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“Your parents will die young like mine!” Lindsey Graham’s Sister Unveils New Senate Campaign Promise
“Government run health care? Bad idea!” yells Darline Graham, sister of the late Lindsey, during her primary victory speech as she runs to keep her brother’s Senate seat in South Carolina. She gives her pitch to voters, what some may call an alternative to Medicare for All:
This week, a big development for the proxy war in Ukraine: CIA Chief John Ratcliffe made a surprise visit to Moscow, and depending on which corporate outlet you read, the reason for the trip is confusing.
The Wall Street Journal says Ratcliffe went to issue a warning to the Russians, (‘Don’t you dare attack NATO.’) But the New York Times reported that Racliffe was merely sharing some friendly advice that the war isn’t going well for Russia and they should end it before it widens further. Either way, the CIA in Moscow, nearly five years into the war, surely means something is about to happen.
To help sort out the confusion, we are joined by Richard Sakwa, author and Professor Emeritus at the University of Kent, who specializes in Russian and European Politics. He explains that, while Russia has dominated the war so far, time is actually not on their side.
Useful Idiots: This war has been going on for a long time, and the longer it drags on, the bigger the risk that it widens beyond Russia and Ukraine.
Richard Sakwa: That’s precisely the argument of the hardliners, the hawks in Russia, who basically say that time is not on Russia’s side in the sense that the West is in a vanguard of crossing all of Russia’s red lines.
Putin himself also added to the warnings that Ukraine and the West are opening a Pandora’s box. It wasn’t quite clear yet what is in that box.
In response, [UK Prime Minister] Burnham himself then said, ‘Well, you started the fire.’ Now that shows an extraordinary intellectual and conceptual myopia that the West has been locked into since the beginning of this conflict. They simply cannot understand the underlying logic of this conflict, as if Putin woke up one fine morning in February and attacked Ukraine in his mad zeal to re-establish the Soviet Empire if not the Russian Empire
So it’s just an entrenched a position. And of course, this raises, as you suggest, that if Russia does not respond, then it is a sign of weakness.
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