Russia completes its conquest of the Republican Party, but Ukraine holds on
To see how pervasive the idea that the Republicans would save Russia had become, you don’t need to listen to the speeches of Vladimir Putin or Sergei Lavrov. It is in the desperation of this conversation between a Russian soldier and his wife following the elections.
Wife: Ukraine is so small. Why is it taking so long? You told me that you were waiting for the elections of November 8, but what’s the point?
Russian soldiers on the front line in Donetsk awaited salvation, not by action from their own country, but by what the Republicans might do after winning the election. They will be more disappointed with the result than Kari Lake.
But do not worry. The Republicans have a solution to this problem – perhaps even an ultimate solution – that would not just deliver those Russian soldiers from peril, but would give Vladimir Putin a landslide victory that goes infinitely beyond Ukraine. Here is that solution, proposed by former Reagan aide Bruce Fein, writing in The hill.
“Congress can end the war in Ukraine and win a Nobel Peace Prize by passing legislation to withdraw the United States from NATO – transforming it from a mighty offensive oak tree into a tiny, unalarming acorn for Russia. .”
We’re at the point where a former member of Ronald Reagan’s White House is lecturing us on how we should stop scaring Russia and not hindering its invasion. For peace.
The entire article is not only devoted to the destruction of NATO, but to explaining how poor little Russia was forced to launch its bloody invasion after being “provoked” by the United States. It does not explain how the United States pushed Russia to attack Chechnya, Georgia and Syria. But they will get there.
Could the Republicans still get Putin’s ass out of the fire? If they had both Congress and the White House, they could. It’s a safe bet that they would have. This is not a new idea expressed by a single outlier. Withdrawing the United States from NATO is exactly what Donald Trump threatened to do in 2018. As Hunter reported at the time, “[Trump] doesn’t joke about his praise for dictators and his willingness to play ball with autocrats, and despite the damage control efforts of an unnamed senior administration official, he’s not kidding here. He has been blustering about “renegotiating” the US position in NATO or abandoning it since the campaign days. »
Giving Russia the freedom to attack Europe might have been something most Republicans thought was ridiculous when Trump was walking down that golden escalator. They don’t think like that anymore. Starving NATO to please Putin has become a central tenet of Republican politics. They want to offer Russia something that Russia could never win on the battlefield; not just victory over Ukraine, but victory over NATO. And the United States.
Holodomor Remembrance Day
Today is Holodomor Remembrance Day. Although most here are probably already familiar with this term, it refers to a period in 1932 and 1933 when the whole of the Soviet Union was facing a food shortage due to unusual climatic conditions and poor planning (c It was also a Dust Bowl year in the United States, with consecutive years of record high and low temperatures).
However, Ukraine was at the time the largest grain-producing region in the Soviet Union and had a relatively abundant harvest. Under the guise of general shortage, Joseph Stalin imposed grain quotas on Ukraine, which essentially deprived the nation of everything it’s food. With corn and wheat taken away by the Red Army, Ukrainians were deliberately left to starve. There are even reports of food being destroyed to speed up this process. Estimates of the resulting genocide range from a low of 3 million to 10 million dead. Stalin followed this with a program to further encourage Russian settlement in Ukraine.
Russian state media commentators and translated messages from the Russian military have suggested that Russia should have a second Holodomor as a means of punishing Ukraine.
Russia’s economy in sharp decline
Since the start of the invasion, it has been common for pundits in the United States to repeat Russian state media propaganda claiming that the sanctions have little impact on the Russian economy. However, as The Washington Post reports, it becomes much more difficult to pretend that Russia is not suffering. Wrong. And this failing economy is having a growing impact on the battlefield.
For months Putin has claimed that the ‘economic blitzkrieg’ against Russia has failed, but Western sanctions imposed following the invasion of Ukraine are sinking deeper and deeper into the Russian economy, exacerbating equipment shortages for its military and hampering its ability to launch any new ground offensives or build new missiles, Russian economists and businessmen said.
then and now
Leaving today’s update on a high note
Just some of the Ukrainian soldiers, out there in the cold and snow, facing a bloody enemy trying to destroy their nation and their people. How do they maintain?
Election season overtime is finally over, so Democratic operative Joe Sudbay joins David Nir on Downvoting as a guest host this week to recap some of the latest results that just dropped. Topping the list is the Arizona Attorney General race, where Democrat Kris Mayes has a 510-vote lead with all ballots counted (a mandatory recount is unlikely to change the outcome). Also on the agenda is the success of Arizona’s Proposition 308, which will allow students to receive financial aid regardless of their immigration status.
In California, the Democrats have just taken control of the supervisory boards of two huge counties, Riverside and Orange, in the case of the latter, for the first time since 1976. Joe and David also discuss the Democratic candidates who failed this year . they’d like to see try again in 2024, and what the GOP’s slim majority means for Kevin McCarthy’s prospects as a speaker.
