As an older man, today’s GOP supporting Russia is so crazy to me. I remember a decade after the cold war, people were still eager to go slap around the ruskies. The fact they’re so eager to kiss Putin’s ring today is fucking wild.
My step brother still thought they were communist when the Ukrainian invasion happened.
I don’t really have the heart to find out where he’s at with Putin now, but he tends to eat whatever fox and oan or newswhatever it is now are serving.
Especially weird given we are walking towards a sort of Cold War 2.0
We’ve been in it for years. Right now there is talk about the financial ties of the German right wing party with Russia, all the while you can find articles about that from 7 years ago.
Putin had his hands in Brexit, has pawns in the EU to veto for him, is connected to the right wing parties all over Europe and to Trump and the Republicans in the US.
All the while he spams social media with his propaganda.
I don’t know when it started but Putin started to wage internal war against western countries a long time ago. What we see now are the results of a long term effort.
The cold war never ended.
Not in Putin’s mind. During Glasnost, Gorbachev was very much interested in creating a new alliance with the West in order to stave off complete economic and social collapse.
Yeltsin and Putin felt the same way, early on. Putin petitioned to join NATO in the early '00s. In fact, they’d already been in a functional partnership with NATO since 1992, under the “Partnership for Peace” initiative. This became the backbone of US/Russia collaboration in space as well as their cooperative efforts during the early War on Terror.
It wasn’t until the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, back in '06, that relations began to break down
Oh I’m going to disagree. When USSR crumbled and we had some years of a rebuilding Russia, there was no real threat. There really isn’t still. Russia’s economy is small. Like less than California’s. They are a nothing country in terms of power. They are just big in media presence.
Riiiiiight…🙄
This doesn’t seem particularly Cold to me. Maybe with China, but its hard to be at any kind of war with your largest trading partner.
today’s GOP supporting Russia is so crazy to me
Its not that crazy, when you consider how the Putin-Era of United Russia has been all about cultivating the image of the Russian people as Bad Chad Trads doing White Guy Patriotism all over Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This is a perfect mirror of the modern Republican self-image and has been since at least the Bush 43 Administration post-911. One reason why Bush 43 and Putin got along so well during those early War on Terror years.
I remember a decade after the cold war, people were still eager to go slap around the ruskies.
Sure, but then 9/11 changed everything. Russia wasn’t the bad guys. They were the Tough Guys who would do the Hard Man Things in order to tame the raging monster that was Radical Islamic Jihadism.
Same with China in Xinjiang (which just so happened to have all the same Taliban-style militant problems as neighboring Afghanistan for some reason please don’t Google Operation Cyclone). Xi Jinping was our Based Top Cop Ally in Beijing, helping us fight the encroaching hordes of savage brown people.
Its easy to forget that Americans hated the Japanese back in the 80s/90s for stealing all our manufacturing jobs. And we hated the Indians in the '00s/'10s for stealing all our telemarketer, sales, and remote IT jobs.
All that’s gone down the window with the shifting geopolitical landscape as well.
Their main motivation is and always was to protect shareholder values in a capitalist world. Communism was a huge threat to that so obviously the soviet union was the main enemy.
Now that Russia is capitalist, too, it’s not that much of a threat to the ultra wealthy anymore. In fact getting other countries scared into buying weapons from the US war machine is actually completely in line with their ideology.
Even having a war going on is good for business if the weapons used are American.
Taxpayer money going to private companies that supply material to other countries - just more possibilities to enrich their donors…
I feel like it’s not the GOP that supports Putin, it’s Trump that supports Putin and the GOP has no choice but to follow. If the Dems want something… even a thing that the GOP also wants, Trump will be against it and the GOP follows closely behind.
Oh, it’s 100% Trump. 10000%. These rubes don’t have the capacity for original thought, as others have astutely noted in this thread.
They as much as admitted so when they decided their party platform was whatever their orange god said it was.
