This is a regular reminder that no US politician was nicer to Putin than Obama. (George W Bush runs a close second). Obama worked for years to disarm Ukraine before the 2014 invasion, forcing Ukrainians to give up large stocks of weapons precisely in the areas that Putin would claim. (Yes, Ukrainians were mega stupid to agree. But cheating stupid people and getting them killed is still not OK. There’s no defense in law based on the “yes, I murdered him but he deserved it because he was too trusting and dumb.”)
As a Senator for Illinois, Obama personally supervised the disarming of the region that borders – guess whom? – Russia.
In Donetsk, I stood among piles of conventional weapons that were slowly being dismantled,” Barack Obama, then a newly elected United States senator from Illinois, said in 2005 after his first foreign trip.
The future president visited the eastern Ukrainian city, the future hotbed of pro-Russian separatism, and helped secure $48m to fund the further destruction of 400,000 small arms, 1,000 portable anti-aircraft missiles and 15,000 tonnes of ammunition.
Here is photographic evidence:
Donetsk, eh? Donetsk has been under Russian control since 2014 as a result. As a resident of Illinois, I find it hard to understand why the senator of our state – and then the president of our country – would be so dedicated to disarming Ukraine. He probably thought Illinois had no bigger problems than Ukraine’s capacity to defend Donetsk.
Obama actually helped invest US money, our taxpayer money into disarming Ukraine. This doesn’t seem to bother anybody besides me, so I keep bringing it up because I can’t get over the absolute insanity of the US politics where we pay first to disarm and then to arm Ukraine, and this all happens within the same short period of time.
No photograph of this kind exists featuring Trump, by the way. To the contrary, Trump was the first US politician to start re-arming Ukraine in 2016.
Obama made it clear recently that Harris is going to continue whatever he started. More photographic evidence from Obama himself:
Now, attention, an important question: why would Putin not want Harris as president? Again, we have incontrovertible proof brought us yesterday by the Biden DOJ that delivered evidence of Russia funding Lauren Chen’s anti-Trump rhetoric.
Why, in the face of all this, aren’t we discussing whether Obama was a Russian asset? Not a spy, obviously, but definitely an asset. How else can we possibly describe all this? Russia annexed the Crimea and invaded the Donbass during the Obama presidency. The massacre of Ilovaisk where Putin blatantly defied the agreements with the US happened in 2014. There were no consequences to Putin over that. There was no Crimea, Donetsk, Ilovaisk or Lugansk during the Trump administration. I’d be the first person to wail to the skies if there were. What did Trump ever do for Russia that’s remotely approaching all this?
I criticize Trump all the time. I think everybody is tired already of my litany of complaints about Trump but I can repeat it if necessary. But on this issue, which obviously matters to me enormously, I just can’t see how Trump was worse for Ukraine than Obama.
To conclude, here’s the story of the Ukrainian photographer who took the famous picture of Obama at the weapons depot in Donetsk:
A local photographer named Sergey Vaganov took pictures of Obama in the arms depots.
A decade later, Vaganov fled a Russian-backed separatist conflict in Donetsk and, in March, barely survived the Russian siege of Mariupol.
“I was waiting for the relief [of death]. I had these half-suicidal thoughts,” Vaganov told Al Jazeera, describing how he and his wife, Iryna, waited out Russian air raids in their ice-cold apartment with windows shattered by shelling.
The siege of Mariupol took place in 2022, during the Biden presidency. Please, tell me some more about how it’s Trump Ukrainians should fear.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s amazing that people don’t seem to know or be able to understand that this happened. Please continue putting this out there.
Amanda
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This is all very recent, yet people choose to believe media fabrications and not “the evidence of their lying eyes.”
This isn’t what I’m assuming Obama did. He spoke about it openly. There’s a mountain of evidence. But people operate like their minds get erased on a regular basis.
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No matter what hard evidence you bring, the photos, the direct quotations, the undisputable hard facts: people who support Obama Biden Harris will always trust the indoctrination they have been fed rather than the evidence of their own eyes.
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I have asked people I know about this. The answer is always, “Bit don’t you think Trump is worse?” I ask, how is he worse. The answer is, “He said that Putin is smart.” Because it’s all about words. Always and only about words.
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“mean tweets” redux. ugh. “We demand the surface appearance of national dignity! Nothing else is more important!”
Have been making peace with the idea that most people care only about appearances– surface compliance, tribal identification signalling. It’s why we have con artists: because mimicking social signals is a great way to manipulate these people.
But on some level it exists because it serves an adaptive function, right? ingroup/outgroup ritual behaviors are more important to our survival as a species than actually knowing, saying, or acting on objective truth.
Automated compliance and rapid ingroup ID/outgroup exclusion is what makes humans able to act in concert, a large organism with a broad reach and tremendous strength, able to overcome large formidable beasts… instead of a lone naked ape on the savannah, thinking big thoughts and dinner for the first hungry lion that happens along.
I have no idea how you get past that, or work with it. But I’m fairly certain the reason Nature hasn’t stopped producing grumpy eccentrics who can’t mold our thinking to the larger organism, is because once in a while, the larger organism is catastrophically wrong, and a handful of people who can see past the oversimplified group-ID-streamlined picture of the world must occasionally be necessary to avert total annihilation. Any population that successfully eliminates us, doesn’t make it past the bottleneck and disappears from the record.
If true (perhaps it is not), then there has to be a way to get through to the group, to tell the truth and be heard, when it matters.
