Ukraine Always Get What You Want

this fucking guy

 

Good luck with that, Vlad.

 

He’s going to run out of people to push out of windows eventually.

 

Most Americans: “Our system will protect us from becoming like Russia.”

Me: Look at how quickly Russia went from fledgling semi-democracy to autocracy.

Four years of Trump II, or almost any Republican, gets you just a couple highway exits from Putinism.

 

I think early 2000s Russia was more akin to us in 1789 to 1812, where things could’ve gone real sideways real easily.

 

We have about 25-30 percent of the population that craves an authoritarian ruler who'll punish those they hate -- decent people of all kinds. But there's a rather significant difference between a nation established as a flawed but real constitutional democracy and one that had over a 1000 years of various tyrannies, tried a halting democracy, then had an immediate relapse.

 

And the Articles of Confederation were a hot mess and almost spiraled the great US experiment out of control. But it helped that the same guys who led the Revolution were still around to redo the government; Washington took charge in the beginning and brought in all sides to get everything established and walked away after 8 years; Alexander Hamilton created a national bank that helped take on state debt and stabilized the economics of the early republic; and everyone who helped to build the Constitution agreed a strong central authority was not going to work. Russia went sideways because the corruption was allowed to fester as the economy floundered.

 

It only works if people (1) follow the rule of law; and (2) vote. Not that hard. However, when clowns vote for the dictator that's what you get.

 

Great reporting.

How Russia's 35-mile armoured convoy ended in failure