My title refers to The Sting, the movie, and the piano ragtime classic, The Entertainer.
Eight months ago, President Trump claimed he could settle the Russia/Ukraine war in 24 hours.
The crowd cheered (even on CNN). Deep-state mouthpiece CNN and Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky sneered.
How could Trump do it? Simple. Give the Zelensky administration a choice:
(1) The new Trump admin traces the aid money flows and brings to justice any corrupt Ukrainian officials (no matter how high up they are) or (2) the war stops.
Zelensky would immediately agree to end the war.
Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, would also agree because it would end a war in which the enemies (Ukraine, the E.U., and Biden America) have had a secondary (primary?) goal of breaking up Russia.
Carbon-rich Russia still needs several years to regroup and rebuild before hitting back at save-the-world-from-carbon Europe.
The Ukrainian entertainer
About a month ago Zelensky met with reporters from the Baltics (watch with Google translate; note that “Raschist” (Russian fascist) is incorrectly translated as “racist”).
The only hardball question was the last one about Republican concerns about Ukrainian theft of foreign aid in the last two minutes of the video.
Zelensky gave a bizarre, rambling, Biden-style response, ending with the promise that when Ron DeSantis retires, Zelensky will help him financially.
The question about the foreign aid "sting" (or con job as the word was used in the movie) obviously rattled the entertainer to the core.
No wonder Putin often mockingly referred to pre-war Zelensky as merely a good entertainer and actor. He quickly ended the press conference and left. Not a word about corruption.
Putin, the beloved leader of the Russian majority, is a cold-blooded killer, which is one of the few things Biden ever got right.
But he is nobody’s fool.
Fools (especially naive or senile ones) get you into trouble. Just after he became president, Zelensky wanted to talk man-to-man with Vlad.
What an idiot. Weakness or civility are no bargaining chips with cold-blooded killers. The naive, foolish, and reckless behavior of the entertainer, and NATO, the EU, and the Biden administration, helped start the war that could have been avoided.
What is this so-called Ukrainian freedom Zelensky loves to talk about?
A Brit in a wild Hawaii shirt exposed it for the fantasy it is, better than any think tank intellectual ever could.
Freedom from Russia? Yeah, right, tell that to Ukraine’s atomic energy boss who wants to spend $600 million to buy Russian nuclear reactors (just another Ukraine government official taking Russian bribes). Zelensky won’t talk about corruption because it exposes the scam, the sting, the fantasy world in which third world Ukraine teams up with the dictatorial E.U. and the corrupt Biden admin against Republican America.
I lived and worked for years in Russia, China, and Germany. In each country, I spent years learning the language, after which I could no longer listen to the filthy official narratives of the state-run media.
Germany’s incessant, sick comparisons of Trump to Hitler in 2016 was the worst. The vast majority of Germans were (are) like (Austrian) Schwarzenegger, an entertainer and accomplished athlete (mental gymnast), who (on CNN of course) suggests that Trump is a source of Nazi-style hate while totally absolving his own for-real Nazi father from any guilt (“my father and so many other millions of men were sucked into a hate system”). Those poor master race sheep.
A lot of Americans get in on the act too. Timothy Snyder, Ukraine’s beloved Yale historian, for whom Ukraine can do no wrong, gets on a lot of junkets to Kyiv for his reliably pro-Ukraine, anti-Trump mental gymnastics.
But there is a small minority of Germans (usually older Germans who experienced Hitler Germany firsthand) who admit the truth about their history.
And in Ukraine, there is a very small private sector deplorable YouTube press (that publishes only in Ukrainian) that is not afraid of exposing the truth about their homeland (although they all still hate or disapprove of Trump).
Ukraine’s war against its deplorables
A deplorable Ukrainian reporter recently discussed the Ukrainian government’s decades-long war against Ukrainian journalists and the private sector. A war not unlike FDR’s “New Deal” against private sector America. But during World War II, FDR let private sector America breathe (because he needed them). Ukraine’s private sector has gotten no war-time reprieve. About 100,000 Ukrainian “siloviki” (government enforcers, such as customs, tax police, etc.) and “rights protectors” (law enforcement agencies), rather than going to the front lines, wage a war of attrition against all of 30,000 “systemic” Ukrainian businesses.
In another video, he talks about Zelensky demanding that EU countries send Ukrainians back to Ukraine to serve in and help finance the war. But Zelensky never talks about creating the conditions that would make them want to come back.
This is all possible because Ukrainians have a very limited cultural heritage of freedom (Ukraine is not Argentina). They all still firmly believe in a government-run economy that they themselves know leads to massive corruption.
The war-time free-for-all
Alexander Savchenko, a former Ukrainian central bank official, explains how billions of dollars disappear from Ukrainian banks and nobody goes to jail (not unlike American bank bailouts). Oligarchs own judges, prosecutors, and politicians at the highest levels. Only an outside “supersystem” such as the E.U. or U.S.A. can stop this. He sums up the beauty of war: In extreme situations no conditions are made for financial assistance. No-war Trump really would annoy quite a few higher ups in Ukraine (and America). Even the Ukrainian manager of the VOA office for Eastern Europe says that Trump supporters (half of the Americans funding the VOA) blindly follow Trump and his constant “rhetoric” about no wars during his presidency.
The end is near
When the Western oligarchs backing this war realize they won’t get to buy up Ukraine (or a broken-up Russia) on the cheap, it will all end. “And just like that the war ended and everyone went home”, as Forrest would say.
Zelensky’s inner circle will all move to posh homes in southern France. The borders will open for E.U./American-style population replacement. Ukraine will seek refuge from its endemic corruption and from future Russia harassment/invasion by joining the socialist E.U. and NATO. And maybe, just maybe, thanks to Trump forcing the E.U. socialists to grow up (note the defaced American flag), the 540 million E.U. citizens with a combined GDP eight times (!) that of Russia might decide to spend maybe 1% more of GDP to protect themselves from Russia.
Maybe the only way to get Ukraine to “grow up,” to become something like Taiwan or Israel (the Davids that deal successfully with their Goliaths), is for Trump to do the same for Ukraine, to cut off the corruption lifeline?
After all, for the Zelensky and Biden governments, isn’t the massively profitable rampant corruption the real goal?
In any case the new Russia, enjoying more private sector freedom and national unity thanks to the war, will take any measures against any future threats to its hegemony over all of Russian territory. Just like Washington, DC and its sister Democratic metropolises will take any measures against the deplorable American heartland (“flyover territory” that they don’t fly over). Once comrade breadlines Bernie Sanders’ People’s Democratic Party can get 51% of the vote count, the war will be over. And that could happen any time (as Forrest would say “And just like that there were 20 million new voters!”). The EU (with its unelected leaders) and the Ukrainians would welcome a one-party American state led by the “Sanderistas” (search for “Bernie Sanders” in that article). The Russians would shake their heads in disbelief at how the once mighty America (that obviously learned nothing from Russia’s own collapse) rotted from within.