by William Skink

Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock, now two minutes to midnight:

We are living through a situation unparalleled in our history as a nation where the issues of war and peace are not being debated in public, at least not in any serious way.

Moreover, the risk of accidental war has moved quickly beyond where it was just 18 months ago. Now we are entering upon implementation of very provocative U.S.-directed military expansion of NATO activities at the borders of Russia. The ongoing war games — code-named Anaconda-16 in Poland numbering 31,000 troops, 17,000 of them Americans — are rehearsing a NATO seizure and occupation of Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave, just a few miles away.

President Vladimir Putin’s remark at the start of the exercises was that any move into Russian territory would elicit a nuclear response that would not be limited to the European theater but would be directed at the mainland United States. These were clear words, but I greatly doubt that many Americans heard them (or if they did, it was in the mainstream media’s context of the demonized Putin’s “reckless” rhetoric).

And now that things are falling into place for WWIII, NATO is claiming they have a reason to start a war with Russia: Hillary’s compromised private email server. I’m not kidding. From the link:

On Tuesday, June 14th, NATO announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO’s Article V “collective defense” provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to strike back against the attacking country. The preliminary decision for this was made two years ago after Crimea abandoned Ukraine and rejoined Russia, of which it had been a part until involuntarily transferred to Ukraine by the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. That NATO decision was made in anticipation of Ukraine’s ultimately becoming a NATO member country, which still hasn’t happened. However, only now is NATO declaring cyber war itself to be included as real “war” under the NATO Treaty’s “collective defense” provision.

NATO is now alleging that because Russian hackers had copied the emails on Hillary Clinton’s home computer, this action of someone in Russia taking advantage of her having privatized her U.S. State Department communications to her unsecured home computer and of such a Russian’s then snooping into the U.S. State Department business that was stored on it, might constitute a Russian attack against the United States of America, and would, if the U.S. President declares it to be a Russian invasion of the U.S., trigger NATO’s mutual-defense clause and so require all NATO nations to join with the U.S. government in going to war against Russia, if the U.S. government so decides.

NATO should have been scrapped when the Soviet Union collapsed, but instead of moth-balling this Cold War relic, Bill Clinton took advantage of the Soviet collapse to push NATO east, which it has been steadily doing ever since.

Trump has criticized the role of NATO, which for this idiot partisan is a point of contention he thinks local media should be questioning Ryan Zinke about:

While there are literally hundreds of problematic positions that have been taken by Mr. Trump, the Montana press should ask Congressman Zinke about at least a few. Here are some suggestions.

1. Given his endorsement of Trump’s foreign policy, does Congressman Zinke agree that South Korea and Japan should build nuclear arsenals? With Trump’s plan to withdraw American troops from those nations? His economically-crippling suggestion that the US would block oil imports from Saudi Arabia? His calls for a trade war with China? His disavowal of NATO? His contention that nuclear weapons could be used in Europe?

My suggestion is the Montana press should ask Denise Juneau if Hillary’s reckless use of a private server should be an issue worth triggering nuclear armageddon over.