We can't even maintain order in our own country, look at the damn border. We played global cop in Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism, yet today, the communists exist in all of our major institutions, especially education, which is literally the worst outcome if you want to stop the spread of communism. And there are people who clearly support communist style policies to force those who disagree with them to acquiesce to whatever the party narrative at the time may be. Covid is the most obvious example of this. Funny how now that there is proof in data that all the covid dogma was mostly a lie, with the worst part being that we could have started treating people right away with cheap generic drugs given in the right doses, with doctors publishing specific protocols that they had used successfully, all the attention has suddenly been switched back to Russia Russia Russia.

All the manufacturing the built up the middle class after WWII has been shipped to communist countries after we figured out, hey we can use slaves over there and just not say anything about it, so everything will be cheaper to make and we can sell it for more money. Now, all the people who would have had these manufacturing jobs that used to provide a comfortable middle class lifestyle with one person in the household working, are left with restaurant, grocery, housekeeping, etc industry jobs that don't pay enough to even rent an single apartment. To make things even better, the currency has been devalued to basically being worthless, and this inflation we're seeing now is probably just from the 20 years of war in the Middle East. The people who are going to deal with the covid inflation aren't even born yet. Unfortunately the part you make about ending the constant state of war being disruptive to the economy is accurate, and really sad that it's come down to that, and the endless defense spending is what's brought our currency down to the value of used toilet paper.

NATO is as good as dissolved, as it should be. The damn cold war ended over 30 years ago. The Europe needs the Russian gas, he'll just freeze them out in the winter if they want to fight. Vlad wins.

I think it stems from the American Exceptionalism idea. Before people jump down my throat, I'm not saying America isn't great. But there is a prevailing idea that we are the country of "bootstraps." Everyone likes to take credit for making something out of nothing on their own without any help while conveniently ignoring all the people and institutions that made their journey up the ladder possible. That goes back to isolationism. It's really a delusion that we don't need anyone else because we did it ourself before and can do it again....except we didn't do it ourselves. We had the help of European allies. And if the shipping bottleneck and computer chip shortage in no small part helping to drive up inflation is any indication, we absolutely need imports and exports to keep our economy moving. Locking down would destroy our economy.

Dude, for real. You need to come up for air. Turn off Cable News. Take a break from Breitbart and Daily Caller or whatever hate machine you read and just take a breath. Nothing you are saying is grounded in reality.

Except they’ve proven time and again that they won’t and after 30 years of underfunding their own military now can’t.

Germany, France, the UK, and Italy ALL have a higher GDP than Russia. H€||, Canada has a higher GDP than Russia. But Europe isn’t INTERESTED in paying the freight for their own defense when they’ve been able to get Uncle Sugar to do it for them for the last 75 years.

A few decades ago, France got 80% of their electric power from nuclear energy. Germany was something like 40%. Finances be damned, they are now energy dependent on Russia and wouldn’t get through next winter without it. And there aren’t enough LPG tankers in existence to replace the pipeline. Think we can supply Europe with coal by airlift ala The Berlin Airlift?

They made the CHOICE to become dependent on Russian natural gas, just like they made the choice to let their militaries wither away after the USSR dissolved. And the Ukraine started it’s independence with 170 ICBMs and 1700 nukes that they sold. You think that Russia would be threatening them now if they’d even kept a half dozen nukes?

Eventually we need to let the rest of the world take responsibility for the their own actions.

How did the Germans invade Poland? They walked in backwards and said they were leaving.

Old joke, but it’s no joke when Russia suddenly may be knocking on Poland’s door. The next move is for Russia to state that Poland cannot be a member of NATO.

Poland is getting nervous.

Especially considering what frickin industry we're in!

I don't love Russia, or Putin. He is a tyrant.

But instead of looking at Russia, lets look in the mirror for a second. Has the government, working with large corporations (fascism) not destroyed the lives of many Americans over the last two years over a virus that was was basically 100% survivable with mild symptoms, if you were anywhere close to healthy and forced people to take a pharmaceutical product that they may have not needed or wanted?
Did the government working with large corporations (fascism) not actively work to make the pandemic of that virus much worse by actively blocking cheap, generic treatments for covid that were actually used by doctors to treat those who did become very ill, and were given away for free in kits in many poor countries.
Did state and local tyrants around the country not violate the principles of due process and the Bill of Rights when they decided who should and shouldn't be able to make a living or even exercise their 1st Amendment rights to assembly?
You may not agree with me because you were afraid, but that doesn't make what I said un-true.

