In which the pond goes to war with the reptiles, thanks to the presence of petulant Peta embracing foreign affairs ...

 

The pond always looks forward to Thursdays, because petulant Peta is usually out and about, and so the pond can take a break ... and so it came to pass yet again ...

What an odd juxtaposition in the reptile triptych of terror, but more of the French clock lover anon.

Meanwhile, a quick dismissal to the stands ...

Stand up and speak out for common sense? These days mediocre government? Political contest? Speak up and take a stand? How quickly they forget ...

And what was that snap good for?  Why, mediocre government of course, and an abject lack of common sense, and a road to ruin ... because those who can't, turn into News Corp hacks who still can't ...

Ah the savvy Savva, long gone from these pages ... but speaking of how quickly they forget it would be remiss of the pond not to acknowledge Moustafa Bayoumi scribbling in The Graudian The Iraq war started the post-truth era. And America is to blame ...

The pond has a minor quibble. The post-truth era probably started with that routine the long absent lord pulled on Adam and Eve, but in the pond's living memory there was also the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which has its own wiki here. 

And then there's Lt Commander Pat Paterson, US Navy, February 2008, in full at the US Naval Institute here back in February 2008:

Questions about the Gulf of Tonkin incidents have persisted for more than 40 years. But once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Well yes, so we should at least date the modern post-truth era to August 1964, though some might like to wander back to 1953 and Mohammed Mossadeq's Iranian government being overthrown with the help of the CIA and MI6 (or so the wiki says here).

That said, the pond did enjoy Moustafa Bayoumi slagging off all the liars and boofheads, including but not limited to the NY Times ...

...The New York Times, as the nation’s leading newspaper, played a key role in disseminating the administration’s lies with, well, let’s call it questionable professionalism.
By 2004, the paper was issuing its own mea culpa, admitting it had misled readers about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and more, because accounts by anti-Saddam exiles “were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq”.
In all its agonized self-reflection, the Times’ editorial somehow managed to blame foreign exiles above the US government or even the Times. “Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources,” the editorial said. “So did many news organizations – in particular, this one.”

Well yes, even if the pond is about to soil itself by quoting the rag ...

Anyhoo, relieved of the duty of giving a flying fuck about petulant Peta, it's a foreign affairs day, with the curmudgeon Keating sure to trigger the bromancer, but first up, there's another quisling in the ranks, and this time it's the gravely gloomy Sexton, doing his bit for Vlad the impaler ...

What's important to remember, but is usually forgotten, especially by the Neville Chamberlains and gloomy Sextons, is the Budapest Memorandum, signed back on 5th December 1994 ...

According to the three memoranda, Russia, the US and the UK confirmed their recognition of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine becoming parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and effectively abandoning their nuclear arsenal to Russia, and that they agreed to the following:

1. Respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders.
2. Refrain from the threat or the use of force against the signatory.
3. Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by the signatory of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.
4. Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".
5. Refrain from the use of nuclear arms against the signatory.
6. Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments. (wiki here for the footnotes).

But what's a scrap of paper promising peace and territorial integrity to a Vlad the impaler or a gloomy Sexton, especially when there's NATO to blame? Allegedly ...

Yes, it's hardly useful, but it is increasingly popular, because the appeasers, lickspittle fellow travellers and quislings are gaining strength, and taking the Tuckyo Rose line ... and that's led to something of a fuss, per the NY Times, paywall, with Swannie team tagging with Maggie ...

There's an all-out war between the isolationists, the appeasers and the lickspittle fellow travellers and the rest, and what do you know, Ms Lindsey is on the other team, and for those who have paywall issues a lengthy blurb follows...

...Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in an interview on Tuesday morning that he “could not disagree more” with Mr. DeSantis’s characterization of the stakes attached to the defense of Ukraine.

“The Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends well,” said Mr. Graham, comparing Mr. DeSantis to the British prime minister who appeased Adolf Hitler. “This is an attempt by Putin to rewrite the map of Europe by force of arms.”

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also took issue with Mr. DeSantis’s comments — a significant rebuke from the senior Republican in Mr. DeSantis’s home state.

“I don’t know what he’s trying to do or what the goal is,” Mr. Rubio, a former presidential candidate, told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.

And Senator John Cornyn of Texas told Politico he was “disturbed” by Mr. DeSantis’s comments.

Mr. Trump has long made his views on foreign intervention clear, railing against the Iraq war in his 2016 campaign, but Mr. DeSantis had sought to avoid being pinned down on one of the most important foreign policy questions facing the prospective Republican presidential field.

