Some big events happened in Vladimir Putin’s life yesterday. It is being alleged that he may have perhaps in some way caused the private plane of poor old Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin to clumsily fall out of the sky, turning the artist formerly known as “Putin’s chef” into “Putin’s flambé.”
Silly Russian pilots! Always flying their airplanes out of windows and making them bonk on the ground!
Anyway, either Putin did a(nother) murder, or this is another demonstration of that state-of-the-art Russian air traffic control and/or airplane construction, or it’s something else.
Meanwhile, back in America, two oligarchs who are still in Putin’s good graces, Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, took a long bath together and put the whole sordid event on Twitter. It was bath time, and they splished and they splashed, and Trump and Tucker washed each other’s hair with the No More Tears shampoo, and they made devil horns with the shampoo in their hair and took funny pictures.
It was the Republican debate event of the century!
And during that long bath, Tucker looked at Trump and asked, “Don’t they have to kill you now?” Yes, it appears Tucker is scared Joe Biden and the Deep State are going to give a Putin Special to Donald Trump and throw him out a window. Or maybe Joe Biden will do the old “polonium in the wall ketchup” trick to Trump. After all, isn’t Joe Biden the REAL Vladimir Putin, Doer Of Murders?
Tucker posted these highlights:
Tucker kept talking about it, according to people who watched it.
“Can I ask you — that gets back to my original question,” he said. “If the protests didn’t work, and you got elected anyway; the impeachment didn’t work, twice; indictment is not working … If you chart it out, it’s an escalation, is what I’m saying. So what’s next, after trying to put you in prison for the rest of your life? That’s not working. Don’t they have to kill you now?”
Trump didn’t respond directly. “I think the people of our country don’t get enough credit for how smart they are,” he said. “They get it. I got indicted four times. All trivial. Nonsense. Bullshit. It’s all bullshit.”
Slate says that’s the second time Tucker tried to get Trump on board with the idea that “they” were going to kill him.
It apparently started five minutes into the interview, with conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein, and how “they” killed him, and now “they” are going to kill Trump, obviously, isn’t he worried about that?
Carlson: This is kind of far afield. But it was just interesting. I read [Bill] Barr’s account of this time; he wrote a book about it, his autobiography. And in it he lies about Jeffrey Epstein’s death. Clearly lies. Do you think Epstein killed himself, sincerely?
Trump: I don’t know. I will say he was a fixture in Palm Beach. I don’t know what Barr said about it either. I have no idea what he said. What did he say, that he killed himself?
Carlson: He said he killed himself and they were going to do this investigation, and they never did the investigation. And it’s never been public, and they hid it, and, like, why are they doing that?
Trump wouldn’t take the bait, though. He was reportedly much more interested in babbling about RIGGED AND STOLLEN ELECTION and how impressively he is winning the 2024 Republican primary, but not the prospect of being assassinated by Joe Biden and the Deep State. C’mon, Trump! Play along!
Carlson: Do you think it was possible that Epstein was killed?
Trump: Oh sure, it’s possible. I mean I don’t really believe it — I think he probably committed suicide. He had a life with beautiful homes and beautiful everything, and all of a sudden he’s incarcerated and not doing very well. I would say he did. But there are those people, there are many people — I think you’re one of them, right? But a lot of people think that he was killed. He knew a lot on a lot of people.
To which Carlson replied definitively, “He was killed.” Orrrrrrr:
“I think. I think the closer you look — I’m not a conspiracy person at all. I believe everything I hear.” But he wasn’t done. He smiled momentarily. “But yeah, I mean the closer you look into it …”
Good God.
“The reason I’m asking you is I’m looking at the trajectory since 2015,” he said. “It started with protests against you, massive protests, organized protests by the left, and then it moved to impeachment next, and then indictment. I mean the next stage is violence. Are you worried that they’re trying to kill you? Why wouldn’t they try to kill you, honestly?”
Trump again did not answer directly. “They’re savage animals. They’re people that are sick, really sick. You have great people in the Democrat Party. … I represent everybody; I’m the president of everybody. But I’ve seen what they do, the lengths they go to.”
