America This Week, February 23, 2024: "Ukraine’s Blues"
2024-02-23 00:30:30
Welcome to America This Week, with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, the national news wrap-up so true, we recommend you stow all sharp objects before reading. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.racket.news/s/america-this-week?utm_medium=podcast">www.racket.news</a>
All right, welcome to America This Week, I'm Matt Taibbi.
And I'm Walter Kern.
Walter, how are you doing? I'm down in Florida, hence the gear. This is television broadcast gimmickry right here. But you've got your lumberjack thing on, so we've got a whole, like...
Yeah, we've got a whole north-south thing. I'm somewhere in the great north woods at Paul Bunyan's camp, making flapjacks with Babe the Blue Ox.
That was the mythology I grew up with, and this is the only clean shirt I have this morning.
I love it, I love it, excellent.
Well, it's been a weird week. Not quite as apocalyptic as last week's news, but an awful lot of weirdness, as usual. The one that really struck me, and maybe it's slightly old news for folks by the time this comes out, but this completely out of thin air invented story about the Russian threat that is being done in this continuing all-out knockdown-dragout effort to get the House to pass this military aid bill for Ukraine that it clearly does not want to pass. They clearly don't have enough blackmail material on the last, however, many members of the Republican caucus. So they cooked up this story in the morning where they had Mike Johnson, the new House intelligence chief, come out and say there is a threat, a credible threat, involving Russia.
This was straight out of the Bush years, with the bar graph charts about how scared we should feel every day that the DHS put out.
Well, I was going to say, Matt, when you said this week wasn't as apocalyptic as last week, that we should probably have a meter down in the corner out west. Out west. here we have a fire danger sign. outside the National Forest. when you drive in.
There's this little half of a pie graph that goes from, I don't know, yellow to red, and there's an arrow showing fire danger. And I think when it's pointing to the red, it means that where you're going is actually on fire. And we stay always toward that end. lately. And last week or this week, it did seem to touch almost the extreme with this notion that nuclear weapons in space are going to knock out satellites, thereby knocking out modern life as we know it.
And then it turned out not even to be in deployment. I'm sorry. It was just so funny.
Well, the Democrats in their full capture of 1980s, apocalypticism, which belonged then to the right,
are now constantly throwing the book of revelations at us. And space nukes is something like the seven headed dragon, or one of these.
It's the seven golden bowls full of God who lives forever and ever. Or the great star that fell from the sky that was called Wormwood. Anyway, go ahead. Right.
Yeah, this was Operation Wormwood, basically. And I always call it the book of revelations when it's supposed to be singular. And I know I'll get mail on that. It's one of the things people seem to care about most.
And anyway,
so, having been through the first round of this, when it was Pat Robertson's.
bailiwick, it's now Rachel Maddow who preaches fire and brimstone.
Yeah, we got to play this video because there's no other. I think I think the entire audience needs to see.
This reaction by Rachel Maddow to Mike Johnson talking about.
Talking about the the Russian existential threat. This is apparently what gives her hope for all humanity. Here we go.
I want you to know that the White House gave us information today. They're going to remain in close contact with leaders of Congress on the issue, and it will.
be dealt with. They're steady hands at the wheel. The United States can't rely on other nations to handle matters like this. We must do it ourselves, and we will.
The bottom line is, is that we all came away with a very strong impression that the administration is taking this very seriously and that the administration has a plan in place. We look forward to supporting them as they go to implement it. But in the interim, I've got great faith in what the administration is currently doing to address this matter. And I appreciate the support and the working relationship on a bipartisan basis I have with my ranking member.
You are not hallucinating. That was two senior Republicans, including the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, praising the Biden administration, saying how much they trust them and value them to deal with what was first reported last week as an emerging national security threat of Russia trying to put satellite-killer nuclear weapons in orbit around the Earth, up in space.
For this unbelievably partisan and dysfunctional Republican Congress to have senior leaders praising the Biden administration on a national security issue related to Russia is perhaps the tiniest of teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny silver linings of-.
What in the hell? So, first of all, did you notice that she raised her hands in praise at the beginning? Did you notice that the Jimmy Swagger, you know, gestural language has been completely absorbed by the likes of MSNBC?
I mean, it's straight out of, I mean, I can't. even. There are so many different sci-fi novels that this is, it feels, it's very much a, would you like to know more, you know, out of Starship Troopers. Right. Yeah.
