I’ll say this upfront: I think it’s most likely that Vladimir Putin, or elements of his regime, had Russian dissident Alexei Navalny killed. Putin is certainly capable of bumping off the political opposition — and with Navalny directly under Putin’s thumb, having been thrown in prison and then dropping dead suddenly at 47 years old, when he’d already been poisoned once with the chemical nerve agent Novichok, and then his body being withheld from his family — it’s hard to look any guiltier than Putin and his people do.
Navalny was caught on film conspiring with Western intelligence agencies attempting to unseat Putin. From our perspective, that might make him a hero. From Putin’s, he was a domestic enemy. We don’t have to leave aside our disgust at what happened to Navalny to note that in the Russian way, what happened to him makes an ugly kind of sense.
That’s how they roll in Russia.
I also think that Navalny’s death plays — though I would imagine there were lots of reasons closer to home why Navalny would be killed by the Putin regime — as a profound boot to the testicles of Tucker Carlson. Carlson, after all, had barely left Moscow after interviewing Putin, making the statement and following up with video to the effect that the Russian capital is a nicer and better-run place than most major American cities, and then he was immediately humiliated by Navalny’s death.
Kurt Schlichter, writing at Townhall on Monday, was spot on in noting that Carlson’s basic point was that those cities are horrifically run, and whether Carlson is correct in comparing Moscow to New York isn’t the point. New York isn’t run as well as it should be, and the people who run New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, St. Louis, Detroit, New Orleans, and pretty much all of the big blue shitty cities don’t care about running them well.
What they care about is power and graft — and running a city into the ground, chasing away its tax base, and replacing it with federal swag that carries zero accountability, is a pristine way to achieve both.
Power and graft have replaced the dollar as the going currency among America’s ruling elite, and that’s a damn shame, because power and graft are the currencies of totalitarian, kleptocratic, and lawless regimes — something ours is rapidly descending into. The examples are legion, but one that just showed up in Washington state has offered a clear view of just how ridiculous things have become:
It could be a lot harder to find affordable and durable car tires under a bill being considered in the current legislative session.
The bill would give the Washington State Department of Commerce the authority to ban tires it deems inefficient and bad for the climate. It would apply to any replacement tires for cars and light-duty trucks under 10,000 pounds. It would also give the Department of Commerce the ability to fine people anywhere from $100 to $10,000 for violations.
“At the end of the day, we’re facing a climate crisis, and we need to use as many possible tools to get ourselves out of that,” Democrat Representative Chipalo Street told the House Transportation Committee. “This is one way to increase the gas efficiency of some of our vehicles.”
There is zero evidence by anything remotely close to a credible source to indicate that “inefficient” tires play a measurable role in predicting the weather over the next century. The stated justification for that bill is nothing short of gibberish. But that’s not what’s really going on — what’s really happening is that the radical leftists at the Washington state Department of Commerce would, thanks to this bill if it were to pass, have the ability to make supplicants out of tire suppliers and vendors in that state, something they will monetize to the hilt both above and below the table.
That might be a bit more subtle than using nerve agents on the political prisoners, but when it comes to power and graft, the general societal outcome isn’t all that different. And besides, using tires as a stealth means of practicing petty tyranny on the citizens is about as subtle as it gets from the modern Democrat Party; the American state, which is supposed to be our financial capital, has just used its judiciary to effect a bill of attainder on one of its most prominent former citizens for “fraud” that contained no victim and no harm.
And the people defending this utter outrage are some of the stupidest humans on the planet. To wit:
Trump said his fraud had no victims.
Wasn’t the taxman cheated when he devalued his property for that purpose?
Weren’t banks cheated when he negotiated more favorable rates based on fabricated numbers?
What am I missing here?
— Being J Wood (@BeingJWood) February 17, 2024
And by the way, today’s Democrat Party is no stranger to killing its political prisoners — or have you not noticed the rash of suicides among the inmates of the Jan. 6 gulags? — or even taking them. Just ask Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, or Donald Trump.
Or Mark Houck.
Or Douglass Mackey, who got seven months for making memes in a travesty of justice that wouldn’t have been believed 15 years ago.
Then there’s the story of Gonzalo Lira, the American journalist who died in a Ukrainian prison for doing his job with zero meaningful assistance from the Biden administration to get him out.
Schlichter called Carlson an American patriot for demanding better of his government, and Schlichter is correct.
Did Putin lie to Carlson? Absolutely. If nothing else, he told a lie of omission when he recited 30 minutes of Russo-Ukrainian history and never once mentioned the Holodomor. Carlson might not have felt comfortable arguing the subject with someone who lives and breathes it, and that’s understandable. But the effect was not good.
On the other hand, is Carlson’s softer-than-optimal treatment of Putin really any worse than this?
How utterly pathetic.
Anyone who has paid attention to the controversy in question knows that the House Republican position on aid to Ukraine has never been “no.” It has been that such aid cannot be unconditional; it has to be accompanied by a strategic plan, if not an exit strategy, and it must come in concert with a commitment to stop the flood of unvetted migrants across our borders.
This is by no means an unreasonable position, particularly when there is an actual invasion of America by tens of thousands of single, military-age Chinese men whose intentions here are utterly and completely unqualified in any way:
A large amount of the illegal crossings in San Diego sector happen in Jacumba where there is a small gap in the wall that illegal immigrants pour through every day. (We shot this a couple weeks ago).
