Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a violation of international norms and intenational law, BUT:

To be clear: none of this excuses Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The loathing of Putin and Russia over this invasion, though, made it impossible for very many people in positions of leadership to think clearly about what was at stake in this conflict.

And that's essentially the end of his argument. He cites the example of an Irish cafe that may need to close if its electricity bill skyrockets. Well and good. Does this mean the West should not have imposed economic sanctions on Russia? He basically says Putin is despicable, but we shouldn't let this cloud our judgment. So what is his policy prescription? I will even grant him the possibility that sanctions, as in cases like Cuba or Iran, often don't have much effect, but Dreher must be aware that the US and NATO are doing much more than boycotting caviar -- they're sending tens of billions in direct military aid.

The military aid is having direct effect, forcing Putin to call up reserves to the point of potentially destabilizing his regime. If Dreher is against economic boycotts, is he also against military aid? Oddly, he isn't clear about this at all. So what should the West do? He actually has no prescription other than to suggest anything it does that actually has enough effect to make Putin retaliate is a bad idea. But hasn't there been a consensus since Hitler and the Sudeten crisis that appeasing dictators is a a bad idea, and avoiding small sacrifices in the short run means making much bigger ones later?

Walsh brings up Anthony Blinken as the enabler of current policies on Ukraine that date back to the Clinton administration. Indeed, Anthony Blinken's father, who passed away only this past week, was apparently a key figure:

Donald Mayer Blinken (November 11, 1925 – September 22, 2022) was an American businessman and diplomat. He served as the United States Ambassador to Hungary from 1994 to 1997. His son, Antony Blinken, is the current Secretary of State to United States President Joe Biden. . . . His father and mother were of Jewish descent and his father was originally from Kyiv (now the capital of Ukraine). His grandfather was author Meir Blinken.

I've been wondering where current US Ukraine policy originated, and this may be a partial answer. My developing view is that the Blinken family represents an unaccustomed strain of at least partial competence in the current administration, and it is somehow consistent with the George Kennan-Averell Harriman policies of an earlier generation. The right-wing objections to it amount to appeasement.

I've also been wondering who's powerful enough behind the scenes to prevail on Biden not to interfere in Ukraine, and conversely, to say only what he's told to say about policy. The Blinkens may be at least a lead.

Russia's Problem Is A Problem For Orthodoxy

I've noted here now and then that there's a schism within the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest Orthodox denomination, arising from the dissolution of the Soviet Union but recently exacerbated by the Russo-Ukraine War. The Wikipedia entry on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) says,

Prior to May 2022, the Primate of the UOC-MP was the most senior permanent member of the ROC's Holy Synod and thus had a say in its decision-making in respect of the rest of the ROC throughout the world. On May 27, 2022, the UOC declared its independence from the Moscow Patriarchate due to Patriarch Kirill's support of the invasion of Ukraine. Before its decision for full independence, more than 400 parishes had left the Moscow Patriarchate as a consequence of the invasion.

Most recently Patriarch Kirill has tied the Orthodox faith directly to fighting in Ukraine:

While celebrating the Divine Liturgy on Wednesday at the Zachatyevsky Monastery, which is traditionally considered the oldest convent in Moscow (a historically dubious claim), the Patriarch begins his sermon by recalling, not the birth of the Holy Mother, but the birth of the Fatherland at the Battle of Kulikovo.

. . . He declares that while retreat might be possible from worldly things, it’s impossible to retreat “from faith,” a powerful line, now a standard in his sermons, which draws an equivalency between Russian aggression in Ukraine and defending and living the Orthodox faith.

He then goes on to once again erase Ukraine from the historical map, saying that the people ought to pray that “Holy Russia would be reunited.” As he’s made clear before, Ukraine is not, to his mind, an independent nation, but a rogue territory within Russia. And keeping Ukraine as part of Russia is a sacred obligation. It’s also apparently what victory looks like for the Virgin Mary (she does get a shout out at the end).

Reading about individual parishes leaving a denomination reminds me of the "continuing Anglican" and related movements to leave the US Episcopal Church, and it's simply a bad sign, since it means an inevitable loss of prestige for the denomination as a whole, both the parent body and its contentious children. In the case of Russia, it ties the denomination to an unpopular war. During the Viet Nam war, most Christian denominations or people claiming to represent them were publicly against US policy, which on one hand protected the denominations from loss of face when the war went badly.

