Lyin' Biden REFUSES to do the ONE thing that can hurt Russia

Ask any idiot. It's obvious to them.

Flyguy wrote: ==========

** Putin is betting that they won't. He has planned, calculated and timed the invasion of the Ukraine to the minute. But I wonder how long can he can he hold onto control ?

...... Phil

Flyguy snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

That has nothing to do wit a goddamned thing.

Another zero effect republitard talking point.

Now you are mumbling, as usual. What exactly id closed about "transport" you stupid f*ck?

They are called reserves for a reason, you stupid f*ck.

Like a hole in the head.

Reagan wasn't remotely great. Think about Contragate.

Secretly breaking an arms embargo against Iran to get funds to secretly finance right-wing terrorists - the Contras - in Nicaragua.

That's about as squalid as politics gets.

The USSR was put to its knees on his watch. Great man.

He didn't have much to do with that. The US had been spending ridiculous amounts of money on weapons development since WW2, and the Soviet Union was silly enough to devote a much larger proportion of a rather smaller economy on trying to keep up. Reagan was lucky enough to still be president when the Soviet Union finally fell apart, brought down mainly by its own defects.

Putin seems intent on making the same mistakes, in part because he sees informed criticism as a threat to his power, rather than as suggestions about how he might use it more wisely.

Correlation does not imply causation.

He was an actor - he did what people around him directed him to do. To be fair on the guy, he /did/ have a reasonable (in comparison to many) group of advisors, and he certainly put up a good show of leading. (Remember Bush the elder? His must trusted advisor was his wife, and her advice came from her astrologist.)

Most big things in the world happen as the consequence of long chains or webs of interconnected events, influences and coincidences. Even the leaders of the most powerful countries in world seldom have much direct effect in the big picture. In particular, they seldom have much /good/ effect - but they /can/ screw things up fairly quickly.

The collapse of the USSR was the result of decades of pressure. Regan contributed his few straws to the camel's back, just like his predecessors. Other than that, he just happened to be the guy in the office at the time. "The USSR was put to its knees on his watch" - he was watching, he did not put the USSR to its knees.

Of course he did not do it single handed and of course he built on what his predecessors had built.

But 8 years in the White House takes quite a correlation without having to do with the cause. He was an actor - like *any* president, this is the major part of the job. And he was wiser than most to delegate to competent people instead of trying to play important. Great man.

While it is certainly true that there were decades of pressure, the containment policy, Reagan did give the Soviet Union the final push, by bankrupting the SU.

Their economy basically did not work, and their military was quite expensive. Star Wars basically pulled the SU into a spending contest with a far richer opponent, as did expanding the Navy to 600 ships (target, not quite achieved), and the Army, etc, with no end in sight. Size of economy does matter.

Joe Gwinn

Crediting Regan with the final push (or crediting him with picking the staff and advisors that did this) is reasonable. Making it sound like he single-handedly brought down the USSR is not.

"Star Wars" was quite successful, in its way - not bad for a bigger work of fiction than George Lucas's version!

No man ever has single-handedly defeated any empire, obviously. But there is more to it than the obvious. Reagan was just made for the job. Any good leader must be a good actor and act such that his people will follow him; he was that *and* he believed what he was doing was right. Or at least this is what the world saw.

Picking the next good actor to do a similar job is a difficult thing. The actors are known by the characters they enact and this is not enough for those who pick them to pick one. Hopefully they find someone, not just anybody only because anybody will do better than Trump.

Indeed, I wonder to what extent did the Russians fall for it. Perhaps those within the KGB knew, perhaps not. But the media effect on the people in the East Block was huge, we all thought "now let me see the Russians match *that*" (the media here was whining how bad they were wanting to militarize space etc.).

I was in Grozny (Chechnya) this summer. Do you remember what the city looked like after the war? Now it is a young flourishing city. America has been brainwashing Ukrainians since 1991, and especially since 2014. I was in Kyiv on the first "Maidan". Ukrainians are very active, passionate, but narrow-minded people. Now there will be no "Bandera", "Ukrainian rebel army", "moskalyaku on gilyaku", torchlight processions. The West created anti-Russia from Ukraine.

Go post in a Russian newsgroup. Most English speakers disagree with you.

Well they were looking at Poland over the border and saw them develop; they have also seen what life is in Russia and what it was for them. They made the obvious choice. The West is guilty of being a better place to live and thus attracting them to itself, in that sense you are correct.

In Russian there is such a word "халява" = freebie. This is the main incentive. This is the same carrot in front of the noses of Ukrainians aimed at European integration. Ukraine was ruled by an oligarchy until the Americans came in 2014. I see how CNN and Euronews propaganda works. The missile that hit a multi-storey building today was Ukrainian anti-aircraft. Now new military assistance has been promised to the regime of the controlled Zelensky - together with the militants, she will be expelled to Poland. Lviv - the Polish city will be again. With Stingers and Javelins))

The West is trying to undermine Russia inside. But the worse for the Russian, the better))

Didn't know the халява word. But *no*, this is not the incentive for people to want to westernize. What people want is to have a future to look forward to. In oligarch (i.e. feudal) countries there is no such thing, if you live in Russia you will know that. Now how much of it is there in real life elsewhere can be debated but this is what people are looking/hoping for. Usually they find out life is not as easy and shiny in the West as they hoped it would be but although harder than expected they do get a chance they could not hope to get while in oligarch land.

So you seriously believe what the Putin media tell you about that? Not that it is impossible but they also tell you that after 3 days of heavy fights they have no casualties...

Well he asked for help and hopefully he will get it.

Well this is what enemies do. The Kremlin does the same, troll farms and everything.

I know the Russians are capable of putting up with hardships, but to look for these... At the moment they are under control of yet another psychopath whose idol is Stalin, do they really like that?

It's not exactly the same. Some hacking exploits of the past, which are traced to Russians versus US, were, according to Putin, perhaps just 'patriotic' Russians. That sounds suspiciously like a letter of marque and reprisal, i.e. an official approval of attacks against a foreign nation. Such a letter of marque is an act of war.

The US doesn't shield its citizens committing such misdeeds just because the victims are foreign.

I know. But the typical thinking of those sympathizing with the Kremlin is that the western media are undermining their regime.

Which they are, being guilty of showing life in the West as it is...

Reagan was selected because he'd look good in the job. There's no evidence that he ever did much beyond looking good, and the "Contragate" scandal makes it perfectly clear that if he had any control of what as going on he have to have been a idiot.

Good actors are known by the range of characters they can represent. Reagan wasn't famous for that - he was typecast a lot, and his gig as President of the US was just more of the same.

Trump has considerable skills at playing gullible customers. He's useless with customers who can think for themselves, and his businesses went bankrupt often enough to suggest that he hasn't got any other valuable skill.

The George Lucas "Star Wars" was trivial rubbish. Effective entertainment, but no more than that.

It was pretty silly, but the "take the high ground" principle did sound good. Expressed as "get into open space where everybody can take pot shots at you" it would have been less attractive.