So there's a Russian joke...

Rachel Maddow talks about US troops rushed to EU countries near the Russian border, which Obama did in his last few days of office, as he is sworn to protect the NATO countries and they axed for the troops. The 5-billion-dollar question is what will Trump do with those troops? Because if he pulls them out, he is thumbing his nose at the treaty, giving Putin what he wants, and possibly adding to the speculation that Putin has damning surveillance footage of Trump.

But wouldn't it be silly to risk world conflict to avoid embarrassment? Or is keeping a gross sextape hidden exactly the kind of top priority on which the current president of the United States chooses to focus? And who said anything about world conflict? Hey wait a minute, why has no one said anything about world conflict? If EU nations are nervous and Putin wants troops pulled from their borders, why? Could Putin actually be considering invading? Perhaps more likely, Putin is planning on taking back what once belonged to the USSR. Getting the old gang back together. Making the Soviet Union Great Again. And he doesn't want the neighbours getting involved.

And what could Trump be thinking in this? Is he too focused on his crowd sizes to consider what global conflicts his gross sextapes and his decisions might get the world into? Or is he on board? Strengthen his allegiance with Russia and raise the US up a little, by helping to cause turmoil in EU? To knock them down a peg or two? These are the types of questions we need to start asking now, instead of getting transfixed on lies about crowd sizes (it was a lie, end of story), conspiracy theories regarding whether Trump really lost the popular vote (it doesn't matter, it won't change anything either way) or whether he'll release his taxes (unless it can lead to impeachment, it doesn't matter if Trump has done bad things in the past as long as the world is so hung up on them that they let him continue to do bad things, and then only talk about those when it's too late). Well, there are some people who are thinking of these real issues, such as Masha Gessen, who worries Trump will lead us to nuclear holocaust. She mentions a few predictions of milestones on the road to Trump's bottom, among them banning increasing numbers of newspapers from the White House, and calling on Americans to report immigrants, thereby beginning a culture of citizen against citizen. Lots of scary stuff to watch out for and mark off our Trump Presidency bingo cards!

Now that Trump's in office and we all need to be thinking of what World War III's going to look like over the next several years, it's clear that it's going to be US + USSR teamed up against everybody else. Perhaps Putin/Trump will try to persuade the biggest nuclear powers to form a gang. Then everyone else can be bullied with impunity. Mutual Assured Destruction is a deterrent against the use of nuclear weapons, but if it's only Unilateral Assured Destruction there's no problem. It would almost be a waste to have all those weapons and not use a few. That would really "put the world on notice", as Conway has claimed Trump is doing when he speaks of an intention to expand US nuclear capability.

Oh, the joke courtesy of Gessen is, we thought we'd hit bottom, and then someone knocked from below. Dark comedy! This is starting to look worse than Bush 2. I guess we'll have to be on the look-out for Pence orchestrating a terrorist attack on the US, and the subsequent power-grab of whatever power is left ungrabbed, amidst the suddenly unquestioning, unified, unquestioning support of the US people.