Tucker had one favorite rubber ducky in the bathtub and by God he was going to chew on it until he broke the squeaky.
For more highlights on how bizarre the interview was, Slate’s rundown is fairly thorough. They note that Tucker almost made Trump seem reasonable by comparison. That’s quite an accomplishment.
AS FOR PRIGOZHIN!
Welp, we do not really know whether he was murdered or he deplaned himself or he wasn’t on the plane to begin with and he faked it.
Cathy Young has a pretty comprehensive piece in The Bulwark running through possibilities. He is proooooobably dead. This is prooooooobably Putin doing payback for Prigozhin’s mutiny, two months later. Which is quite crazy, considering how much Prigozhin has done for Putin over the years, not only with his Wagner mercenary group, but lest we forget, Prigozhin ran the Russian troll farm that helped Putin steal the 2016 election for Trump.
What a spectacular fall from grace OUT OF RUSSIAN SKY LOL.
Young reports that the main Russian organs you’d look to with questions like these — Russian aviation authorities, social media associated with Wagner, the founder of Wagner — all say Prigozhin is dead. Most people seem to think the plane was shot down, but of course conspiracy theories are bubbling around, especially in pro-Kremlin quarters, that maybe Ukraine bombed it. Or maybe he faked his death and now he’s on the beach drinking piña coladas somewhere.
Young writes:
While such a scenario obviously smacks of conspiracy theory, it is less far-fetched in Prigozhin’s case than in many others: the putative deceased is a notorious trickster and hoaxer, and the search of his St. Petersburg apartment after the mutiny yielded a stash of fake passports as well as a collection of wigs and a batch of infamous selfies showing the shady tycoon in various disguises. In yet another subvariant of this scenario, some think Prigozhin and Putin teamed up to stage his death and engineer his disappearance. (What Putin would get from such a scheme is not clear.)
But he probably dead.
For the record, Putin is expressing condolences -- awww! -- and US officials are starting to lean toward "bomb" as opposed to "missile," reportedly. For more on why this particular time might have been exactly Goldilocks just right for Putin to murder his former pal, read the rest of Young’s piece.
Also, read David Ignatius on how Prigozhin might be dead, but his mutiny did perhaps irreparable harm to the entire mythology of Vladimir Putin, Evil Genius. Prigozhin exposed the ill-prepared farce of Putin’s military, as well as the complete pointlessness of Putin’s brutal war on Ukraine. Ignatius quotes Prigozhin speaking just before his mutiny:
“There was nothing extraordinary happening on the eve of February 24,” the day last year when Russian attacked. “The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war,” he said. “The mentally ill scumbags decided: ‘It’s okay, we’ll throw in a few thousand more Russian men as cannon fodder. They’ll die under artillery fire, but we’ll get what we want.’”
None of that was incinerated in the plane’s wreckage.
But anyway.
Yeah, Putin had a big day yesterday. It’s hard to keep all these oligarchs in line! Sometimes they fall out of sky. Sometimes they do interview at Bedminster and both their pants are falling down like they have a poopy in their butt. Meh!
[Slate / Bulwark / Washington Post]
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And OT but AWESOME:
Cheesebro tried to call DA Willis's bluff and demanded a speedy trial. But, as Joyce Vance said, "DA Willis didn't come to play around". DA Willis said, "Great! Let's have the trials starting October 23rd!"
That's ALL the trials, since the defendants are ALL being tried together. You can bet PAB, Roodles, and all assorted Krackens are right now trying to figure out how to deplane Cheesebro because THEY DO NOT WANT A SPEEDY TRIAL.
AWESOME.
Onion:
𝗡𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻’𝘀 𝗟𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝗔𝗻𝘅𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗹𝘆 𝗪𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗨𝗻𝘇𝗶𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗧𝗼 𝗝𝗲𝗿𝗸 𝗢𝗳𝗳 𝗧𝗼 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝗺𝗽 𝗠𝘂𝗴 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘁