This story has not received enough attention: among the numerous conflicts of interest which Donald has created for himself by being elected, there is one which he probably cannot get out of: his lease on his hotel in the District of Columbia. This story on NBC News explains that he will violate the terms of his lease by becoming an elected official:
Steven L. Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at the George Washington University Law School, and Daniel I. Gordon, a senior advisor to GW’s Government Procurement Law Program (and President Obama’s first administrator for federal procurement policy) pointed out this week in Government Executive magazine that a provision in Trump’s lease with the General Services Administration states that “No … elected official of the Government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom…”
This provision appears quite plain and it behooves the General Services Administration to terminate its lease with the Donald before January 20.
A typical low information voter.
Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee in the recent presidential election, is pushing an effort to get recounts in the following three states: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The total by which Hillary lost in those three states is less than 100,000 votes altogether, which probably explains why she is concentrating on those three. Her initial effort, to bankroll the attempt in Michigan, netted over $2,000,000 in initial funding. She raised the bar after seeing how quickly she reached $2 million, and as of the last writing, she was already up to $4.3 million. The other two states will follow, as the deadlines for filing a recount request are later. You can read the details of her attempt on NBC, here. By the way, the recount requests are not required to state a reason, so she need not allege any wrongdoing to get the recounts.
Trump won Michigan by about 9,500 votes, Wisconsin by 22,500 votes and Pennsylvania by 69,700.
The first column is Hillary votes, the second Donald votes, the third Jill Stein votes, and the following columns are percentages for each and the changes in counts. The most important number is the last, which is the “margin shift” or the percentage loss in Democratic votes from 2012:
| Michigan* | 2,268,839 | 2,279,543 | 250,902 | 47.3% | 47.5% | 5.2% | 9.5% | -0.2% | -9.7% |
| Wisconsin | 1,381,823 | 1,404,000 | 189,490 | 46.4% | 47.2% | 6.4% | 6.9% | -0.7% -7.7% |
| Pennsylvania | 2,875,952 | 2,944,123 | 214,571 | 47.7% | 48.8% | 3.6% | 5.4% | -1.1% | -6.5% |
Note that in Michigan and Pennsylvania, Hillary received a large percentage fewer votes than Obama did in 2012. The same holds true for several other states, which I will discuss further below. A spreadsheet showing the running totals is here, in google docs.
In the total vote count, Hillary saw a margin shift of -2.1%, but in 13 swing shifts, her margins went down by -5.4%, and certain states were significantly worse. In Arizona, which Hillary lost, she actually showed an improvement: her losing margin went up by 5.4%, meaning she gained that many votes. In Iowa, she lost -15.2% and lost the state where Obama had won by 5.8%. In Maine, which she won, there was a -12.6% shift. In Ohio, there was a -10.9% shift and she lost the state where Obama had won. New Hampshire showed a -5.2% shift, but she still won.
These dramatic losses compared to Obama’s 2012 showing are interesting in themselves, but combined with the fact that 1.1 % fewer people voted in Iowa compared to 2012, 2.1% fewer in Ohio, and 3.0% fewer in Wisconsin, they are striking. There was a 4.3% increase in voters in the nation overall, and there were comparable shifts in the 13 swing states overall, but there were dramatic shifts in the number of people voting in some states. These changes can be explained in part by the number of people living in the state, as shown by census data. For example, a 10.9% increase in voters in Nevada is explained by population shifts, but some of the losses in voters are not explained so easily.
I haven’t time today to make a direct comparison between census population changes and changes in the number of voters state by state, but tomorrow I will attempt to compile that data. There are some odd differences that stick out immediately, for example in North Dakota there was a 6.6% increase in voters even though the state has lost population over the same period.
These changes in votes between the Barack Obama campaign in 2012 and Hillary’s campaign in 2016 represent losses related to propaganda by the Donald campaign and their sympathizers. The propaganda put out by Donald at his rallies and such low-information magazines as The Enquirer (which gave prominent front page coverage to every unsubstantiated rumor that could damage Hillary and even demanded her imprisonment) was vicious and covered the places where most people who do not read or study news would see them.
