CSNbbs

Quote:You’d think Vladimir Putin would give it a rest after getting his puppet candidate, Donald Trump, elected President of the United States, but apparently, Russia just can’t stop meddling with American social media.

In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, CNN ran a piece attributing the rise in pro-gun and pro-NRA tweets to Russian bots. And when everyone was waiting for the Nunes memo to become public? Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff demanded to know if Russian bots were pushing the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag.

Now, the same mysterious “bipartisan” group that linked those pro-Second Amendment tweets to Russia has both HuffPost and Salon convinced that the #WalkAway hashtag — encouraging fed-up Democrats to leave the party as it moves further and further left toward the edge of the cliff — is also a Kremlin operation.

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It's amazing how Obama protected us from Russian interference for 8 years. Or maybe they didn't need to interfere since his incompetence/agenda was getting the results they wanted any way.

I guess that's the thing now, if anyone on the left has an independent thought just blame it on the Russians.

Geez. Liberals have become the Flat Earther's of political thought....

They're panicking...and with good reason. It's like Tonto and Lone Ranger when they were surrounded by Indians.


Tonto didn't hang around too long. LOL

(07-09-2018 10:14 PM)thespiritof1976 Wrote: [ -> ]Geez. Liberals have become the Flat Earther's of political thought....

Heck, they deny science every day.

Gender is a choice.
A fetus isn't a baby.
Manipulated hockey stick climate data is settled science.

(07-09-2018 09:54 PM)banker Wrote: [ -> ]It's amazing how Obama protected us from Russian interference for 8 years. Or maybe they didn't need to interfere since his incompetence/agenda was getting the results they wanted any way.

I guess that's the thing now, if anyone on the left has an independent thought just blame it on the Russians.

The Crimea Capitulation was done under who's administration and What Sec of State?

I love the smell of desperation in the morning... Smells like

Winning!

(07-10-2018 12:43 AM)JMUDunk Wrote: [ -> ]The Crimea Capitulation was done under who's administration and What Sec of State?

I agree with your point, but Obama's options were very severely limited in responding to Crimea--just like Bush's were in responding to Georgia earlier. Our normal response would be to send a carrier task group and an amphibious task group to the area as a show of force and intention. As Bill Clinton has said many times, whenever there is a crisis, a president's first question is, "Where are the carriers?"

But here's the rub. Sending carriers to the Black Sea would violate international law, specifically the Montreux Convention. It puts limits on the size and types of military ships that non-Black Sea states can send through the Bosporus and Dardanelles--basically nine ships, none over 15,000 tons, for a maximum of 21 days. In theory nobody--Black Sea states or non-Black Sea states--can send carriers through the straits. That's why Russian ships like the Kiev and Moskva classes were designated as "cruisers." Those restrictions pretty much preclude any significant naval or amphibious demonstration of force.

After that, the responses get pretty limited. We could use land-based air, but unless we were willing to put USAF assets directly into Ukraine or Georgia, they would have to come from NATO bases in Romania or Poland, hundreds of miles away. And that transit time is a killer. There just aren't a lot of military options, so it's pretty much down to diplomacy.

I would have tried to offer Putin something like Crimea and Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine in return for agreeing to let Ukraine pursue NATO and EU membership. I don't think he would have taken that, because that doesn't really solve his problem. Giving him everything east of the Dnieper River sort of addresses one of his issues, but that puts Kiev on the border and shortchanges Ukraine. But he might have gone along, and maybe it could have been a starting point for something useful to have been negotiated from there.

I have also wondered about the possibility of a Polish-Ukraine union. That area would pretty much approximate one medieval iteration of Poland, and it would get Ukraine clearly into Europe. I don't know how workable it would be--I don't know how well Poles and Ukrainians could work together, it could be anathema to Putin, and there are zero defensible natural boundaries. It probably works a lot better on paper than on the ground.