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Charlie_Jack · January 20, 2023, 12:00am

I lied, or rather, I went back on my word, and continued to goof around with the Notepad file, and then abandoned the whole thing and goofed off awhile, and then ate a bunch of CNY geedunk that the Taiwanese teachers gave me (an entire boxful of those tubular cookie things, and a big pack of something called “Chofers,” (I guess it’s a portmanteau of chocolate and wafer)).

Now I’m back on the Matt Taibbi video, and it’s getting really interesting. When Mr. Blumenthal presented the thesis that Russiagate was solely about “greasing the skids for a proxy war with Russia,” I became somewhat skeptical. However, it makes a kind of sense. I’m not yet prepared to fully accept it, but I’m not rejecting it, either.

Max Blumenthal, Matt Taibbi, and Aaron Maté from about 1:00:24 to about 1:02:23:

[Max Blumenthal:] The reason that this all triggered me so much was that it was obviously part of a broader campaign that transcended U.S. partisan politics to grease the skids for the Ukraine proxy war.

[Matt Taibbi: “Mm-hm,” and nodding.]

[Max Blumenthal:] The–Russiagate was generated by a convergence of Clintonite dead-enders and Cold Warrior neocons and actual spooks like John Brennan. And some of them wanted to explain away the 2016 loss or delegitimize Donald Trump. They were, you know, election deniers, but in a good way, and then you had the spooks, who have been trying to generate, to gin up a new Cold War with Russia, and eventually confront Russia militarily. And that’s where we’re at right now. And so much of the public was turned hostile to Russia during this period after the kind of ice-breaking of the 1990s. And Putin has been turned into the world’s greatest enemy. Now he’s responsible for trying to pit ourselves–pit our society against itself through the Parkland shooting,^{1, 2, 3} and take a knee,⁴ and you know, he’s capturing all of our social movements and using them. So that’s why this was so dangerous. That’s why I was really triggered by it. That’s why Aaron was, and you as well. It’s not just about, you know, scrutinizing an obvious lie. It’s about trying to stop a war.

[Matt Taibbi: [nodding] Yeah.]

[Aaron Maté:] Yeah, it’s been massively consequential. Russiagate poisoned diplomacy with Russia. It set the stage for the proxy war in Ukraine, which was going on long before Russia invaded, to escalate. Trump was pressured to send weapons to Ukraine that Obama wouldn’t send. And then when he briefly froze those weapons, he was impeached, and that was portrayed as a grave threat to national security, which solidified the consensus that we need to arm Ukraine and keep this war going. To–you know, as Adam Schiff said, we aid Ukraine so that we can fight Russia over there, and don’t have to fight them here. . . .^{5, 6, 7}

Again, I’m reserving judgment on the “grease the skids” thesis, but it’s interesting.

(Edited to add: I didn’t eat both the pipe-shaped cookies and the Chofers in the same sitting. I do have some scruples. (Well, actually, each item was given to me on a different day, so I didn’t get to find out whether I have scruples.))