There is little doubt that Hillary’s losses are real; most election observers think that it would be very difficult to alter the votes registered by the voting machines by hacking or other ulterior means. The problem is simply that Democratic voters failed to come to the polls, and Donald’s voters showed up en masse.
Nonetheless, the expense involved in recounting the votes is relatively small, and there is one person who could easily finance a recount: Donald. The fact that he does not suggests that he has no incentive to do so, whether he thinks it is unnecessary or possibly dangerous.
In addition, the attitude that he takes towards a recount is a function of the fact that he has won the Electoral College; if he lost, he would certainly have financed immediate recounts wherever necessary.
Cat Picture, As Promised
Embattled presumptive President-elect Donald Drumpf (Trump) wants to nominate Dr. Tom Price, a Republican Congressional Representative, who at 62 has been an orthopedic surgeon representing a portion of Atlanta and a strident critic of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a rump department once known as Health, Education, and Welfare but stripped of its education responsibilities by Republicans who want to destroy federal supervision and support of the nation’s health, education, welfare, and in general all federal help for the lower 99 percent of the American public.
According to the New York Times (NYT), Dr. Price wants to repeal the ACA (ObamaCare) and substitute an extensive set of new rules:
The legislation Mr. Price has proposed, the Empowering Patients First Act, would repeal the Affordable Care Act and offer age-adjusted tax credits for the purchase of individual and family health insurance policies.
The bill would create incentives for people to contribute to health savings accounts; offer grants to states to subsidize insurance for “high-risk populations”; allow insurers licensed in one state to sell policies to residents of others; and authorize business and professional groups to provide coverage to members through “association health plans.”
As secretary, Mr. Price would be responsible for a department with an annual budget of more than $1 trillion, health programs that insure more than 100 million Americans, and agencies that regulate food and drugs and sponsor much of the nation’s biomedical research.
The NYT article states that Dr. Price has aligned himself generally with the positions of the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Medical Association of Georgia (MAG), voluntary associations that include less than half of all practicing physicians. The AMA was strongly opposed to Medicare at the time that it was established by President Johnson in 1965. (A medical insurance program for all Americans was first proposed by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, and then by President Truman in November 1945, shortly after he succeeded President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.)
Medicare had been feared to be a budget buster; in 2015 it covered over 55 million Americans and it laid out over $583 billion, or 14 percent of the total federal budget. The ACA reduced expenses and projected costs dramatically, easing fears of stretching the budget. Nonetheless, the Republicans strenuously decry the ACA, saying that it is a “government over-reach” or “boondoggle” that “infringes on American’s freedom.” It appears that the Republicans object to the drive to “force” all Americans to have health insurance, disliking the “loss of freedom” that this represents. (Those quotes are from my own imagination but, I think, fairly represent Republican attitudes.)
Dr. Price has specifically decried “a stifling and oppressive federal government.” His main complaint is that the law inserts itself into the doctor-patient decision making process. He has presented the Republican’s objections vociferously, and is described in the NYT as a leading critic of the ACA.
Dr. Price has served six terms in the House of Representatives; previously he was a Georgia state senator. Dr. Price has always been known for his retrogressive positions, as described in the NYT article:
He has introduced legislation that would make it easier for doctors to defend themselves against medical malpractice lawsuits and to (sic) enter into private contracts with Medicare beneficiaries. Under such contracts, doctors can, in effect, opt out of Medicare and charge more than the amounts normally allowed by the program’s rules.
He also supported legislation to bar federal funds for Planned Parenthood [PP], saying some of its clinics had been involved in what he called “barbaric” abortion practices.
Dr. Price’s attempts to defund PP have led some to label him “a grave threat to women’s health” (as stated by Cecile Richards, president of the PP Foundation of America.) Gay rights groups also vehemently oppose him; he called the Supreme Court ruling allowing same-sex marriage “not only a sad day for marriage, but a further judicial destruction of our entire system of checks and balances.” (Apparently he feels that judicial approval of same-sex marriage, rather than endorsing Constitutional fairness/equality in marriage, infringes on Congressional authority to enforce a basically unfair and religion-centered policy– which is absurd, because the Republican-controlled Congress is not about to recognize the basic equality and fairness in marriage doctrines that is required by the Constitution.)