On the other hand, both the government and the denominations were also protected by the US constitutional ban on establishment of religion, so that no denomination of any stripe was forced to defend the government. The problem for Russian Orthodoxy is that it has been an agency of the Russian state in one form or another since 1721 under Peter the Great. In many ways, the Russian Orthodox Church's history in the 18th century echoed the history of the Church of England, with the government seizing monastic lands and influencing church governance.

Catherine even made sure that the salaries of all ranks of the clergy were paid by the state instead of the Church, resulting in the clergy effectively becoming employees of the state.

Even after 1917, while the communist government seized church valuables and for a time executed priests, religion was never fully abolished, and by the time of the 1941 German invasion, Stalin came to see the church as a convenient ally in the war. Thus Russian Orthodoxy has been tied to the state and specific state policies, including war, ever since the establishment of modern Russia. It's recognized that both Patriarch Kirill and his predecessor were KGB agents during the Soviet period:

Forbes reported on February 20, 2009 that, "Kirill, who was the Metropolitan of Smolensk, succeeds Alexei II who died in December after 18 years as head of the Russian Church. According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies."

The difficulty for Russian Orthodoxy is that even through the disruptions of the 20th century, the denomination has continued as an agent of the Russian state, and the patriarch at this point is still a convenient puppet of the Russian autarch. It doesn't help that Russian Orthodox clergy have been not just state employees, but KGB agents, which compromises both their motives and their standing as ministers to the faithful.

In his recent sermon, Kirill tied Russian Orthodoxy to a founding event of the Russian state, the Battle of Kulikovo (1380). The problem for Russia generally is that its impending loss in Ukraine is bringing to mind other key historical events like the First (1410) and Second (1914) Battle of Tannenberg, which have also been cited as turning points in Russian history, and with them, Russian Orthodoxy.

This is also a problem at the core of Western right-wing support for Russia in the war, since many such supporters favor Putin for promoting conservative values in Russia, as opposed to Western countries that support Ukraine, when those governments also pursue policies that undermine sexual morality. The difficulty will increasingly be that Putin will lose prestige as events continue to develop, while at the same time evidence emerges of Russian policies that are nearly as destructive in Ukraine as either Hitler's or Stalin's.

While I was an Episcopalian, and since then as well, I noticed an incresing trend among their clergy especially to affect Orthodox forms -- for instance, to refer to the Virgin Mary as the Theotokos -- in an effort to borrow Orthodox prestige as the prestige of Anglicanism faded. I don't think that strategy will last much longer.

Trump's Latest On Ukraine

Via the UK Daily Mail -- there's not much on this in the US.

Former President Trump said he hopes is 'wrong' about the possibility of World War III because the U.S. is being run by 'stupid people' at a rally in Wilmington, N.C. on Friday.

'I was right about Ukraine. I was right about what, Taiwan and I'm hoping I'm not going to be right about World War Three, because we have stupid people dealing,' the former president said, as he predicted the U.S. would lose a conflict to Russia.

. . . 'Putin mentioned the N word,' Trump told the crowd. 'You know what the N word is? It's-- no, no, no, it's the nuclear word. You mentioned the N word yesterday. The nuclear were not supposed to be mentioned,' Trump continued, as he claimed the Russian invasion 'never would've happened' under his presidency.

As far as I can tell, Trump's remarks in Wilmington mainly covered US domestic politics and focused on endorsements of his favored list of North Carolina candidates -- the mentions of Ukraine and nukes were offhand and non specific. However, I've got to question what's up with two of his implications.

The first is that the US would "lose a conflict with Russia" as reported. At the moment, the Russo-Ukraine War is a proxy conflict with Russia in all but name, and the takeaways for now include:

• Ukraine fought Russia to a standstill within days of its initial invasion even without US weapons.
• Once largely obsolete second-hand weapons from former Warsaw Pact countries began to be supplied, Ukraine scored battlefield victories.
• US intelligence did provide a major advantage to Ukraine.
• Russia never achieved air superiority at any point in the invasion and has kept its strategic bombers well away from the area.
• Putin's recent mobilization suggests the invasion has drained its armed forces of trained manpower, and Russia will need to recruit and train new forces even to continue the Ukraine conflict, much less prosecute a wider war.

