☕️ BABY DRIVERS ☙ Tuesday, September 3, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

America's potential auditor-in-chief blinds media; ironic motorcade pileup makes political point; Proxy War strategy shows strategic Russian timing; military eats recruiting crow over mandates; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Thank you for the massive outpouring of prayer and well wishes for my father yesterday. Our medical adventure continues, as does the news. In today’s roundup: surprising suggestion for new American auditor-in-chief makes headlines — in foreign press; deeply ironic Walz driving mishap fuels inevitable political comparisons; Russian war strategy changes dramatically, becoming more aggressive and faster paced, just in time for U.S. elections; and media admits the US military is running on recruitment fumes, for some reason.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 Our favorite space billionaire may be launching the most adventurous part of his career. Traveling back to the land of the Taj Mahal for pro-Trump news, we begin with India Today’s morning headline, “'I can’t wait..' Elon Musk on reports of role in Trump cabinet to audit US government agencies.”

The gist is that “reports” say Trump floated the idea of appointing Musk to audit federal executive agencies to trim waste. One immediately recalls that, when Musk bought Twitter two years ago, he promptly pink-slipped three quarters of its 7,500 employees, and pressed ‘delete’ on fabulous employee perks like gourmet chefs, onsite acupuncture and wellness services, nap rooms, and an unlimited vacation policy.

Despite —or because of— those cuts, Twitter’s views are higher than ever.

Republicans who haven’t yet yielded up their last remaining scraps of hope for change would heartily endorse any kind of government audit. Let’s go! For his part, Elon says he’s raring to get started:

Maybe, instead of asking how much more a handful of billionaires could pay in taxes, we should be asking how much less tax money the entire federal government could spend.

It’s not just that Elon is a CEO with executive management experience like Trump. That is a huge advantage, but it’s not nearly enough, as we learned from Trump’s first dance with the deep state, exemplified in disastrous developments like former Exxon CEO and fleeting Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who called his boss (Trump) a “moron” in a group meeting and then got fired via a Tweet.

We’ve always needed more and better executive ability leading the agencies. But executives have big egos, they’re busy with more profitable ventures, they often bristle when taking orders, and they frequently lack DC-level political ninja skills.

But Elon is different. Elon has been through the government wringer. He’s battled nearly every agency and survived. Not just survived; his rocket company has, against all odds, become the Pentagon’s and NASA’s key space contractor and now, the cleanup crew. One also wonders, from time to time, precisely what his underground ‘boring company’ might be quietly burrowing for the feds.

As far as I am concerned: how could Elon Musk possibly be any worse than what we presently have? I say, give the man a shot. Let him cut, and then cut some more, then keep cutting, until he burrows back to the beginning.

🔥🔥 Metaphor alert! The Hill ran a prescient story yesterday headlined, “Motorcade accompanying Walz involved in crash in Wisconsin.” The good news is nobody died.

Details, as you might imagine, were sparse. But the gist is that at least two press vans in the Walz motorcade, maybe as many as five, crashed while parading from Minnesota to a rally in Wisconsin. Several reporters suffered minor injuries, one got a concussion, and one broke her arm.

The Hill said Walz’s car was “not involved in the pileup.” So technically he wasn’t fleeing the scene of the accident when he continued toward the scheduled campaign event without stopping.

The cause of the crash was reportedly “unclear.” We don’t know yet. It’s a baffling mystery. We may never know. In fact, I’ll bet we find out who killed JFK and who filmed the moon landing before we find out who crashed Walz’s motorcade.

Haha! The scenario is pregnant with metaphorical meaning yearning to be born. Walz’s car crash of a campaign remains stuck in his home state. The mendacious media wrecked on the highway of politics, compulsively lying about who caused it. Sold-out reporters were bruised wrangling with Cackle’s political pile-up. You get the idea.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

🚀🚀 Yesterday, Reuters ran a story headlined, “Putin says Russia advancing fast in eastern Ukraine.” Although Reuters included the sneering phrase “Putin says” in its headline, the story confirmed that, for the first time since the beginning of Russia’s war of attrition, Russian forces are in fact advancing fast over the battlefield.

Following the Ukraine war is often a meaningless memory exercise of trying to keep track of the long, convoluted, consonant-dense names of various Ukrainian towns and villages. I don’t report the daily play-by-play here at C&C, since other sources cover the war more thoroughly and much better than I can.

It is worth a short aside to marvel at how war reporting has changed. The only real-time sources of reliable information are now found on Telegram and X, and even corporate media has begun quoting them instead of the various involved officials. As a result of independent, real-time, open-source reporting, the public enjoys more visibility into granular, hour-by-hour battle detail than in any other war in history.

I often wonder whether Telegram readers have better battlefield intelligence than do the NATO war planners. I’d bet my left kidney the NATO General Staff carefully reads the Telegram channels.

