Biden's Last Hurrah Against Russia and Putin | Seymour Hersh |

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with military chiefs in Moscow on November 22. (Photo Credit: Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Pool/AFP)

There is a scene early on in Nathanael West's satirical 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts that reeks of depression, despair, and genius. It's hard to forget. The protagonist is a lovelorn advice columnist for a newspaper in New York City who receives a letter from a teenage girl who describes herself as having the makings of a beauty, with a slender figure that many rave about, but she bitterly notes she has never had a date. Can it be, she asks, because she has no nose?

The scene came to mind this week as I considered the bitterness of President Joe Biden, who seems to be full of resentment because a group of Democratic Party bigwigs, aware that he was failing, forced him to give up his planned re-election campaign and turn over the fight against Donald Trump to Vice President Kamala Harris, and all the more resentment because she failed to beat Trump as Biden did in 2020.

The president is no longer talking about his failed policy in the Middle East, though American bombs and other weaponry are still flowing to Israel and being put to deadly use. Biden is now trying to stem the losses in Ukraine's war with Russia. A week ago he gave the Ukraine government, headed by President Volodymyr Zelensky, permission to fire a long withheld advanced American ballistic missile capable of hitting targets 190 miles inside Russia. Days later, he decided to provide Ukraine with landmines capable of maiming and killing all whose paths cross them, young and old, friendly and not.

I have been told that the strategic implications of the president's escalation--both Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have nuclear bombs at their fingertips--had not been fully analysed inside the Pentagon, and that some important offices, sure to have different views about escalation, were never asked for their input. Putin responded by escalating in turn by firing a nuclear-capable ballistic missile at Ukraine and said in a speech that what had been a regional conflict "had now acquired elements of a global character." The New York Times noted that the response "was meant to instil fear in Kyiv and the West."

• The Oreshnik hypersonic missile strike, multiple warheads, obliterated military complex Dnipro | by Simplicius |

Putin's explicit warning came a day after Biden's decision to permit the use of American anti-personnel landmines in an effort to slow Russian advances in the Donbas region. Neither Washington nor Moscow are signatories to the international mine ban treaty that has been signed by 164 parties, but Biden's decision to deploy the weapon was widely criticized by international human rights groups.

Meanwhile, the Russian army, whose front-line troops are exhausted, continues to push forward against their even more undermanned and under-equipped enemy. Ukraine's successful penetration into Kursk, the scene of a dramatic German defeat in World War II, is now the object of a brutal Russian counterattack, with huge Ukrainian losses in men and equipment. The long-term prognosis for the Ukrainian army remains dire.

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I have also been told by experts here in Washington who are knowledgeable about Russian political affairs that Putin does not want to make a settlement with Zelensky "until he is good and ready"--meaning that he is going to wait until the currently very successful Russian surge targeted at Donetsk and Kursk plays out. There is said to be concern in Moscow about extensive "stay-behind" intelligence and operational activity in Ukraine that is believed to be organized by American and British agencies.

What is going on now, one American expert told me, is an attempt to change the long-standing American support for containment, exemplified by the Biden administration's instinctive disdain for the governments of Russia and China, which marred the initial meetings with each in 2021. The Chinese delegation at the meeting in Alaska early that year publicly walked out on Secretary of State Antony Blinken after accusing him and his delegation of attempting to interfere in internal Chinese matters.

Biden has been a disdainful critic of Putin throughout his public life, calling him at various times a "war criminal," a "murderous dictator," and a "pure thug." He famously claimed at a one-on-one meeting in Moscow with Putin in 2011 that he looked into his eyes and told him: "I don't think you have a soul." Putin replied, according to Biden: "We understand one another."

Covered by The New Yorker in another media BS story with fabrications ...

• The Biden Agenda | 20 July 2014 |

This is not a brief for Putin, a former Soviet intelligence agent who is brutal to his political opponents and runs a government that is quick to put foreign journalists in jail. He is also considered by many in the American intelligence community to be a competent and informed leader.

Israel's boycott of Haaretz is straight out of the authoritarian playbook | The Forward |

Sanctioning newspapers is a threat to democracy

Authoritarians have a playbook when it comes to dealing with the media. It may not be written down anywhere, but the tactics are all too familiar to those with experience of these regimes: Demonize, detain (and if necessary even kill) -- and defund. So it should ring alarm bells when supposed democracies engage in these behaviors. Israel's decision on Sunday to cut funding for Haaretz -- an internationally respected news outlet and Israel's oldest newspaper -- is the latest in Israel's efforts to shut down criticism of its actions at home and to stifle coverage abroad.

Israel's cabinet voted unanimously to sanction Haaretz after its publisher Amos Schocken called for sanctions against Israel, which he described as imposing a "cruel apartheid regime" on Palestinians, whom he described as "freedom fighters."