News of the World - Putin Crazed Republicans Rush Stage To Wipe His Feet With Their Tears

Not totally true, but pretty close. -- He has a face like a hamster. See below for the button to the non-hit song, "Burn in Hell Hamster Face"

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Preface

Trump, Putin, and the Illusion of Strength

Donald Trump loves to present himself as the ultimate alpha male—tough, uncompromising, and always in control. Yet, for someone so obsessed with projecting strength, he has a baffling weakness for actual strongmen. His list of autocratic bromances reads like a dictator’s fan club:

• Kim Jong Un? “We fell in love.”

• Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? “He’s a tough guy.”

• Vladimir Putin? The grandmaster of manipulating Trump with a wink and a few words of flattery.

For a man who claims to be a hardliner, Trump’s foreign policy is anything but tough. It’s an unpredictable mix of isolationism, appeasement, and authoritarian admiration. He warns America must be strong but believes it can retreat from global leadership without consequences. History disagrees. When great powers disengage, the world doesn’t pause—it fills the vacuum with aggressive opportunists.

The Masterclass in Naïveté: Trump’s Foreign Policy

To be fair, Trump isn’t always wrong. His complaint that NATO allies (yes, Canada included) aren’t contributing enough to their defense is valid. Canada spends 1.38% of its GDP on defence, well below NATO’s 2% target. If NATO were a group project, the U.S. would be the overachiever doing all the work, while Canada would show up with a half-eaten doughnut.

But Trump being Trump, he takes a good point and derails into economic nonsense.

Trump’s Love Affair with Bad Economics

Trump clings to mercantilism, an outdated economic theory that should have been buried with powdered wigs. Mercantilism insists a country’s power comes from hoarding gold and running trade surpluses, treating trade like a war rather than a system of mutual benefit.

This thinking leads to terrible policies like:

✅ High tariffs (bad for consumers and businesses)

✅ Government-controlled markets (bad for competition and innovation)

✅ Economic nationalism (bad for, well, everyone)

The last time the U.S. went all-in on tariffs? The 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It worsened the Great Depression and sparked a global trade war.

Trump, however, insists on repeating history’s mistakes.

Trump, Ukraine, and the Appeasement Playbook

Nowhere is Trump’s naivety more dangerous than in Ukraine. His hostility toward Zelensky and willingness to hand Ukraine to Putin on a silver platter is nothing short of a Neville Chamberlain moment.

Zelensky is a Crook.  

Ukraine was corrupt when it was a Russian vassal state under Victor Yanukovych.  It has improved, but wartime is a bad time to work on a corruption problem, like quitting beer during Octoberfest. But the broad consensus is that corruption isn’t getting worse.

Kremlin propagandists - make no mistake, the Kremlin and its army of Twitter/X bots are some of the best liars and propagandists that the 20th and 21st centuries have known - short of that impressive run of Goebbels - are busy.  

But it is strange how pro-Putinists in the US put this argument in their pro-Putin bromance kit when Putin is considered by many to be the richest man in the world. He owns a nearly 200,000-square-foot palace on the Black Sea and is estimated to be worth about $200 billion. 

He does well for someone making  $140k annually.  

The Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend.  

Humans have a strong tendency to join tribes.  But it’s run amock in an age where most people get their information from the staccato info bursts our algorithmic overlords offer to us digital peasants.  The heuristic of “if they are an enemy of my enemy, they must be friends” is painless and easy.  It's also quite dumb.  

But being dumb today is not an impediment. Furthermore, when readers judge a country thousands of miles away from which they get precious little information (because that country controls the media), they will get nothing more than state propaganda that those clever little Kremlin bots and Kremlin-backed fellow travellers curate. 

A report, Enemy of My Enemy, put out by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, studied two years of Twitter/X activity, including the lead-up to Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, military assault on Ukraine, and traced how accounts aligned with President Vladimir Putin’s messaging disseminated pro-Kremlin narratives in Canadian Twitter/X discussions.

While researchers were following this spicy tale of Russian information-warfare campaigns getting all cosy with Canadian Twitter/X users, around 200,000 Twitter/X accounts were retweeting what the report describes as the greatest hits of the Kremlin’s playlist. Classics like, "Ukraine is just too corrupt for us," "NATO started this war," and the chart-topper, "Russia is just helping Ukraine get rid of Nazis (and their Jew President!)." 

And here’s the kicker: a quarter of those polled were like, "Russian disinfo-what now?" The report also shows evidence of 90 pro-Kremlin Twitter/X influencers throwing serious social media parties, attracting Canada's far right and far left. Though these groups probably can't agree on the colour of new snow, they are bonding over their shared hobby of not wanting Canada to send help to Ukraine.

And for a twist on old stereotypes: the far-right is fangirling over Putin's "down with globalism" hits, while the far-left has been jamming to Moscow’s anti-Western tracks since the Cold War was a thing. 

They Pushed Him; I Hate It When People Push Me.

The West pulled a fast one on Russia at the Cold War's curtain call. They promised no NATO expansion, then went all-in, totally ghosting on integrating Russia into this shiny new European security clique. Instead, they nudged Moscow into its old beef with the US and pals. This storyline—crafted to perfection—makes it look like NATO's the bad guy here, and it's messing with heads over in NATO lands, making it seem like Russia got the raw end of the deal.

