Wagging the Dog in Ukraine
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Wagging a dog in the Ukraine. If you haven’t seen the movie, I’ll talk a little bit about it. It was a great movie, came out late 1990s, I think it was 1997, 1998. And Barry Levinson movie had Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, David Mamet did the screenplay on this. And basically it’s about how political operators, make a long story short, political operators is scandal in the White House.
President of the United States gets caught messing around with underage girls and they concoct a fake war to distract the public from the president’s scandal. And again, I highly recommend the movie. Talking about wagging the dog in the Ukraine.
I don’t know, I’m trying to throw this out here. I’m trying to figure out, more and more stories that I get coming out and the research and with the people that I’m talking to, that the conversations that are being had with actual military personnel on the ground, the situation is not good by any stretch, the imagination. It’s not even just that, it’s on the periphery. What’s happening in some of these European nations when it comes to their overall military? I mean, this past weekend, you had one of
Zelensky’s supporters walk into a town hall meeting upset because the amount of money that the local politicians were taking because of the war and lining their pockets blew up the meeting with a couple of grenades. I’m not kidding. That happened. That happened. Right now, I mean, you take a look at the numbers.
at the estimates of Ukrainians that are killed in action. They go from 30,000 to over 400,000. You know what? A lot of people, they’re putting estimates that Russia killed in action as high as 50 to 60 thousand in this. And again, you take a look at some of the numbers here.
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Again, they mobilize 2,400,000. This is the numbers that they’re coming up with at this point in time. Okay, I don’t know what the exact numbers are, but obviously it’s gonna be a bit of a problem if you’re not gonna be able to bring more people to the front lines. And that’s part of the conversations being had. Recruiters are basically pulling people off the streets and the Ukraine. But it’s not just there. It’s not just there.
This is with our allies. One of the things that’s being presented, not, yeah, a little bit by the Biden administration, but you’re also getting the conservative pundits that are all in on this too. The fact that, you know, this is something that they gotta continue. I don’t know if it’s because of the defense contractor nonsense or what. Story today in the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins. My jaw dropped. I don’t even know where this guy’s getting his information from.
I don’t know, but he’s painting this rosy picture about what’s going on in the Ukraine and that, ah, now Putin is going to have to deal with a brand new spanking great NATO rearming and rejuvenated NATO.
Huh? I know, and then one of you are, well, you know, we just got Finland and Sweden. Finland and Sweden are 31st and 32nd in the world as far as military expenditures are concerned. When you look at all of these small nations that join NATO, you know what you’re looking at is? It’s another mouth to feed.
It’s another mouth to feed and who’s doing the feeding? That would be us. That would be us and don’t look at it any other way. Don’t listen to the BS claptrap, how awesome is Kumbaya, Chardonnay party sipping non-Semite NATO headquarters. Okay, we’re driving this bus. I’ll get into the recruitment efforts in Europe in a bit here, but this piece today talks about you.
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Ukrainians have fought tenaciously. They’re not about to go slack in the face of significant Russian offensive. If it comes out offensive will be compromised as ever by Putin’s unwillingness to supply the necessary manpower. His unwillingness to replace his grafting and politicized military leadership. His unwillingness to empower his generals to pursue the kind of battlefield success that might produce a challenger to his aging rule. I mean, this is some conspiracy theory stuff. It’s coming up.
She’s saying that Putin is afraid of winning because he’s afraid that he’s gonna lose an election. This is the Wall Street Journal today. It’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? And he says that it’s gonna be easy. Right now, it’s easy peasy, according to Holman Jenkins in the Journal today. Putin is gonna stop fighting in 2025 because a 1% increase, GDP increase in NATO defense spending
would be the equivalent of a 24% increase by Russia. Mr. Putin’s 70% planned hike in actual outlays in 2024 equal to about 2% of GDP is not a repeatable event. Even though our rearmament has been paltry and slow to get off the ground, eventually it will swap Russia’s year after year. Are you kidding me?
So you think that NATO, you think we’re just going to continue writing checks forever?
Western equipment will be able to offset Mr. Putin’s ability to throw poorly trained recruits and to battle on Tuesday and have them returned in body bags on Friday. Ukraine was never going to be given the arms to fight this war by attacking air bases, military factories, and transport hubs across the vastness of Russia. But the capabilities it relies on instead, such as ground maneuver, benefit from having time to train and become familiar with equipment. Are you serious?
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I guess this is a Wall Street Journal editorial piece today. This is kind of have a clue what’s actually happening on the ground over there. The Wall Street Journal had a piece last week, basically talking about how awful the conditions are and the soldiers in trenches, voila World War I, getting bit up by rats at night.
You think that this is this war of attrition is something Ukraine’s going to win because of NATO help?
This is the same bullcrap we were told about Afghanistan as we continue to pour more and more and more money into it for two decades in Iraq.
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Each dollar helps to secure an investment already made in restarting the West’s defense industrial base and dismantling Russia’s vaunted military modernization while establishing a battle hardened modern Ukrainian army to serve as a linchpin of European security for decades to come. Are you out of your mind? This is one of the most corrupt countries in the entire world. This is who you’re.