His choice of words, describing the conflict as a “territorial dispute,” was telling. By referring to Russia’s unprovoked invasion that way, he dismissed the argument that Mr. Putin’s aggression threatened the postwar international order. Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump have unequivocally rejected the idea that the conflict is a war to defend “freedom,” a position espoused by two of their potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador.

Mr. DeSantis left himself some wiggle room in his statement, which came in response to a questionnaire that Mr. Carlson had sent to all of the major prospective Republican presidential candidates. The governor did not promise to end all U.S. aid to Ukraine — an omission noticed by some hard-line opponents of support for Ukraine, who criticized Mr. DeSantis for leaving open the possibility that he would keep up the flow of American assistance.

Yet by downplaying the stakes of the conflict to the extent he did, Mr. DeSantis angered many Republicans in the foreign policy establishment who said he had talked himself into a corner. Even if he were to change his mind about Ukraine, how would a President DeSantis rally the public and Congress to send billions of dollars and high-tech weapons for a mere “territorial dispute” of no vital interest to America?

Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, said that the remarks were “a naïve and complete misunderstanding of the historical context of what’s going on,” and that authoritarians would fill the void if the U.S. retreated from global leadership.

Charles Kupperman, who served under John R. Bolton as a deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, said Mr. DeSantis had shown “a very poor understanding of our national security interests,” adding, “I’m surprised he’s gone so far so fast.”

It was unclear who, if anyone, helped Mr. DeSantis write the statement.

Ms. Haley, one of the three major Republicans who have announced a 2024 campaign, released her response to Mr. Carlson on Tuesday, offering an unequivocal “yes” to the question of whether stopping Russia was of vital interest to the U.S.

“America is far better off with a Ukrainian victory than a Russian victory, including avoiding a wider war,” she said. “If Russia wins, there is no reason to believe it will stop at Ukraine.”

Conservatives who want the United States to shift its focus away from Europe to focus on combating China were delighted by Mr. DeSantis’s statement.

“Americans desperately need a foreign policy that understands what’s really in their interests and pursues those interests strategically and realistically in a dangerous world,” said Elbridge Colby, a former senior official at the Defense Department who recently briefed Senate Republicans on China policy.

“That’s clearly the approach Governor DeSantis laid out in his response to Tucker Carlson,” Mr. Colby added. “He prioritized the top threats to America, such as China and narcotics streaming over the border, rightly seeing Ukraine as a distraction from these top challenges, while also rejecting the Wilsonian radicalism that has led us to disaster before and would be catastrophic if pursued today.”

And there is a sharp divide between elite Republican opinion and the views of party voters. While many top Republicans were outraged by Mr. DeSantis’s statement, he and Mr. Trump stand closer to the average G.O.P. voter than Republicans like Mr. McConnell who are urging Mr. Biden to do more to support Ukraine.

A January poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 40 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters thought the U.S. was giving too much support to Ukraine. Only 17 percent thought the U.S. was not doing enough.

Conservative interventionists had held out hope that Mr. DeSantis would split with Mr. Trump on Ukraine policy. Mr. DeSantis spooked them late last month when he suggested on Fox News that he was not committed to defending Ukraine.

But Mr. DeSantis’s comments in that interview were brief and vague enough for these conservatives to stay hopeful that he would end up on their side. They searched for positive signs, finding solace in Mr. DeSantis’s record in Congress. In 2014 and 2015, after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Mr. DeSantis criticized President Barack Obama as not doing enough to support Ukraine. In Florida, Mr. DeSantis recently hosted the historian William Inboden, the author of a recent book about President Ronald Reagan’s efforts during the Cold War, to exchange thoughts about foreign policy, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

Dr. Inboden and an associate did not respond to emails seeking comment. An aide to Mr. DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment.

Several hawks went into overdrive as they tried to lobby Mr. DeSantis. Kimberley A. Strassel, the Wall Street Journal columnist, urged him not to join what she called Mr. Trump’s “G.O.P. surrender caucus.”

“The governor has an opportunity to contrast a bold, well-thought-out foreign policy with Mr. Trump’s opaque retreatism,” Ms. Strassel wrote.

But pro-Ukraine Republicans who had observed Mr. DeSantis closely had more reasons to be alarmed. They were unsettled by his ties to the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank that promotes foreign policy views broadly aligned with Mr. Trump’s. On Monday night, only the most optimistic interventionists could have still been hopeful that Mr. DeSantis would end up on their side.

