Did ya catch Vladimir Putin doing his best Donald Trump impersonation the other day – right down to the paid attendees?

Pacing the stage (more like a caged animal than the prize fighter he probably sees himself as), Putin rambled and grieved for himself, made wild, unsupported and unsupportable accusations, and did his best to appear more than he is. Example? He couldn’t go on any longer than FIVE MINUTES! In Trump’s defense, that bloated orange bastard – when he slips into auto pilot – he can do hours on end simply by rote. Putin’s not good at this – putting on a show, I mean. Or being charismatic. Or reading people. Or leading an army. Or leading period. Putin’s good at one thing: being a spy. Correction – at that he’s great.

Okay – he’s great at two things: being a spy and being a cold-hearted, lizard-brained, nationalistic, religiously misinformed sadist.

And, as he oozed onto that stage set in the middle of a crowded stadium whose seats were filled by fear not patriotism, Vlad was being entirely beta dog reactive instead of alpha dog active. Deep down? he knows this. It burns at his core – right there beside the smoldering, moldering adoration he still feels for the Soviet Union. What was it Putin called the greatest tragedy of the 20th century?

Was it the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust? Was it Stalin murdering untold millions of Russians out of sheer paranoia? Was it Apartheid in South Africa or Putin’s own murder spree in Syria? Was it WORLD WARS One OR Two? Any of them blows past Putin’s choice – the USSR’s sudden disintegration. FFS – that’s like a Blofeld lamenting another James Bond victory over him.

Putin has dreamed of returning this favor from the moment we delivered it to the Soviet Union. He’s a spy, don’t forget. Putin ran Russia’s spy agency when Boris Yeltsin was stumbling and bumbling his way through the waning days of Russia’s leadership vacuum in the late 1990’s. We can only imagine the kompromat Putin had on Yeltsin. Oh, to have been a fly on that wall – as schoolyard bully Putin (he with a forever chip on his shoulder) – set a bunch of damning photos (or whatever) down in front of Boris Yeltsin on New Years Eve 1999 – and then took over the schoolyard.

Remember how the world – America included – looked into this man’s soul and saw a soul? Oy!

Talk about wishful thinking! Putin could have taken the West’s openness at that moment to make Russia a modern nation. He could have diversified Russia’s economy beyond fossil fuels. It’s not that Putin “chose” not to do such a thing; it never occurred to him. Putin’s great at being a spy. He really and truly sucks at pretty much everything else. He knows how to compromise people. That’s because he doesn’t care who anyone is, he only cares how to use who they are to break them – and then twist them to his purposes.

The violence being visited up Ukraine is directly connected to Donald Trump and Russian Intelligence’s successful hijacking of the Republican Party. Full props to Putin. It’s such a massive win that we here in America still haven’t acknowledged that it even happened. But it did.

And yet, for whatever reason, Putin wasn’t satisfied with having pulled off the greatest intelligence coup of all time – literally putting his man in the White House! We know Trump gave away secrets because Russia told us he did! Imagine, if you can, ALL the secrets Trump laid bare – to Putin – a professional spy – a man who hates America with every fiber of his being – and the man who current GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted “pays [Rohrbacher and] Trump – swear to God!“

Despite all the gains made from that remarkable, bold endeavor, Putin felt compelled to risk everything on a gamble there was absolutely no way for him to win. Not in reality.

When you consider the hold Putin had on us – had on our imaginations – the threat his army posed turns out to have been way more powerful than the Russian army ever actually posed (to anyone but itself). Even if the Russian army had performed as we’d been bamboozled into thinking they’d perform, taking Ukraine in two days – or even just Kyiv – that would have been one thing. Holding ON to Kyiv or the whole country, that would have been something else entirely.

Something Russia absolutely could never have done without bankrupting itself forever and leaving its army and air force a wreck.

Missiles and bombs don’t win wars. If anything, they harden hearts and close minds. Russia’s advance into Ukraine is stalled in part because they didn’t pack enough gasoline for the trip (morons!) and in part because all Russia really controls is the roads plus a kilometer in either direction. Outside those little bands? The Ukrainian resistance is firing away at the biggest sitting duck in the history of sitting ducks. The only battle plan Russia has left is war crime – firing artillery at civilian targets.

The absolute stone cold truth is that every missile launched from Russia owes a little bit of its being in flight to the fact that Putin succeeded in making Trump POTUS and then using his presidency against America.

This war – call it what you want – “Putin’s War” or “World War Three” – is a direct outgrowth of Putin’s co-opting the Republican Party and then using them to make Trump president.

Some people pinpoint the moment that Donald Trump set it in his mind that he had to be POTUS as the one where he sat – stoney-faced – while Barrack Obama treated him like a comedy pinata. I can buy that. Whatever his relationship was with Vladimir Putin at that moment, something inside Trump’s lizard brain seems to have “congealed” in that instant and a “thought-like thing” emerged fart-like. He saw a deal with various pieces: a Trump Tower Moscow featured prominently as did the presidency. No one ever had to speak in specifics. Criminals know never to do that out loud. Plausible deniability for the weak-minded. As we already know, back channels to the Kremlin was the name of the game.

And, meanwhile, the job of selling this treasonous charade to America kicked into high gear. Think of what Trump and those close to him knew about Trump’s relationship with Russia as he headed down that golden escalator to make it official: Trump was running for the presidency – and Mexicans are rapists. He tied those two things together. Did he do it deliberately? Probably not. There’s no script. There’s only the free associative “thought” of a thoughtless man, an egomaniac’s egomaniac and a traitor’s traitor.

I wonder sometimes what would have happened if our news media had held onto their righteous indignation more firmly after Trump insulted everyone even remotely Mexican. They had a second bite at that apple when they heard with their own ears Trump insisting that “pussy grabbing” was okay. For some reason, “But her emails” carried more weight than “Mexicans are rapists” and “pussy grabbing” combined. “But her emails” was so powerful that it even made “Russia, if you’re listening…!” innocuous.

As we now know, the last thing on earth it was was “innocuous”. What’s happening to Ukraine? Not innocuous. Nothing Putin’s done has been innocuous. Same goes for Trump. It’s the amazing thing about evil. It really is like a cancer. Once those cells find purchase? You’ve got to remove them entirely – and even then you’ve got to be vigilant forever after.