Left Jabs

Given the recent fire hose of news, I’ve decided to be a little more short-winded this week, weighing in briefly on not one, but three subjects, none of which is Ukraine. Yes, I still believe Putin is enjoying an elaborate bluff, but I’m resisting the urge to write anything today that might make me look silly tomorrow. So let’s instead start with the rumblings of impatience about Merrick Garland’s DOJ, which are as persistent as they are misguided.   Patience Isn’t My Thing, Either I get it. We’d all love to have seen our favorite villains in prison by now. And who can blame us for assuming no news is bad news? But when it comes to the Department of Justice, we should never mistake silence for inaction. And I think we might just be missing what this silence is telling us. Consider that there hasn’t been a single significant leak from Garland’s department. Not one. All those prosecutors, all those investigators, all those people in the field — and no leaks...

Any capable writer would have looked at the words “legitimate political discourse” and said “Uh Ronna? Can we talk privately?” Of course, the writer might’ve been less than capable. Or ignored altogether. Neither would come as a shock. But let’s assume there was a real copywriter on the job. You wouldn’t want to go to market without one, especially when you’re a political clown like Ronna McDaniel, and what you’re trying to market is conspiracy and sedition. Still, you can see how it happens. They’re in this meeting of the Resolutions Committee of the Republican National Committee. Ronna is RNC chair, so we guess she’s driving the effort. The purpose of the meeting is to write a censure resolution. They’re there to cobble together some sort of logic, no matter how tortured, that can justify the censure of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Everyone on the Zoom call knows this is nuts. They all know it puts things on record that have no business being there. Yet someone — and I wo...

It’s cute that people think Putin needs a pretext to go to war. Did you see last week’s story about the staged atrocity shot on video, with Russian actors playing vicious Ukrainians? There was no big strategy behind it. It was just Putin having fun. Nothing to see here. It was just as silly when Hitler pulled the same thing in 1939. He dressed a few of his thugs in Polish army uniforms, who then raided a German radio station near the Polish border. Impersonating Poles, they started broadcasting bad things about Germany, a provocation that the German high command declared — almost as if they’d rehearsed it — too bellicose to ignore. They brought in a few prisoners from Dachau and shot them, just to make the scene look convincing, and the next day Germany invaded Poland with several tank divisions that, just by coincidence, were right there at the border when the “incident” occurred. So before we get too crazed about Putin ginning up the bloodlust of his citizenry, let’s acknowl...

War is no longer just about bullets and bombs. There are new, more subtle, less bloody ways to wage it. Vladimir Putin has a full arsenal of sophisticated weapons, not all of which go bang. He also has a lot of great reasons to not use them. Which doesn’t mean he won’t. His Ukraine gambit is fraught with risk, and nobody knows where he’s going with it. He might not know himself. But in terms of the evolution of warfare, both his strengths and his vulnerabilities are remarkable. With that in mind, let’s divide twenty-first-century weaponry into four categories — military, propaganda, cyber, and economic — and discuss amongst ourselves. Military Putin knows it’s harder to get out of hot wars than into them — Russia had its own Afghanistan quagmire to learn from. And hot wars are rarely popular. Recent polls show three out of four Russian citizens already detest him. Does he think soldiers coming home in body bags will improve that? The old shock-and-awe-type war has been show...