Ukraine

2024 Election, Idaho Politics, Ukraine

Who to Blame for Losing Ukraine …

Posted on by mjohnson

Congressional Republicans once represented a political party that lead every campaign stressing its national security credentials. No price was too great, no sacrifice too significant to keep a GOP congressman or senator on top of any debate about protecting American interests around the world.

But that Republican Party is dead and gone, sacrificed on the altar of the last Republican president’s coziness with the former Russian KGB agent and disdain for post-World War II security arrangements, including NATO that have long been the bedrock of American security. Donald Trump transformed the party of Reagan, turning it into a cult following an isolationist authoritarian, one increasingly anti-free trade and openly hostile to democracy.

There is never a road so long that it doesn’t have a bend it’s said, and the modern Republican Party has come to that bend. The long, post-war road that defined the GOP brand in national security terms is in real danger of unraveling for good.

A Ukrainian serviceman rides atop an armoured fighting vehicle

As GOP members of Congress fled the capital for their Christmas cheer the headlines were stark, as in who lost Ukraine stark. “With Western aid stalled, Ukrainian troops run low on artillery shells,” said the Washington Post. “Ukraine Hits Major Russian Warship, but Loses Ground in the East,” said the New York Times, noting Ukraine had, while destroying a major Russian ship, also pulled back troops to the outskirts of Marinka – a small city reduced to ruins – marking a tactical retreat and a bleak Russian victory.

It seems all too clear that the brutal nearly two year war has reached an inflection point. Will Ukrainian forces have the stamina and the artillery shells to last through another cold winter or will Vladimir Putin prevail simply by not losing?

“Our needs are resources,” General Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top military leader, said recently. “It’s weapons, it’s ammunition, it’s people. We calculate all of this in formulating our needs – people who we have lost, people who we could lose in the next year.”

The November decision by Republicans to link policy related to the U.S.-Mexican border to approval of essential aid to Ukraine is as short-sighted as it is stupid, but here we are. Just as the Ukrainian weapons stockpile disappears the GOP insists on a border security solution that has evaded Congress for a generation. It’s almost like Republicans were looking for an excuse to help Putin and they found one just outside of El Paso.

There is no mystery in the GOP linkage. The party has never sought a real policy solution to immigration or asylum seekers because it could have had one a dozen different ways over the last three presidencies. Republicans like – make that love – “the border” as a red meat issue to stoke fear and grievance within the GOP base. What’s a little Ukraine blood and territory as collateral damage to such political cynicism?

And for good measure add a little demagoguery to this retreat from international leadership, stiffing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky who came to Washington earlier this month, helmet in hand, to get the tools to keep defending his country and by direct extension western Europe and the United States.

By all accounts the aid the U.S. has sent to Ukraine has caused the greatest degradation of Russian military capability since Hitler’s Panzers rolled toward Moscow in the summer of 1941. As the Center for European Policy Analysis calculated, “from numerous perspectives, when viewed from a bang-per-buck perspective, U.S. and Western support for Ukraine is an incredibly cost-effective investment.”

For a single digit percentage of the total American defense budget, according to a declassified U.S. intelligence report, Russia has absorbed “315,000 dead and injured troops, or nearly 90% of the personnel it had when the conflict began.” Furthermore, the report “assessed that Moscow’s losses in personnel and armored vehicles … have set back Russia’s military modernization by 18 years.”

But such logic confuses a modern Republican backbencher like Idaho’s election denying Congressman Russ Fulcher. “We’ve already spent $113 billion in resources to Ukraine,” Fulcher said recently, “and we don’t know what the clear mission is.”

Say what? The mission is to keep Putin from winning and in the process protect western Europe from Putin’s plan to rebuild the old Soviet empire.

Fulcher helps us understand the incoherence of his position by noting that his constituents overwhelmingly oppose more aid. Precisely the arguments made before American entry into World War II when Franklin Roosevelt, facing bipartisan opposition as blinkered as Fulcher’s, persuaded Congress to support transferring U.S. supplies to a beleaguered Britain as it hung on against the Nazis.

This is the modern Republican Party, ruled by isolationist, white nationalist reactionaries in Washington – and clearly at the grassroots – who have decided to follow Trump and his Hitler-invoking rhetoric along the yellow brick road toward Putin and Moscow.

Fulcher hints at possible support for additional Ukraine aid if Joe Biden assures “serious reform, serious attention to our southern border,” but he’s joking. He’s the worst kind of congressman, one who claims to represent the will of his people even when doing so requires – assuming Fulcher were capable of such a thing – applying simple common sense.

The biggest clue that the GOP is fixing to abandon Ukraine comes from the junior senator from Idaho, James E. Risch, who by virtue of luck and Senate seniority, now sits as the ranking Republican on the once prestigious Foreign Relations Committee. Until December and the party’s pivot to link the Mexican border to the Ukrainian front line, Risch was a stout hearted supporter of American aid, even going to Kiev for a photo op with Zelensky. Now, Risch’s continuing support is conditioned on, as he says, the security issue his rightwing constituent’s fear most – desperate humans at the border fleeing poverty, crime, corruption and chaos.

“The biggest threat that my constituents feel is not from (Ukraine),” Risch said recently as he pirouetted away from the foreign policy threat of our time, “it’s from our southern border.”

Risch’s lifetime in politics may not feature accomplishment, but he is a survivor, and he can read the polls, including the November Gallup survey that shows 62% of Republicans believe the U.S. is doing too much to aid Ukraine.

Risch, once about as conversant with foreign policy as Trump, the fellow Risch carried water for during that memorable period, is now, thanks to luck and the seniority system, in a position to actually do something for Ukraine, Europe, America and the world. Don’t hold your breath. Given a choice between a moral stand based on genuine principle and the political path of least resistance, Risch always takes the low road to expediency.

The party that zipped its collective lip when Trump embraced Putin, tolerated Trump’s shakedown of Zelensky in order to influence domestic politics and remains totally silent as their party leader pushes ever farther toward authoritarianism is no party of principle.

I genuinely hope to be surprised when Congress returns early next year to take up the aid issue again, but expecting Republicans like Risch, even when they have taken a strong pro-Ukrainian positions in the past, to defend a position the least bit unpopular with “the base” is to live in a political fantasy land. And Risch has positioned himself perfectly to be against what he once was for, and he always has Joe Biden to blame.

When we start asking who lost Ukraine, remember the little men from Idaho who talked big and voted small.

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Additional Reading:

A few items I found interesting/important …

In 1967, a Black Man and a White Woman Bought a Home … Politics Would Never Be the Same

White and Black Detroit in the 1960s …

“On their fifth night in the neighborhood, the Baileys’ telephone lines were cut.

“On the sixth night, the police did nothing. They just watched as neighbors — 80 to 100 of them — threw smoke bombs and broke windows at the house that looked exactly like their own. Gov. George Romney threatened to call the Michigan state police.

“On the ninth night, embarrassed into action, members of the Warren police department put on their riot helmets and marched behind a rumbling tank to rescue the beleaguered family at 26132 Buster Drive.”

A stunning bit of history from Michigan. Link to Politico.

Extreme weather is changing California … These road trips show how

“This year, transformations were on full display after record-breaking winter storms wreaked havoc on landscapes already reeling from years of drought, wildfires and coastal erosion. While scientists are still debating whether the intensity was increased by human-caused climate change, they have long predicted events like these will worsen as the world warms.”

A Guardian reporter talks to the road to assess climate change in California.

Why Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to college graduates still matters today

A wonderful story … be sure you watch the video piece at the very end.

“Young people, college students especially, loved Vonnegut. During the early and mid-1960s, he commanded an avid and devoted following on campuses before he had produced any bestsellers. Why was a middle-aged writer born in 1922 adored by a counterculture told not to trust anyone over 30? Why did he continue to appeal to younger generations until his death?”

Here’s the link.

Thanks, as always, for following along. It’s been a year, hasn’t it?

As you can likely tell I’m seriously concerned about the future of American politics and democracy, but I’m trying to end the year on a genuine up note. Amid the many trials and wars and political dysfunction so many good people are doing so much in their own ways – large and small – to improve the human condition. Let’s celebrate that human connection as we ring in the New Year. All the best.

See you soon …

Ukraine

Isolationism: So Old It’s New Again …

Posted on by mjohnson

Montana’s hard rightwing Republican congressman Matt Rosendale has likely never been compared to a influential progressive politician who figures prominently in his state’s history. At first blush there is precious little about Rosendale, a disciple of Donald Trump and opponent of almost everything, that is remotely like New Deal era Montana senator Burton K. Wheeler.

Montana’s isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler

Wheeler was a pro-union, anti-big business western progressive. He was a driving force behind big Montana public works projects like Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River. He fought corruption in the Justice Department during the 1920’s and battled Franklin Roosevelt, a president of his own party, over an ill-advised scheme to “pack” the Supreme Court.

Rosendale is known, to the extent he is known, for often being in a tiny minority of House members who vote NO on many things, including infrastructure spending. Rosendale is an outspoken member of the hard right “Freedom Caucus,” traffics in conspiracy theories, and recently observed that he found it ironic that Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973, the same year the Supreme Court issued it decision legalizing abortion.

But in one important respect Rosendale and Wheeler, who left the Senate in 1947 and died in 1975, are similar. They are unapologetic isolationists. Wheeler was the acknowledged leader of isolationist or non-interventionist forces prior to World War II. Wheeler, along with Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator, became the chief spokesmen for the America First movement, an umbrella group that attracted both passionate pacifists and disgusting anti-Semites.

Idaho’s Mike Crapo, a very conservative Republican senator not known for his foreign policy expertise or even interest, is also displaying isolationist instincts. So, too, Utah Republican Mike Lee and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and a handful of other conservatives. All three senators joined with eight others recently to vote NO in the Senate on a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine. That aid was nevertheless approved and will, like previous assistance, continue to allow Ukraine to hold off, and indeed turn back, a brutal, unnecessary war started by Vladimir Putin.

