You know what I think?

[PCIntern]

No...but I’m about to tell you...

It’s always about money with a Trump, isn’t it? “Transactional” the media commentators have dubbed it. Tit for tat...or in the case of Stormy Daniels, Tit for mushroom...but I digress.

As there is a bounty on the heads of members of the armed forces, there is a bounty on Americans’ heads who die from COVID. He’s going for record numbers.

How else to explain why he politicized the obvious deterrents to illness and death. Btw, the final death toll from COVID will be in the millions due to the aftermath of lung, vascular, neurological, organ, and mental disease which will follow, much as the illness and death from 9/11 attacks dwarfed the number massacred in the buildings that day. That is what he and his vermin offspring will be paid for. The Russians play the long game. They know what’s what.

I have told people for decades to READ, not watch the film, but READ From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming for a primer of how the Russians think and plot. This is a country where chess is a spectator sport. Do not underestimate their genius.

[cilla4progress]

1. Good

point

[onethatcares]

2. I'm almost old enough to remember

A Russian premier saying something like, "We will bury the United States without firing a shot, and even sell them the shovel we use" or something to that effect.

Khrushchev was his name if I'm not mistaken. He would be grinning ear to ear at this point in time.

[PCIntern]

3. "You betcha!"

[apcalc]

4. Nikita Kruschev...

[OMGWTF]

20. IIRC, he would take off his shoe and bang it on the table to get peoples' attention.

[Oldem]

21. He said

we'd destroy ourselves from within.

[RVN VET71]

22. Bob Hoskins gives a fascinating portrayal of him

in the film "Enemy at the Gates." The film concerns the siege of Stalingrad and focuses on the interaction of 2 snipers, one Russian, the other a Nazi, but the broader story is about the siege and the cost in human lives the Soviets expended to keep the Nazis at bay and, ultimately, to drive them off. Kruschev played a pivotal role in the battle and is portrayed as a very scary man, not at all like the "Uncle Niki" presented by the media at the time.

[Pluvious]

32. That was an unforgettable movie - in so many ways

The setting, the suspense, the cold heart of the hunter and his prey.

Highly recommended.

[RVN VET71]

33. I agree 1,000%

And, off the subject but apropos of your avatar, in 1968 I was stationed in Ft. Jackson, S.C. and ventured into town (Columbia, the State capitol) on a one-day and stopped by a record store. The kids working there were playing "Little" Lulu's "Morning Dew," and discussing it when I entered. I asked them if they had the Grateful Dead album that featured that song because, while I thought Lulu had done a very nice job, Jerry Garcia and his San Francisco psychedelic acid-enlightened rock group did one that was much better.

Short of it: they put the album on and played the cut -- and were entranced sufficiently by it that I have prayed since that day that these 2 white southern kids were influenced by it sufficiently to turn on, as we used to say (quoting the good Dr. Leary) and become enlightened.

[Pluvious]

34. What a great story...

... Thanks for sharing
That's a great memory.

It's random encounters such as these which often profoundly impact the courses of our lives. Hopefully they didn't drop out though, lol.

My first show was shortly after the movie came out...

Outdoors at the beach in sunny Santa Barbara California.
Back when Kieth and Donna were still Playing.
Playing in the band.

Oddly, many years later, I had tickets to their next appearance there, at the same venue, just weeks away, when the music stopped.

That was hard af.

Cheers my friend.

[dameatball]

5. I remember. I think it was a speech at the UN and have often thought of it these past four years.

Actually, they sold us the shovel and "we" used it ourselves.

[Silver Gaia]

8. My Dad quoted that often when I was growing up.

And I've thought of it often the past 4 years.

[Joinfortmill]

6. Yup

[tiredtoo]

7. I remember it well

Also remember Kruschev beating his shoe on the desk at United Nations.

[AmericanCanuck]

9. He is not a deep and/or strategic thinker

He was told that his reelection was virtually guaranteed if the economy stayed strong.

In his mind, stock market is the economy.

So when the markets tanked with Covid, his primitive instinct was to make Covid go away by hook or crook.

So he minimized it. He discouraged wearing masks because they would affect the markets.

He forced reopening to keep markets high - only to guarantee his reelection.

It all blew up in his face. If he had handled Covid competently, he would have won in a mini landslide - he blew the opportunity - because he is stupid.

[AZ8theist]

14. "He is not a deep and/or strategic thinker" is the funniest thing I ever read...

He's a:

[RVN VET71]

23. Tillerson hit the nail on Trump's empty head with that one!

[AmericanCanuck]

29. Yeah he is

My response was primarily to the OP who made it sound like there was some deep and clever game on Trump's part.

[apcalc]

31. He knew he was incapable of leading,

Planning, or coordinating, any kind of national response. So he ignored it, pretended it was nothing. To acknowledge it, meant he’d have to do something about it.

