© UnknownVictoria Nuland, previously foreign policy adviser to vice-president Dick Cheney. Married to neo-con Robert Kagan. Her slogan sums up the US' attitude towards the EU.
Meet the new (cold) war, same as the old (cold) war. Same same, but different. One day, it's the myriad implications of Washington's "pivoting" to Asia - as in the containment of China. The next day, it's the perennial attempt to box Russia in. Never a dull moment in the New Great Game in Eurasia.
On Russia, the denigration of all things Sochi - attributable to the inherent stupidity of Western corporate media "standards" - was just a subplot of the main show, which always gets personal; the relentless demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin. [1]
Yet Nulandgate - as in US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria "neo-con" Nuland uttering her famous
"F**k the EU" - was way more serious. Not because of the "profanity" (praise the Lord!), but for providing what US Think Tankland hailed as "an indicator of American strategic thinking".
Here's the game in a nutshell. Germany remote controls one of the leaders of the Ukrainian protests, heavyweight boxer Vitali Klitschko. [2]
"F**k the EU" is essentially directed towards Berlin and Klitschko, its key protege. Washington sees this going nowhere, as
Germany, after all, has been slowly building a complex energy-investment partnership with Russia.The Obama administration wants results - fast. Nuland herself stressed (
check it out, starting at 7:26) that Washington, over the past two decades, has "invested" over US$5 billion for the "democratization" of Ukraine. So yes: this is "our" game and the EU is at best a nuisance while Russia remains the major spoiler. Welcome to Washington's Ukrainian "strategy".
Comment: Charging and convicting a politician in the USA with taking bribes is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. A man in his position would be expected to accept bribes; failure to do so would have raised suspicion and flagged him for extra scrutiny. If anyone wants to do well for his community in the US, he must play the game. In fact, in today's America, for someone to be charged with taking bribes, it probably means they were diverting money in order to be able to do good with it.
So the question is; why Nagin? Could it be because he interfered with certain developers' plans for post-Katrina N.O.? Could it be because he was actually a rare case of a good politician that he has been sent down for more than most murderers get in the U.S.? Somebody clearly wanted to eliminate this man from the game.
Curiously, the evidence used against Nagin is 'secret' and won't be made public.... 'just temporarily', they say, but everyone will have forgotten about it once he begins rotting in prison.
From his Wiki page we learn that: ...and those "some businesspersons" are no doubt among those implicated in the deliberate sabotaging of the city's flood defenses during Hurricane Katrina, along with the deliberately delayed federal response and the barbaric handling of refugees in the city and across the country.
Despite all that, Nagin still managed to turn the city around for one of the fastest ever urban recoveries from a major disaster.
It seems to us that they put a decent man away because he wasn't a psychopath like them.
See also:
It was the levees, not the hurricane, that flooded New Orleans