If you’re a sports fan or (especially) if you gamble on sports, there’s a good chance you know the name Chris Fallica.
Mr. Fallica, who is currently employed by Fox Sports, specializes in telling you how to make cash the good old fashioned way: by outsmarting your bookies, which are now mostly legal gambling operations.
He’s usually known, if you follow him on X, for takes like these:
Over the previous 12 years, Steve Sarkisian’s teams have been an underdog of at least five points 11 times. They have won twice outright, including by 10 last year at Alabama as a seven-point dog.
— Chris Fallica (@chrisfallica) January 11, 2025
Sweating final minutes here at Goodison… but how can anyone bet Ando in the last at GP? 310k purchase debuting for 35k tag for Chad? Sure, he can win, but just a terrible proposition at 5-2. Change at Jamaica interesting at a price.
— Chris Fallica (@chrisfallica) February 12, 2025
And sometimes, he doesn’t post about degenerate gambling, but instead reposts jokes about degenerate gambling — like this one involving a Valentine’s Day card based around the Shohei Ohtani interpreter betting scandal:
— better call saul enjoyer (@fight_club40) February 14, 2025
If this is something you actually sent your sweetheart, odds are (pun intended) you met in Gambler’s Anonymous.
Anyway, Fallica is probably better than the rest of us at figuring out how to bet on sports. World politics is another matter, since he apparently believes the only U.S. president that Vladimir Putin has not launched a military offensive designed to capture another country’s territory under is actually “bending the knee” to Russia.
As you may perhaps have heard, on Monday, the United States voted against a United Nations measure to condemn Moscow for the invasion of Ukraine. CNN Breaking News, on X, called it “a stunning turn away from allies” and the U.S. “sid[ing] with Russia.” Fallica agreed.
“Bending the knee to Putin and Russia is quite the 180. Imagine telling Reagan and the Republicans of that era this,” Fallica said.
Bending the knee to Putin and Russia is quite the 180. Imagine telling Reagan and the Republicans of that era this.
— Chris Fallica (@chrisfallica) February 24, 2025
Fallica was apparently too busy scrutinizing betting sheets for the fifth at Pimlico to read any of these:
- A calendar, which would tell him that it’s 2025, and that means Reagan left office 36 years ago, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union,
- News reports, which laid out in detail why the U.S. voted how it did (spoiler alert: not because it was “[b]ending the knee to Putin and Russia”), or,
- Wikipedia, even — the idiot’s guide to the world, unless you’re even lazier and default to ChatGPT — either of which would have told him that every U.S. president who has served a full term while Putin has been in office except for one (and guess which one?!) has seen Putin mount an irredentist war on their watch to try and reassemble the old USSR.
So, first, the calendar. It’s an app on your phone, Mr. Fallica. Open it, and once you get past the reminders you’ve put in there (taking wild guesses here: “Put 15k on the Magic and the over,” “Send apology text to Ohtani’s interpreter for reposting the Valentine’s Day joke,” “Ask if Ohtani’s interpreter still wants to go in halfsies for 10k Astros futures bet, under 87.5 wins”), look at the date.
Anno Domini 2025 is more distant, time-wise, from 9/11 than Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration was from the JFK assassination. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has been running Russia (or running it through his puppet, Dmitry Medvedev, for four years before he managed to do away with term limits) since two years before 9/11.
In other words, stop invoking “What Would Reagan Do?” as if it’s the end-all-be-all of how to get tough with Russia. This isn’t just for Fallica, but for everybody who keeps falling back on this rhetorical feint — which is why this silly, ill-considered post merits covering in the first place, because it represents a strain of misplaced conservative/NeverTrumper nostalgia, which treats “The Hunt for Red October” as if it were an eternally true political treatise, not a work of fiction.
We’re not in the “Mr. Putin, tear down this wall!” era, because there is no wall to tear down anymore, only a war to end in a post-Soviet world. And, as anyone who’s been following the Russo-Ukraine conflict, that war has to end, so we don’t re-enter the Soviet era, for reasons I’ll lay out in a second.
But second, the news reports. Even the report contained in the CNN post that you were responding to, Mr. Fallica, laid out the reasons for the vote, slanted though the article may be. The resolution demanded that Russia “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders,” something which has zero likelihood of happening.