[erronis]

10. I would counter with the fact that it is not loser Trump who is playing the game of chess

He is just a pawn who will be disposed of to try to win the end game.

[bucolic_frolic]

13. Yes, we still need to see the front man's tax returns

I can guess, and I can hint, but let's just say there are enemies of democracy in the world, and we have defeated a few of them in major wars. There are heirs to any throne, even if they go subterranean for generations. Very few ruling lineages, over the past 2000 years, died out.

[TrogL]

11. Fleming would know - he was a Naval Intelligence Officer

[bucolic_frolic]

12. There was the theory

first floated in think tank type articles in the early 1970s, I believe, that the U.S.S.R. would become more like the U.S., and the U.S. would become more like the U.S.S.R.

They were ruled by elites who rode in limos and vacationed in several dachas on the Black Sea even though they were allegedly an egalitarian communist society.

We allege freedom and equality and love of mankind, and look at us.

[erronis]

15. So both systems of governments inherited the worst aspects from each other... blood ties and money

cementing the relationships.

Peasants, serfs, slaves, peons, hoi polloi are all the same - expendable and sometimes useful idiots.

While the "upper crust" types interbreed and make wars.

[bucolic_frolic]

17. And elites intermingle and maintain business ties

https://www.csmonitor.com/1980/0703/070362.html

So the Cold War was never airtight.

[Hortensis]

27. Erronis, you left out voters. I can't argue that some citizens

aren't peasants and serfs at heart -- they obviously exist; but no citizen with the vote actually is. Basic stuff.

It does seem to me that a citizen who denied he had the power and responsibilities of citizenship would be behaving like a self-made emotional peasant. And psychologists say many are anxious to be rid of both, just not emotionally suited to democracy.

This, btw, is not to insult by association those real peasants in the relatively few places remaining on this planet who have no such power and no such choices to make.

[Hortensis]

24. Spoken with true commitment to fight for all three.

We don't just allege -- a majority of Americans believe in all three. So maybe hoick up those principles and fight for them as strongly as you presumably wish others would.

Agree, however, that Russia's plot is to destroy us by exporting and instilling corruption, SOP for them, and that with big powers here sharing many overlapping goals here they've made great progress.

[OMGWTF]

18. I've always thought the reason Traitor Tot DGAF about Covid-19

is because the more Americans he murders, the less his bill to the Russian oligarchs will be. Yes, he is that evil.

[Illumination]

19. Have also been saying the same thing about not only bounties on our soldiers, but US citizens as

well. It only stands to reason that with that & all of trump's other anti-American behavior, Putin ass kissing, etc., he's a Russian agent!..... ..... .....

[mucifer]

25. I have been saying this for a long time

[housecat]

26. different is different

I'm trying to see a big picture of this surreal horror show-- where it's coming from and where it is going -- but I can't see any reason for the hundred of thousands of deaths. The Trump crime family doesn't have the brains to actually execute any plan, let alone understand one or see how they are all being played. So if Putin is using these vile vermin and the Republican party to execute a plan, I don't get it. Mother Russia doesn't benefit from nursing home victims, children, and people of all ages, with or without politics, to die horrible deaths.

(By the way, trump never had covid. It was a ploy to show how resilient he is).

Just as Democrats and others, apart from the cement-for-brains Republican base, have made no real effort to step in and do something to control the madness, they are already talking about whether or not to hold the mass murderers accountable. Really? Putin knows how Republicans think more than anyone. Yet we still refuse to acknowledge that different is different. Americans don't think like or understand Russians; Democrats don't think like or understand Republicans; No sane person can even want to think like or understand the Trumps. Just because they might look like you does not mean that there is any chance of communicating. Sorry, I am rambling. i will have to reread Fleming.

My question is: what is the long game? Destroy the planet? Why? Biden won in spite of the Republican voter suppression and postal service sabotage, and they were stunned. How could Trump lose when he brainwashed seventy million zombies and wrecked the postal service? It is war, and it has always been war, and Biden's administration had damn well better learn fast that different is different. Physical similarity has fooled us for too long. People can communicate better with dogs and cats, and they have no physical similarity. Just because many humans look like us, we are not even close. They will never abide by our rules or share our morality, yet too many of us are naive enough to believe that we must change them if we are to save the planet.

[moondust]

28. Communist parties have 5-year plans.

I don't know about North Korea or Vietnam but the Soviet Union had them and China still has them. As a former KGB man, Putin is certainly no stranger to longer-term thinking and balancing long-term goals with short-term objectives. Some might consider that an advantage of communism.

Capitalism is more about quarterly profits and short-term thinking. Biennial and quadrennial elections tend to make long-term planning and long-term thinking kind of pointless.

[Blue Owl]

30. K&R