...a typical thug.

Heck, they can't even win at sports without cheating

of the American vacuum, created by trump.

racism, homophobia, you name it, anything but face real issues:
https://www.overshootday.org/

U.S. is the number 5 most egregiously greedy consuming nation,
Russia, at number 13 wants to catch up.
But, but, but, we can't bake cakes for gay weddings cause Ghod.

Russia is at war with the west. You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars.

1) Cash
2) Kompromat
3) Total control of the Russian media

control a vast majority of the Russian money and they can focus HUGE dollars onto disrupting foreign adversaries like the US, the UK, France, etc.

Funneling $20 million or $30 million into an American presidential election is small money for 20 or so guys worth tens of billions combined.

Their military is low on morale and can’t be trusted to win conventional wars. So, they got good at unconventional warfare. They get their objectives and have deniability.

With no constraints, ethical or moral, whatsoever. Raw, autocratic power enabled by the amoral greed of Western corporations.

I refuse to let the Russian people off the hook. Putin is wildly popular there, and the country itself is jam packed full of white hate filled gay bashing bigots who resent Americans. The Russians are the Klingons of our world. Fuck em.

Klingons have a code of honor.

They're Cardassians. The US is like the Ferengi except the corporate oligarchy sinks to lows that even the Ferengi refuse to sink to (like polluting the world we live in).

Luckily, there are many of us who will never say that there are anything but four lights.


Sorry to those who are not Star Trek fans. I'll translate: Cardassian are a military species who conquer an oppress other species who are not strong enough to fight them off. They blatantly spout lies and propaganda and they enjoy torture. One such torturer tried to get Captain Picard to deny that there were four lights in front of him, but he couldn't break him. When he was rescued, Picard turned to the torturer and shouted There. Are. Four. Lights! That phrase has come to mean defiance and denial of obvious lies.

I would prefer a different analogy. From Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" from Season 1 ep. 22.
I'll use the closing narration to illustrate what Putin and his minions are doing. If you happen to watch a "Twilight Zone" marathon, you'll see the parallels from the Cold War era to the Cyber War era:

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices...to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill...and suspicion can destroy...and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own – for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone."

Great episode!

Gene Roddenberry simply extrapolated from the Cold War. From the original TV series, we all knew the Klingons were a stand in for the Russkies.

We buy planes and ships and build bases while Putin divides us without firing a shot.

to use as the same formula. You don't have to care about your people to make yourself rich if you've got the hackers, money and military force available. In this way, Dump and Putin are exactly the same. They don't give a shit about anybody but themselves.

What they ARE devoid of is scruples. Putin cares about glory, wealth and power, and Russia has enough of that to maintain an 18th century-style society with a solid oligarchy on top, a tiny middle class that has little prospect of growing, and a large segment of working poor, just like they did in their socialist days.

I haven't been in a few years, but one of our good friends was Moscow station chief for west German radio news, still has his Russian girlfriend (who visits often), and he is still there for long stretches every year. He does not hang with, or know, the top elite, but he knows people who do, and he gets the story pretty much straight from the source.

...building an infrastructure to accomplish the same things.

All Vlad had to do was clone a second set of controls. And in the end, their goals aren't that different.

coinciding interests. And both have a serious lack of moral scruples.

The blue tidal wave will finish it next fall. Fingers crossed.

Russian operatives organized multiple anti-TPP and anti-Keystone XL protests. They also organized some BLM protests but as far as we can tell just so they would happen right next to white nationalist protests. And of course there's Jill Stein.

The big difference between Russians, though, is that their country was never a democratic republic. They've either been ruled by monarchies or by the Politbureau, which corrupted the ideals espoused by the early Communist Party people, creating wealth for a few more in control of the political levers, and further impoverishing the masses. The Russians don't know any other kind of way, but Americans do. We've known this for 250 years or thereabouts. Or at least those of us who are hoping to see the continuation of democracy rather than the demolition of it by extreme ideologues and racists, and others who want to plunder its resources for personal enrichment.

And it works for his popularity.

A handful of cronies have looted what little wealth Russia has. Petro dollars mostly, as Russia makes very little anyone wants. Couple that with what Russia does very well outside of classical music and ballet, intelligence, and you have a very effective weapon of asymmetric warfare. Now all they need is a major political party within a rich, giant advisory that's morally bankrupt and you have the debacle we find ourselves in.

and not Russia. Its absurd on the face of it and yet the repukes are running around and shouting it from the rooftops. Its one of the privileges of owning half the media , you can make anything up and they will go along with it.

I see a republican on tv, and I just can't. We live in an "I am rubber you are glue..." nation.

It seems that everyone has taken crazy pills.

this holiday season let's all have fun whistling past the graveyard, all the cool kids are doing it

It's not hard to get. Looks a lot like Trumpism.