Trump, with his threats to pull the United States out of the NATO alliance and his actual withdrawal from trade and other agreements, popularized – again – the notion of America First, perhaps knowing the slogan would become a rallying cry for the far right, as well as serving as a dog whistle for anti-Semitism and pro-authoritarianism.

This neo-isolationism from the far right is not exactly new in American politics. Figures like Ohio senator Robert Taft in the 1950’s and more recently conservative gadfly Patrick Buchanan embraced the notion that the United States should essentially retreat from world leadership and focus more completely on domestic concerns. Buchanan wrote a book claiming it was Winston Churchill’s blunders rather than Adolf Hitler’s megalomania and desire to dominate Europe that sparked World War II.

This is the kind of revisionist, pro-Putin, anti-democratic, white supremacy nonsense that is being widely embraced in the dark corners of Internet and the increasingly dark corners of American conservatism.

Republican J.D. Vance, the opportunist Ohio Senate candidate who rejected Trump before embracing him, has become a key figure among the neo-isolationists. In one of the greatest political non-sequiturs ever, Vance recently said, “I will be damned if I am going to prioritize Ukraine’s eastern border right now when our own southern border is engulfed by a human tsunami of illegal migrants.”

If Vance wins in November he will, fittingly, occupy Bob Taft’s old Senate seat.

Another would-be leader of the neo-isolationists is Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who clearly hopes to be president one day and knows just how to push the most powerful alt right buttons. “We don’t need any more globalism, left or right. We need realistic, robust nationalism,” Hawley said recently. Whatever that means it apparently appeals to Trumpers everywhere. Hawley also voted NO on the Ukrainian aid package.

As the online news site Axios reported recently: “Republican lawmakers – following former President Trump’s lead – are working with a wide range of conservative groups to pull back American support for Ukraine, the Middle East and Europe.”

The money and influence behind this neo-isolationist surge is powered by a permanent alt right infrastructure that includes the Koch Brothers, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and others. (This same network funds state-level anti-public school and tax cut advocacy from groups like the Idaho Freedom Foundation.)

Fox News personality Tucker Carlson champions neo-isolationism, while playing to the white nationalist sympathies of his audience.

After acknowledging that Putin’s war against Ukraine is illegal and has been clouded by vast lying from the Kremlin, the Cato Institute dismisses the war for the future of Europe with this: “it is a tragedy that neither the United States, nor NATO, nor Ukraine itself made a serious effort to discover whether there was a diplomatic way to prevent this invasion.”

That single sentence neatly sums why the neo-isolationists are as wrong today as they were in 1941.

Senator Wheeler, in many ways a heroic character, misread completely the state of the world as Hitler sought to dominate Europe, and like the neo-isolationists in the modern Republican Party, Mike Crapo, Mike Lee and the loathsome Rand Paul, he opposed the American aid to England that became known as Lend-Lease.

“We sympathize with the oppressed and persecuted everywhere,” Wheeler said, channeling Montana’s current congressman, “We also realize that we have great problems at home, that one-third of our population is ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-clad, and we have been told repeatedly, upon the highest authority, that unless and until this situation is corrected our democracy is in danger. I fully subscribe to this view.”

Wheeler’s views about Nazi aggression, had they prevailed rather than Franklin Roosevelt’s, might well have allowed Hitler to control Europe for a generation or more. Imagine our world today had that happened.

The same can be said for those turning their backs on Ukraine. What is their alternative: a Europe dominated by Putin? NATO rendered obsolete? Turning the other way as the ex-KGB agent kills and plunders a sovereign nation and U.S. ally?

Mike Crapo worries, apparently, about the country spending too much to defend democracy in a place far away. But he’s never met a tax cut he didn’t love. So, the fiscal responsibility argument is about as specious as justifications coming from the Kremlin for this unjustifiable war. Crapo’s stand, oddly, also puts him at cross purposes with Idaho’s other senator, James Risch who has steadfastly supported Ukrainian aid.

Crapo and the rest should know that Ukraine’s fight is our fight, too. The history of appeasement of dictators with territorial ambitions is not at all promising. We should have learned this in high school.

A great benefit of studying history is the insight past experiences provide for the present. This is surely such a moment. Why would a Crapo or Rosendale take such a blinkered view of history? Why, indeed, would these folks turn their backs on 80 years of history?

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Additional Reading:

Some other items you may find of interest …

Thoughts and prayers of a different kind

I’m numb and exhausted. I suspect most of us are.

And perhaps that is what the gun nuts at the National Rifle Association (NRA) have been after all these years. What if they actually sought to so normalize gun violence, including murdering ten-year olds in their classrooms, that those of us who reject the culture of more guns all the time just became numb to the death, dishonesty and deflection? It seems to be working.

Outside the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas

I don’t think a society that is healthy, meaning rational and caring, tolerates what happened this week in Uvalde, Texas, but here we are again. And where will we be next week or next month? A town in Idaho, or Oregon to Michigan?

The only thing we know for sure is that we will see this again … and again.

