PMC Commentary

Welcome to McCarthyism 2.0?

No, I'm not enlisting in the Hysteria Corps. I'm not joining neo-Wokists' alarmist brigades. By passing this along, I am not suggesting our children are doomed pedagogically. But, for what it's worth, here's the Washington Post's Greg Sargent on recent GOP proposals "targeting 'negative' U.S. history" being taught in public schools:

"The mania for muzzling how teachers address race and other topics is only accelerating. We’re seeing dozens of GOP proposals to bar whole concepts from classrooms outright. The Republican governor of Virginia has [by executive order] debuted a mechanism for parents to rat out teachers. Bills threatening punishment of them are proliferating. Book-banning efforts are outpacing anything in recent memory."

Scary, indeed. What's missing from Sargent's reporting, however, is any accounting of the bills' political survivability. No doubt certain reactionary pols are proposing insanely McCarthyite methods to be practiced in the classroom — outlawing, as one other example, notes Sargent, "advocacy for doctrines such as socialism or Marxism." But, for such bills, how many co-sponsors are there? What are the odds of a state legislature actually passing such gibberish?

The odds may be good. On the other hand, they may be lousy. Fact is, based on Sargent's reporting, I have no idea. I also have no idea if similar bills were proposed a year ago, two years ago or 10 years ago — each of them symptomatic of incorrigible, long-standing, right-wing authoritarianism, and all of them rightly consigned to the legislatures' inferno.

Particularly scary, for sure, is a proposed New Hampshire bill, featured by Sargent: "It would ban the advocacy of any 'doctrine' or 'theory' promoting a 'negative' account of U.S. history, including the notion that the United States was 'founded on racism.' Additionally, the bill describes itself as designed to ensure teachers’ 'loyalty,' while prohibiting advocacy of 'subversive doctrines.'"

Any such bill is, of course, subversive itself, and disloyal to the concept of intellectual freedom. (Not that anyone could find so much as one American high school teacher who's in the habit of banging his shoe on the classroom's podium, shrieking about Marxism's ultimate burial of U.S. capitalism.) But again, what are the odds of, what's the prognosis for, the N.H. bill's passage? I'd sure like to know. And it seems to me that it's rather incumbent on a reporter to fill me in.

In short, my complaint isn't about the McCarthyite lunacy of the above. That speaks for itself. My complaint, rather, is that today I've no better idea as to the actual threat of these McCarthyite tactics than I had yesterday. And that's a major journalistic failing.

Trump the scofflaw, at it again. But will he still be around in 2024?

I doubt there's a stopwatch on the market that is mechanically capable of timing the infinitesimally short interim between your public incitement of violence against prosecutors and the prosecutors' issuance of an obstruction of justice charge, or some similar indictment. Unless, of course, you happen to have been the 45th president of the United States, of sorts. In that phantom-of-the-operalike case, have at it.

Which is precisely what Trump did, Saturday, in Texas, although his advisers employed a linguistic trick:

"If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt. They’re trying to put me in jail. These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick. They’re going after me without any protection of my rights by the Supreme Court or most other courts."

The word "protests," not riots, was meticulously, telepromptly inserted, which is known in politics and organized gangsterism as "plausible deniability" in the exercise of an illegality. Under the "reasonable person" standard of law, however, not a conscientious juror alive would conclude that the speaker meant anything but riots. (He pulled roughly the same trick with his pardoning promise toward treasonous rioters of Jan. 6; those treated "unfairly.")

Which is merely to say: Had you stormed in a speech as Trump stormed over the weekend, this morning you would find yourself — and on this I'd wager any amount – in a prosecutorial cauldron. But not Donald J. Trump. He remains above the law, free to excite, or incite, whichever he chooses.

That much we know. Still hanging undetermined in the court of public opinion, though, is the question of his political sustainability. Since his (also) unindicted acts of Jan. 6, has his base been eroding? There's evidence that the answer is yes.

Forty-four percent of Republicans said in a mid-January, Associated Press survey that they prefer a presidential candidate other than Trump. What's more, a late-January, NBC News poll found that 56 percent of Republicans say they're supportive of their party, rather than identifying as Trump-firsters, who accounted for 36 percent of surveyed Republicans.

The significance of that last statistic — which "spanned every demographic: men and women, moderates and conservatives, people of every age" — is that it's down nearly 20 points since Trump's final months in the White House.

Even worse for Trump are the findings of a Republican pollster: The former president's margin over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is evaporating.

From last October to the present, Trump's lead over DeSantis in presidential preferences has dwindled from 40 to 25 points — and even worse than that, "among Republicans familiar with both men, the gap was just 16 points, and narrower still, only nine points, among those who liked them both."

Which takes us back to Trump-as-scofflaw. For more and more Republican voters, has he been going too far in his outrages? Is, finally, his criminality too conspicuous, too brazen, too — dare I say it? — embarrassing?

Or perhaps they're just tiring of his endless and unchanging grievances. Or maybe it's a combination of both, combined further with DeSantis' equally weird, Trumplike attraction.

Only one thing is certain. Over the next three years, Republican politics are going to become even weirder. And that is saying the nearly unsayable.