To put the icing on the cake, so to speak, Dr. Price’s website describes him as a member of the Tea Party Caucus. He has said that he is proud to support efforts to roll back a “vile liberal agenda.” His use of the term “vile” goes to the heart of his attitude towards liberal attempts to provide health care for all Americans.
Parenthetically, the “liberal” ACA has not been particularly helpful in the effort to provide health care for everyone due to its lack of incisive policy changes that would remove barriers to access for poor people, as the following abbreviated comments explain:
The ACA has prompted a dramatic increase in the number of Americans with health insurance; unfortunately, many of these policies, primarily those for individuals, have very large deductibles, exceeding $5,000 in many cases. The deductibles and other restrictions cause considerable financial problems for those without large amounts of free cash; these policies tend to represent purely catastrophic coverage. Less affluent people still find it difficult to afford treatment for relatively minor illnesses and less serious health catastrophes.
Lack of health insurance, it is claimed, results in poor health due to lack of access to treatment; having insurance, however, does not readily provide access without other conditions which have not yet been met. As we repeatedly stated in earlier posts, this problem has been nearly solved in European countries that boast comprehensive health care systems; these structures provide health and illness care nearly free and for a total societal cost of half or less that of the American “system.” Discussion of these problems is far beyond the scope of this post and has been covered in prior posts on this blog; these discussions will be postponed to later posts that will reiterate the problems and their potential solutions.
Typical effects of alcohol and drug abuse on White Americans
Alabama Republican Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was nominated to a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Sessions was at that time U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, and he was 39 years old. A year before that, he had attempted to prosecute three black civil rights workers for alleged voter fraud. The three were quickly acquitted. The case was unusual in that it appeared to be a reaction to the increase in black voters among Alabama’s electorate, in response to voter registration drives. Sessions apparently spent hours interrogating black absentee voters and eventually located fourteen allegedly tampered ballots out of 1.7 million cast. Civil rights groups claimed that Sessions was looking in the wrong place for voter fraud. (New Republic article from 2002.)
During the confirmation hearings, Sessions admitted that he considered the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “un-American.” In addition, he admitted to calling President Johnson’s signature civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a “piece of intrusive legislation.” He admitted to calling a white lawyer “a disgrace to his race” for pursuing civil rights cases. Finally, he admitted to saying during a murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) that he “used to think they [the Klan] were OK” until he discovered that some of them were “pot smokers.” He claimed that the remark was clearly made in jest (Perhaps so, but who was he making fun of?)
Another lawyer who worked for the Attorney General’s office, a black man named Thomas Figures, said that Sessions had called the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference “un-American.” He corroborated the “pot smokers” remark and said that Sessions had told him to “be careful what you say to white folks” after Sessions heard him “chastising” a white secretary.
That nomination failed over allegations that Sessions had made racist remarks, among other peccadilloes. Sessions was still popular in Alabama, and he was elected Attorney General for the state in 1994. He continued to investigate alleged voter fraud in absentee ballots among the black community, and he was accused of not investigating the burnings of black churches that swept the state the year he became Attorney General. In 1996, Senator Heflin retired and Sessions was elected to his former seat in the US Senate, where he remains. At age 69, he is still the junior Senator from Alabama.
Senator Sessions also received a seat on the Judiciary Committee, the same committee that rejected him in 1996. He has supported many notoriously racist nominees since then, including Charles Pickering, who wrote a paper defending Mississippi’s law against race-mixing in marriage (miscegenation) in 1959, before it was nullified by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. Sessions actually described Pickering as “a leader for racial harmony.” (All of the above quotes are from the New Republic article.)
In 2009, President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. That nomination succeeded, but during her confirmation hearings, Senator Sessions spent 30 minutes grilling her on allegedly racist remarks she had made; you can view his questioning here. (Thanks to Mother Jones for the link; you can read their analysis of the questioning session here. For completeness, here is Sen. Lindsay Graham’s questioning, and here is Sen. John Kyl’s turn.)
