Being Necessary To The Security Of A Free State

While Trump plies his wiles trying to get the feckless Germans and Dutch to pay their share of defending their stagnating continent, at least part of free Europe doesn’t need reminding of the consequences of not standing up for their own freedom.

The Poles need no reminding about keeping their defenses strong.

And to their north, the Latvians, Lithuanians, and especially Estonians, in the wake of Obama’s debacle in Ukraine, seem to grasp the need to defend their freedom.  Four percent of Estonia’s entire population is in the military or the (voluntary) reserves – not bad for one of the more libertarian states in Europe.

It‘s very personal to them:

Like almost all Estonians of his generation, what drives [Estonian special forces Colonel Riho] Uhtegi is intensely personal, and tends to be tied up in the history of his country.

“We all had one grandparent that remembered independence,” said Uhtegi, speaking of growing up during the Soviet occupation, “and they filled our heads with stories of it.” He shifts his very blue Estonian gaze back from the distance. Unspoken is the fate of all the other grandparents—the ones who were executed by the Russians or died somewhere in a gulag. Wartime casualties aside, more than 10 percent of Estonia’s population was deported before Stalin’s death in 1953.

And it’s not even a little bit abstract:

“You know why the Russians didn’t take Tbilisi in 2008?” Uhtegi asked me. “They were just up the road, 50 kilometers or so, and nothing was stopping them.”

Having spent many years in Georgia, I knew the answer to this one: because Georgians are crazy. Uhtegi barked a laugh. “Yes. Exactly. Georgians are crazy, and they would fight. The idea of this unwinnable asymmetric fight in Tbilisi was not so appealing to the Russians.”

He continued: “There are always these discussions. Like, yeah. The Russians can get to Tallinn in two days. … Maybe. [The Estonian capital is about 125 miles from the Russian border.] But they can’t get all of Estonia in two days. They can get to Tallinn, and behind them, we will cut their communication lines and supplies lines and everything else.” That dead-eyed Baltic stare fixes me again. “They can get to Tallinn in two days. But they will die in Tallinn. And they know this. … They will get fire from every corner, at every step.”

Read the whole, fascinating thing.

85 thoughts on “Being Necessary To The Security Of A Free State

  1. How is it possible to believe that is thinner skinned than Hillary?

  2. BB: I would be curious to know why you believe Obama should be in prison.

  3. Aren’t you in the “investigate until you find a crime” Emery?

  4. It would appear that Mueller and Trump’s own DOJ are throwing a little shade on him. It’ll be hard for republicans to shut down Mueller with this latest development. Although I suspect there will be plenty of whataboutery coming from Trump’s followers.

  5. “Although I suspect there will be plenty of whataboutery coming from Trump’s followers.”
    As in “Whatabout the fact that that the latest development does not involve Trump?”

  6. Trump apologists are hard at work trying out new defense slogans once “no American has been indicted for collusion” gets permanently retired.

    It could have been someone sitting on their bed that weighed 400 lbs. But it turns out it was the Russians. To be fair we don’t know how heavy those 12 Russians are. 😏

  7. I dunno. One or more of team Hillary henchmen might get invited. Does Christopher Steele count as an American? By his own admission, he colluded with Russian intelligence sources to dig up any kind of dirt on an American presidential candidate.

  8. You are being irrational, Emery. You should accept this.
    If you reverse the Hillary & Trump roles, and have the Trump campaign do what the Clinton campaign actually did — hire a dodgy ex-spy to use his sources in Russian intelligence to gather dirt on Hillary, and then have Trump turn over that info to friendly contacts in the JD so they can use it to initiate an investigation of Hillary’s Russian connections — you would be screaming for Trump’s head, for colluding with foreign nationals, including Russian intelligence, in a ttempt to change the outcome of the 2016 election.
    My guess is that you won’t deny this, or try to refute it, instead you’ll just give a “let Mueller do his job!” response.

  9. Is the dossier supposed to be classified? Because I’m always being told it’s fake and if it’s fake why would it be classified?

  10. Trump supporters need to be thankful to Obama, McCain, Clinton and others who had this information and didn’t use it in the campaign. Do you think Trump would’ve done the same thing? He and his campaign were generating “Fake News” at an industrial scale all through the campaign.

    /Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
    An “extremely credible source” has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud./

  11. Low IQ, leftist reprobates are a hoot. If there was a shred of credible evidence, however tenious, linking Trump you know CNN would be running with it 24/7.

