Quotations

Democrat supporting US journalist Cenk Uygur:

'Sarah Palin was very nervous before her VP debate with Biden in 2008 and then she realized she just had to memorize the talking points on each issue and give that answer no matter what the specific question was. Are we sure that's not what Kamala Harris did this entire campaign?' 

Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald

The US and UK are now actively working on the missiles they provided Ukraine to launch inside Russia. Ukraine can't launch them on their own. They need US intelligence and military support to guide them. Putin knows this. Would the US be OK with that?

Alexander Titov:

Meanwhile, all the talk in the West about ending the war, such as a freeze on the war along the current frontline or a 20-year moratorium on Ukraine's NATO accession, is in its own bubble.

Absurdly the international deep state apparatchiks say Tulsi Gabbard might give classified information to the Kremlin

2022 

 

"Dear Presidents Putin, Zelensky, and Biden. It's time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country-- no military alliance with NATO or Russia—and therefore alleviate the legitimate security concerns of both US and NATO countries as well as Russia, because there would be no Russian or NATO troops on each other's non-Baltic borders. This would allow the Ukrainian people to live in peace." 


October 

"Kamala Harris was in Europe a few days before Putin invaded Ukraine, speaking very clearly and loudly about how Ukraine should become a member of NATO. This was one of the main instigators, crossing the red line that Russia, during Putin's reign and before him, has held."For any objective-minded person, you can see why they wouldn't want NATO missiles sitting in Ukraine, the country with the biggest border with Russia. Kamala Harris has put us, the American people, in this position, where we are closer to the brink of World War III and nuclear war than we ever have been before. We are staring down the barrel of nuclear Armageddon because of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden." 

American revolution

The gallant British and the brave American Tories lost the war of 1776-83. The only American conservatives  were then deported.

We should have freed the slaves and won with their help, then executed the Founding Fathers. 

Our defeat led to the French Revolution and eventually to Marxism, girls in slacks and all the horrors of the modern world.

Since then all Americans have been liberals, except for the somewhat influential Marxists and the insignificant fascists.

Now England, of course, is an American colony.

Perhaps Mr Trump will be an isolationist and set us (and the rest of the world) free, but I know he won't.

Quotations

Ed Miliband, after losing the 2015 election (which meant David Cameron had to fulfil his promise to call a Brexit referendum), said: "When you win, everything you did was an act of genius and when you lose, everything you did was the work of a fool."


Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: "Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career."


Mario Vargas Llosa: "We live as many lives as we read books."

A. N. Wilson: “Being Russian, unless you are preternaturally stupid or wicked, produces violent inner tensions and conflicts, reflected in nearly all the great imaginative geniuses to emerge from Russia in the last two centuries. On the one hand, you know that you have been born into a ‘God-bearing’ nation, whose destiny is to keep burning the flame of truth while the other nations languish in decadence. (The truth may be Orthodox Christianity or the creeds of Marxist-Leninism, but the feeling is the same.) You know that the Russians are best at everything from poetry to gymnastics, and that they invented everything: ballet, bicycles, the internal combustion engine. You know that Russia has more soul than any other country – that its birch avenues, its snows, its ice, its summers are all the more glorious than the manifestations of nature in more benighted countries. There is only one drawback, which is that it is completely horrible to live there.” 

Is Trump America's De Gaulle?

Tom Gallagher once asked me this and Richard Vinen, a fine historian, explores the idea in Unherd.


I'd prefer to say he is the antithesis of Franklin D Roosevelt. That is a good thing, in case you were in doubt.

When I was 19 the joke was "Ronald Reagan's hero is Calvin Coolidge, Nancy Reagan's is Calvin Klein".

It is Ronald Reagan's achievement that the joke is no longer funny because liking Coolidge is respectable.

I have come to join his fan club.

Donald Trump has certain things in common with Silent Cal, when it comes to policy not personality. Perhaps he should bring tiger cubs into the Oval Office.

The BBC's Katty Kay said in 2016 that Trump was really a Democrat but he turned out to be one of the very few Republicans still standing, by which I mean Coolidge Republicans.

Trump is right-wing but left and right no longer mean very much and the parties in most countries no longer make sense. 

My favourite journalists are mostly leftists like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Tahibbi, Max Blumenthal, Patrick Cockburn and Caitlin Johnstone, on foreign affairs. 

They are far more like my romantic Toryism than any British Conservative politician. 

Theresa May was to the left of Tony Blair. 

Boris Johnson was the most left-wing Prime Minister since Harold Wilson.

This is from Allister Heath in yesterdays' Telegraph. (He is usually very good, but not when he rejoiced at Liz Truss's budget.)

