So, I am moved, foolishly, to write a thing about Kiev-A-Lago, a thing which is probably wrong-headed, but it\u2019s this.\r\n
I find it very easy to believe that at some point Paul Manafort was told something like \u201cWe will give you a large amount of money to do things that are dishonest, illegal and bad for the national security of your country. If you succeed, you will be very rich and also the United States will both lose influence and respect around the world and also be wracked with internal divisions that will potentially destroy it.\u201d And that Paul Manafort said something like \u201cHow much money exactly?\u201d I totally buy that Mr. Manafort was identified by the Russians as someone who would sell out his country for money, approached because of that, and then did so.\r\n
I find all that difficult to believe about Rudy Giuliani.\r\n
Now, that\u2019s not because I ever thought of Rudy Giuliani as a hero of any kind. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever thought of him as anything but an asshole. But I think of him as the sort of self-righteous asshole who would not just take money to betray his country\u2019s interests\u2014that is, who would not want to think of himself as someone who would do that. I believe that Paul Manafort would think of anyone who put patriotism over profit as a sucker; I believe that Rudy Giuliani thinks of himself as a patriot.\r\n
And I\u2019ll add that I don\u2019t think Rudy is a moron. I think that Our Only President, for instance, is a dolt and a dupe, someone who is easily manipulated and has neither the ability or the interest in resisting obvious bullshit. But I have never thought that Mr. Giuliani was easily duped. A clever, patriotic asshole. I think that\u2019s what I would have said about him in 1995, and in 2001, and in 2016.\r\n
But surely at some point when Viktor Shokin and the Shmenge Brothers (Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, that is, who I call the Shmenge Brothers for reasons that are probably less obvious than I think they are) and Dmitry Firtash were feeding him a line of obvious bullshit that was\u2014let\u2019s say perhaps\u2014directed from Moscow, surely at some point he must have understood when he was taking their money that he was working for Putin. Right? No? After everything that happened in 2016, did this former tenacious prosecutor just think that these wads of money were just normal business and not in any way suspicious? I really do hate to think that he deliberately sold himself and his patriotism. And sure, maybe his loathing for Hillary Clinton has blinded him to what the Russians have actually been doing. Or maybe his disappointment at being so soundly rejected as a Presidential candidate has warped him enough to let him think screw this country, anyway<\/i>. Or maybe it\u2019s that thing that sometimes (but not always) happens in people\u2019s seventies, when their personalities change substantially. Or, of course, I was always wrong and he was always either a schmuck or a scoundrel in addition to being an asshole.\r\n
I have no idea. But one thing that has been, I think, neglected a bit in the Kiev-a-Lago story so far, despite Fiona Hill\u2019s attempt to bring it out, is how the only<\/i> evidence of the stuff Our Only President was on about (the Biden stuff and the 2016 stuff) was from people who were obviously<\/i> peddling Putin\u2019s wares, and that nobody who knew anything about anything should have been listening to them. And, I mean, maybe that\u2019s overly strong, but at the very least a clever ex-prosecutor should have suspected<\/i> that this was Moscow bullshit, particularly when the people in the Ukraine who were strongly anti-Putin all said it was Moscow bullshit. So what was Rudy Giuliani doing?\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger feels that the somewhat-more-accurate-to-Ukrainian pronunciation that is newly fashionable scans much better than the old Yiddish-inflected pronunciation.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20163"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20166,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20163\/revisions\/20166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}