    But what’s *really* fun is, even if Trump did something worth impeaching him over, Mike Pence would be GREAT.

    And he will be great after Trump gets his 8 in. By the time a leftist wins the WH again, SCOTUS will consist of 7 young, solid conservatives and 2 impotent nimrods screeching autistically in irrelevant dissent.

    And that will be the state of things for the next 40 years.

  12. Isn’t it ironic that many jobs require an enormous amount of personal investment and patient cultivation of demonstrable skills and competence, yet to become the President of the United States, it appears that all you need is a big mouth.

  13. Poor Emery. He’s been shooting his pie hole off like a pro, and all it’s gotten him is a gut full of bile, derision and a reputation for plagiarizing.

    Trump doesn’t even out 1/2 the effort into it that Emery does, and he gets mountains of cash money, hot models, strippers and the keys to Air Force 1.

    Don’t be like Emery. It’s suks to be Emery.

  14. MP, that is probably the funniest thing I’ve seen on the internet.
    “Payload master” should be included as a college “studies” major.

  15. Isn’t it ironic that many jobs require an enormous amount of personal investment and patient cultivation of demonstrable skills and competence, yet to become the President of the United States, it appears that all you need is a big mouth.

    We warned you about this back in 2008, buddy.

    Regarding why he belongs in prison, it’s a hunch that since everybody around him never got around to doing serious investigations of any of the scandals that enveloped his administration, that there just might be a guy at the center of all of it who was orchestrating it, and that if people had rightly been put on trial for “Fast and Furious”, the IRS scandal, Hilliary’s server, and the like, somebody would have spoken up about who it was.

    Not.That.Complicated. It’s the same thing guys like Hoover and Giuiliani used to cripple the Mob.

  16. MP wrote: “Let’s be clear about who we are talking about when we speak of “elites.”

    The elite will always lead; if they were not leading somebody else would be the elite. In the name of meritocracy, the elite has created a system that preserves too many privileges and advantages for the elite and their children. The elite must shift the system to allow more equality of opportunity, more accountability for members of the elite after failures like the financial crisis, and a reduction in inequality. But it’s not just about billionaires vs. peasants. The upper middle class (let’s say making $80K-$250K) has to change their attitude. They are not successful simply because they are wonderful and virtuous. Many were born on third thinking they hit a triple (baseball reference). When a Harvard grad lectures the poor that they should really have gotten a better education, that is perilously close to a “Let them eat cake” moment. Too many of the educated elite are bitterly contemptuous of most Americans, focusing on their shortcomings as opposed to their virtues, particularly when the political candidates of the educated elite fail to get elected. That contempt translates to more political failure. The educated elite has to get behind a political program that says “Americans are great, and this is how we’ll make them greater”, as opposed to “Most Americans are (bigots/misogynists/homophobes/lazy/stupid/rubes), let’s throw them a bone to make their poverty comfortable while keeping them out of our walled garden.” The two parties treat different slices of the electorate with contempt, but the contempt is there for both, as is the walled garden with its moat.

  17. BB: I have a “hunch” that Mueller went out of his way to write a “speaking document.”
    The 29-page report is deliberately written in a narrative style that tells a story, and by design it divulges much more information than a standard plain vanilla indictment.
    Mueller did this for several reasons:
    1) to let the Russians know that he knows exactly what they did.
    2) to let all the Americans who aided and abetted them know that he knows exactly what they did. and
    3) Mueller makes it abundantly clear that he knows Trump is guilty, and he will hold Trump accountable like anyone else.

    But yes Obama…..

  18. OK, so you’re saying that Bob Mueller is more or less handling things that ought to be handled by the State Department, too. To say that this is not exactly an endorsement of his work would be the understatement of the year.

    And sure, I’m willing to assume that the fact that the Russians spied on the Democrats obviously means some Republican must have been in on it, because it’s not like the Russians ever spied on us before or anything like that. No Rosenbergs out there, no Alger Hiss, nothing like that, nosirree.

    Honestly, you have got to learn to stop taking anything coming out of Mueller’s, Comey’s, or Strzok’s mouth at face value.

  19. Emery, one of the problems with elites leading the people is that they do not understand the limits of their leadership. They are unable to determine whether their policies are truly good for the people or just good for themselves.
    The bourgeois as elites may work well at fostering economic growth, but may be terrible at fostering moral improvement. Indeed one strain of elite thought is that the two are one and the same.

