Moscow’s dispatch of strategic bombers and heavy transport planes to Venezuela last week (12/10), and its subsequent obliging Washington to remove them only four days later (12/14), highlights both what has and has not changed in the in the “new cold war” between Russia and the United States.

Indeed, as Moscow-based military expert Aleksandr Golts argues, the appearance of two Russian Tu-160s in Latin America this week highlighted that the present-day hostility between Russia and the US could far more easily go “hot” than was the case in the “old” Cold War (Otkrytyye Media, 12/12).

That’s because, given the weakness of the Russian Federation today compared to the strength of the Soviet Union in the past, Russia’s nuclear stockpile remains the only resource Putin has that allows him to claim any kind of superpower status for his country.

This results in a foreign policy of “Putin Realpolitik” –  not the sophisticated kind reflected in the works of Henry Kissinger, where the major powers balance economic, political and security interests, but a primitive kind that’s dangerously delusional..

As a White House Advisor to President Clinton during his entire impeachment proceedings, I’m experiencing 1998 déjà vu.

That’s as prosecutors once again work overtime to turn extramarital affairs and the efforts to keep them secret into impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors.

Except it’s worse.  Unable to get the witnesses to compose the stories they want, today’s prosecutors are discovering they can simply compose the crimes by manipulating the pleas of men desperate to protect their families. That never happened in 1998.

The Michael Cohen Sentencing Memo of November 30 took aim directly at both Cohen and President Donald Trump. It was used, unethically, to cast the president as directing a criminal conspiracy to make “secret and illegal” payments.  Then again, when has Mueller and his gang done something ethically?

Yesterday (12/10), I received an email from the Motion Picture Academy informing me that if I didn't pay my dues, I wouldn't be able to vote in the Oscar nominations in a couple of weeks.

I debated for a few minutes.  Dues have inflated since I joined in the eighties and are now a hefty $450 per annum.  Nevertheless, spendthrift that I am, I bit the proverbial bullet and went for it. Call it the inability to break a bad habit. Or an addiction to the non-stop influx of screeners that arrive at my door every December, not that I watch many of them. (I suspect I'm not alone in that.)

But it wasn't just the money that had made me hesitate.  On one level, I wouldn't have re-upped up for $4.50, let alone $450.  I mean -- what was the point of this? Does anybody care who wins the Oscar anymore?  I certainly don't -- and I'm a voter.

Here’s why this year the Oscars will continue on their downward spiral toward life support.

Robert Mueller’s legal team may write a damning report on Trump’s ethics, based mostly on flipping minor former business associates of Trump’s and transient campaign officials by threatening them with long prison sentences.

So far, we know that the U.S. government decided to intervene in a political campaign to help one candidate and to smear the other — under the pretext of Russian “collusion.” That would be Obama’s government helping Hillary to smear The Donald.

And so it hired or made use of spies and informants including Hank Greenberg, Stefan Halper, Felix Sater, and others to contact Trump campaign officials to catch them in supposed collusion traps.

It enlisted the help of foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the British and Australians.

It misled FISA courts into granting warrants to spy on Americans and, post factum, threatened long prisons sentences with those surveilled and interviewed.

Why has Robert Mueller investigated absolutely none of this?

The pattern and purpose of Mueller’s investigation and the endgame is becoming clear, and yes, it’s clearly get the president at all costs.

The team Mueller hired really foretold the story — Andrew Weissmann as the stop-at-nothing pit bull and a group of Democrat lawyers, including some who have represented the Clintons, had the obstruction of justice charge ready to go on day one.

The investigation, I believe, has come up truly empty on its central charge related to the president — collusion with the Russian government. They are now trying to find someone, anyone who had any contact with Julian Assange with the aim of calling that collusion-lite.

But mostly what Mueller’s team is doing is bludgeoning witnesses on unrelated charges to piece together a case against the president. They are shaping that case through the indictments -- and threats of indictments -- that are being used to get guilty pleas to make the president seem like an obstructor or co-conspirator. They are literally creating the crimes.

Let’s review what Mueller and his team are doing: