The only anchor in reality appears to be Biden suggesting that they knew how to take it out which seems like a pretty weak place to build a large story.
What I find particularly odd is that this entire thing appears to be based on a single, unnamed source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning".
But he does often rely on sources who remain anonymous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh#Use_of_anonymous...
I did find it interesting in that Wikipedia article to read that The New Yorker's editor insists on knowing the identify of all of the anonymous sources that Hersh has used when his reporting is published in that magazine. That suggests to me that while Hersh can probably be generally trusted, his work is of a higher quality when it's published in an outlet like The New Yorker, as the editor-in-chief and other staff submit it to a more rigorous internal discussion. That's in comparison to probably no internal review or discussion by Substack.
Since Nordstream was destroyed amidst public pressure from US energy companies who wanted to takeover the European energy market, the US has become the world's leading exporter of liquid natural gas, Europeans are paying record natural gas prices, and US energy companies are reporting record profits. Again, the relationship between these things should surprise nobody.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/08/bidens-bi...
Or you could take a breath and realize that Nordstream 2 was not yet complete. It was an ongoing, non-operational project. In that context, “bringing it to an end” could easily mean not completing it. In fact, that’s the far more reasonable interpretation—-the literal physical destruction interpretation is only made by someone who wants to believe that.
And yeah, that is true. But when the wife was in fact murdered, then the odds that the known abusive husband did it are very high.
Maybe it was a reasonable interpretation that he didn't mean blowing up the pipeline, before the pipeline was blown up.
> known abusive husband
Not sure what you’re referring to here. If you’re analogizing what Biden said with domestic abuse, that’s just ridiculous. It’s more akin to telling the wife they’re going to need to divorce if she doesn’t stop threatening the children. If you’re saying the US in general has a history of doing things that could be compared to domestic abuse, sure, but so could all parties involved, particularly Russia. So we’re back at square one.
But it's not a comparison, it's just an example of the same statistical dishonesty.
When the pipeline was in fact blown up, of course we're going to look at vaguely worded threats in another light.
I was stating my opinion that the comparison was of low intellectual quality, not taking offense.
> When the pipeline was in fact blown up, of course we're going to look at vaguely worded threats in another light.
Except it’s only vaguely worded if you’re approaching it from the bias of wanting to think it was a threat of blowing it up. Approaching it a different way, they’re just the words a person would use if they were talking about ending the project, not literally blowing it up.
If Biden were going to be so aggressive as to threaten to blow up an infrastructure project of a close ally, why specifically limit it to Nordstream 2? “We’re going to lose our ever-loving minds here, but only for phase 2 of the project”.