To be brutally honest, I’m so tired of the small-minded jerks like Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott I could puke. They literally make me sick to my stomach. That they get away with their nonsense about guns is infuriating.

Having said that: I am also a realist. We have a Supreme Court that has invented a Second Amendment that was nothing like what the Founder’s envisioned. Conservative judges made up “rights” related to guns and we live with that, or die with it.

We have 400 million – 400 million – guns in America. So many that even if we decided tomorrow to regulate them in some way its unlikely we could.

And we have a political system that pays lip service to caring about kids, but really doesn’t. We are caught in a doom loop of guns, and killings and worst of all a widespread willingness to accept it all.

There is a sickness in America about guns. I’m all for hunting and sport shooting and protecting your home, but 18-year olds no questions asked buying battlefield weapons and high capacity magazines – that is not remotely sane.

Our gun sickness is not rational or normal and it does not place a priority on children’s lives – or any life. It is a deep and profoundly ugly failing. America is truly exceptional, at least when it comes to killing with guns.

The last thing I wrote about the gun lobby was posted in 2019, how many mass shootings ago? Here’s that piece – “The NRA is a Fraud” – I’m sorry to say it is still relevant.

I have nothing even remotely original to say any longer about this massive nonsense, so I suggest you read my friend Darrell Ehrlick in The Daily Montanan.

On the Ball: In Memory of Roger Angell, 1920-2022

I went to a game in Milwaukee last Sunday – before the tragedy in Texas and before the pathetic governor of that state showed up to a news conference wearing what looked like a Texas Ranger shirt (the cops not the ball club) – and I thought about the late, great Roger Angell.

His life and work is a joyful memory amid the awfulness of this week. Here’s the writer Michael Lindgren.

“Roger Angell’s sensibility was emotionally generous, and his subjects sensed this and responded with great warmth. (In his unshowy way, he was one of the great interviewers of his or any time.) He wanted to see the players and managers and fans in their best light; in doing so, he showed us ourselves in our best light. There will not be another like him.”

I’ll leave it there. It’s been a long week. Be safe.

Politics, Russia, Ukraine

Disinformation is the Story of Our Age …

Posted on by mjohnson

Vladimir Putin’s criminally deadly war on Ukraine provides huge warnings to the democratic world about what happens when an entire population becomes captive to a thuggish authoritarian who lies with the kind of ease that most of us associate with taking the next breath.

Putin has been in power for 22 years, having successfully looted the country to enrich himself and a handful of his billionaire cronies, he now owns something even more valuable – the minds of most Russians. This ownership of public opinion appears so complete that Putin can transform the reality of his brutal invasion into a narrative that claims Ukrainians are the aggressors. The dead of Mariupol or Kharvik are, in Putin’s world, the “Nazis” threatening Mother Russia rather than the other way round.

Some of the awful scenes of Putin’s war from Bucha, Ukraine

We are witnessing a profound, real-time display of the power of misinformation, lies, hypocrisy and deception that truly is a warning as much as it is a tragedy.

It has been impossible this week to miss the horrific pictures and extensive first-hand reporting from Bucha, the Kiev suburb destroyed by Putin’s genocidal army. Yet, Putin and his henchmen have dismissed the images as propaganda. It’s an old, tired and disgusting tactic.

As the Associated Press has noted: “Denouncing news as fake or spreading false reports to sow confusion and undermine its adversaries are tactics that Moscow has used for years and refined with the advent of social media in places like Syria.”

Russian television, a veritable Fox News of lies and distortion and totally controlled by Putin, dishes a daily misinformation diet to people who have been lied to for so long that many have given up trying to ascertain the truth. While it would be foolish to put much faith in public opinion polling emanating from a country so thoroughly brainwashed, it appears most Russians, without ready access to independent reporting about the war, believe the lies pushed by the former KGB agent who is responsible for this madness.

Here’s how this disinformation reality connects to domestic politics, and the clear and present danger it presents to American democracy. For a decade or more the politics of the United States have been swamped by a deluge of lies with much of the lying amplified by people in high places and by cynical and manipulative media figures. Where to start?

The lies about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. The lies about school shootings being “false flag” operations. The lies about a pedophile ring operating from a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor. The lies about a presidential election being stolen.

The purpose of all this lying is, of course, to fuel grievance – make people mad – but also to confuse. Is there really a world-wide child sex abuse network, as QAnon has claimed? Did presidential election ballots disappear in Michigan? Was Covid-19 a Chinese communist plot?

The confusion has worked. The lies have penetrated deeply into the political world. A December opinion poll “found that 17 percent of Americans believed that the core falsehood of QAnon – that ‘a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media’ – was true.”

This helps explain, indeed may explain in its entirety, why a handful of the most craven Republican members of Congress verbally assaulted Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing over the lie, advanced by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, that Jackson’s jurisprudence might “endanger children.”

Hawley’s nonsense was immediately rejected by a review of the facts of Judge Jackson’s record, but as Georgetown professor Donald Moynihan pointed out in the Washington Post the allegation was never about facts. “The goal,” Moynihan wrote, “was to portray Jackson, and by extension Democrats, as players in the QAnon narrative that public institutions are overrun with child predators.” This line was immediately advanced by Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn, each clearly vying for the title of worst United States senator in the modern era.