Biden could be "transformational" in quite another, Rooseveltian way

President Biden may yet achieve an FDRlike legacy. The latter confronted global fascism head-on, while the former, as he has unceasingly warned, is wrestling with a world engaged in a soul-saving struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.

Hence these threats to the West, past and present, are not unalike: Roosevelt faced a two-front menace, Germany and Japan; Biden, Russia and China. As with Roosevelt, Biden's more immediate challenge lies in Europe. What's unalike is that Biden's resolve there — expressly, in Eastern Europe — could, perhaps, forestall a conflict in Asia, where China's aggressiveness is vastly incomparable to mid-20th-century Japan's. Today's resolve is tomorrow's deterrence. And so, for President Biden, the Russia-Ukraine conflict has taken center stage — with sudden, astonishing resolve. 

By that emphasis I mean the Pentagon's remarkably monitory press conference of yesterday, held hours after Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, virtually begged the United States to cease its amplifying warnings of a Russian invasion. The U.S. Defense Department's press timing was extraordinary. Although Zelensky had asked the U.S. to tone it down — all this talk of war in Ukraine — the Pentagon dialed it up.

"I think you’d have to go back quite a while to the Cold War days to see something of this magnitude," said the visibly alarmed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin surveyed Russia's "bristling array of ... combined arms formations, artillery and rockets assembled at the Ukrainian border," as the Times put it, which Austin himself described as "far and away exceed[ing] what we would typically see them do for exercises." Added the Pentagon's press secretary, John Kirby: "We continue to see ... more accumulation of credible combat forces arrayed by the Russians in, again, the western part of their country and in Belarus."

Unwarranted alarm? Hardly. Of particular worry to U.S. officials is that roughly 35,000 Americans are in Ukraine, with many residing in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital — a potential military target by Russia's unpredictable, possibly trigger-happy autocrat. Especially given the recent uproar over Americans "stranded" in Afghanistan, DefSec Austin was somewhat duty-bound to open the prospect of deploying U.S. troops to Ukraine, for Americans' evacuation. And God only knows would could ensue from there.

Any such scenario would not be by American choice, of course. But the scenario is, prospectively, a real one. And Americans at home deserve an awareness of the danger, beforehand. So when Ukrainian President Zelensky admonishes the U.S. for its ramifying talk of war — "In my opinion, this is a mistake," he complained — there can be little mistake that such talk is inescapable.

Zelensky's principal and understandable concern is that billions of foreign-investment dollars in Ukraine are drying up amid the potential of war. Yet his remarks, understandable as they may be, have also bolstered Russian propaganda: "The Americans have started to so blatantly and cynically use Ukraine against Russia that even the regime in Kyiv has become alarmed," said Putin's foreign minister yesterday. Could any development be stranger? Yes.

Taken together, circumstances in Eastern Europe present not only a triangular, but a quadrangular, mind-bending, nerve-racking puzzle. As the U.S., Russia and Ukraine each attempt to gain whatever advantage, with Zelensky attempting to stamp out even the talk of war, his own defense minister and a northernmost European neighbor are becoming increasingly, well, let's say, troubled.

Zelensky's defense minister? He has warned that Russia's military presence in Belarus could menace "all of Europe," while in one of NATO's Baltic states, Latvia, its foreign minister has come close to ringing the ultimate bell: "We are reaching the point where continuous Russian and Belarusian military buildup in Europe needs to be addressed by appropriate NATO countermeasures," he tweeted this week.

Alarm is spreading, and deepening. Eastern Europe is ground zero in the — for now, and let us hope it stays that way — ideological struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. Chances are, say military and foreign relations analysts, probably less than 50/50 that the struggle could turn hot. But hot it could indeed turn. And in that eventuality, President Biden would face Rooseveltian choices — and, one would also hope, Rooseveltian outcomes.

"A laptop to gunfight"?

Based on this morning's reporting — good or bad, depending on one's point of view — the Ukrainian journalist I quoted yesterday, Irena Yarosevych, of the pro-democracy English-language newspaper Kyiv Post, had Vladimir Putin pegged quite accurately.

The news is that Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, "suggested" today that, well, what do you know, "there may be room to negotiate with the United States on at least some [Ukrainian] issues" — possibly on the West's "missile deployments and military exercises" in Eastern Europe. The U.S.'s fresh negotiating position contains, in Lavrov's words, "a kernel of rationality." This kernel sprang from Putin's initial irrationalities; demands he knew would go nowhere, but one can always play a bad hand with a bluff.

[Update: I should add that the report quoted above was from the NY Times, whose take — initial take, anyway — was far more optimistic than the Washington Post's.] 

Channeling, perhaps, students of U.S.-Russian diplomatic history and the Cold War ghosts of the Eisenhower/Kennedy era — who would be less than shocked to hear that such "room" has suddenly become available — the Ukrainian journalist and Putin's psychoanalyst, so to speak, wrote this in a follow-up piece yesterday:

"Heaven knows the U.S. is not getting anything out of these talks underway in three European cities, nor is NATO getting anything, nor is Europe, and definitely not Ukraine. These entities are only at the table to give. As he takes, Putin is not giving anything other than the promise that he may not wreak havoc at a future date....

