Putin's really bad Plan A and worse Plan B

 From a thread by The Palmer Report

Something I tried to drive home during the Trump era is that when someone's "Plan A" turns out to have been a really dumb plan, their "Plan B" is likely to be even dumber and even less likely to succeed. It's now proving true again, this time with Putin.

I'm not talking about someone making a mistake and then going in a different direction. I'm talking about a someone deciding to try to make a certain thing happen, and after their first plan fails, they try another plan for making that same thing happen.

Let's say you decide to do something, and you look at all your options for making it happen, and you pick the best one. If it's terrible and stupid, you only chose it because your other options were even more terrible and stupid.

Trump would try "Plan A" for making something happen, and it would just be laugh out loud inept. So it was obvious that his "Plan B" would be even more inept, because now he was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Yet the media would insist that his Plan B would be a magic wand.

If you have two weapons at your disposal, a magic wand and a dead fish, you're *never* going to try waving the dead fish first. So if your Plan A turns out to be waving a dead fish around, it proves that you don't have a magic wand available, or you'd have used it.

Yet we had to spend four years listening to the media tell us that every time a laugh out loud idiotic Trump strategy failed, it was just going to "embolden" him to break out the magic wand. It literally never once played out that way, but it's all we ever heard.

Now that Putin is finally failing as badly as Trump was always failing, we're hearing the same nonsense. Putin failed to even get his puppets Belarus or Syria to fight for him, so that meant he was somehow going to get China to fight for him. Idiotic narratives like that.

We also keep hearing that because Putin's troops and equipment in Ukraine have failed, he's now going to bust out the really good troops and the invincible military weapons. But if he had any good troops or dominant weapons, he'd have used them first.

Maybe it's just because we've all seen too many movies, where things play out in a fashion that's dramatic but completely unrealistic. Fifty bad guys show up at once, but they take on the hero one at a time, instead of ganging up on him. Dramatic nonsense like that.

In the movies, someone isn't going to succeed until they're down to their last round of ammo, or until the bomb has ticked down to one second. So we come to believe that when someone is totally screwed, it means they're about to magically win.

But in the real world, things almost never work that way. The more screwed you are, the more likely you're going to lose. The worse your Plan A is, the worse your Plan B is likely to be. Losing doesn't mean you're about to win, it means you're about to lose.

Yet the worse it gets for Putin, the more depleted he becomes, and the more clear it is that he has nothing better up his sleeve than what he's already tried, the more we hear about how he's going to break out *the magic wand* and suddenly win.

What could Putin do to win at this point? Any new plan he tries is going to be even weaker than the plans he's tried up to now. Any further escalation on his part only increases the odds he'll lose.

Yet Putin must have some "Plan B" up his sleeve for magically winning this whole thing, right? And the only reason he hasn't yet busted it out is that this movie's running time hasn't yet reached two hours, right?

Oh wait, this isn't a movie. Real world doesn't work that way.

But the media has spent years scaring us into staying tuned in by insisting that people like Putin and Trump are invincible, and that if they're losing, it means they're just toying with us until they decide to use their evil magic powers to automatically win.

That narrative sounds clinically insane when phrased that way. And yet 90% of everything that the mainstream media has said to us over the past several years has been based on that ridiculous narrative.

Even after these villains lose, the media STILL says they're winning. Trump's life has been destroyed and he's rotting in obscurity, but the media says he's about to make a 2024 comeback. Putin could die tomorrow, and the media would say Putin now has us right where he wants us.

A cartoon by Clay Bennett