The child predator narrative has become so prevalent among the fact-free alt right that when Utah Republican Mitt Romney said he would vote to confirm Jackson to the high court he was attacked online, an assault barely short of accusing the former Republican presidential candidate – a Mormon in good standing – of being soft on child abusers.

The disinformation – the lies – have become so prevalent that it is nearly impossible to keep track, and that is another aspect of what one-time Donald Trump “strategist” Steve Bannon infamously called “flooding the zone with shit.” This is the fatigue of confusion. Putin has mastered this, and Trump has long mimicked the man he called a “genius” for invading Ukraine. And it has worked, especially in this deadly moment for Putin who increasingly can count on a pro-Putin wing of the GOP to spread his lies.

From Tucker Carlson, the Russian propaganda peddling Fox News star, to 63 House Republicans – including Idaho’s Russ Fulcher and Montana’s Matt Rosendale – who voted this week against a resolution of support for continuing U.S. engagement with NATO, Putin’s disinformation has broadly entered the country’s conservative political bloodstream.

Altogether, as Will Saletan noted in The Bulwark, 21 Republicans have opposed, or sought to constrain, aid to Ukraine or sanctions on Russia. “That’s a group three times the size of ‘the Squad,’ which Republicans claim is in control of every aspect of Democratic policy. Imagine how much power those 21 Republicans would wield in a GOP-controlled House.” And lest we forget a former and potentially future American president has been his willing accomplice, while once responsible members of the Republican Party have aided and abetted his repeated lying.

“Disinformation is the story of our age,” says The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. I would take the observation a bit farther. It seems entirely possible that we are living in the advanced stages of a Putin-like capture of millions of American minds; minds filled with mush and grotesque nonsense, the kind of rank garbage that poisons democracy.

But who is really to blame for this softening of American minds? And is what we are experiencing really any different than the John Birch Society’s communist under every bed conspiracy of the 1950’s or who killed JFK narratives that have never ended?

The answer is a definitive – yes. This is different. An entire political party has willingly permitted this to ripen and grow rancid. That party, preparing to regain control of Congress this year, has proven beyond any doubt it will use disinformation to not only discredit its opponents, but delegitimize democratic institutions, including courts and elections.

As for who is to blame – we are, all of us. While we’ve been busy with the myriad distractions and trivialities of modern life, we allowed our democratic system to crumble into terrible disrepair, electing unserious, craven people and acting as though truth and character no longer matter.

While hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fight for their lives and their democracy, we can’t bring ourselves to discard the liars who threaten ours.

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More Reading:

My “carefully” curated selections that just might be of interest …

Baseball’s Labor Wars

Well, there was some good news this week. Baseball is back, but perhaps with an asterisk.

Fenway last year

“Today, twenty-four of baseball’s thirty owners are billionaires. Many inherited their wealth or made it in other sectors, such as real estate, banking and finance, and communications. Almost all of them have seen their wealth increase during the pandemic. The wealthiest among them, Mets owner Steve Cohen, built his fortune in the hedge fund industry. Since 2020, his net worth has increased from $13.9 billion to $15.9 billion.

“Total MLB revenues grew from $9.5 billion in 2015 to $10.7 billion in 2019. Even though the pandemic emptied the ballparks in 2020, revenues recovered to pre-pandemic levels in 2021.”

A good historical assessment of players and owners. Enjoy the games – I will – but there is always a backstory.

How did cockroaches survive the asteroid that led to the extinction of dinosaurs?

Turns out the pesky cockroach survived the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Who knew?

“How could roaches a couple of inches long survive when so many powerful animals went extinct? It turns out that they were nicely equipped to live through a meteoric catastrophe.”

This actually explains a lot.

Sugar Daddy of the Right

Turns out the founder of the John Birch Society – the wacky rightwing outfit is enjoying a new moment of relevance – also invented the Sugar Daddy candy.

Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society, and opened the floodgates of conspiracy

I’ve been reading the new bio of Robert Welch by Edward H. Miller. It’s good.

“The mid-20th-century United States was a place where Robert W. Welch Jr., a bankrupted candy manufacturer and inventor of the Sugar Daddy lollipop, could found a national organization that would leave a conspiratorial imprint on modern conservatism — planting the seeds for today’s fever dreams.”

As I said, there is always a backstory. A review of Miller’s book.

Thanks for reading. Defend democracy. It really is under attack.

GOP, Trump, Ukraine

A Matter of Character …

Posted on by mjohnson

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s historic speech to a joint session of Congress properly received a great deal of attention this week. The former comedian turned international leader reminds us not only of the stakes in a country under siege, but that courage and character in the face of great adversity is the very essence of political leadership.

Zelensky’s incredible performance, literally under fire, has summoned comparisons to Winston Churchill’s leadership in 1940. As the Financial Times noted, Zelensky “never aspired to be a war leader. Yet it is precisely his empathy and communication skills, teamed with exceptional guts, that have turned him into the voice of his people and their resistance, and a symbol of modern Ukrainian identity.”

