Now we have President Grandpa making an unannounced visit to the Ukraine, telling the Russians only hours before his arrival. Sure, this is helpful, isn't it?

It was all one gigantic photo op, with Biden hugging Zelenskyy in front of cameras, air raid sirens being activated only for effect, and empty, tough talk from Biden, with him doing that silly, embarrassing shit where he leans down and whispers into microphones. Its not just posturing, it's dangerous posturing with potentially disastrous consequences.

President Grandpa thinks he can out-crazy crazy. The truly insane are not guided by rational thought. You cannot merely behave as if you're unpredictable when, in fact, you are not unpredictable.

Listen to Putin's most recent public statements. Look at the Chinese and Russians drawing nearer to each other. Look at the way China is mocking us by not taking calls from our military leaders and laughing at us in public.

And for what? So this asshole Biden can reinforce the image he has of himself as a bad-ass hero? Joe Biden is a career politician, a self-serving and corrupt bureaucrat who has enriched himself and his family by unethical and illegal means.

He has no foreign policy talent and he thinks this is all a game. He's halfway to being a bowl of pudding, and I am astonished that any thinking person would approve of what Biden is doing and the tensions being created by our involvement in a regional conflict.

Leftists support this insanity entirely, and I am floored that anyone on the political center or right would support our rush to destabilize the world.

When we read history books- accounts of wars past- it all seems to occur fairly quickly, despite all the dates specified of outlined events, because the events are condensed to a digestible form on the page. In reality, though, actions and mistakes which can bring about war can occur at a slow pace, and this past year with our involvement in the Ukraine has been a slow lead-up to where we are now.

We- the United States- are making a huge mistake. In our efforts to once again be the world's savior, we have made things much worse. We have enraged a despot whose sanity is openly questioned and we have emboldened the Chinese with our buffoonish actions with those stupid balloons.

There is no pulling back from it now; the die is cast. We've stepped up, toe to toe with the Russians and if we blink and turn away, we come off weakened even more than the idiotic policies of the Biden administrations have made us.

We have made a terrible mistake. There is no way for me to adequately convey this to you. If our involvement in the Ukraine was calculated to prevent a possible European war, we have failed, because the danger is no longer the threat of a war confined to the European continent. The consequences of our choices are now far greater than that.

I lack the verbiage to indicate how vehemently I agree with your assessment. This is a major mistake, we're in it now with no signs of trying to veer off the path to a global conflict we're not going to withstand unscathed.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
President Grandpa thinks he can out-crazy crazy. The truly insane are not guided by rational thought. You cannot merely behave as if you're unpredictable when, in fact, you are not.

I was too young to understand it as it happened, but I've been told this is exactly what Reagan pulled off and a major reason why the USSR crumbled. "Star Wars" and space lasers and making them think he was crazy enough to pull off some sci-fi movie stuff. They spent themselves broke trying to keep up with someone they felt was just unpredictable enough to vaporize Moscow from orbit. Biden doesn't bring that brand of crazy to the table. He thinks he's tough, but he never played a cowboy in a movie and this isn't the 80's. Maybe he'd like to think he can affect that kind of swagger, and that's the scary part. The man truly thinks he's intimidating and apparently some people in this country do, too.

quote:

We have made a terrible mistake. There is no way for me to adequately convey this to you. If our involvement in the Ukraine was calculated to prevent a possible European war, we have failed, because the danger is no longer the threat of a war confined to the European continent. The consequences of our choices are now far greater than that.

You've conveyed it well. It is a terrible mistake.

Chance the Gardener, the character from Being There would have been a better POTUS. Biden is a corrupt, more evil version of Chance, he knows NOTHING that is pertinent to being a leader of a nation.

Biden is no doubt over his head and really has no clue what he's doing. Weak leader all the way around.

I'm still in favor of the US, EU and NATO countries supply Ukraine with arms and technology. I've read this thread more than once and there are good argument for not getting involved because it's a European problem and Ukraine is corrupt and that border battles have been the norm forever in Europe.

I get that but I also turn back to Germany in WW2 and picture Russia as the modern day Germany. If we took the same approach to Germany as many are advocating here, we should have been content to let them keep Poland in 1939, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and France in 1940 and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941 too.

We wouldn't have fought back or assisted Great Britain because it was their problem too.

It was only because the US stepped in do we have the free countries in Europe that we do today.

You think this is the same thing? You think Putin is going to have tanks rolling into Poland? And then moving into Western Europe after that?

Peppered throughout the conversations in this forum about this conflict, members have pointed out that the Russian Bear is actually a paper tiger.

We can't have it both ways. We can't say that Russia lacks the military might it evinces, and then turn around and suggest that Putin's goal is the conquest of Europe.

I understand the WWII analogy. But the main difference now is the potential of it going nuke. Our other wars were waged on foreign soil. The next one may well be in your yard.

We're monkeys who've managed to develop god-like technology capable of causing a complete collapse of civilization the world over. We're fucking around with people who do not look at the world in any way approximating our own. What do you think is going to happen when we back these crazy sons o' bitches into a corner and leave them only one option? After that, there will be no fixing it.

[FLASH_VIDEO] [/FLASH_VIDEO]

Biden tonight in Poland boarding Air Force One
It has become a normal part of his routine.

<<I'm still in favor of the US, EU and NATO countries supply Ukraine with arms and technology. I've read this thread more than once and there are good argument for not getting involved because it's a European problem and Ukraine is corrupt and that border battles have been the norm forever in Europe>>.

There is no Constitutional basis for supplying Ukraine with weapons. I don't always agree with Napolitano but his article in today's Washington Times should be required reading.


https://m.washingtontimes.com/...onstitutional-war-i/

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
You think this is the same thing? You think Putin is going to have tanks rolling into Poland? And then moving into Western Europe after that?

