We are talking about Mitch McConnell's recent triple bank-shot rationale for inflicting still more misery and death on the god-forsaken peoples of Ukraine.

American support for Ukraine is not charity. It's in our own direct interests – not least because degrading Russia helps to deter China.

What kind of sick fuck would demolish an entire nation and slaughter tens of thousands of its citizens in order to weaken its neighbor and historic suzerain—all for the purpose of sending a carom shot across the bow of rulers 3,600 miles away. And rulers, at that, who are no boon to their own citizens but also pose no threat to the liberty and safety of the people of Kentucky or any other part of the United States?

Indeed, even when President Truman and War Secretary Stimson ordered the cold-blooded killing of 214,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki their rulers actually did mean America harm and had already killed thousands of its soldiers from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima. But exactly where is the evidence that Beijing is assembling a massive armada of air, sea and land forces to invade the coast of California or is standing up a devastating first nuclear strike capacity to leave American cities in cinders before the awful nuclear retaliatory forces of the US could strike back?

So let's cut to the chase: Without Washington's dollars, weapons and hegemonic pressure the war in Ukraine would have been settled by partition long ago. The map of Ukraine above would be cut into two nations roughly at the faint blue line representing the Dnieper River and that would be that.

Yet for demented reasons that are truly hard to fathom Washington has found it necessary to reject this obvious option and, instead, conduct a red-hot proxy war against Russia and China. So doing it is annihilating far more innocent people for far less plausible reason than did Truman and Stimson in August 1945