Why anyone with any modicum of self respect would follow someone who speaks like a plate of beans negotiating their way out of cows digestive tract is beyond me.
It’s easily explained, although no less surreal. In the McCarthy era, it was easy to whip people up into a frenzy over the Soviet Union, an avowed enemy of America, due to nuclear paranoia and a desire to continue the post-WW2 economic boom America was experiencing that was attributed to Republican policies. In 2024, all the Republicans stand for is political obstructionism and contrarianism to whatever the Democrats are talking about. Democrats want to protect NATO and Ukraine? Republicans are against that.
More than likely, between Putin and Trump and the rest of the modern GOP, there is some cheese pizza and child sex trafficking rings that keep all of them in a Mexican stand off with each other and it definitely has a non-zero relation to Epstein.
Gee, I wonder if this is why Russia turned out the way it did.
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We learned a long time ago. There is no bottom. It just keeps getting worse, every time.
I was amused the first few months the GOP fell for this but after so many years of such awful, demented, stupid shit, it’s just sad.
We haven’t learned. He’s in with a shout in November. The rabid half wants him in, and the left is so fractured with concerns about what is happening overseas and the usual morons who don’t vote, be it in protest or out of apathy or that their vote ‘doesnt matter’, that they’re having trouble putting up a united front and to hell with the country as long as my views are heard.
It’s sad. And with no ability to elect functioning govt, or even present realistic candidates, how do they expect the problems to start healing? By themselves?
Politicians lobe non-voters,one less idiot they need to convince.
If you’re voting based on the genocide or the climate apocalypse, your vote quite literally doesn’t matter.
It seems about certain you would care about more than just two issues. It sucks that those two very important issues do not have a likely good candidate, but getting pissy about it and sitting it out is begging to get screwed over on any other issue you would care about. Raise hell during the primaries and speak loudly, but sulking instead of participating in the final contest won’t do your causes any favors.
As a Canadian, if this is the best your country can do, you deserve to start over. Good luck.
He’s proven he’s a traitor. Why isn’t anyone listening.
I’m just waiting for him to openly suggest that the US “return Alaska to its rightful owners.”
…Canada.
I’m sure France doesn’t want the southern US back.
Two MAGA’s. Zero redeeming qualities.
Reagan has been absolutely catastrophic for the United States. The amount of debt that we have would never have happened had he not basically ended taxes for the top bracket. Should taxes have been lowered? Sure. But by like, 40%? God no. The budget cuts fundamentally changed the nation.
And yet, compared to Trump, he’s like this ideal Republican candidate who at least wouldn’t abandon geopolitical allies while fucking over the working class and the lower class. It’s just insane how far the GOP has fallen and it’s even crazier how so many still think they’re not doing enough.
Fuck Christian fundamentalists and fuck anti-government zealots who want to defund the government and everything it provides for those that need its assistance.
Fuck Christian fundamentalists and fuck anti-government zealots
Literally the backbone of why they left to settle America lol.
Who are the anti-government zealots you speak of?
Those that live on the fringes of both sides of the political spectrum. Mostly far-right conservatives, but also some non-pragmatic libertarians and anarchists
Anti government people seem to COMPLETELY forget that Corporations exist outside government, and we DONT get a vote on how they run things, and thats if the power vacuum doesnt attract a warlord or tyrant
Hey look, 2 former Presidents that both have dementia.
But one had it after he left politics and not the while running for office.
(I actually don’t know if Reagan had it showing up while in office)
Trump thinks Reagan was a pussy. So do his fans. I’m not apologizing for Reagan. He’s one of the USA’s greatest monsters.
Feels like a stretch to say Trump’s fans are capable of thinking anything. Which is probably why they follow him in the first place.
Then again, here in Europe we’re dealing with a different breed of morons.
Anyone else feel surrounded by idiots?
Trump’s more of an Eisenhower guy, in so far as he’s willing to work with Russia to defeat Germany and conquer Europe.