But I mean, I said, stop, stop, because I exclaimed out of the depth of my pop culture soul, because I have just watched Wag the Dog, the, you know, David Mamet written satire with De Niro and Hoffman in which they stage a war and in order to get a president reelected. And the tones of Mike Turner and Mike Johnson, the two Mikes, when they said, you know, it's being handled, the United States is responsible, is a responsible, steady force or something like that. It reminded me of when they pretend to be at war with Albania in Wag the Dog. And the way they-.
Oh, was it really Albania or was it a fictional-. Yeah, it was Albania.
No, it was Albania in the movie. I'm pretty confident of that.
And the way they get the press to start covering it is by denying it and saying, you know, something like the truth of our conflict with Albania is not being represented correctly or whatever. But in any case, the intonations of Mike Turner and Johnson were both so phony in that thing. They were doing that thing of pretending there was a- we just left a room in which a major crisis and a major threat were displayed. And we want you, the people, to know, even though we're not going to be able to share the details of it, that America stands strong, ready, and so on. And they have never sounded more like phony politicians in their lives to me.
Well, and they were playing a role that used to be pretty familiar in the national security landscape, which is the, you know, the senior congressional intelligence figure, you know, the person who's sitting in the skiff all day long hearing the real dope, and they come out and they're arm in arm with their Democratic colleagues about something that they can't tell us about. Now, this was, this was, you know, the entire run up to the Iraq war was full of displays like this, where we had senior Democrats coming out and saying, you know, there's a lot of concerning stuff, we can't really get into it. Of course, we would prefer that there be inspections, but, you know, we understand how serious the threat of terrorism is. And, you know, now it comes out years later that they were getting intelligence saying there's no operational tie with, you know, between Saddam and al-Qaeda. They were lying, right?
And in this case, you know, this is how they comported themselves. This is how they comported themselves during Russiagate, too, you know, when they'd come out, claiming that they'd just seen evidence that they couldn't discuss of, you know, the subversion of the presidency, and so on.
Right. On both sides, right? So especially in the Senate, the Senate Intelligence Committee, where it was Warner and the Democratic side, I forget who the main figure on the Republican side was, but they both signed off on it. And now you can see Johnson and Turner, but particularly Johnson, looked like, you know, every cell in his body was squirming as he was delivering that, you know, that initial thing. And then, then you have Rachel coming up a week later, basically, saying how...
Hallelujah hands.
Right. Yeah.
You know.
Right. Right. And remember, MSNBC used to be, this is what's so amazing, MSNBC, like Daily Kosk, had a story on this. Like these used to be, the kind of places where at least some anti-war voters used to, you know, hang out. And now the thing that gives her hope for the future direction of the country is that Republicans and Democrats may be united on a totally fictional, trumped up threat, you know, about nuclear space weapons.
We were openly talking about developing nuclear space weapons in the Reagan years, if anybody remembers correctly. And, you know, of course, I don't think those ever happened, not that I know of. But then, you know, it subsequently came out that they weren't even talking about this immediate threat that we immediately had to know about was nowhere near being deployed.
But Matt, Matt, didn't we just get through years of withering satire of Trump's Space Force proclamation?
Right. Right. I mean, oh, I know.
Wasn't that almost prima facie evidence of him having gone totally cuckoo?
You know, does he think he's in Star Trek, etc?
That's right. They did have quite a lot of fun with that, didn't they? We should dig that up. That should be the next. next task for Matt Orfalea is to dig up the, you know, the Trump and his loony Space Force thing.
But nuclear space weapons became an instantaneous talking point across the board. And it was not, it was not just on the Democratic side. Nikki Haley, in classic fashion, you know, got up there and she was a guest on on Fox where they were discussing, they immediately converted the story into into a discussion about how Biden was sleepwalking on the Russia nuclear space threat. Right. And, you know, the National Review put out a story.
Russia's space weapons capabilities are worth worrying about. You know, it was. it was everywhere, this thing. And there was nothing that we that we had anything concrete about. I mean, Bloomberg US tells allies Russia, Russia may launch anti-satellite nuclear weapon into space this year.
That has echoes, certainly, of the Iraq period. Remember the famous British intelligence assessment talking about how they could launch chemical weapons or biological weapons within 45 minutes.
And then later came out that there was nothing behind that at all. But you know, so what? We can tell the public later.
Putin came out and, of course, directly said that this wasn't happening.
You know, we've been categorically against, and are now against, the deployment of nuclear weapons in space, he said. But whatever. He's evil. Oh, he's a liar. Vladimir Putin.
So that doesn't really make the news very much. But the fact that these stories came out and there was just nothing in most of these reports talking about the obvious subtext of it, which is that there is a still unpassed piece of legislation that is preventing us from continuing the war in Ukraine. It just tells you how completely ridiculous our system of media is. now. I mean, we've now gone beyond the, you know, the point of no return with this 1984 style news reporting system.
