Former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev is 88. He’s living in Russia, and CNN sat down with him just the other day.
In Russia, Gorbachev is not popular, because his name is associated with the collapse of his Soviet Union (https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/01/europe/gorbachev-russia-us-cold-war-intl/index.html).
But us folks in the West consider him to be some version of a hero, because when he was President of the USSR, and Bush One was still our President, he could tell that his Union was badly frayed, which is why former Soviet “Republics” like Uzbekistan, according to associate solitary reporter Sheryl Keniston, have been able to visit there so they can marvel at how much nicer everybody there is compared to most members of the political party which Donald Trump has hijacked.
Trump is 73, fifteen years younger than Gorbachev, and the world leaders he admires The Most are China’s President for Life, 66-year old Xi Jinping, and Perpetually Youthful North Korean Dictator Kim Jongun (35), so by the time Trump gets to be as old as Gorbachev is now, he will have completed his third term, but he’ll want to keep going, just as FRD did.
In the CNN interview, Gorbachev appropriately worried about the increasingly grave prospects for a new Cold War, even a Hot War (such as he and Ronald Reagan prevented) between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Trump’s version of the USA.
Putin illegally grabbed Crimea, his mililtias are fighting a Hot War in the Donbass Region of Eastern Ukraine, and Trump continues to give Putin all kinds of goodies — as he did in Helsinki in July 2018.
That's when, standing right next to the physically diminutive (but much more sophisticated in international relations) Putin -- Trump said he had asked Putin whether he had interfered in our presidential election in 2016 — and Putin said "of course not" — and Trump swallowed Putin’s Big White Lie completely, thus humiliating our Intelligence Community, which knew conclusively what Putin had done to insinuate himself into our democracy.
We must never forget where Putin came from: the KGB, where he started in 1975, when Trump was very busy settling a 1973 Justice Department lawsuit against Trump buildings in Gotham where he and his dad, Fred, had blatantly discriminated against people of color. To settle that lawsuit, true enough, Trump lied, but if you work for a Russian intel agency like the KGB, you are much more accomplished at lying than you are in telling the truth.
The KGB was succeeded in 1991 by the appropriately named Слу́жба вне́шней разве́дки Российской Федерации (Foreign Intelligence Service).
It was our Moscow-based associate solitary reporter, Foma Kheroshonsky, working closely with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who identified Putin’s Foreign Intelligence Service as the entity that helped Trump receive fewer popular votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Shifting nimbly to other topics, should anybody feel sorry for Williiam Barr?
He’s the Trumpite who (last time we looked) holds the position of Trump’s Attorney General.
Numerous pundits (including your solitary reporter, https://www.apocryphalpress.com/2019/08/28/william-barr-ain-t-nothin-but-a-republican-party-boy/), have repeatedly said that Barr acts more like Trump’s personal attorneys, Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, than as what he’s supposed to be, namely, an independent Attorney General.
Consider what Mimi Rocah, a former Assistant U S Attorney for the Southern District of New York said just yesterday: “We [in the SDNY] have done investigations based on a lot less than what we’ve heard already [about the deeds and misdeeds of Team Trump] (https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/01/justice-departmentelection-year-trump-074408); also https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/11/30/trump-impeachment-elie-honig-cillizza-the-point-vpx.cnn).
So we couldn’t help asking our vast staff of associate solitary reporters here at AP whether there might be any conceivable comparisons we could make between William Barr and William the Conqueror (c 1028-1087). After all, William the Conqueror, the first Norman King of England, spent his entire adult life as an expert swordsman, consolidating his power, both in Normany and in England.
Problem for Little Willie Barr, however, is that the Justice Department, which he nominally heads, includes the traditionally independent FBI; and the Department of Justice is/was also traditionally (until Jan. 20, 2017) independent of interference from the White House, and even in the Trump Era, there are career professionals who are demonstrably more dedicated than craven political appointees like Barr, to the institutions which they have served faithfully during the Administrations of numerous Oval Office occupants.
And as Yahoo News recently reported, some interesting things might happen in connection with the numerous investigations which have ensued after a brave CIA official blew her whistle (https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-seeks-interview-with-cia-whistleblower-121637359.html).
So we asked associate solitary reporter Kheroshonsky to speak directly with Gorbachev for his best prognostication of who The Whistleblower is.
“Foma,” Gorbachev responded quickly, “that’s so easy. Of course, it’s you."