Inexplicably, the Biden admin has made no effort to fill or fix this small gap. pic.twitter.com/wqQRI917VU— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) February 13, 2024
You are not negotiating in good faith when you openly allow China to invade America while demanding $60 billion to stop Russia from invading Ukraine, which isn’t even part of NATO.
And when the regime media frames questions to the decrepit figurehead atop the government in a way that blames Mike Johnson for Alexei Navalny’s death, we’re down a rabbit hole beyond anything we could have thought possible 15 years ago.
Last week when Navalny died, there was a rash of the most disgusting social media attacks on Johnson that I’ve ever seen:
MAKE IT TREND: #MoscowMikeJohnson is a traitor to America & Democracy.#MoscowMike https://t.co/OpnV7D6cc5 pic.twitter.com/5eO9rnyXUK
— Metal Gear Fella 🇵🇱 🇺🇦 🇩🇪 🇺🇸 🇪🇺 (@BonkGearMetal) February 16, 2024
Ukrainian troops withdraw from Avdiivka, Donetsk region because of ammunition shortages.
Speaker Johnson is blocking aid for Ukraine on behalf of Vladimir Putin.
Karma is watching Mike Johnson. #Avdiivka #Ukraine #Russia #RussiaisATerroistState #MoscowMike #MoscowMikeJohnson pic.twitter.com/Ws639ru7os
— Herry Rodin (@HerryRodinNapit) February 17, 2024
Planning to call #MoscowMike? Some tips from me since I do it regularly.
1: Staff is rude, will hang up on you. Call back immediately. Say you were hung up on.
2: Sometimes turns his voicemail off when on vacation. Keep calling so you catch it when it comes back on. pic.twitter.com/8uoK9oW7Fd— Rachel The History Fella (@PurpleMermaid82) February 14, 2024
None of these people give a damn about Alexei Navalny, you know. His death horrifies everybody who values human life, but the truth of the matter is that Navalny’s fate has nothing to do with Ukraine.
The only real connection is that Team Biden and the mouth-breathing social media and legacy corporate media goons who can’t wait to shovel our money into the meat grinder in southeast Europe, from which more power and graft comes more easily than anywhere else on earth, have found Navalny a convenient poster child.
Especially in death.
Want a theory about Navalny? I’ll give you one. Perhaps Putin decided now was a good time to kill Navalny because he knows he’s going to win in Ukraine regardless of the $60 billion.
Perhaps he knows that prolonging the war in Ukraine will further expose the rot that infects our defense industry and its manufacturing capabilities. Perhaps he knows that what ails Ukraine isn’t a lack of weapons and ammunition — a problem that long precedes the need for that $60 billion, by the way, and Joe Biden and his team spent months spinning lies about how the Ukrainians were going to retake the Donbas and Crimea in their “spring offensive” when that time could have been spent at the peace table salvaging something — but a lack of manpower.
They’ve been worn down by a bigger, stronger, more populous, and better organized nation, and a huge portion of the Ukrainian people have demonstrated their level of faith in the Zelensky government by bugging out for other countries. It turns out that Victoria Nuland’s brand of “our democracy” doesn’t inspire all that much loyalty among people who have deserved better treatment from politicians inside and outside their country.
And if that’s true, then the new narrative of Ukrainian desperation at the hands of “Moscow Mike” is a double lie. Hell, it might be a quadruple or quintuple lie, depending on how far down the rabbit hole you’re willing to go.
I’ve had enough of these lies. I think Vladimir Putin is a dirty son of a bitch who will burn in hell someday, and I earnestly hope that some semblance of Ukrainian sovereignty can be preserved.
But I think Joe Biden should be held to a higher standard than Putin, because while I can’t think of a Russian ruler — other than maybe Boris Yeltsin — who wasn’t a dirty son of a bitch who deserved to burn in hell, an American president exists to further the interests of our people and to uphold our Constitution.
And Joe Biden never once in his miserable life — from the time he voted against the Alaska pipeline in the middle of the 1973 Arab oil embargo to his current attacks on Mike Johnson and Donald Trump amid a special counsel’s report showing that he’s committed multiple felonies for which he’s not worth charging because he lacks the mental faculties to stand trial — has given a tinker’s damn about those responsibilities.
As president or in any of the other offices he holds.
Putin is a stone-cold killer and a master practitioner of the game of power and graft. He’s hardly pretended to be anything else, and he’s the president of a country in which there are no expectations that politicians would ever pursue anything else.
And yet Joe Biden shows zero ability, or even desire, to rise above that standard in a country that, at least historically, demands a whole lot more.
Putin isn’t my problem. Joe Biden is. And so are those mindless, empty-souled spawns of the modern Obamunist Democrat Party who enable and amplify him. Last week Jonathan Martin, while conceding at Politico that Biden is a rotting piece of political meat but journosplaining to ignorant Republicans that he isn’t going anywhere, actually attempted to call Biden a “decent” man.
Decent?
The decline in our politics, our rule of law, our economic capabilities, and our national prestige and credibility — or even our national sovereignty — on this man’s watch is more pronounced than it has been at any time since our founding. And as scandalous as Alexei Navalny’s killing surely is, what Joe Biden and the rest of the cabal behind him is inflicting on our people is a far more horrific and much more actionable outrage.
