Messages From 2008: Further Thoughts on Ukraine, John McCain, and Joe Biden
A friend writes in... and some thoughts pour out...
Some time ago I was an intern at the now departed New York Sun. Yes, I know. I’m sorry. I was young once.
Despite no pay we were expected to wear a tie — or was it a noose?— and I sat right next to its editor, Seth Lipsky, and nearby Ben Smith later of Politico then of BuzzFeed and now of the New York Times, and near Eliana Johnson, now of the Washington Free Beacon.
The Canal street office was neocon high command — the sort of place where I, being neither Jewish nor a New Yorker simply did not belong — and I was a foot shoulder in all that nonsense. For my pains I subsisted off of $5 foot longs and couch surfing — the love of strangers in New York is not to be gainsaid — and I resolved after my internship concluded to never work for free again.
It was, as they say, a “learning experience” and the education was all the more heightened by the 2008 presidential election unfolding between Barack Obama and John McCain and the Beijing Olympics. In those halcyon days we hated China but they hadn’t yet given us an adequate reason besides their professed communist status. New York hadn’t yet elected its own communists nor China revealed itself to be the fascistic, feudal-futuristic fiefdom we know today. Simpler times.
Needless to say I felt a bit on the outside disliking both Barack Obama and John McCain. Obama seemed phony, a sort of effete academic liberal whose pedigree I would later learn was not as he said it was. (We’d later learn he was spook royalty. One day I’ll write all I know about Obama but not now and certainly not for free.)
In my estimation (and that of my family, who served in the Navy, in Vietnam, and the intelligence community) McCain, the failson flyboy wannabe of a lineage of bullshitting naval men who were themselves kind of losers, wasn’t the guy to best the first black president.
But these were McCain people and so I didn’t talk about what I would later reveal — that John McCain was a Tokyo Rose sort doing enemy broadcasts.
If ever I should find myself in the enemy’s captivity I should hope I have the dignity to ask for the bullet rather than the Vietnamese prostitutes but I suppose you never really know until you’re there. My family did know Admiral Stockdale who was a friend of my grandfather’s back in Coronado. If you want to know what it means to suffer for country, read about Admiral Stockdale.
Anyway I did an interview with the weird evangelical TruNews about McCain’s treason. You can listen at your heart’s content though you really ought to do more productive things with your time.
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Russia rolled into Georgia that summer, too, and the New York Sun paper hawks were only too excited to go to war with Russia, too.
Obama picked Joe Biden as his running mate.
The whole thing seemed strange.
My friend elucidates some of the history that I had hitherto not been aware of.
Jewish reentry into Eastern Europe was a topic of discussion at the Tuesday evening dinner in Arlington which I attended for years. The chairman… argued that head Jews like Soros were worried that Israel would not survive into the 21st Century and that they needed to find other boltholes. [He] thought that the looted Holocaust assets legislation which the Clinton administration pushed through was ultimately aimed at prying open the Eastern European countries for Jewish colonization. The Western European nations, predictably, paid up in the 90’s. But the strategic goal was the recovery of the Central European homeland.
Poland and Hungary have vigorously and successfully fought Holocaust asset recovery. I suspect that resistance to Jewish reentry is an undercurrent to their politics.
But. Ukraine. Your article was a little startling. It appears that they have a strong foothold in their traditional homeland. And like 1919, they want the US to use American blood and treasure to protect it.
How will Putin react to that? Remember 2008. Georgia had become an Israeli satellite. The Israeli’s trained and equipped the Georgian army. There were reports that the Israeli’s were building air strips as refueling points for attacks on Iran.
In August of that year, Putin invaded the country, destroyed the Israeli trained army and put an end to the air strips.
BTW. The then president of Georgia, Saakashvili, is now a Gauleiter of some province in the Ukraine.
The question becomes: will Putin tolerate another Jewish run, troublemaking state on his border?
In the case of Georgia, a swift military campaign brought down Saakashvili and his regime.
Would a similar military strike do the same to the Urkainian regime?
My friend is right on the history.
It seems that after leaving the Georgian presidency Mikheil Saakashvili did move to Ukraine where he remains to this day. He even got Ukrainian citizenship, which was stripped from him, before it was restored under the current very pro-Israel president.
Before his turn to Ukraine Saakashvili paid a $800,000 bribe — I mean lobbying contract! — to Orion Strategies, one of whose cofounders, Michael Goldfarb, is an actual lobbyist for Israel and Taiwan. Goldfarb would go on to start the Washington Free Beacon blog with cash from the very, very, very pro-Israel billionaire Paul Singer. (How is that not foreign interference again?)
Paul Singer, who was against Trump before he was for him, would go on to fund the Fusion GPS dossier that was later picked up by the Clinton campaign and has now led to a whole crazy Russian subplot where Russian intelligence fooled the FBI. Oh what a tangled web…
The Washington Free Beacon is now headed up by Eliana Johnson, whose father Scott Johnson is pictured here, seated, as part of the Israeli lobby’s keyboard warriors. Like father, like daughter, I suppose. (Anyway Netanyahu is in the foreground.)
The Israelis certainly seemed to have played a big role, too, in that Russian-Georgia five day war.
Here’s the Atlantic:
Fresh documents released by WikiLeaks raise new questions about the five-day war between Russia and Georgia in 2008. In particular, the role of Israel and its involvement in providing military intelligence to Russia in the run-up to the war.
According to a leaked e-mail from an analyst at the intelligence firm Stratfor, Russia and Israel engaged in a deal in 2008 in which Jerusalem provided the Kremlin with secret codes for Georgian UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in exchange for information on Iranian missile systems. In the e-mail, a Stratfor analyst says "Israel and Russia made a swap – Israel gave Russia the ‘data link’ code for those specific UAVs; in return, Russia gave Israel the codes for Iran’s Tor-M1s." In 2008, that 'data link' code was allegedly used by the Russians to take down a Georgian drone flying in Georgian air space, a defining moment in the months before the war.
The Georgian influences in our politics continue too.
Molly McKew, a self-stylized “information warfare” expert, lobbied for the Georgian government (does no one even bother checking the FARA registration now?) and advised none other than Saakashvili himself!
McKew called yours truly an “information terrorist” in a fact-free story for Wired Magazine but she’s a pay to say assassin who hawked the Iraq War. Of course she never discloses any of it to her readers. You can read all about the crazy world she lives in here.
Are you still paying attention?
That’s a mighty complicated history, Charles. I lost you somewhere along the way. And that’s exactly my point, dear reader.
None of this has anything to do with the USA.
We are, as John Quincy Adams once put it, “friend of liberty everywhere but custodian only of our own.”