These circumstances reinforce the observations I've seen that had Russia invaded Poland rather then Ukraine, the result would likely have been immediate rout rather than a stalemate. So I've got to conclude that Russia simply doesn't have the capability to prosecute a major conflct even in a wider European theater -- it's being defeated in detail in Ukraine alone without any direct confrontation with any NATO power. So I simply have to conclude Trump is wrong on that assumption about World War III, at least if he means any sort of conventional war.

If instead he means Putin could push the doomsday button and just try to vaporize major cities without otherwise sending military forces abroad, I'm just not sure how that would work. Given how poorly the Russian weapons systems we've seen have performed, I'm not sure how his missiles would do much better, but even the short-term result of any such exchange would likely be the end of the Russian state.

Trump's next position is that the US is being run by "stupid people". In cases like Secs Mayorkas, Buttigieg, and Grantholm, and Attorney General Garland, I have no disagreement. The puzzles are Secs Blinken and Austin. It almost seems as though they've been able to work out some sort of deal with Biden's handlers whereby in exchange for promoting wokeness in military training and general diplomacy, they've received some type of firm carveout in Ukraine policy, whereby on on hand, Biden promises not to interfere, and on the other, as in his UN speech, he says exactly what he's told to say with no wandering off script.

At this point, as I've said here now and then, US Ukraine policy is achieving positive results in a remarkably cost-effective manner. This is, however, given the circumstances the US and NATO were handed as of late last year, that Putin made a reckless and destructive decision to invade Ukraine, followed through on it, and is currently doubling down to the point that a negotiated outcome short of complete Russian withdrawal to pre-2014 borders is unlikely.

What would Trump have done differently to avoid this? But whatever he might have done, how would Russia not invading Ukraine have led to a better outcome for the world, if the current more likely result of the war will be the disintegration of Russia as a geopolitical force? What are Trump's plans for this outcome now, if any?

"She Was 12 -- I Was 30"

Here's just another data point on the condition of the big guy's mind:

President Joe Biden surprised viewers Friday when pausing his speech to acknowledge a woman in the crowd he said he knew when she was 12.

“You gotta say hi to me,” Biden said during a speech at the National Education Association headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We go back a long way. She was 12 — I was 30. But anyway, this woman helped me get an awful lot done.”

Biden did not acknowledge how he knew the woman or what she did that helped him, but the remark caught viewers off guard.

Videos of the remarks show a remarkably animated Biden as he recalls whatever the episode might have been:

As opposed to his normal affectless. squint-eyed expression, he's flirty and even devilish as he alludes to some mutual memory that had to have been at least a bit naughty. A few commentators have noted that the audience, teachers' union members, giggled and tittered with the big guy. It's all a big in joke. (As I review the video, though, I note the women behind Biden are the ones who are yukkin' it up. Most of the men, who seem to be Latin, aren't even smiling, and they look uncomfortable. I think they actually see the same point the women do, but it isn't funny to them at all.)

This goes to the question I raised in my post about Biden's visit to the UN: he goes off script at will, often to his detriment, and at times when a normal adult would be expected to show restraint. It's a problem Barack Obama and his advisers recognized. The man seems to have no self-control, and this goes back at least to the photo at the top of this post, which is with his daugher, Ashley. She was born in 1981, so this must have been taken around the time of his first presidential run in 1987-88.

Somehow, some adult somewhere is able to sit on the guy and make him focus on the program, as he did at least for 20 minutes or so at the UN. Otherwise, he does exactly as he pleases, and he gets away with it. It looks as though he's been able to do this all his life, and I would guess that people who've known him for many years can recount episodes of him wandering aimlessly around a dais that go back a long way as well.

This isn't dementia, this is lifelong habit borne of entitlement.

What Is Colonel Reisner's Real Message?

After a two-month absence from YouTube, Austrian Col Reisner is back after only two weeks with another odd take on the Russo-Ukraine War. Let me preface this by saying yet again that I was thrown out of the ROTC after a year, and that's the full extent of my experience in the US or any other country's army. But here's my take on that war.

Russia, thought to be the second-ranked military power on the planet, managed to bungle its invasion of Ukraine from the start. Within days, US generals were commenting that the Russian army was simply failing to meet its initial objectives, and this was with Ukraine's army having no Western resupply and fighting almost entirely with its existing stock of hand-held anti-tank weapons and cheap drones.