Ukrainian president Zelensky with some of his soldiers

A remarkable gesture by the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia received less attention, but the dangerous rail journey to Kiev undertaken by the eastern European leaders not only demonstrated solidarity with Zelensky but was also noteworthy for the courage and character the leaders displayed. Both moments will live in history.

If only we could count on a bit more character and courage in our own politics.

Yet, having said that I detected something genuinely encouraging amid all the usual partisan brawling and useless backbiting. Some courage and character broke out.

Utah senator Mitt Romney spoke again, as he has in the past, in support of American democracy, and specifically in support of courage and character. At a fundraising event for embattled Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney, Romney received a standing ovation when he said, “People of character and courage have stood up for right at times when others want to look away. Such a person is Liz Cheney.”

Cheney, of course, is under assault from the fact-free Trumpian alt right and the former president for having the gumption to stand up to our own home-grown anti-Zelensky. Cheney seems determined to get the full story of the January 6 Capitol insurrection no matter where the truth leads.

Here at home, Romney said, “what has kept us from falling in with the same kind of authoritarian leader as Vladimir Putin are the strengths of our institutions, the rule of law, our courts, Congress, and so forth.” That so forth includes character and courage.

Another prominent western Republican had much the same message this week. Writing in the Washington Post, two-term Montana governor and former Republican National Committee chairman Marc Racicot said: “Rarely stopping to inventory the essential qualities in human character, we all know them when we see them: decency, honesty, humility, honor and faithfulness.”

Racicot said his purpose in speaking out about the unfitness of the “leader” of the Republican Party “was to urge all Americans of good sense and honest purpose to confront, define and vindicate the truth. Sometimes that truth has sharp edges, but nonetheless, it is still the truth. This is one of those times.

“And so it must be said again: Donald Trump does not possess the essential qualities of character to lead this nation, most especially in a time of crisis.”

Racicot, typically a measured, quiet man not given to overstatement, was scathing and specific in denouncing Trump’s truly disgusting comments about Putin’s war on Ukraine. “If the former president’s recent remarks about Ukraine had amounted to just another ration of narcissistic self-indulgence, it would have been briefly noted, but not thoroughly examined. Such patent nonsense has become, after all, predictable and expected.”

The former Republican chairman went on: “The vicious actions of the Russian president have been universally condemned by decent people everywhere. But not by Trump. To the contrary, the former president could express only his admiration of the Russian president’s tactics — describing them as ‘savvy,’ ‘smart’ and ‘genius.’

“There is no record of anybody else, other than Trump, anywhere, at any time during this Russian massacre, who has described Vladimir Putin’s actions as ‘savvy,’ ‘smart’ and ‘genius.’”

Racicot said the former president’s remarks display a shocking “lack of maturity and morality” as Putin’s artillery and missiles rain down death on hospitals and schools in Ukraine.

The conclusion of Racicot’s piece in the Post spoke directly to those politicians who duck and cover rather than confront the character and courage issues that confront their party and our county.

Putin: not savvy, but he does have really long tables

 “Those who, during this painful moment in human history, find any redeeming value or humor in the former president’s remarks; or who continue to ignore his profound lack of knowledge or intellectual curiosity; or who excuse his lack of regard for the truth; or who consciously or unconsciously modify the priorities of their own character or moral imperatives to secure his favor, or the favor of his disciples, might do well to remember the words of author J.M. Smith: ‘If you dance with the devil, then you haven’t got a clue, for you think you’ll change the devil, but the devil changes you.’”

Donald Trump did not create the deep fissures that have contributed an America that is more divided, less civil, more mean and less committed to truth. Those attributes, sadly, have long been features of a sprawling, diverse nation that has too rarely confronted its own contradictions.

But Trump, his willing accomplices and those afraid to speak truth about him have exploited division and distrust for the basest of reasons – power and punishment. Maybe the Trumpian fever is about to break – we can hope – since Trump endorsed candidates in several states are floundering.

Still, hoping the stench goes away naturally does not absolve Republicans in Congress, statehouses and city councils from the moral decisions they have made to tolerate this intolerable man and the damage he has done to American democracy. By lack of courage, they have made lack of character acceptable in the highest office of the land.

We cannot predict the future of the brave people of Ukraine or that of their determined president. The future may well hold much more death and destruction with implications far beyond eastern Europe. There is little reason for optimism, but at this historic moment Volodymyr Zelensky and the country he leads reminds us of what truly matters – courage and character.

Celebrate that. Embrace that. Demand that of our leaders.

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Additional Reading:

A few other items that may be of interest …

MLB’s new collective bargaining agreement fails to address players’ biggest grievances

I’m eager for baseball, but really frustrated by the owner’s lockout and the agreement that – finally – emerged. A good explainer here from Victor Matheson, a sports economist at Holy Cross.

