If you could see the glorification of Victor Bout (Merchant of Death) in Russia and watch even only just 3 minutes of the interviews he smugly gives, your blood would boil and you’d also question the wisdom of swapping him for the Hugely Important Celebrity Druggie whom everybody already forgot.
By the way, Ukraine conducts prisoner of war exchanges with Russia often. And every time manages to negotiate really impressive terms. So please don’t tell me that Biden just couldn’t have traded Griner on better terms. Russians are poor negotiators and its easy to play them. They are emotional and ripe for manipulation. There are, for instance, dozens of daughters of Putin’s oligarchs who can be easily arrested for prostitution. Or drug possession, or money laundering. Go grab a few, and Putin will bring the junkie over in his teeth.
But no, that would require effort. It’s so much easier to let a murderer go than actually think, plan and investigate.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s not a question of lack of effort. It’s two variables at work:
Biden is heavily owned by a lot of bribemasters, notably China, who do not particularly care whether one of the world’s most lethal men is let loose again.
Biden is profoundly senile and is not actually running the United States. Although the identity of Biden’s invisible handlers remains unclear, it seems obvious that they deeply hate the United States of America, and greatly prefer trading a cannabis-consuming athlete for a mega-arms dealer than trading (say) a U.S. Marine imprisoned in Russia for several years. There is no way in Hell that Biden’s handlers are going to pursue any policy that would have the effect of qualitatively strengthening the geopolitical position of the United States with respect to any adversary, whether it is Russia or China or Iran or Elbonia.
To the degree the current regime is supporting Ukraine from being overrun by the Russians, I’m very sorry to say that this benevolence is probably a fragile accident, and is certainly not a consistently followed position.
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This is spot-on. It’s precisely the lack of consistency and a conscious, serious position that’s at work here. The Biden administration is supporting Ukraine because that’s what the electorate clearly wants but it hasn’t accepted the possibility that Ukraine will win the war. Because then you’ll have to do something, adapt to a new world order, create a program of action, and all that is too complicated. There’s absolutely a fear of a strong, decisive US making an appearance.
Great comment, thank you.
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“Great comment, thank you.”
You’re welcome — and I hope we live to see a day where my bitter comments about the current regime of the United States are no longer accurate, because the U.S. has qualitatively reformed and improved.
Today is not that day. But perhaps it will happen.
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I believe in this country. I sincerely hope that it will find the way from the current fog of unreason. And no, it won’t happen fast. It will take all of us working together to make it happen.
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If you start from the assumption that the whole point was to release the arms dealer, because he’s useful to somebody, and the athlete is just an excuse, then it makes sense.
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IMO it was wildly successful: every conservative-ish commentator on the internet is now wailing about Griner Griner Griner and looking like jerkface turdmuffins, while completely missing the point: they let Bout go because they wanted to let Bout go. Griner is just the sideshow that forced all the right people to look the other way when they did it, and got all the potential opposition barking furiously up the wrong tree.
I hate it. But it was brilliant, strategically.
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Not everybody on the Right is missing the real point. Jack Posobiec has quoted a famous scene from the movie “God of War” that turns out to be eerily similar to what just happened to Bout.
The people missing the point are the happily oblivious normiecons for whom it will always be 1987, no matter how much the United States has turned into a decaying banana republic, or how horrific the events happening around them are. To realize what Bout’s release represents, you have to be able to admit that we no longer live under an “administration”, by Biden or anybody else; we live under a regime. Most official ‘conservative’ talking heads either cannot face that, or will not admit it in public because they want to keep their jobs and their social status.
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