Please note that this is an exceptional usage of the oppressor versus oppressed narrative. Well done, Vladimir, you poor oppressed man. 

Who's preaching this? In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron spilt at a forum in St. Petersburg that NATO might have dropped the ball over the past two decades, sparking "reasonable" Russian fears. US scholar Michael Mandelbaum and German journalist Gabriele Krone-Schmalz also echoed this sentiment around NATO's expansion, pushing Russia into a corner.

Even John Mearsheimer, a US academic and fan of Dr Evil and Russia, traced Ukraine's issues back to NATO's expansion under Clinton, saying it was unnecessary since Russia was pretty much a non-threat at that time.  Mearsheimer is a busy man; he seems to hate Israel more than he hates Ukraine, stating that he is sure that the IDF murdered those concertgoers in Israel as they wanted to save on ransom money—a clever two-in-one trope, the cheap Jew and the false accusation of Israel being a country that murderers its teenagers. 

But why is this narrative a bit off? In 1990, the Soviets agreed to a united Germany in NATO without securing a solid no-expansion promise. Post-Cold War, the whole geopolitical game changed. Russia started feeling left out with NATO’s enlargement party, but hey, they even recognised the freedom for states to choose their security alignments in 1990. Fast-forward to 1999, and NATO's actions in Kosovo stirred the pot, leaving Russia feeling sidelined yet again.

Long story short, while some big names thought NATO expansion was the original sin, it wasn’t just about expanding; it was about adapting to a Europe where Russia wasn’t the only one calling the shots. Russia’s ongoing grudge against NATO expansion seems to have more to do with lost influence than broken promises. 

Putin’s Tough, He Sits Properly, Not Like Trudeau’s Girly Style

 When Trudeau sits, he looks like he is trying to stop a spoon he dropped on his lap from falling through his legs.  Although shorter and older, Vlad still has not given up pursuing the stone-cold mafia killer image.  But when Putin’s ex-cook Prigozhin, along with a large gang of Wagner Group soldiers, started advancing on Moscow, Putin went all wobbly and left town. This is also the guy who is more paranoid about COVID-19 than your 73-year-old single aunt, that aunt who has barely left her apartment in three years.  

Putin famously eats at a table with the other end two first downs away.  The US just told him ISIS was coming, and he said I don’t need your help.  Then ISIS came and killed 135 citizens.  But Putin was sure tough on the terrorists after he ignored warnings and let them through; his press made sure to show one guy two-ear challenged and another looking like he lost a bar fight.  And even Russians didn’t believe Putin’s sad attempt to blame Ukraine. 

Ukrainians Sound Russian and Putin says they are all a happy family.  

If you listen, Putin has fake historical narratives, but if you fancy relying on Tucker Carlson’s fawning love-sick school girl’s crush version, please move to the library's fiction section. However, Carlson has shown a tendency to pursue stories that he knows are false because he knows that they get him more attention and more money.  I respect this position more than the fanboy bleacher seat where he can’t stop mooning at Putin.

Tom Holland, for instance, criticised Putin's extensive narrative about Russian history, deeming it "calamitous" and noting how it distorts facts to suit a Russian-centric view. He emphasised the misuse of historical events and comparisons, likening Russia's claim over Ukraine to Britain's claim over Ireland, which he found bizarre.​

Another historian, Sergey Radchenko from Johns Hopkins, countered Putin's narrative that Russia as a state dates back to the 9th century, pointing out that the same could be said for Ukraine, highlighting the selective use of history to create a state-centric narrative favouring Russia.  Ronald Suny from the University of Michigan also criticised the mythologising of Russian history, noting it was shaped to justify imperial control over Ukraine. 

You think Your Mother and Me are Made of Money Reason.

Note: Canada isn’t a threat; the navy’s motto is, “Let’s see if this used piece of junk sinks.” Their air force is constantly solicited with Smithsonian Military Cold War Museum donor requests, and their troops famously were - until quite recently - still using pistols left over from WWII.

Can’t afford it is often combined with accusations of Zelensky stealing Ukraine’s defence funding. The US spends less proportionately on Ukraine than the major Western European countries, but there is also the pay me now or later issue. Not to mention that, according to the Washington Post, 90% of U.S. military expenses for Ukraine are spent in America on American equipment.

If the U.S. stops funding Putin and gives him Ukraine, it likely will trigger a massive attack of “Keeping up with the Russians” envy and the wet dream of a Taiwan conquest will be made real.  How would I know?  I wouldn’t, I’m an idiot, but Xi has said so himself, and I’m a trusting soul.  

I wonder where the snotty talking heads on TV who condescendingly said that only an idiot would think that a guy who is massing his troops on your border might invade?   

Yes, the expert opinion says that if the  US doesn’t step up, it will trigger them to beam the pussy version of the bat signal into the sky for signal watchers in Moscow and Beijing,  and the next ten years of military expenses will climb.  So again, pay me now or pay me later.  

Probably Putin will see the pussy bat signal, and he will develop a late-night craving for Polish sausages. 

iLong live Ukraine.  

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