Donald’s transition team put out a press release that listed several people and groups who supported Sessions’ bid for attorney general. The groups were described as “civil rights and law enforcement groups” but none of the groups or people listed actually worked to support enhancing civil rights; those whose work could be described as being in the civil rights field were actively opposed to civil rights for immigrants or people of color. In fact, actual civil rights groups are broadly and vehemently opposed to Sessions’ nomination.
I could go on, but I think Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s record speaks for itself. The photograph at top illustrates the strenuous efforts that US Attorney General Sessions will exert to protect our white womanhood from the pernicious effects of that Negro devil Marijuana.
Those who have heard Donald speak at one of his many well-attended rallies wonder where he got his mesmerizing speaking style and why people who support him appear to be hypnotized, or at least deeply affected by his personality. There is a simple reason: he studied Adolf Hitler’s speaking style and copied it.
From an article by Marie Brenner published in Vanity Fair in 1990 (reposted in July 2015, when Donald went for the nomination):
Donald Trump has always viewed his father as a role model. In The Art of the Deal, he wrote, “Fred Trump was born in New Jersey in 1905. His father, who came here from Sweden . . . owned a moderately successful restaurant.” In fact, the Trump family was German and desperately poor. “At one point my mother took in stitching to keep us going,” Trump’s father told me. “For a time, my father owned a restaurant in the Klondike, but he died when I was young.” Donald’s cousin John Walter once wrote out an elaborate family tree. “We shared the same grandfather,” Walter told me, “and he was German. So what?”
Although Fred Trump was born in New Jersey, family members say he felt compelled to hide his German background because most of his tenants were Jewish. “After the war, he thought that Jews would never rent from him if they knew his lineage,” Ivana reportedly said. Certainly, Fred Trump’s camouflage could easily convey to a child the impression that in business anything goes. When I asked Donald Trump about this, he was evasive: “Actually, it was very difficult. My father was not German; my father’s parents were German . . . Swedish, and really sort of all over Europe . . . and I was even thinking in the second edition of putting more emphasis on other places because I was getting so many letters from Sweden: Would I come over and speak to Parliament? Would I come meet with the president?”
Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda. The Führer often described his defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa as great victories. Trump continues to endow his diminishing world with significance as well. “There’s nobody that has the cash flow that I have,” he told The Wall Street Journal long after he knew better. “I want to be king of cash.”
An article in Business Insider from August 2015 references the interview that Marie Brenner had in 1990, and goes on to explain the probable reasons for Donald’s odd reading material:
Hitler was one of history’s most prolific orators, building a genocidal Nazi regime with speeches that bewitched audiences.
“He learned how to become a charismatic speaker, and people, for whatever reason, became enamored with him,” Professor Bruce Loebs, who has taught a class called the Rhetoric of Hitler and Churchill for the past 46 years at Idaho State University, told Business Insider earlier this year.
“People were most willing to follow him, because he seemed to have the right answers in a time of enormous economic upheaval.”
Thus, we have a reason why Donald has become such an effective speaker, and why his speeches have such a mesmerizing quality to them, a quality which is rarely mentioned but becomes obvious when one listens to even a short excerpt from his speeches. Here’s his final campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It seems easy to imagine that Donald has studied Hitler’s speeches and is copying his style. This is not to imply that Donald intends to employ the same techniques and perform the same atrocities that Hitler did.
A video clip from Business Insider tells us an interesting factoid about Donald: he has for years subscribed to a “clipping service” which employs an assistant to go through all the newspapers and clip out stories about Donald. Every morning, he is given a stack of these clippings, with his name circled in red, and he goes through them. It is said that he doesn’t read them word for word, but just skims the stories and gets the gist of whether he is being lauded or ridiculed.
So we have an insight into Donald’s success in roping together gullible people, especially those who have received little information other than attending one of his speeches: Donald copies Adolf Hitler’s speaking style. It is likely that Donald does not consciously intend to copy Hitler’s ruling style or his policies, but the Republican Party is not so terribly far away from fascism.
According to Richard Wolffe, opinion columnist for the Guardian:
It may be time to concede that one of the biggest winners of this election is the twisted and murderous worldview distilled by Osama bin Laden. Unlike Bush and Obama, Trump and Flynn believe we are engaged in a war with Islam, just as al-Qaida and Isis believe they are engaged in a war with Christianity and Judaism.