Within months, still with hesitant Western support, Ukraine was able to force the Russians to retreat from their main line of attack, the effort to seize Kyiv. In the next phase of the war, Ukraine fought Russia to a stalemate with secondhand, obsolete Warsaw Pact weapons augmented with second-tier US artillery; this phase culminated in a repetition of the Kyiv rout, with the Russians forced out of almost all the Kharkiv region.

The current phase of the war has been characterized by the Russian recognition that its handling of the war has depleted its manpower, requiring a mobilization to replenish its army. While I'm an instinctive contrarian, there's a near consensus that the mobilization can accomplish little more than to send untrained and ill-equipped forces into confrontations that have no better prospects for success than the ones to date -- the pattern of stalemate punctuated by key Russian routs will continue until it can't.

The implications are dawning only slowly, but they're inevitable: Russia as a factor in geopolitics is simply disappearing as we watch. The one commentator who seems to be missing this is Col Reisner. His latest presentation is titled in English, Cognitive Warfare -- The Fight for your Heart and Mind. In German, it's Der Kampf um unsere Meinung.

Now, my German won't win any prizes, and the colonel's is quite good, but I did have a graduate-level course in how to translate German into English, and I don't like his English version of his German title. German Meinung is usually English "opinion", so the literal meaning of the German title would be "The Struggle for our Opinion". "Hearts and minds" is a mistranslation, since this is at best a US counterinsurgency term dating back to Lyndon Johnson's strategy to secure the loyalty of the Vietnamese against the Viet Cong -- but in subsequent years, it's also acquired a heavy irony, since the effort failed, and it carries a connotation of Johnsonian bombast. The colonel misses this. And unsere is "our", not "your"; that simply changes the meaning as well.

Why is the colonel, a sophisticated guy with a PhD, so obtuse? What I note about his three most recent YouTubes is that he focuses on the war from the Russian point of view, and even there, he omits almost any but the most optimistic takes. For instance, he focuses on the Russian threat to cut the natural gas supply and its potential for turning Western opinion against the war in the impending cold season. But this is simplistic; on one hand, this was thought to be a potential problem a few months ago, but more recently, things have leveled off:

Russia is a big player in world energy markets — not just in oil, but also natural gas and coal — with Europe being particularly vulnerable to changes in Russian energy supplies. Markets for oil and gas have been roiled since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, contributing to rising prices and inflation around the world — although energy prices are now coming down after those initial shocks. . . . the softening of prices alongside the decline in export volumes spell trouble for Russia.

The colonel doesn't mention social media, or even much Western news commentary at all, but Ukraine has actually dominated social media, both with proxy channels on YouTube that effectively portray the official line without identifying themselves as such, with independent Ukrainian YouTubers who simply speak as citizens, and with independent military analysts in any number of third countries on their own YouTube channels. The reddit /r ukraine conflict threads have an enormous international following that's almost entirely pro-Ukrainian. In contrast, pro-Russian social media is derided as amateurish and heavy-handed. The colonel either misses this completely or chooses not to mention it.

Nor does he mention the pro-Russian milbloggers who are themselves highly critical of the war's conduct, even though the Institute for the Study of War has been following the implications of what they say closely for weeks. For instance, in just its most recent report,

The quality of Russian bureaucrats and military trainers are [sic] also raising fears among the Russian pro-war crowd that the partial mobilization effort may not succeed. Milbloggers noted that employees of the military enlistment centers are unmotivated and underpaid, reducing their enthusiasm to adhere to the envisioned mobilization plan. Milbloggers also pleaded with officers and commanders in charge of preparing mobilized men for war to train them before deployment.

US generals have noted in interviews, however, that such training will almost certainly not take place. But even beyond the colonel's misreading or omission of the evidence on social media, the problem for Russia is simply that legacy media reports of missile attacks on hospitals, mass graves in the forest, or civilians shot in the head with hands tied and left unburied on the streets are bad press and will only strengthen Western popular support for Ukraine. This is another factor in the information war that the colonel simply omits, even though reports of atrocities, real or fabricated, have been key to wartime propaganda for more than a century.