Peppered throughout the conversations in this forum about this conflict, members have pointed out that the Russian Bear is actually a paper tiger.

We can't have it both ways. We can't say that Russia lacks the military might it evinces, and then turn around and suggest that Putin's goal is the conquest of Europe.

Are you discounting Putin's actions to reclaim the entirety of the Russian territory they once owned/claimed/ruled?

Russia is playing the long game on this. They have a puppet state in Belarus and they have Crimea and now want Ukraine. There's no plan to have a blitzkrieg and conquer countries like Germany but it's myopic to believe that Russia doesn't have greater and ongoing intent. Putin has said so. There's absolutely no evidence that says otherwise.

If there's no intent for Russia to move into neighboring countries, Poland is just being paranoid? Moldava too? Poland has been under Russian screws before and has no intention of ever letting them get the opportunity to try again.

We played this game of territorial ambitions in the 30s and 40s. Russia is playing it again.

It's a quagmire and will end badly. The US taxpayer does not have any interests in Eastern Europe and shouldn't be funding this carnage. To suggest that Russia doesn't have interests in Eastern Europe is intellectually dishonest...it's obviously their neighborhood. Bizarre that people in the US have taken this as a moral crusade. Puzzling.

quote:

Originally posted by Flashlightboy:
Are you discounting Putin's actions to reclaim the entirety of the Russian territory they once owned/claimed/ruled?

That, I am. I'm discounting it all to Hell. We're slashing prices on all despots. Buy one, get one free.

Putin can have all the goals he wants, but achieving those goals is something else. Just look at the trouble he's having in the Ukraine. What makes anyone think that he has the juice to keep going when he can't even seem to finish the job there?

quote:

Originally posted by bdylan:
It's a quagmire..

Giggity!

You can't compare this current regional fight to pre-WWII. At 1 year into WWII, Germany was no paper tiger with a line of equipment stuck in neutral and supplies sitting stagnant for 35 miles.
There was no former comedian as the Prime Minister of U.K, no shopping sprees (austerity was the word), and the US wasn't spending its time with its collective head up its ass, going "woke"

Its intellectually dishonest to ignore the facts, and it all goes back to the original OP statement: This is a circus, with most of this touchy-feely, 2-second tick-tock sound bite nation ignoring the real coming attraction.

We should be hyper focused on China, which is hell-bent on arming itself to defeat us, while we as a nation are depleting our nation's military might, bleeding it financially, ruining morale, and spending needed resources on teaching (and financing surgery) gender neutrality/alphabet soup.

The Chinese aren't just laughing out loud, they are licking their chops, and doing it publicly, with party balloons

quote:

Originally posted by drtenb330:
You can't compare this current regional fight to pre-WWII. At 1 year into WWII, Germany was no paper tiger with a line of equipment stuck in neutral and supplies sitting stagnant for 35 miles.
There was no former comedian as the Prime Minister of U.K, no shopping sprees (austerity was the word), and the US wasn't spending its time with its collective head up its ass, going "woke"

Its intellectually dishonest to ignore the facts, and it all goes back to the original OP statement: This is a circus, with most of this touchy-feely, 2-second tick-tock sound bite nation ignoring the real coming attraction.

We should be hyper focused on China, which is hell-bent on arming itself to defeat us, while we as a nation are depleting our nation's military might, bleeding it financially, ruining morale, and spending needed resources on teaching (and financing surgery) gender neutrality/alphabet soup.

The Chinese aren't just laughing out loud, they are licking their chops, and doing it publicly, with party balloons

In the early stages of WW2 we didn't have NATO or the EU and the weapons and support that's currently being provided to Ukraine. It's unreasonable to assume that Ukraine would still be in this fight if there was no Western support.

I'm reading all the isolationist approaches and disapproval of our helping Ukraine however that same approach would also suggest that we allow China to do whatever it wants in Southeast Asia. The same argument that keeps us out of the regional Ukrainian conflict would also us ignore China.

China is the real problem and they are watching our response and the response from the West relative to Ukraine and they are learning our weaknesses and will move towards Taiwan and other areas.

There's more than one devil in the world and ideologically it's difficult to engage with China and ignore Russia or vice versa. There are some differences of course but if you're going to go full blown isolationist, China should get a pass from us too.

So... not wanting to get involved in another European border dispute means we have to let China do whatever they want? Isn't that basically the message we've already given them directly on just about every single issue for decades? It's not like it matters with Biden in the White House anyway, we could send Ukraine F16's next week and if China invaded Taiwan the next day, we wouldn't do a damn thing about it.

Fuck China. They're a problem orders of magnitude bigger than Russia and you can't convince me otherwise.

We made China a world supplier & power.

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:
Fuck China. They're a problem orders of magnitude bigger than Russia and you can't convince me otherwise.

Very true. If anything that may understate the problem with China.

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:
So... not wanting to get involved in another European border dispute means we have to let China do whatever they want? Isn't that basically the message we've already given them directly on just about every single issue for decades? It's not like it matters with Biden in the White House anyway, we could send Ukraine F16's next week and if China invaded Taiwan the next day, we wouldn't do a damn thing about it.

Fuck China. They're a problem orders of magnitude bigger than Russia and you can't convince me otherwise.

Ideologically I don't think you can make an argument to stay out of Ukraine but justify a response to China in the East if they, say attack, Taiwan. It's just a historical border dispute between them, right. Look at how China treated Hong Kong when the Brits left. It was supposed to be an independent Hong Kong and today it's anything but.

China is a problem, much more than Russia, but you can't say Ukraine doesn't serve our support because it's corrupt or doesn't really affect us but that Taiwan is worth defending because they make the chips for your electronics.

Either we push back on both of them or we push back on neither of them.