The point is that we are only at war if we agree to be at war. It is not necessary to buy into the insane world view of the leaders of the Islamic State, which holds that Mohammedan prophecy predicts that the world will end with a war between the true Islamists and the infidel, with the final battlefield being in a town now under the control of the Islamists. This is a specific matter of belief for the leaders of the Islamic State: the final battle will be in the town of Dabiq, against the armies of “Rome”, that is the Christian infidels, and only a few will survive to see the Day of Judgement. (This information comes from an article in the Atlantic titled “What ISIS Really Wants”– recommended reading for students of the problem, and deeply chilling.)
Do not be reassured. The Islamic State is a deadly threat, primarily because of its sophisticated use of the Internet for propagandizing. Its message is potentially attractive to alienated youth who see nothing good about Western society. Some people will become recruits, and some of them will become committed terrorists who will try to destroy the West from within.
It is tempting, but a mistake, to accept the challenge of this ideology and send American troops to Dabiq to try to destroy the Islamic State. That is exactly what they want, and it will be self-defeating. A better course of action would be to remain true to your personal beliefs and support moderate, modern Muslims who will attack the Islamist jihadists and destroy their retrograde, medieval way of death with modern weapons.
The epithets for Donald’s pick for Secretary of Education have her as “a Michigan philanthropist.” She is much more than that: she sent her own children to a private Christian school and that is what she plans to support: taking public money as vouchers to support private schools, including religious schools.
As medium.com has it:
She and her husband have funded efforts to create private-school vouchers and protect charter schools from government oversight and regulation.
Ms. de Vos’ influence in Michigan has led to minimal government oversight of Michigan private/charter schools; in interviews with Chalkbeat, an independent organization that studies education in the US, King stated:
“There are a lot of schools that are doing poorly and charter authorizers do not seem to be taking the necessary actions to either improve performance or close those underperforming charters,” current U.S. Secretary of Education John King told Chalkbeat about Michigan last month.
So Ms. de Vos, who enjoys the anodyne epithet of “philanthropist”, is in reality a woman who wants to funnel public money into private primary schools that emphasize religion over basic education and avoid government oversight.
Dementia Rate Drops
A new study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the rate of dementia has dropped in the last twelve years:
The new study found that the dementia rate in Americans 65 and older fell by 24 percent over 12 years, to 8.8 percent in 2012 from 11.6 percent in 2000…
In 2000, people received a diagnosis of dementia at an average age of 80.7; in 2012, the average age was 82.4.
And that “is very good news,” said John Haaga, director of the institute’s [National Institute on Aging] division of behavioral and social research. It means, he said, that “roughly a million and a half people aged 65 and older who do not have dementia now would have had it if the rate in 2000 had been in place.”
Since between 4 and 5 million people in the US develop dementia every year, this is a major problem. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health concluded that caring for people with dementia cost more (roughly $215 billion) than caring for those with heart disease ($102 bn) and cancer ($77 bn) combined.
The NYT article also described three simple tests for dementia: a test of recall, immediately and after a five to ten minute delay, for a list of ten nouns; subtracting seven from a hundred repeatedly (serial sevens), and counting backwards from twenty.
The fall in dementia rates occurred despite a dramatic increase in diabetes diagnoses, from 9 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2012. Diabetes increases the risk of dementia by 39 percent.
Dr. Langa, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said in the NYT article that the decline in dementia rates is difficult to explain. Dr. Denis Evans, a professor of medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, was said to claim that the decline in rates could be spurious because of the difficulty in diagnosing dementia, even though the study was performed by experts. Nonetheless, Dr. Langa estimated that rates of dementia have declined 25 to 30 percent since the 1990’s.
Whether rates of dementia continue to decline is open to question, but there is cause for optimism because rates of heart disease have also declined, and both dementia and heart disease may be reduced by aggressive treatment of high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Both conditions have been much more effectively treated recently.
If dementia and heart disease continue to decline in future, then old age may not be so debilitating as it has been in the past. The elderly may be more independent and may enjoy life more, a possibility to be appreciated by those of us who are getting to be over sixty now.