For whatever reason, Colonel Reisner wants to stick to wishful thinking on Russia's ability to sustain its standing as a world power. One explanation may be Austria's continued national policy of neutrality, a Cold War artifact that realpolitik has abandoned in much of Europe for a generation -- but it may be in the colonel's career interests to endorse it, at least in his current political envioronment.

But otherwise, it's harder and harder to take him seriously.

I'm Not Weeping For Scott Adams

So Scott Adams has inserted himself into the news:

“Dilbert” author Scott Adams, who has been drawing the comic since 1989, said the strip that pokes fun at office culture was wiped from nearly 77 newspapers.

Lee Enterprises, which owns nearly 100 newspaper companies in the US, terminated the contract with “Dilbert” for unknown reasons, reports Fox News.

“It was part of a larger overhaul, I believe, of comics, but why they decided what was in and what was out, that’s not known to anybody except them, I guess,” said Adams, who noted it coincidentally happened after he incorporated “wokeness” into the stories.

I've followed him long enough to recognize there's nothing new about this. In 2016, he supported Trump, and at the time, he complained that his speaking engagements fell to almost nothing -- and I think he recognized that Trump didn't sit well with the Silicon Valley types and tech workers who felt Adams was on their side. I watched his YouTube channel at the time, and he also noted that he was in print media, an industry where it was harder and harder to make a buck. The syndicates were cutting back then as well, and the reason was simply that there were more and more things they couldn't afford.

Nevertheless, he still gave us YouTubers tours of his brand new mansion. It suited him at the time to point out how well he was doing, notwithstanding he was already having his income cut. But according to Wikipedia, he just turned 65 in June. Wikipedia also says,

In 2020, Adams said: "For context, I expect my Dilbert income to largely disappear in the next year as newspapers close up forever. The coronavirus sped up that inevitable trend. Like many of you, I'm reinventing my life for a post-coronavirus world."

So he predicted what would happen to him this year two years ago, but now he's talking as if this is new and maybe a result of him criticizing wokeness. Beyhond that, he has an MBA and had at least an average MBA career before he hit the big time as a cartoonist in the early 1990s. He must be aware that comic strips have a shelf life; The Far Side was a cartoon series that lasted 15 years and ended with its creator, Gary Larson, retiring at age 44 in 1995. According to Wikipedia,

By late 1994, Larson thought the series was getting repetitive and did not want to enter what he called the "Graveyard of Mediocre Cartoons." He retired the strip on January 1, 1995, when he was 44 years old. . . . For the most part, he has also retired from public view: "He refuses to have his picture taken and avoids being on TV", Time magazine wrote in 2003. To Larson, "cartoonists are expected to be anonymous."

That's not Scott Adams, huh? Seems like he's creating an ongoing public drama about how his income is going down and he's practically destitute. But out of curiosity, I went looking for his recent takes on wokeness in the Dilbert strip, and if the one at the top of the post here is any indication, I don't think they're all that funny. I would also hazard a guess that if you're going to go political in a comic strip, you'd better be smart, although Adams claims to have an IQ of 187. Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo, had better moves:

Senator Joe McCarthy’s appearance in the strip in 1953, as a malicious wildcat named Simple J. Malarkey, was a particular “hot potato.” In October of 1954—just before the actual McCarthy would be censured by the Senate—Malarkey made another appearance. This time, the editor of the Providence Bulletin told Kelly that if Malarkey’s face appeared in the strip again, the paper would drop the strip.

Kelly finessed this by introducing a character from Providence, giving Malarkey the line “nobody from Providence should see me!” before he pulls an empty bait bag over his head. This had the double effect of getting rid of Malarkey’s face and making him look like a Klan member. “Now we find we are kidded” the Bulletin’s editor admitted, moving the strip to the op-ed page, where satire was evidently permitted.

What I'm seeing with Scott Adams is more that he's at least smart enough to have known that everything has a sell-by date, but he's having a hard time dealing with it. Even so, whatever his financial situation with the big mansion, he now has payments not to one ex-wife but two, having divorced his most recent one this past spring.