Russia officially annexed Crimea under Barack Obama, who didn’t do anything substantive to stop it, and it effectively controlled much of the territory it currently “took” from Ukraine during this war through proxy pro-Moscow militias long before the invasion began.
Instead, it’s worth noting, the United States introduced a separate resolution to the one that very unrealistically demands the immediate return of all Ukrainian territory Russia has taken since 2014. That resolution instead “implores a swift end to the conflict and further urges a lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia” and mourns “the tragic loss of life throughout the Russia-Ukraine conflict.”
“[T]he principal purpose of the United Nations, as expressed in the United Nations Charter, is to maintain international peace and security and to peacefully settle disputes,” the resolution states.
Acting U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Dorothy Shea said that the document was “a simple historic statement from the General Assembly that looks forward, not backwards. A resolution focused on one simple idea: ending the war,” according to Politico.
Ending the war, like it or not, will not involve Ukraine reverting to “its internationally recognized borders,” which would require Russia to withdraw from territory it has controlled, in one way or another, for over a decade. Sorting that out will take a whole lot longer.
The other outcome — a war of attrition in which Ukraine loses more land and more leverage, or a war that escalates from one between Russia and Ukraine to one Russia and all of NATO — is profoundly unlikely to end better for anyone aside from Russia in the first case, and for anyone, full stop, in the second.
Furthermore, the Trump administration has stated that it sees itself as the most likely broker of peace between the two parties. As for whether or not this is realistic, time will tell, but the status quo cannot hold.
Meanwhile, answer me this: What are the odds that voting a resolution with a pie-in-the-sky demand for Russia to return all of Ukraine’s land makes it more likely that the Trump administration brokers a peace agreement? (No, seriously, what are the odds? I’m sure you know, Mr. Fallica. Some U.K. bookmaker must have them up, since you can bet on practically anything over in Merrie England — and they can’t be better than 12,000-1.)
Finally, who’s bending the knee? Because, again, this opinion only makes sense until — and I suggest you try this with politics, Mr. Fallica — you read about the history of the conflict. It helps.
Trump armed Ukraine, pushed NATO countries to up their military spending for a contingency like this, increased energy production at home, urged Europe to be less reliant on natural gas from Russia for energy via the Nord Stream pipelines, killed a few hundred Russian-backed Wagner mercenaries in Syria back when that was considered a red line in 2018, pulled out of weapons limitations agreements with Russia, and — I cannot reiterate this enough — managed to be the only U.S. president to serve a full term under which Putin has not started a war in a former Soviet republic.
In other words, this is basically the toughest president against Russia since Russia was a Soviet Socialist Republic and the president was … Reagan. But that’s just if you read about this stuff on occasion and realize that dealing with Vlad is different than dealing with Gorby and the Soviet Bloc.
Those of you who have ever listened to his rambling interviews know that Putin essentially views the USSR as Voltron and that he views his role in world history, more or less, as reassembling the parts of the mega-robot. That’s why he went into Georgia under George W. Bush, into Crimea (and sent direct support to his proxy militias in Donbas) under Obama, and went into Ukraine whole-hog under Biden.
Again, think about this as a betting man, Mr. Fallica. That’s what you’re basically paid to do, after all. You find yourself suddenly in the position of Vladimir Putin. It’s one of those magic body-switching movies that Hollywood used to be so fond of, like “Freaky Friday.” (What I wouldn’t give to see Vlad reduced to guessing lines on Tuesday night NCAA mid-major men’s basketball games, but I digress.)
You, Mr. Fallica, now find yourself in Putin’s place, and you believe you have to reassemble the USSR Voltron. Which U.S. leader do you choose to do most of the heavy military lifting under? One that’s weak, or one that’s strong? This isn’t a terribly hard question — the weak one, obviously. Duh. It’s a sure bet.
So, either Putin managed to outsmart that ultra-reliable oddsmaker known as “reality” by striking only when the U.S. wasn’t led by someone who was “[b]ending the knee to Putin and Russia,” or you’re simply spitting out ill-informed hot takes about something far beyond your ken.
I’m putting my money on the latter. Unless you can make that body-switch movie with Putin happen, could you please stick to telling me whether Georgetown getting 12.5 against UConn in Connecticut on Wednesday night is a good bet, and staying away from stuff you apparently refuse to inform yourself about?
That’d be awesome. Thanks in advance.
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