All hat, no cattle

American police, equipped with untold quantities of military-grade hardware, trained constantly, cheered endlessly, and almost always protected from accountability when they commit abusive errors, are expected to do one job with minimum dedication and skill: protect the innocent from deranged attackers even when at risk of harm to themselves.

It must come as a shock to many of our fellow citizens to see how the Uvalde cops rolled up in an armored car, kitted out in all sorts of weaponry, but couldn't stop a bumbling teenager from murdering children because they came upon a locked door and didn’t have the key.

That’s nothing compared to the cognitive dissonance that will descend upon us shortly when we realize the same phenomenon is taking place in Ukraine where US and NATO tough guys stand around in a variety of ethnic cowboy hats, egging on other guys to keep getting chewed up by the Russian military machine.

The bipartisan Washington duopoly that pours $700 billion worth of our resources annually into military preparedness lectures everyone on earth about what they had better do—or else because standing behind the threats is a vast array of high-tech weaponry. Oddly enough, that team is getting its ass handed to it by “a gas station masquerading as a country.” Just as on the domestic stage, we’re being told that all is well because our cops are lumbering through the streets with hundreds of pounds of Robocop fetish gear.

The latest breathless narrative is that M777 howitzers or the new batch of totally cool Javelin missiles or some other mystical sounding piece of equipment will turn the tide, just like in the war-porn movies we gobble up.

We’re promised that those trillion-dollar piles of weapons will keep disobedient foreigners from getting ideas and threatening “democracy.” Turns out even pesky sub-humans who haven’t discovered “freedom” and the “rules-based international order” can acquire a bit of agency.

The Uvalde cops and assorted Texas elected officials tried to answer questions about the elementary school debacle by emitting endlessstreams of word salad about the “terrible tragedy” and the valiant efforts of “officers on the scene” who “brought things under control.” They desperately attempt to deflect attention away from the utter and ignominious failure of the heroic cops to actually take a risk and stop the slaughter of children.

Similarly, Sullivan, Blinken, foggy Joe, the laughable Ursula von der Leyen, Boris Johnson, Scholz, Stoltenberg, and their clapping seals in the entire western media universe assume heroic poses on the battlements of their respective capitals. They survey the landscape and decide never to retreat an inch in the Donbass where some 10 thousand Ukrainian troops are about to face the choice between annihilation or surrender.

Victory is just around the corner, though, and the Zelenskiy government will soon be pushing back against the paper Russian tiger, whose demoralized troops are short of food, running out of ammo, and about to desert for a nice job in Barcelona. (I actually heard David Frum predict this on a webinar.)

Meanwhile, the Uvalde cops will be storming the child-assassin—as soon as they get snipers, armor, back-up, and their Starbucks orders. Don’t try to interfere, or we’ll tase you.