There's just there's no pretense anymore to, you know, any kind of connection to reality with any of this stuff. It was really amazing to watch.
There's no, necessarily there's no connection to reality. There's very little connection to the past or to a couple of weeks ago. And there's very little picture of the future either, because the future is clouded with sort of ultimate threats. So, you know, if Russia at some point deploys the space nuke and we've also been prepared now for a while for some kind of cyber outage that they might foment, nothing can guarantee.
And freeze the Midwest to death, right?
Yeah, yeah. Nothing can be guaranteed. If they're talking about them taking out modern life through the, you know,
neutralization of satellites, shouldn't we have a program in the schools, like they did when I was a kid, to get under your desk? I mean, we're not being very well prepared for the space nuke, cyber pandemic and real pandemic future. As far as I'm concerned, it's so weird how they just trot out a new apocalypse every week, but don't seem to have any prophylactics or therapies for them, you know?
Yeah, you would think there would be, oh, well, Russia's going to be nuking our satellites. So let's have classes and remedial talking face to face.
This is the US postal system. This is what a stamp is, you know, but all of this stuff is just so patently absurd. It's been manifestly clear to Americans since, what, the early 50s that mutually assured destruction is something that we have to live with on a daily basis. We've known this. We've known that accidental, you know, apocalypse is entirely possible.
And we don't, we're not asked to worry about that. We're asked to worry about this new, this new weapon system that has not even been deployed and no one has even confirmed yet, the existence of yet. Because why exactly? I just, I don't fully understand. It's clearly connected somehow to trying to get this, the aid bill passed, the $95 billion aid bill passed.
So if Ukraine prevails, if Ukraine repels the invader, does that mean there won't be any space nuke? Will they give up on that?
That's right, how do you connect those dots, right?
Or is it more likely? If we put Russia in a corner, may they perhaps accelerate their Dr. Evil plans to knock out all communications around the world? I mean, let's sit back and see the chessboard, Rachel.
If we put up a space defense and warn them that we're going to do it, will that not accelerate their deployment? Or don't they, don't? they have the key ingredient? Are they still looking for the yellow cake or whatever? the, you know, isotope is that they'll need?
I mean, now that they're, now that they're playing with all these possibilities, I want to see the full, you know, game of risk so that I can make choices as an American citizen on whether, to, you know, move somewhere.
Well, I mean, it also tells you something about the total contempt for the American news consumer, that they don't even build, you know, scare stories that survive even 10 seconds of deliberation about what the next step in the story is. You know, we're supposed to be worried about this. So there, you know, three dots, therefore, we must approve $95 billion in aid to Ukraine so that we can continue fighting a war that won't stop the nuclear defense program.
And is it correct that the aid is still linked to aid to Israel as well?
Yeah. Yes, it is. Yeah. Okay.
That's being downplayed for some reason now.
And I don't know if Tucker Carlson's Putin interview caused them to go into overdrive with this stuff to counter it. It certainly has intensified. And, like you say, it obviously linked to the passage of this funding bill. But going back to what we just saw, where the two Republicans, Mike Turner and Mike Johnson, came out of the hearing room to reassure us about the boogeyman that they'd supposedly seen back there.
And Rachel sang hallelujah and did Jesus hands to it.
Where are we going? In other words, this is all being filtered through Ukraine. But are they preparing us for something even worse?
This is beyond 1980s Star Wars stuff. I think. if you remember back during Star Wars, Reagan was accused of provoking the Soviet Union to maybe commit a first strike because it might be their last chance. That was the whole scare about anti-missile technology.
But Putin, in his interview with Tucker, just said that there was some kind of mutual anti-missile treaty that the US and USR were considering for a second, which was scuttled from the US. Now, that may be complete propaganda, but...
No, no, that was the start. two thing. There was a famous moment in the late 90s. Maybe that wasn't US and USSR, that was US and Russia. But there was a...
Yeah, excuse me.
Yeah, but that was when 50 leading American policymakers and Sovietologists signed an open letter to Bill Clinton saying, don't be expanding NATO, because this other thing is much more important. That was, I think, start two, if I remember correctly. But yes, it's gone.
But shouldn't we now, with the looming ultra militarization of space, be considering one of these treaties again? Does Rachel think we're just going to win hands down in this?
We've got the hypersonic missile now. Does it even matter what they're talking about? I mean, and do you indeed need nukes to knock out satellites? I'm not convinced you do. In other words, they're raising the specter of a total conflict, which could darken the planet and knock out life as we know it.