What does that look like?
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“ingroup/outgroup ritual behaviors are more important to our survival as a species than actually knowing, saying, or acting on objective truth.”
This is so true.
Regarding nature producing eccentrics: the way genes control various traits is complicated. A gene may have an important beneficial effect and thus spread through the population, but it may be responsible (fully, or partially) for something else, so you’ll get that effect as well.
For example, one of the explanations of genes for homosexuality persisting is that they contribute to producing more offspring. Sisters of gay males have more kids on average than other females. To sum up a lecture I’ve attended on that in one sentence – there’s a gene that makes women really like men and have more babies with them, and when men have it, they sometimes end up liking men too.
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I don’t think that liking men is much related to having many babies. Liking babies seems to be a more convincing explanation.
There are easier ways to give men something they’ll really like than babies, is what I’m saying.
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However you want to describe it, a gene that is likely to make men homosexual is also likely to make women have more offspring. It has survived in the population because the increased likelihood of propagation through women outweighs the decreased likelihood of propagation through men.
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I don’t remotely believe it’s a gene, though. The “gay gene” is a woke invention that simplifies a very complex phenomenon to reduce it to the “born this way” mantra. I don’t find it useful or convincing.
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Like I said, genetics is complicated. I don’t think there’s a “gay gene”. It’s a combination of things. I talked about a gene, not “the gene”.
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I was not trying to imply that it was genetic.
Cultural evolution is also a thing.
A culture that successfully eliminates or neutralizes the totally inevitable minority of disagreeable, analytical, pattern-finding sorts, probably eliminates itself.
At the same time, those people can’t be either the majority, or the leaders. It’s too dysfunctional. I suspect success is some narrow sweet spot where these people have a place, but aren’t in charge… as opposed to being burned at the stake.
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Not to justify what Obama has done later, but
a) if in 2005 he was a brand-new senator, then he was overseeing the results of decisions made before him.
b) the weapons stored around Donetsk that were not destroyed eventually fell into the hands of the “separatists”. So the problem is not that these particular weapons were destroyed, the problem is that weapons stored in other regions of Ukraine were destroyed as well.
v07
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Russians in Donetsk had a great supply of weapons. They wouldn’t have needed these. But the Ukrainians in the city has nothing to defend themselves with. Everything had been stripped bare.
As for how Obama was inexperienced and didn’t know, well, he’s gotten more experienced since then. Where’s his mature reflection on the catastrophe he endorsed?
Bill Clinton found it in himself to offer a mea culpa. Where’s Obama’s? If Bill Clinton exhibits a better moral compass, then something is deeply wrong.
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Does anybody remember the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agreed to give up its massive nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees by the U.S., the U.K., and Russia that Ukraine’s borders and territorial integrity would be respected and free from the threat of hostile military force?
When is the last time you heard that international “guarantee” mentioned?
Dreidel
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I personally hear it mentioned at least once a day but only by Ukrainians. Everybody else is pretending it never happened.
Thank you for bringing it up.
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https://www.axios.com/2024/09/05/putin-harris-trump-2024-election-russia-interference
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I really liked the reality check part. “Trump has routinely avoided criticizing Putin.
Earlier this year the former president sparked outcry by suggesting”
Words, words, it’s all about words.
Drives me absolute nuts when people I know repeat “But Biden supports Ukraine! He says it all the time!”
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Also, the only interesting, in-depth, honest discussions of the Lauren Chen scandal I’m seeing are happening in Ukraine. Everything published in the US media is a collection of lies and fantasies.
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Any google translatable discussions or articles you can link?
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Unrelated. We don’t journalists enough.
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There’s a key verb missing there.
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oops. it’s ‘hate’ of course lol
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They deleted it, of course. After millions of people saw the headline and have believe it.
One has to make quite a lot of effort to avoid all this poison.
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What a disgrace.
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This Sunday’s sermon at my church was from Mark, when Jesus cures the person with the speech impediment by crying “Ephphatha!” (be opened) as he puts His hands in the fellow’s ears. Our priest went on in his homily to note that we hear what is important to us, and it is our responsibility to open our ears to God’s word.
The idea of opening to what we wish to hear and closing to what we don’t seems relevant to this election cycle. (Of course, it’s pretty timeless irrespective of elections.) What makes us open to some things and closed to others? It’s got me curious. What causes some of us to accept a fraud, rapist, racist former president and come to the conclusion, “Yes, he’s a fraud, rapist, racist, but he’s OUR fraud, rapist, racist.” Or, “Fraud, raping, and racism is better than being woke.” Or however we support or accept such a person.
And it’s true for our vice president as well–how do we get to “No, none of us wanted her a few years ago, but we’re all in for her now!” or “Some early career corruption doesn’t matter.” What do we open, and what do we close? And why?
And if you want to convince a group of people that your side is right (or better), what indeed does that look like? I think we have to do away with the idea of competition in argument and disagreement and focus more on… understanding? But that’s awfully difficult, it seems.
You think this way sometimes in the middle of church.
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I’m not planning to vote for Trump but I don’t remotely buy that he’s a rapist. As for racist, the word has lost all meaning now that we are lectured that even toddlers are racist. As for “fraud”, it’s an emotional word that can be applied to anyone.
Much more useful, I find, is to look at what each candidate did while in office. Both candidates have a record of what they did in the WH. For me, both did a poor job. I don’t expect either to do any of what I want them to do. That’s my concern and not which one is more “racist.”
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