Russian bots walk in carrying a bottle of Vodka and waving a swastika. They look like people an American would ordinarily trust.
Their propaganda is aimed at the same people they’ve been manipulating for the last six years. You know, the idiots who voted for Trump for supposedly “moral” reasons even though they knew that he had
1. Set up a phony university and defrauded the people who paid tuition out of their money,
2. Managed somehow to go bankrupt six times, including running a casino in New Jersey,
3. Set up a charity for children with cancer and put the money in his own pocket,
4. Made numerous lewd comments about his own daughter plainly hinting at incest,
5. Bragged on tape about committing sexual assault,
6. Had over two dozen women come forward saying he’d assaulted them, including accusations of forcible rape,
7. Was on record for hanging out with sex trafficker of minors Jeffrey Epstein,
8. Had had complaints filed against him for racial discrimination in his businesses,
9. Slept with a porn star and paid her hush money,
10. Publicly called for Putin to interfere in the 2016 election in order to help him win,
11. Gave his campaign’s internal voter database to the Russians, presumably to help them target their attacks on behalf of his campaign,
12. Attempted to extort Ukraine by withholding military aid that had been funded by Congress in order to get Ukraine to supply dirt on Joe Biden,
13. Hired a known Russian operative to be his campaign manager,
14. Etc.
The people who voted for Trump when they knew all this because they claimed it was a “moral” decision to back him … the same people who backed Trump’s attempt to overthrow our government and install himself as a dictator … the same folks who are going to vote for the Republican members of the House and Senate who authored resolutions overturning the election in support of Trump’s coup attempt — those dumber than dirts are who Russian bots are aiming at.
Trying to contact the brains of people who claim with a straight face that they supported Trump on moral grounds is admittedly aiming at a small target, but the Russians have been hitting it with regularity for six years now. They’ve gotten pretty good at manipulating a certain segment of the American population.
Here’s how they’ve been doing it during their war against Ukraine.
Russia invaded Ukraine for no reason whatsoever except that they wanted to take over another country. Nobody made them do it.
The “West” didn’t make them do it.
Biden didn’t make them do it.
Ukraine didn’t invite them in.
Slandering Ukraine is all the rage among right wing Republicans. I well remember that Mick Mulvaney, who was the one who followed through on Trump’s extortion attempt and stopped payment of military aid to Ukraine, claimed that Trump’s action was justified because Ukraine was “corrupt.”
Aside from the absurdity of Trump claiming that someone else was corrupt as justification for the fact that he was directly committing a massively corrupt act, the money was authorized by Congress. The action Trump and his stooge Mulvaney took in refusing to allow Ukraine to have that money was flat-out illegal. It was an abuse of power and it was against the law; several laws, in fact. That’s why Trump was impeached for doing it.
But aside from Republican slanders on behalf of Trump and their own personal connections to Russian money, Ukraine has no fault whatsoever in having been the victim of Putin’s desire to rebuild the old Russian Empire by taking over other countries by force.
Despite this, Russian bots have expended quite a bit of bandwidth claiming that their invasion was somehow or other justified because Ukraine was either fascist or corrupt or something that puts a moral gloss on running over the country with tanks, bombing schools and hospitals, committing mass murder of unarmed civilians, raping women and children and then burning their bodies, tying children to their tanks and using them as human shields — that all that’s justified because Ukraine is … according to Russian bots … bad.
Then, there’s the old fear mongering routine. I have talked to followers of right wing hysteria promoters who are scared out of what little wits they have in fear of the Russians. They have been hypered into a frenzy of stammering crazy by stories of how the invincible Russkies are going to be bombing Cincinnati at dawns early light some day soon. They’re afraid the Russians are going to attack the USA, they’re afraid the Russians are going to use cyber warfare to take out our infrastructure; they’re scared, and I mean really, really scared.
Of course, you can’t reason with these dimwits. Russia’s got its hands full trying to invade Ukraine. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure that if they can’t whip Ukraine — and it appears that they can’t fight the Ukrainian military successfully, so they’re fighting the little old ladies and three year old girls and unarmed old men of the country instead — if they can’t take all their tanks and planes and hundreds of thousands of troops and their relatively short supply line and put the beat down on Ukraine — why exactly would they want to come over here and take on the United States of America?
Those of you who have a brain … think.
As for cyber warfare, there’s a very good reason why Russia has steered clear of that. If they do it, we will do it back, and our abilities in this area beat theirs, big time. The USA tends to be peaceable and hard to provoke. But messing with the homeland will get a reaction, and once that reaction starts, it’s not easy to call back.
We don’t want to provoke Russia into direct conflict with us. President Biden has been very clear about that, and he’s held firm to staying away from anything that might get us into direct combat with Russia. But Russia doesn’t want to provoke us, either.
The problem we have with the screaming sillies who allow themselves to be led into hysteria by right wing pundits is that they’re both stupid and cowards. They like to talk a big game about overthrowing the government and staging a coup and how we need a civil war, but when it comes down to them getting in trouble, they’re the biggest bunch of whiney little cream puffs going. They want to punch somebody else in the face, but they can’t take it when the other guy punches back.
That has been pretty clear watching the Jan 6 squirrels whine and complain about the minuscule amount of accountability they’ve had to deal with so far. They’re spineless zeroes, showboat bullies; crazy, pampered simpletons.
The most recent line of Russian bot attack has been to claim that America’s conduct in the Middle East after 9/11 somehow or other equates to what Russia is doing in Ukraine. That is pure drivel.
America was attacked. Three thousand Americans were murdered on our soil. To paraphrase Lincoln, the war was forced upon us.
I didn’t support the War in Iraq. My reasons were that I thought the intel was fubar, and I knew that the occupation of Iraq would be quicksand for America. As a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, that was a daring position for me to take. On the other hand, I certainly did support a violent response to the 9/11 attack on America. I supported it then, and now.
At no time, not in any way, did America engage in a war of conquest as a result of 9/11. America did things, in particular the use of torture to gather intel, that I opposed and that I oppose still. But America was not only justified in responding to 9/11, we had to do it. And we needed to do it with enough force that we wouldn’t have to do it again.
As I said earlier in this post, America is slow to provoke, but anybody who messes with the American homeland is going to get a response, and that response will be hard to stop once it starts.
Russia, on the other hand, is trying to take over another country for no reason at all. They are engaged in a war of conquest. They are killing, raping, looting, bombing and destroying a whole nation because they want the resources of that nation for themselves.
There was no reason for the invasion of Ukraine. I listened to Putin’s speech in which he attempted to justify his war, and it was nothing but a rambling pile of grievance because Russia no longer controlled the countries of Eastern Europe that it had made into slave states as a result of World War II.
America did not make Japan or Germany or any country into a slave state after World War II, although we clearly had the power to do so. Instead we rebuilt those countries, just as we tried to rebuild Afghanistan. The trouble in Afghanistan is that their leaders had no character. When opposition came, the president of Afghanistan deserted his people. He took a planeload of money and ran.
Russian bots are everywhere. I run into them on Twitter every time I go there. I see their handiwork in the crazed nonsense being spouted by Okies I’ve known for many years.
These bots are so obvious only someone who has been marinating their brains in right wing conspiracy talk for decades would be influenced by them. You’ve got to be ignorant of history and willing to ignore both your own memories and the reality in front of you to believe them.
It says a lot that so many people are stupid, shallow and ignorant enough that these bots work.
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