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The Vice President may disagree with your thesis that the White House has been impenetrable as to infighting.

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They’ve been totally asleep at the wheel, at most casually demonizing and antagonizing Russia, with no leverage to head this off, and no positive relationship or foundation for real diplomacy many months ago when it could have helped. They come off as hyping war, almost begging for war as a political distraction and to prove their “Russia is uniquely evil” narrative. Every day, for weeks we’re being lectured that a massive, unusually horrific, brutal bombardment and land invasion is imminent. And all this administration does is try is try to fake toughness when only escalating tensions, raising the chances of error and wider conflict, and deterring nothing. When was the last time you saw the youngish, not particularly popular head of a relatively weak, divided state find the need to scold our supposedly unprecedentedly-experienced foreign policy expert in the White House for continually destabilizing and wreaking the economy of his country by hyping daily hysteria? Oh, but we have “diverse tiger teams” who have gamed it all out. What kind of half-baked management school tactics is thi? Pretending to a be a perhaps actually unprecedented combination of alienating, weak, incompetent, and bungling war mongers must be some brilliant misdirection on their part. I’m sure if the tiger teams simply name their pronouns and offer somber land acknowledgments, Putin will be touched and reconsider. I didn’t vote for Trump either time (nor Clinton or Biden) but it’s not hard for me to imagine Trump telling Putin bluntly a year ago: look Ukraine is a mess; NATO doesn’t want it. But we can’t say the Ukrainians have no say in which institutions they’d like to join someday. But between you and me, there’s no chance. I could give you a written promise but I’m not going to do something to make myself look weak when the next US president could tear it up. Combine being personally conciliatory with projecting strength, some of the energy-related leverage Biden gave away, and Trump’s own unpredictability. But the key is to have a semblance of a personal rapport, actual leverage to use, and the reputation for being capable of almost anything - well ahead of time. This has been embarrassing to watch and hopefully it does not become a mass tragedy.

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Re the Whire House “playbooks.”—Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

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Brilliant piece Mickey. Spot on as to many things from Old Man Joe to Ron Klain desperately trying to appear in control of this lost ship.

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Feb 21, 2022·edited Feb 21, 2022

OK Mickey, I agree it would be better if we had a younger president. I for one am glad they are finding work arounds for how to deal with Biden's limitations like they did as best as possible with the last president. In fact I am happy if that happens with any president as they all have had limitations. What I am most interested in is how can we get to a place to get the best president with the least limitations elected? I despair that it is ever possible. This video with 15.5 million views really lays out how it is not possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs At times I just want to give up since we all are like Sisyphus in this exercise. At the least our focus needs to be on how to develop and get in place a better system of government that enables a more perfect union if you will. How about you focus more on that area.

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