Okay, there are new headlines in the Quasi-Official New York Times and I snipped one and copied and pasted another into a post right before this one. And then I decided not to post it. Putin wants this attention. He wants the West on pins and needles. He wants to sow panic in Ukraine and in the U.S./NATO. And I am not going to rise to this bait and I wish the New York Times did not. This is exactly want the media, especially CNN but the Times and all other major media, did for Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016. They hung breathlessly on his every word. He was 24/7 coverage for them and he sucked the oxygen out of the Republican presidential primaries. It was free publicity for Trump, worth an estimated, if memory serves, $200M. Today, every time I have checked the Times, Russia and Ukraine have led the top of the newspaper. To what end? To Putin's end is the answer. Putin told his government in November that this was the time to put maximum, sustained pressure on the West to see if it would crack. That is what he is doing and I'm not playing (not that I have quite the clout that the Times has). I have taken down two of today's posts.
Everyone in the West, individuals, the media, and the countries' leadership need to keep focus on what we do, because we have a plan, we have a plan for every contingency, and this wall-to-wall attention on Russia risks, through this pressure, those plans. Has there been anything new since December? Hasn't everyone in the West expected a Russian attack on Ukraine since then? Hasn't the Biden administration for days been saying that a Russian attack is imminent, that it could happen within days? Isn't that what is happening now, an imminent attack? So, what's new, what's "news"? Are the Western media going to give free play to every lapel-grabbing hour of Putin's "sustained" pressure for months and months and months? Are we still searching for MH370? Our attitude should be that the ball is in Putin's hands. The next headline I want to see is that the invasion has begun. Until then, if that then comes to pass, let it be. Whatever Putin does we will respond as we have gamed it out.
