I’m going to apologize for the tone of my last blog post. What got me annoyed was I heard “poking the bear” several times in the past few days online and a family member, who I thought would not have forgotten how the Russians operate, used the “poking the bear” rationale too. I was a bit stunned actually, but she trusts Tucker Carlson and kept saying he brings up lots of good points and he’s right most of the time. She’s mentioned things he’s said numerous times. I happened to see Tucker Carlson mocking the people in the media who criticized him and doubling down on his talking point, “Why would Russia blow up its own pipeline?” spiel, just like he keeps bringing back that retired COL who urged the US and Europe not to help Ukraine and that guy made excuses for Putin’s full-scale invasion too.
I’ve been a tad perplexed and a tad dismayed at how much our domestic spin info war, waged by our own crazy partisans, has polarized Americans not only about hot button culture war topics, but it’s led to many Americans now viewing American foreign policy strictly through that extreme partisan filter too.
Everyone has a right to believe whatever they want, of course, but I keep wondering how bizarre America has become. On the left we’ve got the liberal media working to silence views and information to bolster Democrat narratives and such an evil and demented gender activism that preys on children. There’s also a relentless effort to spread fear of right-wing Americans. In the right-wing media it’s filled with a lot of hysteria, paranoia and often selling Kremlin propaganda and there’s a pervasive stream of selling fear of liberals.
We live in strange and troubling times. My blog post was the Cold War warrior that’s still inside me venting. I still love that family member and she’s entitled to her opinions.
For the record, the Russians have staged numerous events and then blamed NATO. They loved to forge documents about Western European officials, then leak those forged documents into western media. The West German government was a target numerous times. So, the idea of Russia damaging a pipeline that they had already shut down and that’s half-owned by Western companies, didn’t sound implausible to me. Russia has aggressively been expanding its oil and gas markets world-wide to survive the sanctions and it’s exerted pressure on OPEC and Venezuela to freeze the US and Europeans out of acquiring more oil. Putin is willing to play hardball, probably harder than the Europeans, who had still been sniveling to Moscow and trying to get Putin to relent on shutting down Nord Stream. Plus Biden and the Europeans were still buying Russian oil, despite the ban they placed on Russian oil.
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