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Neville Chamberlain
With very few exceptions -- mobsters, warlords, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un, Bashar al-Assad, Ramzan Kadyrov and the like -- no one's ever had an unequivocally "good" call with Vladimir Putin. If you're on the phone with Putin, you've probably already made a mistake. And Elon Musk's been on the phone with him, allegedly.
There are world leaders other than Xi and Kim capable of conversing with Putin without coming away compromised. Recep Tayyip Erdogan's one of them. So's Narendra Modi. And Mohammed
Ramzan Kadyrov may be the most ruthless of the bunch. Hell, Chechens even carry out terror attacks in Moscow! In the good old days when one could reply to Russian extortion attempts to squelch the most embarrassing videos they have of you visiting porn websites, I’d reply in Russian that I would, indeed, like to settle up with them. But not via Bitcoin in person. In Grozny. None ever took up my offer despite my assurances that “your safety will be assured because the exchange would be carried out in a room in the government security ministry where my brother-in-law works.”
That said, “the lamb being led to the slaughter” seems very apropos to Trump and Zelensky.
Robert Hansen’s handler tweeted today “The Trump administration preemptively concedes to key RU demands before the talks even started. “Art of the deal”. In Trump We Trust.”
Trump as the modern-day Neville Chamberlain, in relation to his “discussions” with Putin, is just so right and it is all you need to know in determining how things will unfold from here… very clever analogy.
I knew Trump had no knowledge of history, and Putin surely does. Munich – Jesus H Christ! The first of Little Marco’s many humiliations.
Another Putz sitting on our collective faces: Trump, Putin, Hegseth. Musk and all his babies …. Putin knows, as he always has, that he doesn’t have to conquer us, he just has to fawn over our empty air head, and Bob’s your uncle, we lose.
Yep, Putin is happy to let Trump and crew focus on domestic “enemies.” The fact that so many people treat the media, civil servants, transgender, and immigrants as the enemies is a sad state of affairs, but Trump sure loves to bully people who are constrained in how they can respond.
H-Man, maybe Trump and Putin could meet in Germany and call it “Munich Agreement II” or “Sudetenland Reborn”. Poland will have an itchy trigger finger in all of this after what happened to Czechoslovakia during WW II and that peace agreement.
We are no worse off than if we still had Biden, but that isn’t saying much. Too bad a better class of Americans don’t seek the presidency. Reporting every move instantly on social media sounds more like Brittany Spears than a president of the United States.
We’re 4 weeks in – give it a little time. Things can and will get worse for a lot of people.