Yeah, I was so down on American politics when Russia invaded, but I felt much, much better when I saw how every single element of Russia's military, from top to bottom, was corrupt, incompetent, and lacked any sense of direction or leadership.

What really got me was how it wasn't contained to any single part; when people call Russia a "Mafia state", they're not exaggerating. It really is a money laundering scheme disguised as a country, with no actual rule of law or civic institutions. You're expected to embezzle and lie.

And yet TACTICAL MASTERMIND VLADIMIR PUTIN, the finger-tenting evil genius who outfoxes us at every turn, never bothered to inspect his military in 22 fucking years.

Yes, he did a bunch of photo ops where he went to factories and looked at missiles so he could say "Yep, that's a missile."

But he clearly never performed an actual investigation or serious audit of anything. Because the rot of corruption had been there for DECADES, and it wasn't remotely subtle. So clearly, Putin paid close to zero attention to it beyond his sycophants saying "Yeah, everything's great" and him responding "great I'll go have sex on my yacht."

This is seriously a "Hitler napping through D-Day" level of laziness. And it's even more amazing when you consider how important military supremacy was. This guy made "We have the most terrifying army in the world and aren't afraid to use it" a major pillar of Russia's identity.

So to recap: A fierce military was critical to Putin's true endgame of restoring the USSR, as well as Russia's identity as a hahaha "Geopolitical Superpower" and his legacy as the next Peter the Great. Yet almost no one, anywhere, in the entire military took their job seriously. The problems were highly visible and obvious, even to laymen. Over the course of decades, a huge percentage of the hardware they had in storage had been gutted by embezzlement.

And Putin didn't notice any of this. Not once. Not even when he chose to invade Ukraine, with a strategy based on "overwhelming force and a quick victory that's so decisive nobody, not even NATO, will do anything about it."

I know bringing up Hitler for any reason is the internet's oldest cliche, but Putin really is like Hitler: Lazy as fuck and totally incompetent, but great at convincing smoothbrains he's a world-historical genius, despite his nonstop fuckups.