I guess that's what an IQ of 187 gets you

Biden At The UN

I'm convinced there's a latter-day George F Kennan now at the State Department who, like the one who wrote the Long Telegram, has the ear of some contemproary Averell Harriman, who in turn can tell important people what to do. Consider that the one area in which President Brandon has effectively recused himself in recent months has been Ukraine. Either Secretary Blinken, Secretary Austin, or Gen Milley articulates US Ukraine policy and says (or carefully omits to say) what weapons we are sending there. Early in the game, it seems the big guy contradicted Secretary Blinken on whether Ukraine would get third-party surplus Migs, but somehow the Migs happened anyhow, while the big guy effectively stopped talking about Ukraine. At all.

Biden's tendency to ramble and interfere has been fairly well documented, for instance:

The veteran Senator, as Obama saw it, had a tendency to “ramble, clearly loving every minute of it".

The would-be President is said to have confided in his advisor David Axelrod: “Joe Biden is a decent guy but man, that guy can just talk and talk. It's an incredible thing to see.”

In Condoleezza Rice’s confirmation hearing during George W.Bush’s presidency, Obama is alleged to have passed a staffer a note saying: 'Shoot. Me. Now,' as Biden addressed the hearing.

The book also claims, “The biggest insult to Biden was how little his input mattered to Obama's inner circle.

This tendency to go off script and run his mouth was displayed just this past weekend, when he variously declared in an interview that COVID was over, contradicting Dr Fauci, announced US troops would defend Taiwan, against established State Department policy, and gave a muddled and unconvincing reply to Putin's nuclear threats that discomfited the generals. Yet, since the business of the Migs, he's stayed out of Ukraine, pretty much except for yesterday, when he addressed the UN. But there was nothing freelance or prolix about that.

His address to the General Assembly was not, shall we say, vintage Joe Biden. He simply does not normally talk this way.

Mr. President, Mr. Secretary-General, my fellow leaders, in the last year, our world has experienced great upheaval: a growing crisis in food insecurity; record heat, floods, and droughts; COVID-19; inflation; and a brutal, needless war — a war chosen by one man, to be very blunt.

Let us speak plainly. A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council invaded its neighbor, attempted to erase a sovereign state from the map.

Russia has shamelessly violated the core tenets of the United Nations Charter — no more important than the clear prohibition against countries taking the territory of their neighbor by force.

Elevated diction. Parallel structure. Stately rhythm. Four-syllable words. And minimal stuttering and stumbling. This wasn't written by his normal handlers. It presumably came from the mandarins at State whose predecessors wrote the same material for John F Kennedy. Somebody not only got it written, but somebody else was able to tell the big guy to shut up, sit down, read this through more than once before you deliver it, and follow the teleprompter. You want to ramble and interfere? Tough. Do it the way we tell you.

And he did. It wasn't perfect, but the garbling and misspeaking were much more under control than usual. And I can only contrast this with his behavior only hours after the address:

Joe Biden spoke to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, but the most disturbing part of his day happened afterward. The president took that stage at an event sponsored by The Global Fund, which does work regarding AIDS and other diseases, and things went off the rails. In this case, quite literally.

A video is circulating showing Biden appearing to be completely dazed and confused, fumbling around the stage as his handlers attempt to talk him down. Meanwhile, another man is speaking, trying to thank him for being there while the president appears to have no idea what’s happening.

Here's a version of the video:

There was nothing particularly new about this episode; he's become well known for wandering around the stage and shaking hands with people who aren't there. What's intriguing is that it came so soon after his performance at the General Assembly, where this sort of thing in fact did not happen. What was the difference? Donald Trump has suggested in the past that he gets some sort of shot before debates and other such events that keeps him alert and on the ball for some period of time. If so, it may have worn off by the time he spoke at the Global Fund. On the other hand, we have no direct evidence of anything like this.

But even if we stipulate that this is the explanation, we still have the question of who's able to make him get that shot, because he clearly doesn't get it before every appearance. Even if the shot is the explanation, someone decides when he absolutely has to take it. On the other hand, if there's no shot -- and so far, there's no real evidence there is one -- someone still seems able to sit him down, tell him to serious up, read this damn speech before you deliver it, and pay attention to the teleprompter. But Barack Obama himself was never able to do this, from informed accounts.

So, if it isn't Barack Obama, who is? And let's face it, our Ukraine policy has been about the wisest and best-executed of any, from any administration, probably since Reagan. Someone has been able to tell Biden to stay out of it and make that instruction stick. In that one area, no other.

Isn't that odd?