CARTOON: AAAARGH!!! The Russians Are Coming!!!

Relax, the Democrats have this! Really...No, REALLY!

Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink

How Dare Tucker Carlson Let Putin Talk!

To acknowledge the contradictions of corporate media coverage of Ukraine would spell disaster for corporate journalists.

By Max Jones
SheerPost (2/25/24)

In the aftermath of Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, some corporate journalists offered relatively detailed analysis of the interview, while many did anything but. Most often, they dissuaded audiences from watching the interview by assuring them that “nothing new” occurred, painting Carlson as a Russian stooge and dumbing down the interview as nothing more than a piece of pseudo-journalistic propaganda. In what was meant to be, by any credible journalistic standard, an engaging debate about Putin’s claims, was replaced by a stenographic narrative that repeated the lines of the State Department. 

It’s understandable why corporate media did this. Since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, they have repeatedly called the war “unprovoked (also see here, here and here)” and characterized Putin as an expansionist warmonger with whom no one could ever reason. Putin’s explanations of the U.S. and NATO’s provocations against Russia, his admitting how long he tried befriending the West, his accounting of the nearly completed peace deal between Ukraine and Russia that Boris Johnson blocked at the beginning of the war, his clear declarations that Russia has no plans to expand its military presence beyond Ukraine, and his calls for diplomatic settlement of the war should raise serious questions for any reasonable audience member about Western media’s characterizations of Putin. 

Carlson’s interview should have challenged the media to examine the contradictions of these previous claims, and even some of the historical events that they have omitted from much of their analysis of the Ukraine war since its beginning. The most crucial among them is the 2014 U.S.-backed Maidan coup in Ukraine, which saw the CIA-enabled overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych. 

In a response to Carlson’s interview on her MSNBC show, former White House press secretary turned journalist Jen Psaki misinformed (or perhaps even lied) to her audience about the U.S. involvement in the coup. Specifically, after she described Carlson as a “noted conspiracy theorist” and a well-known “Kremlin mouthpiece,” she stated, “Tucker did not challenge Putin’s baseless accusation that the United States orchestrated a coup in Ukraine in 2014.”

Putin did not claim that the United States “orchestrated” the Maidan coup, but rather that the coup was done with the backing of the CIA. Psaki’s falsehood goes much deeper than a simple exaggeration, however. 

“European aspirations”

What Psaki does not tell her audience is that the U.S. has dedicated more than $5 billion dollars to Ukraine to achieve its “European aspirations” since 1991, according to Victoria Nuland, Biden’s under secretary of state for political affairs. The Maidan protests were originally sparked as the result of a policy dispute — specifically about whether or not Yanukovych should accept an E.U. association agreement, or as the founder of Consortium News, the late Robert Parry, put it: “The issue was whether or not [Yanukovych] should accept an E.U. economic package that involved major concessions to the [International Monetary Fund], i.e. more austerity for Ukraine, or whether he would accept a more generous package of a $15 billion loan from Russia, which is already supporting Ukraine through discounted natural gas. It was a policy issue, not an issue of whether democracy would go forward.”

Further, the U.S. government funded NGOs that played a direct role in getting the protests that led to the Maidan coup started. According to the Financial Times, a project under the Ukrainian NGO Center of United Actions titled “New Citizen,” “played a big role in getting the protest up and running.” According to the Kyiv Post, funds from Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network accounted for nearly 36% of Center UA’s budget, while a USAID funded NGO called “Pact Inc.” covered 54%. The remaining funds were granted by George Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), whose first director once told the Washington Post “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” and which has a long history of aiding U.S. regime change operations. The NED is funded by Congress.  

The NED also funded 65 projects in Ukraine to the tune of more than $20 million in 2013. Among the focuses of these projects were “conflict resolution,” “accountability and governance” and “democratic ideas and values.” Curiously, according to Monthly Review, the longest continuously published socialist magazine in the United States, on Feb. 25, 2022, the day after the Russian invasion, “The National Endowment for Democracy deleted all records of funding projects in Ukraine from their searchable ‘Awarded Grants Search’ database….The archived [NED] webpage (captured Feb. 25, 2022 from 14:53) shows that NED granted $22,394,281 in the form of 334 awards to Ukraine between 2014 to the present. The capture at 23:10 the same day shows ‘No results found’ for Ukraine.”

Further, the founder of Center of United Actions, Oleh Ryabchuck, told the Financial Post, “The Orange Revolution was a miracle, a massive peaceful protest that worked. We want to do that again and we think we will” (emphasis added). The Orange Revolution successfully overturned the election victory of Viktor Yanukovych in 2005.

Psaki also does not inform her audience that John McCain, Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) and Victoria Nuland all spoke to protesters on stage in Kyiv during the civil unrest, showing support for their cause that ultimately led to the (second) ouster of Yanukovych. 

While speaking, McCain and Murphy shared the stage with Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party in Ukraine. Oleh Tyahnybok and Ruslan Koshulinskyi, deputy head of the Svoboda Party, later met with an anonymous Western official and discussed how many Ukrainians needed to be killed by the Yanukovych government for the West to no longer recognize Yanukovych as Ukraine’s leader …

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DENNIS KUCINICH: How The War Machine Conquered The Democrats

What happened to the Democratic Party? Why has it become impossible to question war and the massive expenditures on arms? Why is such questioning political suicide?

The Chris Hedges Report
Real News Network (12/16/22)

There was once a wing of the Democratic Party that stood up to the war industry. J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire, and, of course, Dennis Kucinich. But that was largely decades ago. The new Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America, but the arms industry. The massive military budget, $858 billion in military spending allocated for fiscal year 2023, is an increase of $45 billion over the Biden administration's budget request, and nearly $80 billion more than the amount appropriated by Congress for the current fiscal year.

WTH? Democrats?

What happened to the Democratic Party? Why has it become impossible to question war and the massive expenditures on arms? Why is such questioning political suicide? Why can't a Democrat ask, especially at a time of economic hardship and huge deficits, how much we are going to divert to the war in Ukraine, which has already consumed some $60 billion? Former presidential candidate and eight-term Congressperson Dennis Kucinich joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the past half century of the Democrats, and how the war machine conquered the party.

34-minute video