  20. Wow. Just watched the Trump-Putin press conference. Russia 2, USA 0.

    Trump was rootin’ for Putin

    BB: Mueller is meticulous, focused, professional, disciplined, and ethical. Sadly, these adjectives will never, ever be used to describe the man the Russians backed. And that’s why they backed him

  21. Yup, Emery, that’s exactly what I’d say about the guy who accepted that nonsense report that got the whole thing started without checking it out, not even enough to review the passport record of one of the guys mentioned.

    If you think Mueller is doing so great, tell me how he’s going to prosecute those 12 guys from Russia without compromising national security. Given that it’s foreign nationals doing it and a hypothetical national security threat, every bit of evidence is classified, and the server it was “found” on has never been in the custody of the FBI.

    Good luck with that one.

  22. It’s too late for you to avoide over-praising Mueller, Emery, but if there is room to change your mind on Muellers integrity, you should examine Mueller’s actions in the Hatfield anthrax case. Totally bungled, because he’d decided early on, based on dodgy sources, that Hatfield was guilty. Mueller then created the evidence to charge Hatfield (dogs who had smelled the anthrax packages were brought to Hatfield. They approached him. He petted them. This was considered a “positive detection” by Mueller’s team).
    It is not disputed that Hatfield was innocent of the crime. A man named Ivins was reposnsible.
    The miscarried Hatfield investigation is never mentioned by Mueller’s proponents or the MSM.

  23. “Look, I don’t care about any of this….can we please just get back to being angry at black guys for not standing for the national anthem?” ~ Trump’s base

  24. “Look, I don’t care about any of this….can we please just get back to being angry at Trump for deporting felons back to their home countries?” ~ Emery and the far left.

    There, fixed it for ya, Emery. Nobody was avoiding topics but you. You just didn’t like the direction the train of evidence was going.

  25. Drudge Report: ‘Putin dominates’ Trump in Helsinki

    When you have lost Matt Drudge….

  26. The Drudge headline links to an online newspaper you have called “The Daily Fail.”
    You should try to use your powers of reason, such as they are, when you make a point.

  27. Drudge also quotes Brennan as saying that what Trump has done in Helsinki is treason. Predictable, but interesting since Brennan has said that in 1976 he voted for Gus Hall, presidential candidate of American Communist Party. Declassified American and Russian documents have proven that the American Communist Party and Gus Hall were a stooge of Russia’s politburo.
    Looks another of the Left’s torpedoes is circling back on them . . .

  28. It used to be that being a Communist disqualified someone from getting a security clearance. At the very least, if you’re involved with national security, as was Brennan, it’s a sign of not paying very good attention. Gulag Archepelago had just been published, after all, and Kruschev had disavowed Stalin not much before that. It’s not like the last word on the subject was by Walter Duranty.

  29. I just knew this post’s comments list would take off again after the *DISASTER* that took place in Helsinki and the (now) widespread (and newly discovered) patriotism of the left. Who’s always been a staunch enemy of the Russkis and would be happy to go to war against them (by send your kids off to die after phishing for and acquiring someone’s password (which was “password”)).

    You should try to use your powers of reason, such as they are, when you make a point.

    The irony, it burns. 😉

  30. Yes, Trump’s press conferences are embarrassing. His habit of publicly lavishing praise on Putin is off-putting (like his similarly inexplicable habit of kissing Bibi’s posterior whenever they’re together.) And laying the blame for the current state of US-Russia relations on the US is obviously not quite the way to go when speaking for the US in public.

    Finally, the weird way he summarized his view of the Mueller indictments — “US-intelligence-says-this, but-Putin-says-that, and-I-kind-of-side-with-Putin” — is typically Trumpian as well. On that issue, we’re where we’ve always been. NSA collects the haystack, and they should have the conclusive evidence one way or another.

    We must wait until Mueller releases the results of his investigation before taking premature partisan stands. Mueller’s conclusions — if we ever see them — will rise or fall on the strength of his evidence. His investigation has, so far, been admirably leak-free.

    On a personal note, can we just admit we have taken this: “Anyone Can Grow Up To Be President” a bit too far? 😉

  31. ..and of course the big difference between ingratiating himself with Putin and brown-nosing Bibi is that with the latter, Trump’s policy choices follow in train, no matter how disadvantageous they are to the US, whereas with Putin, there is a huge divergence between what Trump says and what he does.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.