DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Ukraine: The Saga Concludes

their pool is much bigger than Ukraine's

Are you suggesting they stop fighting for their freedom? Would you?

Let's not forget who started this BS War.. It was Russia.. NOT Ukraine. They are defending themselves. It wasn't that long ago that the Republican Party actually knew who Americas enemies were. Now Trump and many in the party are in bed with them.

it wasn't that long ago that Dems, Indy's and Repubs all agreed, Russia was an enemy for the ages.

But now, for some damn reason, we have all these republicans (MAGA) that think that Russia has it right and we should emulate their system of Government...

if we were ever invaded by a foreign country.....should i go out of my way to save a MAGA family or just look out for my own?

MAGA is making me feel less of a patriot and veteran and more of a guy who despises his fellow countrymen.

Come on my man, that isn't true.

We are looking to pull back on our financial support. Doing that isn't switching sides. If we started to send Putin money to support his war machine, I would agree and be among the loudest critics.

Any mineral deal will act as a security blanket. At that point we will have a vested interest in Ukraine and would be more willing to protect those interests.

I don't know, maybe it is just me but if we are hell bent on spending money, at least put it in to this country. New roads and bridges. A new electric grid. Support business who in turn employ American workers at solid wages. Whatever. It is as if other countries see the US as the world bank who lends out money but doesn't require repayment or only pennies on the dollar.

That is where I am at. I am an old dog. I have seen us take care of the world at the expense of our own self care. Maybe it's time to shore up things at home?

ROI is absolutely great in Ukraine war.

So what exactly do you call plans to lift Russian sanctions if not providing them with more finance and funding? Google

By slashing our National Park services, along with social services and healthcare services? Not taking care of our homeless folks at all. Yeah old dog, that’s the ticket. Shoring up things at home, DOGE. Pffft Goper’s. Watching planes fall out of the sky slashing government jobs and saying we need to shore things up at home. You guys crack me up.

Your answer is to basically gift Ukraine to Russia. You can slice that and dice that any way that makes you feel better about it but your answer is to put Putin on the doorstep of NATO in order to save money. When you should know from history it will cost us ten fold later. That's what always happens when you reward a dictator for their aggression. That's an obvious side of weakness to them. If you can't see all of the things trump is doing to help Russia while blaming Ukraine for everything there is no helping you at this point.

Nobody seems to understand - after talking about this until I'm blue in the face - how spot on this point is.

I think Ukraine should fight for its freedom. But, inevitably, they will not win - they don't have the resources.

I think the best thing that can happen is Ukraine signs a deal to end the war and we go protect our investment. Otherwise, Europe will have to do it, and we will focus on fixing everything wrong in our country.

Russia did invade and start the war.

Russia, China, and North Korea are the enemy.

Do you know how to use Google search?


We are pulling back our financial support... AND moving to lift sanctions on Russia... AND brow-beating our allies... AND shutting down our cyber-warfare planning vs Russia... AND giving in to each and every Russian negotiating point.

Doing that is very easily interpreted as switching sides. But for the extra dense, we also voted on a resolution against our European allies and with Russia, Syria, and North Korea. It's understandable that Fox News skipped over that event.


I appreciate the MAGAs that are sticking around on here since the EO's gained steam... there are WAY less of you participating in this forum compared to 40-some days ago... which is a weird way to celebrate getting all the things you voted for. That said, it's exhausting trying to carry a debate on here when the majority of my posts involve bringing you up to speed on current events and explaining common sense topics.

How do you supposed we do that when we're slashing and burning the departments that would be responsible for carrying that out?

If Russia is one of our main enemies why is it bad to help a democracy weaken them at a fraction of what it would cost us to do so? And can you explain why trump claims he cares about balancing the budget while he's lifting the spending limit so he can spend trillions on tax cuts?

Are you saying we can hand out trillions in tax cuts but couldn't afford the just over 100 billion we spent on weakening one of our top enemies by supporting Ukraine's war effort?

You see, none of this is about spending or balancing the budget. Republicans too spend like drunken sailors. They just lie about it. They just decide to spend tons of money on different things. In this case it will be trillions to mainly line the pockets of the wealthy.

MAGA is getting tired of arguing. Instead of wasting their energy arguing, they are taking action and ignoring the Dems.

And ignoring every major ally we have. Putin and Russia are SO HAPPY right now.

I would be tired too, if facts, truth, and honesty were on the other side of the argument.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/...-rise-of-the-brutal-american/ar-AA1AiY4M



The Rise of the Brutal American
© Brian Snyder / Reuters
A book festival in Vilnius, meetings with friends in Warsaw, a dinner in Berlin: I happened to be at gatherings in three European cities over the past several days, and everywhere I went, everyone wanted to talk about the Oval Office performance last Friday. Europeans needed some time to process this event, not just because of what it told them about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it told them about America, a country they thought they knew well.


In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.

Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterward, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.” They announced that they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would “get” Greenland, which is a part of Denmark—a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too.



These are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are Mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.

The Oval Office meeting, the subsequent announcements, and the speech to Congress also clarified something else: Trump, Vance, and many of the people around them now fully inhabit an alternative reality, one composed entirely of things they see and hear in the ether. Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many cease-fires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.


It’s precisely because they remember these broken truces that the Ukrainians keep asking what happens after a cease-fire, what kind of security guarantees will be put in place, how Trump plans to prevent Putin from breaking them once more and, above all, what price the Russians are willing to pay for peace in Ukraine. Will they even give up their claims to territory they don’t control? Will they agree that Ukraine can be a sovereign democracy?

But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X.

Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. This is not new. Back in 2016, at the height of the election campaign, Trump frequently repeated false stories launched by Russia’s Sputnik news agency, declaring that Hillary Clinton and Obama had “founded ISIS,” or that “the Google search engine is suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.” At the time, Trump also imitated Russian talk about Clinton starting World War III, another Russian meme. He produced a new version of that in the Oval Office on Friday. “You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III,” he shouted at Zelensky.


But what was ominous in 2016 is dangerous in 2025, especially in Europe. Russian military aggression is more damaging, Russian sabotage across Europe more frequent, and Russian cyberattacks almost constant. In truth, it is Putin, not Zelensky, who started this conflict, Putin who has brought North Korean troops and Iranian drones to Europe, Putin who instructs his propagandists to talk about nuking London, Putin who keeps raising the stakes and scope of the war. Most Europeans live in this reality, not in the fictional world inhabited by Trump, and the contrast is making them think differently about Americans. According to pollsters, nearly three-quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.

In reality, the Russians have said nothing publicly about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the past decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but that millions of people can see. Their use of tariffs as random punishment, not for enemies but for allies, seems not just brutal but inexplicable.

And in the Oval Office, Trump and Vance behaved like imperial rulers chastising a subjugated colony, vocalizing the same disgust and disdain that Russian propagandists use when they talk about Ukraine. Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next.

They can win, just like the Taliban took Afghanistan back over. Russia is the occupying force and they have to throw a bunch of bodies - more than they have already - in order to fully take over and occupy Ukraine. They are significantly draining their resources. It's already an albatross for them and it's unsustainable for the long term.

You've done your best to inform them of the facts from every angle possible. They're just not interested in facts.

The problem is that partial-truths and dishonesty are on both sides of the argument.

Join the club. I’ll always step up when I see the vulnerable attacked. But I feel ya in my core.

Why, it’s the art of the deal. Give Putin everything he wants and hope that he’s satisfied. Trump almost sounded like he wanted Greenland to protect us from Putin and China last night. But one of our allies holds it, willing to allow us access for strategic use, but not control or ownership. AND this does not sit well with Trump why? Hmmm…

ROI is great for whom? Corporations or "us"? Ukraine?

Ukraine is holding off Russia with other people's scraps, but somehow Russia is supposed to still be some huge threat to NATO countries? (I'm not so much saying it isn't a threat as that this approach isn't really changing that threat)

Meanwhile the cost in lives keeps climbing.

It's not that there is no return, I'm just not sure that "absolutely great" necessarily paints the whole picture.

I'm not applauding this administration's approach. I wasn't applauding the previous one, either.

Ukraine had the resources and the deterrent. But they gave up those NUKES to be part of the free world order… pesky facts.

Peen, the vast majority of aid money was spent in America to provide material aid. Programs like medicaid have kept hospitals open. Projects like SNAP prevent crime and feed kids. Let me ask you this; when the medicaid and snap benefits get shut off, what do you think those people will do to survive? If working there way out of poverty were possible, they would have already done it. Those programs dehumanize you and nobody lives GOOD on them. They’ve been stigmatized since the 30s and 40s. Yet millions count on them daily. Same with social security. We’re talking half or more of the population losing hope and heading to Hoovervilles. Remember the crime sprees pre and early depression years? Get ready to see thugs around every corner… but this time it will be everyday desperate people trying to survive.

Remember this when Dems get power again. And you’ve lost your mind if you think that won’t happen.

It’s great for democracies around the world. Ukraine has shown the world that Putin and the mighty Russian military is a paper tiger. Everyone but Donald see that. Donald worships Putins wealth, and it’s been long thought that he is actually the richest man in the world. Trump has no reason to fear Putin while wielding the might of America’s military and riches. Yet he cowers. Why?

They won’t. Rinse repeat.

It seems as though trump helping put Russia on the doorstep of NATO isn't a convincing enough of an argument to believe that's not good for us. It seems emboldening Putin for his aggression which history has shown only emboldens such men to further aggression isn't enough for him to believe helping Ukraine isn't good for us.

Maybe it will take a Russian ally bombing Pearl Harbor again for some to get the message. That's what it took the last time the free world catered to a dictator.

Putin has a bunch of dirt on Trump no doubt.

In general, absolutely.


Right now in this very specific point in time... I don't think so....

if for no other reason than because Democrats really aren't saying all that much.

The elected Democrats, perhaps. The social media (and media, media) "Democrats" are still making a lot of noise.

And it will get louder.

Is Russia a paper tiger or a threat to democracy? Seeing it in seemingly contradictory ways works better for some than others.

The whole worships and cowers loaded language seems inaccurate to me. Trump sees everyone as a mark. Some need coddled, some need intimidated.

Yet, Trump and the strategies for addressing Ukraine are still two different (if sometimes overlapping) things. It feels like many conflate things together excessively.

And likely less accurate and less productive. That's more or less my expectation.

So randos on the internet are saying.............

There's a lot of noise to be made right now when you have a president saying stuff like he's the ultimate authority on what is law, and somehow granting an unelected/unappointed campaign contributor the ability to mess with funding across the entirety of our govt despite a rash of conflicts of interest and holes in data integrity and security.

Well if you really want the answer, it’s everything all at once. Alpha and Omega. It’s the beginning middle and end of stupid little games. It’s asking for contributions while taking what we want… this is how YOU come into conversations and say nothing but disrupt everything.

Sorry man. I don't generally say this, but you aren't worth the time.

You and yours are the problem the Dems are up against.

As an example. The recent air accidents are a pilot problem, not a FAA problem. I don't know who was eliminated from the FAA, but it wasn't controllers.

One was a military pilot several hundred feet above allowed height.

Another clipped a wing on landing and flipped the plane.

Those aren't control problems. Those are pilot problems.