Comedy, it is often said, is unusual people in real situations and farce is real people in unusual situations. No doubt, it can be said that by electing comedian Vladimir Zelensky as their new president in a landslide victory in Sunday’s runoff, the people of Ukraine find themselves in a farcical situation. To be sure, the country’s embrace of an inexperienced showman represented a verdict on three decades of political failure. Ukraine’s first president in the ‘post-Soviet’ era Leonid Kuchma...

Russiagate has three purposes. One is to prevent President Trump from endangering the vast budget and power of the military/security complex by normalizing relations with Russia. Another, in the words of James Howard Kunstler, is “to conceal the criminal conduct of US government officials meddling in the 2016 election in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign,” by focusing all public and political attention on a hoax distraction. The third is to obstruct Trump’s campaign and distract him...

The real “deplorable” in today’s United States is the continuation of a foreign policy based on endless aggression to maintain Washington’s military dominance in parts of the world where Americans have no conceivable interest. Many voters backed Donald J. Trump because he committed himself to changing all that, but, unfortunately, he has reneged on his promise, instead heightening tension with major powers Russia and China while also threatening Iran and Venezuela on an almost daily basis. Now...

Many of us do our part to help the environment. We recycle, we bike to work, and we buy less plastic. Yet tap water everywhere is still so filthy; the air, coastlines, parks, and lands are more and more polluted; and cancer continues to take the lives of millions of workers, young and old. Who’s to blame? Bottling companies? Chemicals corporations? These companies are very serious polluters, and should be held accountable. But most of all, blame the US Department of Defense. Pentagon is the...

Imagine being robbed every time you receive a paycheck, but once a year getting some of the stolen money back because the thieves took more than they intended. Would you be happy about it? If you are like most Americans the answer is yes, since most people are grateful when they get a partial “refund” of the taxes the government withheld from their paychecks. A tax refund means more taxes were taken out of your paycheck than you legally owed — in other words, thanks to withholding you gave the...

Julian Assange’s mother reported yesterday that the WikiLeaks founder has not been permitted any visitors during his detention in Belmarsh Prison, including from doctors and his lawyers. Doctors who visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy have attested that he urgently needs medical care. Belmarsh is a maximum security prison sometimes referred to as “the UK’s Guantanamo Bay“. And yet we’re asked to believe that this has something to do with an alleged bail violation and a US extradition...

The Mueller report has finally dropped and instead of being relieved to discover, once and for all, that the president didn’t collude with a foreign power to steal an election, Democrats and media pundits are utterly devastated. This is America in the era of Russiagate. The partly-redacted, nearly 400-page report, delivered to Congress on Thursday afternoon, offered no new evidence or indication that Donald Trump or his 2016 campaign were in cahoots with Moscow to prevent Hillary Clinton from...

The two-pronged conspiracy theory that has dominated US political discourse for almost three years – that (1) Trump, his family and his campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, and (2) Trump is beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin — was not merely rejected today by the final report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It was obliterated: in an undeniable and definitive manner. The key fact is this: Mueller – contrary to weeks of false media claims...

Today (April 17) I heard a NPR “news” report that described the democratically elected president of Venezuela as “the Venezuelan dictator Maduro.” By repeating over and over that a democratically elected president is a dictator, the presstitutes create that image of Maduro in the minds of vast numbers of peoples who know nothing about Venezuela and had never heard of Maduro until he is dropped on them as “dictator.”Nicolas Maduro Moros was elected president of Venezuela in 2013 and again in...

It is depressing to observe how the United States of America has become the evil empire. Having served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War and in the Central Intelligence Agency for the second half of the Cold War, I had an insider’s viewpoint of how an essentially pragmatic national security policy was being transformed bit by bit into a bipartisan doctrine that featured as a sine qua non global dominance for Washington. Unfortunately, when the Soviet Union collapsed the...

The bug in Mueller’s report to be released Thursday is that he accepts that the Russian government interfered in the election. Trump should challenge that, says VIPS.MEMORANDUM FOR: The President FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) SUBJECT: The Fly in the Mueller Ointment Mr. President: The song has ended but the melody lingers on. The expected release Thursday of the redacted text of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference...

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals. In the current governmental climate, where laws that run counter to the dictates of the Constitution are made in secret, passed without debate, and upheld by secret courts that operate behind closed doors, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can render you an “enemy of the...

A little more than a decade ago, I was asked to address a London dinner-table of about twenty Gulf “figures” – a mix of Ambassadors and those with “ties to power”. All represented the cosmopolitan, rich élite of the Gulf. Then, towards the evening’s end, talk turned to Hizbullah: the gathering simply erupted into flames. Well, almost literally – as these grandees choked on the smoke and tongues of fire pouring from their nostrils (to say they were unhappy is an understatement). In unison, they...

The arrest of Julian Assange has produced rapturous cheering from the American political elite. Hillary Clinton declared that Assange “must answer for what he has done.” Unfortunately, Assange’s arrest will do nothing to prevent the vast majority of conniving politicians and bureaucrats from paying no price for deceiving the American public. “Truth will out” is a phrase that is routinely recited to keep Americans paying and obeying. Politicians and editorial writers toss this phrase out to...

The Justice Department said Thursday that it was charging Julian Assange with one felony count of conspiring to hack into a computer. In the greater scheme of things, that’s a nonsensical charge. There are probably 10,000 fat, lonely guys, living in their parents’ basements who the government could charge with that crime on any given day. Assange’s attorneys in the UK say the extradition process might last five years because it will likely end up in the European Court of Justice. If true,...

I recently spoke to some college students who, I realized, were in fifth grade when I got on a plane to Iraq. They now study that stuff in history classes like “Opportunities and Errors: 21st-Century America in the Middle East.” About halfway through our conversation, I realized it’s coming up on 10 years since I first went to Iraq. Now that’s real history. I was a Foreign Service Officer then, a diplomat, embedded with the US Army at a series of forward operating bases and in charge of a...