Post-election statistics show that 42 percent of women overall voted for Donald. 53 percent of white women voted for Donald. 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary, but only 68 percent of Latina women did the same.
Why would any woman vote for Donald after what he said about “grabbing women” by the genitals, women he didn’t even know?
I considered the possibility that some women didn’t even hear the tape that recorded (not surreptitiously, but unbeknownst to the speakers) Donald’s comments about how he was so famous that he could sexually molest women he didn’t know and get away with it. Or if they did hear it, they discounted it as propaganda or somehow irrelevant.
It is possible that the state of the media today is such that a significant proportion of women simply didn’t hear about this issue. The fact is that there is a lot of news that doesn’t reach the people who really need to know.
Another possibility is that women heard about the tape, but discounted it because of contrary information they received about Hillary. It is hard to imagine for me, but possible that some women heard about Hillary’s claimed misdeeds and thought them to be more consequential than Donald’s statements and the corroborating statements of at least a dozen women who described his attacks upon them.
What did Hillary do that was so terrible? “Lock her up” was apparently just a campaign slogan, as Donald said today that he wasn’t going to pursue her for her allegedly illegal deeds because she was suffering over a “vicious” campaign. Donald forgot to mention that it wasn’t up to him to decide whether the Justice Department or the FBI should investigate or prosecute anyone in particular– that’s not how it works in this country. Both institutions are supposed to be independent of the President. Perhaps Donald intends to alter that arrangement.
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Here’s an article that purports to answer the question of why 53 percent of white women voted for Trump: the “Ivanka voter.” I don’t believe it but then I’m not a woman, so I don’t get to answer the question.
From the same source, PopSugar, here’s an article that claims that, if it were only up to people under 39, Hillary would have won. That makes me feel a little bit better, but until the country gets to be majority black and Hispanic and majority under 39, and everybody under 39 votes (they didn’t, not by a long shot), we’re still in for a lot of Republican control.
The Enemy of My Enemy is My Enemy
The preceding piece on ex-General Michael Flynn mentioned Mr. Flynn’s relationship with Russia and his advocacy of rapprochement with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. There is also, in the article by Seymour M. Hersh, a statement that China has a stake in the Syrian conflict and that China also faces an Islamic terrorist problem. There are two comments following the article which present an alternate point of view, namely, that Mr. Hersh is not telling the entire truth.
China does have a problem with Islamic terrorists, and China is an ally of the Syrian government, but there is more to the story, as usual. The Chinese government is oppressive towards its Uighur minority, and there is an equivalent Uighur Muslim resistance which could be described by the Chinese as terrorism.
Russia has a problem with Islamic terrorists, particularly in Chechnya, but the Russian government is no more benign than the Chinese government. Premier Vladimir Putin has abrogated democratic elections, ordered the assassination of dissenting journalists, and engaged in brutal acts of terrorism against its own people on many occasions. These actions have been publicized in many American news media over the years, and the stories are not false.
Perhaps the most famous story is that of the assassination of a Russian dissident, a former member of the Russian intelligence services, in England. The dissident was killed with a solution of polonium-210 surreptitiously administered in his tea; it took him a month to die of internal radiation poisoning. His death would have been a mystery if the doctors treating him had not had the inspiration to investigate the possibility of poisoning by an alpha-particle-emitting radioactive element, a substance that could only have been obtained by a government with the specialized resources that Russia possesses.
Such curiosities aside, it is clear that Russia is governed by an oppressive regime. China is governed by a similarly repressive regime. Syria is governed by a genocidal, oppressive regime which thinks nothing of murdering its own people with poison gas. The Islamic State is an ideologically-driven, aggressive, violent, and oppressive regime. The only government that I can say is not oppressive is that of the United States, and I’m not entirely sure of our own purity.
Perhaps the only truth is that governments are, of necessity, violent and oppressive, and there is no way to effectively govern the people without resort to violence and repression. That is hard for me to believe. There must be some way to govern effectually without resorting to repression, obstruction of basic human rights, violence, and murder. There must, somehow.