And they're not doing it in the context of maybe we should have a treaty, or maybe we should think about things, or maybe this is a good reason for Russia and US to sit down. They're merely suggesting we need to spend more money and win in some final way that they're not clear about. They're not even clear about how one would win.
And in a few months, should these killer, these satellite killer satellites or weapons platforms be orbiting, or however they work? Will it be too late? Will we be under permanent blackmail?
You know, I don't know that there was an article. The only thing that came close to describing what the thought process here was that I saw was this comment by the Lithuanian defense minister. Now, the headline of this article is, as long as Russia is mired in Ukraine, quote unquote, mired in Ukraine, threat to NATO countries will not increase. And then it says, Lithuanian defense minister comments by Arvidius Anastasius said, you know, to summarize what the defense ministers say, Russian threat is not diminished.
But he went on to say, basically, as long as they're tied up in Ukraine, they can't, they can't be making other mischief. So I guess that's the thought process.
Ukraine is the panacea. We keep that war going long enough, and these launch pads, from which they'll need to send these space nukes up, can't be used for some reason or won't be used. Or, you know, they can't walk and chew gum at the same time over there. As we are assured we can do constantly.
And as long as yeah, as long as this Ukraine thing's going on, all is right with the world, basically.
Right, right. I mean, that's a simple, it's as basic as that. And, you know, let's share one more screenshot of one, you know, one more story that was kind of, I thought, significant. This is the National Review. Okay.
So this is kind of, you know, I guess, polite, Mike, Mike Johnson, Mike Turner, Republicanism, Russia's space weapons capabilities are worth worrying about.
Then it goes on to talk about how they sort of play down the Democratic response to this, even though Democrats were the clear source of this whole thing.
And then they talk about what could happen. And there's this amazing paragraph, should Russia deploy a nuclear weapon in orbit, it would be analogous to firing a shotgun in a crowded room, where everyone hit by the initial blast, but also be forced to let off a smaller shotgun blast of their own. The result could be what scientists call the Kessler syndrome, a theoretical scenario in which each collision in an overcrowded orbit generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions. This would jeopardize mankind's ability to access space and greatly damage America's military and civilian advantages and fields, such as broadband internet, cell phone service, GPS, weather forecasting, satellite radio and television, etc, etc, etc. And so it's this bizarre kind of like, let's pile on the, you know, fictional story about which we know absolutely nothing.
You know, all we know is that whatever they're leaking out.
What was that called, dude? The Kessler effect?
The Kessler syndrome. Yeah.
The Kessler syndrome.
The Kessler syndrome.
That's a satirical movie. The Kessler syndrome.
Yeah. And we might as well just bring back Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman to do that movie too. Right.
So just to pause for a second, where was that again? Who wrote that article?
That was the National Review.
Okay. The National Review knows nothing about firearms metaphors. Okay. Believe me, believe me, mostly because I'm wearing this shirt, that their scenario about a shootout between shotgun wielding people was made no sense at all to anybody who knows anything about guns. Okay.
That was a Tom Friedman-esque metaphor. I mean, that was impressive.
It was about a shotgun. blast in a crowded room causes everyone else to have to bring out shotgun.
Well, yeah, let's see.
In a room crowded with people carrying.
It would be analogous to firing a shotgun in a crowded room, where anyone hit by the initial blast would also be forced to let off a similar shotgun blast of their own. Now, that would kind of seem to me to defeat the purpose of firing the shotgun blast.
I would not want to be the guy who fires a shotgun in a room full of people with shotguns. You know what I mean?
I'd maybe want to go into a room where people didn't have shotguns, and.
I think he's mixing.
. Go ahead.
And shotguns, let's just stipulate, don't in a crowded room, don't necessarily kill that many. You know, the essence of a shotgun blast is a lot of scattered pellets. If they're concentrated on one person, they might kill them, but just shot into a crowded room, what they're going to do, even if the rest of the people don't have shotguns, is cause a mob of people to come and rip your flesh.
But let's not muddy our conception of the Kessler syndrome by comparing it to actual shootouts. What they're talking about is a giant belt of basically space gravel, which results from everything blowing apart in space, constantly orbiting our Earth in this belt of debris. Would that hamper communications? I should think so. It might hamper everything to the point where we will be picking up rocks and trying to recreate civilization from the Neolithic.
Not to give this National Review author a difficult time, but let's look at the Wikipedia entry for Kessler syndrome. The Kessler syndrome, also called the Kessler effect, collisional cascading or ablation cascade, proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit, LEO, due to space pollution is numerous enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris. that increases the likelihood of further collisions. Does that language sound familiar to you at all?
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