"America is now Trump country, at war with progressivism, open borders, international bureaucracies, net zero, Jihadism, military adventurism and the Left-wing media. The old order is dead, never to be resuscitated; for better or for worse, American politics has finally caught up with globalisation, deindustrialisation, the resurrection of history (contra Francis Fukuyama) and the internet’s explosive rise.

"Donald Trump is 78, but he is a very modern politician with an intuitive grasp of how social fragmentation and the rise and fall of institutions can work for him. He has learnt to bypass network news and The New York Times. His brand of populist, multi-racial, working-class, highly online, Right-wing politics has captured the new centre-ground. It now looks as if 2016 was a mere dry run, derailed by Covid; 2024 is the real deal, a revolutionary moment, a reconstitution and realignment of American and Western politics around fresh principles, many excellent but some much more malign."

Another question is: is Putin Russia's De Gaulle? They do have certain things in common, though very much that separates the Christian gentleman from the ex-KGB thief.

A famous victory

They said I'm going to start wars – I'm going to end wars. 

Donald Trump in his victory address at Mar-a-Lago

Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said on Wednesday that Donald Trump will be tested on his statements that he can stop the war within hours.

Any objective observer could see Kamala was unqualified for the job. Even Kamala at times, behind the cackle laugh and the word salads and the baffling array of accents, seemed to know she wasn’t up to it.

But they pressed ahead with her anyway. In the end, it didn’t seem to matter to the virtue signalling Left that Kamala’s position had been achieved by chance to a greater extent than anyone since Lyndon Johnson. That, a diversity hire for VP, she was able to fall into the presidency slot because Joe Biden needed to be put out to pasture with no time for a contest.

America in decay

Biden-Harris are responsible for a disastrous humiliation in Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine and what looks exactly like genocide in Gaza. 

The administration has a malign influence in the world, trying to subvert the Hungarian government and make France woke. 

They preside over US decline, which might be a good thing.

They and their proxy the UK were defeated when they went to the aid of Israeli shipowners at risk from the Houthis. Many Americans and Englishmen could scarce forbear to cheer on the Houthis. 

Worst the Biden and Harris left the American borders open while they interfered around the world.

My taxi driver today blamed America, and her desire for expansion, for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most Bucharest taxi drivers seem to do so. 

Behind the killing in Gaza he thought were Israelis discerning tourist industry and real estate opportunities. I thought of Mr Kushner.

He, the driver not Mr Kushner, reminded me to look at of the Baron in The Third Man, the one who played the violin at the nightclub. This put me off him, no doubt unfairly.

An interesting conversation with someone in the real world. 

He might know more than the men and women who write for the papers. Taxi drivers often do. Discuss.

Quotations

“You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power—he's free again.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Israel

“The REAL enemy that we have is not Iran…is not Hezbollah….is not Hamas... it's from within, the messianic, crazy, extreme groups of Israelis that think that they can kick out the Palestinians and annex the territories. Netanyahu depends on them… he allows them to do things which are totally intolerable and unacceptable.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last night.

'Netanyahu, Gallant and Halevi are gambling with Israel’s very existence… they never think for a moment about the day after. They are disconnected from reality and exercise no judgment … When the catastrophe strikes, it will already be too late … These three megalomaniacs imagine that they are capable of destroying both Hamas and Hizbullah and ending the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran … They want to accomplish everything through military pressure, but in the end, they won’t accomplish anything. They have put Israel on the brink of two impossible situations [–] the outbreak of a full-fledged war in the Middle East, [and secondly] continuing the war of attrition. In either situation, Israel won’t be able to survive for long. Only a diplomatic agreement has the power to extricate us from the quagmire into which these three men have dragged us.' IDF (retired) Major General Itzhak Brik

'The consensus in the defense establishment over the progress of the war is surprisingly broad. All senior officials, from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on down, have been speaking in near-unison for a week. After a dizzying series of military and intelligence successes in the past three months, the war in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon has just about exhausted itself, with only a few necessary measures remaining. Once these are completed, it would be best to try to reach agreements that will end the fighting in the north and south and include the release of all hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.' Ha'aretz two days ago

“I met many [neocons] at the Hudson Institute, where [I] had worked for five years in the mid ‘70s; some of them, or their fathers, were Trotskyists. They picked up Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution. That is, an unfolding revolution – whereas Trotsky said what began in Soviet Russia was going to spread around the world: The neocons adapted this and said, No, the permanent Revolution is the American Empire. It’s going to expand, and expand, and nothing can stop us – to the entire world”. Profesor Michael Hudson quoted by Alistair Crooke