Aaron Maté, a leftist Canadian who writes for the fringe conspiracy-theory website Grayzone, has recently become a favorite source for the far-right fringe of the MAGA universe, the fringe that prefers to “Make America Guilty Again.”

Don’t buy it.

Maté just produced a long-read article on Ukraine for RealClearPolitics. Because of RCP’s credibility, his error-riddled “investigation” into the origins of the war in Ukraine is gaining a readership, even in congressional circles.

Indeed, Maté’s polemic is full of distortions.

His central claim: The Russia-Ukraine war is the spawn of intervention by the Obama-Biden administration, which supported and directed a coup in 2014 by Ukraine’s “far-right” — a claim that echoes the most persistent theme of Russia’s propaganda machine.

The truth: As anyone in Kyiv during those turbulent months (as I was) knows, the Maidan protests of 2013-2014 were led and directed by democratic, pro-European politicians and supported by the mass protests of hundreds of thousands of ordinary middle-class citizens from Kyiv and around the country.

In Viet Nam days, when a carrier transited to the Philippines, the Russians would send a TU-95 Bear to take recon photos of the ship.  It was greeted by two fighters with an Alert 5 standing by.  On my second deployment the Captain was a mustang and tough as nails.  He invited all who wanted to come to the flight deck and "flip" the plane the "international sign of peace."  I wonder what their intelligence people thought when they saw 1,000 men flipping off the Bear?

The State of California has been cooking the books for so long that the books have transitioned from "hammered" to "whole burnt offering". $$ gets shuffled from one budgetary area to another. Gas tax and DMV fee $$ that should be used for road/highway building and maintenance has been funneled into Sacred Mass Transit boondoggles for decades (think Moonbeam 1.0). Teachers' and state employees' pension funds have been underfunded for decades.

This is a big part of why I was and am so POed that R Mo-o-o-o-o-oooooooderates ego-stroked Ahnold the RINO into running for governor in the Gray Davis recall. State Rep Tom McClintock would have won instead, and he knew where every budgetary skeleton-closet was and where every budgetary body was buried. Ahnold the RINO was a budgetary invertebrate!