And then we have our friendly neighbors to the north whose legal system apparently allows them to freeze bank accounts of those who donated to a peaceful protest movement that burned down no buildings and destroyed no property, all without due process, all because the Prime Minister had the nasty blue collar folks that are in his servant class show up at this doorstep and demand to speak. That's ok I guess because that particular tyrant is "saving lives", just like Pfizer told him to.
We won't talk about the fact that the main reason that people should be forced to take Pfizers product is because it protects others, proved itself to be untrue basically right away (and the real scientists would tell you that this was never even something that could have been possible). It's all very Putinesqe, Stalinesque, Hitleresque, whoever you want to compare it to. They're all the same.

Maybe when we get our legal system and national conscience to say that everything that I stated above is not acceptable, then we can worry about democracy in other countries. But first, lets get our own house in order.

There is no doubt that many European countries have been negligent in their NATO obligations. And certainly I agreed with the previous administration's effort to hold them accountable, albeit disagreed with undermining it in favor of Russia. The correction isn't for us to throw up our hands and tell them you're on your own. It is to help them get back to their funding obligation and multilaterally punish the aggression by Russia through sanctions. Everything else you said distracts from root cause of the problem. Side note: France's electricity generation from Nuclear is still 78% and 19.1% are renewables, so I'm not sure which misinformation farm you got your stats from. As I've heard said before, our beef is not with the Russian people. Generally they have no issue with the US. Our problem is with the hardliners that have taken control of the Russian government.

I'm pretty sure the only people watching Rachel Maddow are conservatives who love to hate watch her. Me and most of my "lefty" friends certainly aren't interested in a talking head telling me what to think.

C'mon man. This is a great rant and I hope you feel better now but none of it is historically accurate.

Vietnam fell to commies but all of their surrounding countries except China and PRK did not. They would have. I'd call that a success even though the war itself was a failure.

There are many commies in the country. Mostly the younger Millennials and Zoomers who love AOC and Bernie and want free crap. They have absolutely no historical reference to what that means because they were coddled by their parents and went to schools that didn't have books. That generation is a problem and is going to willingly give away their freedom if they don't smarten up. hopefully they learn when they mature like the rest of us did. However with the exception of dingbat AOC and the squad, who are mostly ignored in Congress, they aren't in charge yet.

Covid wasn't fake. It was a real pandemic and a hell of a lot of people died. Stop with the conspiracy covid cures. Even ivermectin was shown to be internet quackery. The problem was we let it become a political battle that both sides dug in determined to win. It got sucked into the culture wars. The mask crap should have ended when the vaccines came out. Now they are legislating fear.Calling it communism is a stretch. What is communism is the fact that I can't go to the grocery store and buy what I want because they are out of things like coffee creamer. Reminds me of the bread lines in the late stage USSR. The government is constraining the supply chain now with the covid crap that should have ended last year.

Then you go off into a rant about offshoring. I somewhat agree with you but you act like that started when dems took over at Obama's election. Mills were closing in NC back in the 60s. What you're seeing with offshoring is unbridled capitalism at its finest. when you give mega corporations free rein to do whatever they want, they will screw the people over every time. They answer to their shareholders not the consumers to workers. There is an opposite extreme of communism and it's capitalism. And isms aren't good. None of that is germane to this discussion however. It has nothing to do with the Russia crisis. Fact is major oil companies quit fracking (domestic oil supply) because it's a very expensive way to get oil out of the ground and doesn't pay unless oil is above $100bbl. Watch those pumps start pumping again. We can definitely pump our way out of this oil crisis like we did in 2008.

NATO can't be dissolved. That's stupid. again, you have no historical reference. If there was no NATO the iron curtain would have been the western shore of Europe (do you even know what the Iron curtain is?). Even today it stands as a barrier to Russian aggression. It's a line in the sand not to cross. Putin isn't stupid and he doesn't want WWIII. NATO is the only thing preventing that. He knows if he invades a NATO country it's on like Donkey Kong (bet you're too young to know what that means too).

As for Canada I don't give a damn what they do. Its a free country and an ally. That's the Canadian people's problem. Good to see they are rising up.

I really think you need to turn off cable news and crack a book. You're embarrassing yourself and your embarrassing us, your fellow conservatives.