Assorted Notes | Tom Camfield

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I FOUND ON THE INTERNET a story dealing with the early stages of Putin’s War and an absence of esprit de corps on the Russian side. It stated:

“Some entire Russian units have laid down their arms without a fight after confronting a surprisingly stiff Ukrainian defense, the official said. A significant number of the Russian troops are young conscripts who are poorly trained and ill-prepared for the all-out assault. And in some cases, Russian troops have deliberately punched holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks, presumably to avoid combat, the official said.

“The Pentagon official declined to say how the military made these assessments — presumably a mosaic of intelligence including statements from captured Russian soldiers and communications intercepts — or how widespread these setbacks may be across the sprawling battlefield. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational developments.”

THEN THERE’S FOX NEWS. I don’t know just where it figures in all this, but some people swear by Fox. “As the United States increasingly goes after some of the Kremlin’s business tentacles, and one person arrested for violating U.S. sanctions against Russia is a former Fox News director who left to launch a Russian propaganda network.

“The Department of Justice revealed that Jack Hanick was quietly arrested in London early in February for dodging U.S. sanctions by helping a sanctioned Russian oligarch, Konstantin Malofeyev, start his right-wing Tsargrad TV.” Further detail is readily available on the Internet.

ANOTHER STORY OF THE SAME VINTAGE begins: “Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr said then-President Donald Trump became furious after Barr told him there was no evidence that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

“'I told him that all this stuff was bulls*** about election fraud. And, you know, it was wrong to be shoveling it out the way his team was, Barr said in an interview with NBC News's Lester Holt. First highlights of the interview were scheduled on MSNBC's ‘Andrea Mitchell Reports.’ See Internet under headline “Former AG Barr said Trump became enraged after being told election fraud claims were nonsense.”

OR MOST OF ALL read the story about Trump’s faulty wall under this headline on the Internet: “It’s Official: Trump’s ‘Impenetrable’ Border Wall Is An Expensive Failure.”

The story begins: “Former President Donald Trump promised his supporters an ‘impenetrable’ border wall between the United States and Mexico. Instead, the $15-billion wall was reportedly breached thousands of times in areas where it was completed, and the smugglers who cut through it were able to do so with cheap power tools available in retail stores.

“Unpublished data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection obtained via the Freedom of Information Act showed that Mexican smugglers cut through the wall 3,272 times over three years, according to the ‘Washington Post. In some cases, they replaced the areas they cut with tinted putty, essentially creating secret passages . . .”

Perhaps we should have left the Rio Grande River undisturbed and spent part of the $315 billion on farming support and law enforcement in Central America.

A RELATED CONSENSUS — Former National Security Advisor John Bolton said Putin was "waiting" for Trump to withdraw the US from NATO. He previously warned that Trump would have withdrawn from the alliance if he'd won a 2nd term. Bolton also said Trump's "main interest" in Ukraine was trying to "find Hillary Clinton's computer server."