And speaking of alarums going off, the pond should get back to the grave Sexton, still going off, and doing his bit for Vlad the impaler and even peddling a classic Vlad line that the neo Nazi was apparently installed in office by Donald Trump (yes Zelensky won the presidency by a landslide in April 2019, and who knew it was effectively the work of the mango Mussolini?) ...

Of course you don't have to look hard to see the motivations of some of the appeasers and fellow travellers, a story which first came to the pond's attention on Morning Joe, but can be found at the Graudian... (yes, the pond still suffers from that vice on occasion, and Joe's absence provided no relief, because there was still Mika getting agitated) ...

Meanwhile, the grave Sexton is still explaining to Vlad to hold out hope ... just stay the course and the appeasers will help out, as Chamberlain once did, and didn't that work out well ... lickspittle fellow the travellers in the form of perhaps the mango Mussolini or Ron DeSanctimonious, or Tuckyo Rose. They're on the way and soon Vlad the impaler will have a win, and then he can take out a nearby minnow or three ...

Of course the grave Sexton is just a warm-up act, with the reptiles pointedly posing the bromancer up against the French clock lover ...

A few """ in that crowd, and the reptiles loved the feud, elevating the French clock lover to the front page of the tree killer edition ... though the work harder, get paid less routine was shared by all ...

The pond expects three new columns a day from reptiles to replace the """ crowd ...

Never mind the work harder, get paid less routine, surprisingly the reptiles had elevated simplistic Simon to the top of the digital page, and not the bromancer ...

Could that be because the bromancer was surprisingly tepid, almost defeatist, in his response? There was no "this is nuts" or "that's crackers", just three pallid gobbets ...

Could it be that the bromancer felt awkward standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Wong, who usually never gets it right in reptile company?

Was the bromancer feeling a tad uncomfortable with his war on China, and the thought that China might actually launch an attack on the mainland, and then all we'd have to hand are a few subs, perhaps by 2050? Had the war on China been a beat-up, an assumption that we'd just pull on another Opium war and soon they'd be buying all the Oz wine and coal they could?

Ah, but there's the rub, isn't it? We'd box Chinese ears, save Taiwan, and there'd nary be a missile down under ...

Meanwhile, there's that pesky, difficult isolationist streak, fomented by the bromancer's US kissing cousins at Faux Noise, Tuckyo Rose, and the branch of the GOP that's dominated by the mango Mussolini and Ron DeSanctus, showing what might happen if the Chinese sent a missile or three down under ... if the pond might repeat its little paraphrase ...

“While the U.S. has many vital national interests – securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party – becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Australia and China is not one of them. The Biden administration’s virtual “blank check” funding of this conflict for “as long as it takes,” without any defined objectives or accountability, distracts from our country’s most pressing challenges.

Without question, peace should be the objective. The U.S. should not provide assistance that could require the deployment of American troops or enable Australia to engage in offensive operations beyond its borders.  F-16s and long-range missiles should therefore be off the table. These moves would risk explicitly drawing the United States into the conflict and drawing us closer to a hot war between one of the world’s largest nuclear powers and an irrelevant minnow somewhere down under. That risk is unacceptable...

...We cannot prioritize intervention in an escalating foreign war over the defense of our own homeland, especially as tens of thousands of Americans are dying every year from narcotics smuggled across our open border and our weapons arsenals critical for our own security are rapidly being depleted."

It's a tricky situation, and the bromancer couldn't see the many consolations that could be found elsewhere in the lizard Oz. Deprive the weak, send them into the wilderness ...

Yes, and then there were all the jobs ... there's nothing like a good war to get jobs moving ...

Finally a reason to be cruel, an excuse for the natural reptile tendency to savage the vulnerable, finally a boost to productivity, work longer hours for less pay, but strangely no comfort for the bromancer, and worse, the cartoonists have had a field day ...

The bromancer didn't have much in his locker as a response ... perhaps he felt knee-capped or intimidated ... sure, there's the war on China by Xmas, but that snorting the French clock lover sent the bromancer into a bout of denialism, because the French clock maker wasn't declaring war on the Albanese government so much as declaring war on the bromancer and the reptiles and their war on China (not to mention the Nine papers' war on China), and what's worse, behind the paywall, within the citadel so to speak, so that the reptiles might squabble and feud among themselves ...

Fading but doleful influence? But there he was, cheek by jowl with the bromancer in the comments section, and top of the front page ma, finger pointed to the heavens...

Oh it's a fine old stoush, and the pond rounded it all off with a serving of the immortal Rowe ... with the ancient sea mine with still enough threat to set off the bromancer ...