Spring training finally got going this week

“Baseball junkies will notice several cosmetic changes to the game right away: an expanded postseason, sponsor advertisements on jerseys and a designated hitter in the National League. The agreement also opens the door for rule changes in 2023 that include larger bases, limits on defensive shifts and a pitch clock. Other than some real improvements to the salaries for the league’s lowest-paid players, however, the economics of baseball’s underlying labor model remains as flawed as ever.”

Read the whole thing:

“I can help them” – one man’s journey from Portland to Ukraine’s frontlines

A Portland man heads home to fight for Ukraine.

“Sergey is one of about 66,000 Ukrainians returning home to help fight the Russian invasion following President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call for Ukrainians abroad return to the homeland to fight the Russians. Korenev, whose family is Jewish, is one Ukrainian in the US answering the call.”

From The Guardian:

How the North Beat the South, Morally and Economically

A very interesting new book on dueling economies during the Civil War.

“The South was bountiful but impervious to change. In the decade before the war, cotton production jumped from 2.8 million bales to more than 4 million, and the value of its four million slaves doubled. This industry was centered in four hundred mostly contiguous counties of loamy soil that was essentially a monoculture. In the North, farmers sought to improve varieties of wheat and corn. They invested in farm and machinery. Southern planters felt no need to innovate. There was scarcely any patent activity in cotton and little investment in machines. They scarcely invested in capital goods. It was cheaper to breed Negroes.”

The book is Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War by Roger Lowenstein.

Here is the link to an excerpt:

Cooking with Dorothy Sayers

Miss Dorothy L. Sayers, the famous author, whose radio play introducing Christ as a character has caused widespread controversy, is seen here Feb 6, 1942 in London signing a visitors’ book where she addressed the lunch- time service congregation at St. Martin’s-In-The-Fields. (AP Photo)

Loved this piece from The Paris Review.

“Dorothy Sayers was said to enjoy both food and drink in great quantities. And her characters do as well.”

The link:

That’s it for this week. Thanks for following alone. Stay well and be in touch.

GOP, Trump, Ukraine

The Ukraine Memory Hole …

Posted on by mjohnson

“We have the evidence to prove President Trump ordered the aid withheld, he did so to force Ukraine to help his re-election campaign … we can and will prove President Trump guilty of this conduct and of obstructing the investigation into his conduct.”

— California Congressman Adam Schiff during the Trump impeachment trial concerning Ukraine

Military analysts, and most famously the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz, have long referenced the “fog,” or uncertainty that always surrounds war. Given the best planning and skilled execution, battles never unfold the way they are envisioned on a map in a secure location.

Wars become a blur. Information is unreliable. People make mistakes. Supplies get destroyed or sidetracked. Leaders and followers stumble around in the dark amid death, destruction and dread.

A fog of war descends.  

One suspects Vladimir Putin has lived in this state for two weeks now. The war crimes this “small, feral-eyed” man – that’s Senator Mitt Romney correctly describing Putin – has perpetrated in Ukraine will live in infamy. The heinous crimes are visible to all. The former KGB man is doomed. The only questions are how long it will take to be rid of him and how many innocents will die while the world waits.

Putin’s War on Ukraine involves bombing hospitals (NBC photo)

Yet, while we wait and contemplate what Putin has done to a mostly peaceful post-war Europe, at least a Europe where NATO never seriously faced off against a nuclear armed Russian, and before Americans become consumed with gas prices rather than crimes against humanity, we should confront some hard truths about our own Ukraine back story.

Tribal politics have done much to damage the United States. Good faith in our civic life has become as rare as $2 regular at the pump. Lies and misinformation dominate seemingly every debate. The work is underway, therefore, to rewrite the Ukraine narrative in the interest of sparing many conservative politicians of any accounting for how cavalierly they treated issues in eastern Europe when their guy was running the show.

As good a place to start to plug the memory hole is Paul Manafort, the Republican political operative and lobbyist who lived a high life and made millions, as NBC reported in 2017, “working for a corrupt pro-Russian political party that repeatedly disparaged America’s most important military alliance” – that would be NATO.

Just to jog your memory, Manafort “volunteered” for no salary to work on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign even though he was reportedly in dire need of cash.

[Personal observation: political consultants are some of the most money conscious people in our system. They are always afraid the political client will run out of money and they won’t get paid. To work for the pleasure of being associated closely with a world-class narcissist is, to say the least, unusual.]

Manafort did several things during his time with Trump. He engineered a remarkable change in the Republican platform. As the Washington Post reported in July 2016: “The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.”

One Republican who opposed the platform sight of hand was Diana Denman, a Texas delegate to the 2016 convention. Her comments in 2016 read in the context of Putin’s war today are little short of stunning. “The Ukrainian people are trying to come out of the past and stay free,” Denman said. “We owe to those who are fighting for freedom still to give them a helping hand.”

“I’m very passionate and supportive of the Reagan foreign policy of peace through strength,” Denman said.

Since there are no coincidences in politics it’s not a stretch to believe the GOP platform switch was orchestrated to please Manafort’s once and potentially future Russian clients. The change in longstanding Republican policy was simply a very cheap gift to Vladimir Putin, who Trump made no secret – then or now – of admiring, indeed emulating.

