kunstler hits it out of the park in this piece;

The political insanity roiling the USA only gets worse, with no end in sight. On Wednesday, Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass), made the astonishing statement on CNN that “the American people wanted a confrontation, not a conversation,” between Presidents Trump and Putin in Helsinki.
Really? We wanted a mud wrestling bout and all we got was some lousy chit-chat? Next time, maybe Mr. Trump will bring a fungo bat to the room and “tune up” his counterpart — a popular negotiating technique from the rough-and-tumble New York City construction scene back in Mr. Trump’s halcyon days. Some people you just can’t reason with, especially the hell-spawned man-beast who personally directed Russian “meddling” and “interference” in our election and stole certain victory from president-designee Hillary. (I know this because The New York Times and The Washington Post said so.)
Another astonishment: in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the US would not recognize Crimea as part of Russia and would demand the return of the region to Ukraine. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Pompeo is pissing up a rope on that one. Russia will not give up its warm-water naval bases on the Black Sea anymore than the US will return its San Diego naval installation to Mexico, and Mr. Pompeo knows it. So do the posturing idiots on the senate committee, who apparently forgot that our own government officials fomented the 2014 Ukrainian coup that prompted Russia to annex Crimea and its military assets in the first place.

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/round-the-bend/