You’re putting your horse, you’re betting on Ukraine?
They oligarchs, they run their basic system just like Russia does for crying out loud. Are you nuts?
This again, I’ve described it. It’s like an African country. An African country that is rich and all sorts of natural resources, but the people there are in poverty. Lowest per capita GDP in Europe, the lowest. And this is in the journal today. And let’s go to all of these rosy predictions in regards to Europe is gonna man it up. NATO is manning up.
Right. Fact, the British Army is now the smallest it has been in. Two hundred years. Let’s say that again. The British Army is the smallest it’s been in two hundred years. And Germany. The military recruitment crisis is so bad that they’re thinking about bringing back conscription.
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Yeah, yeah, wow.
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184,000 UK troops, that’s what they got. 184,000, 75,000 are regular soldiers, that’s it.
That’s it. 75,000, the rest are reservists. Now think about that. It’s the smallest it’s been in 200 years. 200 years ago, the population of Britain was 20 million. Now it’s 70 million.
Yeah, and now, you know, they’re debating this in the UK and thinking about bringing back conscription, Germany as well. German politics is not going to happen. That’s not I mean, years ago, we were making fun of, you know, he was watching German troops train with fake guns, wooden guns. I mean, the toy guns that I had when I was a kid were more realistic than the ones that the German soldiers were training with.
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You got to understand what NATO is. NATO is us.
It’s us. You know, that’s the reality of NATO. And to think that all of a sudden these European countries are all of a sudden going to start, you know. Spending a fortune on armistice? No. I mean, again, you got certain politicians there. Poland actually is recognizing this saying, hey, wait, we got to wake up here because the United States is going to be shifting its priorities to other places around the globe.
At some point in time, we’re going to have to start defending ourselves. But again, good luck with that. You go through and you take a look. Take a look at the amount of countries within NATO that are actually spending the required 2% of their GDP on defense. Few and far between. And Trump was eviscerated.
for that when he went after NATO and all of these countries. Oh my God, it’s a NATO alliance and you’re not making friends. Give me a break. I’m gonna give Trump some credit here what he said about Ukraine. And he said, I know Zelensky well and I know Putin very well, even better. And I had a good relationship, very good with both of them. I would tell Zelensky, no more, you gotta make a deal. I would tell Putin, if you don’t make a deal.
We’re going to give them a lot. We’re going to give them more than they ever got. If we have to, I will have the deal done in one day, one day. You know, I’m gonna be honest, people, anybody have anything against what Trump was saying here? Anybody at all? I know, left us out there, you’re abandoning Ukraine. I’m sorry, okay, guess what? You’re gonna need to have a negotiation. You know, Russia’s gonna end up getting Crimea.
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Maybe you can negotiate all of these other territories and back it out and come up with something. But when, as soon as we said we’re not gonna negotiate in this situation, it was one of the dumbest things we could possibly do. It basically said, you know what, now we’re in. We’re in, it’s like the old pottery barn theory, you broke it, you buy it. So now we’re in, but we’re in for how long? For how long? Again, I don’t know, you know.
The House of Representatives adjourned, they went home, probably getting phone calls, Republicans from their friendly neighborhood defense contractors. Please, please, you gotta pass this, this is good for business, we’re gonna be money back home to the district and the usual nonsense. Biden, on the other hand, the wag the dog bit. You know, he ends Ukraine, there’s some sort of negotiated settlement, Nick, and ends up saying, oh, he’s weak, like it was with Afghanistan.
and he doesn’t want to see that happen. So again, we the taxpayers, the United States, at some point, at some point in time, we have to push back on this. You’re gonna have to start saying enough’s enough here. I’m tired, I’m quite frankly, you see all these politicians, it really, it kind of ticks me off. They’re all wearing their Ukrainian flags on their lapels and…
Where are you going to find a Ukrainian flag here, there, and everywhere? And okay, you want to put that stuff up. You know, why not? And I was thinking about this because, you know, we have all of these adventures that, you know, the president decides without any sort of formal authorization from Congress. We don’t declare war. We send soldiers all over the place. Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe maybe we need more mercenary groups here in the United States. Maybe we need our own. I mean, we have.
Was it Blackwater and some of those ones? Maybe like that Wagner group that Putin uses all the time. And people wanna sign up or you wanna send your kids off to fight for the Ukraine, you can sign them up and they can join that paramilitary group or Blackwater group or whatever it may be and have them handle this. Because people at some point in time, some point in time, and when’s enough? I mean, seriously, when’s enough?
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and we’re complaining, we’re not spending enough on our military, we’re like, oh no, it’s never enough. And then you take a look, look it up yourself, see where we are in the world compared to everybody else. And I’m all for having a powerful military. But the amount of money, we’re talking close to $200 billion and we’re being told, ah, it’s well worth it, it’s a great investment. Yeah, I’m not buying that. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.