Paul Manafort, arrested, charged, convicted … pardoned by Trump

We also know, despite ongoing efforts to whitewash the truth, that Manafort gave sensitive Trump campaign polling information to one of his Russian contacts at the very time Putin was engaged in a massive social media disinformation campaign designed to influence the presidential election, and sow division in the American electorate.

[Another reminder: a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee detailed the Russian interference. It was no hoax.]

Trump and his cult now claim he was tough with Putin. It’s a lie. Trump essentially endorsed Putin’s annexation – steal – of Crimea. Trump sided with Putin rather than U.S. intelligence agencies on the matter of Russian election interference, infamously saying in Helsinki in July 2018, “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

Trump embraced the fiction that Ukraine had meddled in the election, a move he made after Ukrainian records implicated Manafort in a financial scandal that led to his conviction. Manafort was, of course, pardoned by Trump.

Then came the “perfect call” between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a conversation that was so imperfect as to warrant Trump’s first impeachment. To again plug the memory hole: Trump tried to shake down Zelensky by withholding military assistance from the newly elected president in exchange for a storyline that Ukraine was investigating Joe Biden.

At a time when Ukraine needed building up, Trump did Putin’s bidding.

[Another reminder: remember the Portland hotelier Gordon Sondland? He was U.S. ambassador to the European Union and was in the middle of the Trump shakedown. He testified to the truth of a central fact in Trump’s impeachment. Watch it again and wonder how history might have changed had Republicans senators done their duty.]

Republicans, like Idaho’s Jim Risch and Washington’s Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who minimized and excused Trump’s “drug deal” approach to Ukraine in 2019 are now shamelessly acting like all this history never happened. They had a chance to rid themselves of this cancer on conservatism by convicting Trump of abuse of power. They punted.

“Trump didn’t care about the people of Ukraine—their lives or their democracy,” Amanda Carpenter wrote recently in The Bulwark. “He simply understood that he had power over them and could abuse this power to help his re-election. And his fellow Republicans, almost to a person, either helped him with this blackmail or defended it once it came to light.”

Biden’s handling of Putin’s war has hardly been perfect. He, too, suffers in the fog or war, but Biden has succeeded, at least so far, in uniting and re-invigorating NATO and the European Union, the one really big thing Putin sought, with Trump’s help, to destroy.

The endgame of this crisis, as serious as any in Europe since the 1930’s, is far from clear. What is clear is that one political party, a party once with a tradition of hardheaded national security policy, willingly enabled the dangerous impulses of a failed real estate developer who has never made a secret of his admiration for a dangerous dictator.

While we pray for the people of Ukraine we should remember how far into deceit and depravity that party was willing to take the country – and the world.

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Additional Reading:

A few other items you may find of interest …

Our local-news situation is even worse than we think

A sobering serious from the Columbia Journalism Review.

“As reporting staffs have shrunk, the American population has grown. Since 2004, the number of newspaper newsroom staff per 100,000 people—a measure we might call “coverage density”—has dropped by a staggering 62 percent. This shows statistically what we knew anecdotally: reporters are spread far thinner than they used to be. It also helps explain the rise in ‘ghost newspapers,’ more than 1,000 publications that have lost more than half of their staff in recent years.”

Link to the series: 

Charter school program favored by Tennessee governor rewrites civil rights history

Good example here of why local news coverage is so darn important.

“If Governor Bill Lee gets his way, Tennessee will become a major player in a network of taxpayer-funded charter schools set up by a Michigan college with close ties to former President Donald Trump.

“Lee calls Hillsdale College’s approach to teaching civics ‘informed patriotism.'”

Some conservatives are worried about kids being “indoctrinated,” and that is exactly what they really want to do. It’s not history, but “informed patriotism.”

Good reporting from Nashville’s NewChannel 5:

Billionaire-backed group promotes hunt for voter fraud, uses discredited techniques

The big lie continues, perhaps even picks up steam in Wisconsin.

“Ever since Trump failed to convince the world that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud, like-minded people across the country have been taking up the same rallying cry, revisiting that vote with an eye toward what will happen in 2022.

“Now, a new group is stepping into a more conspicuous role in that world by providing easily accessible tools for people in Wisconsin, other Midwest battleground states and, eventually, the entire country to forge ahead with a quest to prove election irregularities.”

The money is coming from the hard right Wisconsin industrial family, the Uihleins, part of a network of deep pocketed activists who are keeping the big lie alive. Great reporting from Pro Publica and the Wisconsin Examiner.

Pulitzer winner Walter Mears dies, AP’s ‘Boy on the Bus’

A great tribute to a remarkable political reporter.

Jimmy Carter and the AP’s Walter Mears

“Walter’s impact at the AP, and in the journalism industry as a whole, is hard to overstate,” said Julie Pace, AP executive editor and senior vice president. “He was a champion for a free and fair press, a dogged reporter, an elegant chronicler of history and an inspiration to countless journalists, including myself.”

Read the obit for a glimpse into Walter Mears’ ability to “nail the lead.”

That’s all I got. Thanks for reading. Stay safe.