Anyway, as we suspected might happen, following the DNC, the Russians shifted into a new, more aggressive mode. Until this month, Russia’s strategy has been defending its 600 kilometer line of contact, and inching slowly and steadily westward by yards through Ukraine toward the Dnieper, the massive river that bisects that Eastern European country.

But over the last couple weeks, Russian units shifted into overdrive, now making what war commenters call “big arrow” movements, and racing toward strategic battlefield objectives. Instead of discussing at length the gradual Russian advances in terms of weeks and months and meters, the war bloggers are now dizzily ticking off the increments of Russian victories in days and hours and kilometers.

Not only that, but the Russians are finally fighting like they want to win. A weekend Bloomberg article reported that, “This week’s air raids on Kyiv and other cities across the country were the largest since Russia’s full-scale invasion began 2 ½ year ago.” The devastating infrastructure attacks produced this record-setting headline:

Why now? To me, it appears all about the timing relative to the US election. Russia could have done this anytime.

The map above shows the part of the battle getting the most attention this week. The otherwise unremarkable Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk (shown above, top left) is much more remarkable than it appears. It is Ukraine’s last major logistics hub east of the Dnieper river. In other words, after crossing the vast banks of the Dnieper, all NATO supplies pass through this well-positioned town before making their way to Ukraine’s supply-starved forces.

There is no realistic replacement for Pokrovsk’s logistical role. When the Russians capture Pokrovsk, absent some unforeseen miracle, they will have shut down Ukraine’s ability to easily supply its troops in the Eastern half of Ukraine. Hence, Russia will have won the logistical war.

Ukraine suffers from a warehouse of weaknesses. Ukraine’s only remaining asset is its unlimited supply of NATO weapons and supplies. But if Ukraine can’t deliver the weapons and supplies to its dwindling numbers of troops, that lone advantage will be neutralized, disappearing in an acrid puff of gunpowder residue.

Corporate media headlines are studiously avoiding mentioning the real risk that Ukraine is staggering on the brink of losing fully half its territory, which raises serious questions about its ability to survive the military equivalent of having all its limbs amputated.

It’s hard to imagine what unknown stockpile could deliver a badly-needed miracle. The neocons are bogged down in their unwinnable middle-eastern Proxy War with Iran, and the equally thorny matching political problem at home. The CIA-led ‘peace talks’ with Hamas are going nowhere, fast. NATO’s inventory for resupplying Ukraine, even if it could deliver the goods, is gasping for air. For example, Germany just reduced its Ukraine budget to zero. Headline from Politico, two weeks ago:

It all looks exactly like we suspected, that Russia has held back for two years, exhausting Ukraine’s ability to fight, and now that U.S. presidential elections are imminent, is doing what it always could have done: easily overrunning Ukraine’s positions with superior manpower, equipment, and air supremacy.

This story is most remarkable because of its incredible timing. A massive loss in the Proxy War is the last thing Democrats want people thinking about going into the November elections. We’ve spent enough money in Ukraine to rebuild Maui, build six border walls, and give free houses to every homeless person in America. And for what?

🚀🚀 The notion that the U.S. could possibly help Ukraine directly fight the Russians is a dead letter. Vox ran a long-form, well-sourced story Sunday headlined, “America isn’t ready for another war — because it doesn’t have the troops.” The sub-headline bleakly added, “The US military’s recruiting crisis, explained.”

Of course, the story explained nothing that actually exists in this matrix of reality. To give away the article’s punchline, recruitment figures across all branches of the U.S. military are so bad that Vox floated what it called the “D-word,” meaning the draft.

Vox described what it called “a political horseshoe effect,” meaning that both right-leaning and left-leaning citizens are equally eschewing military service, and “refusing to fight what they call unnecessary, unwinnable wars.”  Imagine that.

The article then noted, almost in passing, the “especially sharp decline in enlistments by white men and women.” So weird.

You’ll be disappointed if you go looking in this article for any mention of diversity policies, the effect of vaccine mandates, or the military’s new obsession with promoting atypical sexual preferences in the ranks.  Too late:

If only they’d considered how the mandates would affect recruitment

The article described a ‘recruiting doom loop.’ With force levels at post-WWII lows, service members are being assigned to more and more frequent overseas missions in combat zones, making life in the military generally miserable, resulting in lower recruitment levels, therefore more onerous combat assignments for active-duty soldiers, and so on, and so forth.

It’s become a race to the bottom.

Vox grudgingly admitted that a well-needed draft would be difficult. Not just politically. Americans of prime draft age are fatter and sicker than ever. Fewer than three out of ten American young adults can pass basic health and physical fitness requirements for military service.

But you know what could stop the doom loop? Fewer combat assignments. You know what could reduce combat assignments? Fewer proxy wars. If only we had a presidential candidate whose platform included fewer proxy wars and healthier Americans.

If you know of such a candidate, tell me in the comments.

Have a terrific Tuesday! March back here tomorrow morning as what promises to be an even more fascinating week of news launches like a Patriot missile barrage.

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