"Now that the adults are finally paying attention to him, he will offer to discuss with them options of how they can help him put out the fire that he started."

Sound familiar? It should. For Putin's tactical maneuvering has been akin to Trumpian tactics — and much, much worse than that. They are the rather reliable tactics of bigger, nastier bullies, demagogues and dictators with whom the world became acquainted over the past two centuries.

As Yarosevych previously noted: "[Putin is] hearing that there is no actual commitment of manpower from NATO," which has been key to his larger strategy. Observed Yarosevych, now he's "exploring what he can extort for a promise to not attack at all."

It may be that a new, revanchist Russian war in Ukraine has been averted (for now). In itself, that of course is good news. The bad news is that Vladimir appears to be only partially rational, what with his Stalin Complex and unhinged reveries of a Greater Russia and all. "Putin" — not Peter — "the Great." His unpredictability is wretchedly predictable, as is his utter indifference to human life.

"The big unknown is whether or not Putin is actually cruel and irrational enough to go ahead" with an insane war at some undetermined point, as Yarosevych mused. "While Putin may pay a price for beating the shit out of somebody," she continued, "he is the kind of guy who actually is willing to beat the shit out of somebody – the kind of action that repels civilized people."

Such, in general, are the bloody tactics of bullies, demagogues and Hitlerian dictators, which, to our eternal regret, we once dismissed as mere bluff. The eponymous autocrat was informed by knowledgeable advisors as early as 1941 that he could not win a European war; no way, no how, Germany would be doomed, it couldn't hold out, it hadn't the resources, they told him. Yet the dictator's irrationality, indifference to human life and iron hand prevailed. He was, indeed, "willing to beat the shit out of" a whole lot of people, whatever the price.

In confronting the ghoulish likes of a Vladimir Putin — as destined to doom, for sure, as some of his likeminded predecessors; after the squalid wreckage — I confess a certain, Audenesque turn to hardness. The British-American poet and philosopher (b. 1907) himself confessed a certain, erstwhile obliviousness to the seemingly otherworldly dangers of monomaniacal authoritarianism. Yet he came to see that "Evil is unspectacular and always human / And shares our bed and eats at our own table." His most memorable reflection was that which came belatedly, titled "September First, 1939":

More than ever
life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, loveable,
but we shan’t, not since Stalin and Hitler,
trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively,
all is possible.

It was, perhaps, with such sorrow and historical remembrance that the journalist Yarosevych remarked: "It feels as though the West is bringing a laptop to a gunfight." 

A Ukrainian perspective, from a Ukrainian journalist

I thought you'd be interested in what Ukrainian journalists, rather than those of the American sort, are saying about the current tensions — to understate matters — in their own backyard. To that purpose, here are parts of a lead opinion piece for the Ukrainian English-language newspaper Kyiv Post, a pro-West, pro-democracy outlet. The writer is Irena Yarosevych, an editor and journalist who also served as the foreign media liaison for Rukh, Ukraine's first opposition party under the Soviets.

Now that Putin has the attention of the West with his massive troop build up, before he actually begins military action, during the next few weeks he will attempt to extort (under the guise of negotiations) the West to meet some of his demands and see how much of Ukraine he can get without using bullets....

Putin has been building up for this fight, some say, to better judge the reaction and capabilities of the West. Reactions aside, in the end, you do not spend this kind of money and commit this amount of resources just to get attention. If he is going to back down, then he has to get something uber valuable in return. To date, in his opinion, there is nothing of value forthcoming either from the West, or from Ukraine. Quite the opposite. The West threatens economic stranglehold. Ukraine threatens not only hardware and fiercely committed, battle-trained soldiers, but volunteer insurgents to add to the resistance.

If Putin escalates the war, the West has promised to punish: sanctions, closure of bank accounts, denial of visas to Russians, force Russia out of SWIFT [an international system for money transfers], block needed imports, and send military aid to Ukraine.

However, Putin has been stashing billions into his war chest for years precisely to withstand such punishment.

As he sees it, he is not yet getting anything valuable in order to stay quiet; however, he is also hearing that there is no actual commitment of manpower from NATO. This is important to Putin. He is ... exploring what he can extort for a promise to not attack at all.

He is also trying to assess how much actual damage in terms of lives lost, loss of oligarch support, loss of popular support, loss of historical prestige he will suffer if his escalation plan does not go well – a multi faceted blitz shock and awe attack on Ukraine – land, water, air, cyber – is the most often predicted scenario. [Here, the author is in disagreement with most military opinion.]

To be clear, Putin does not want all of Ukraine, only the very valuable, mineral-rich, agriculturally bountiful eastern regions and warm water southern coastline. Just the good stuff. You can keep those scrappy little mountains in western Ukraine that always suffer from spring mudslides.

Yarosevych initially stresses that no potential military conflict exists between Russia and Ukraine. "Russia has ALREADY invaded Ukraine – in 2014 – and occupied 10% of Ukraine’s territory. Ukraine and Russia are ALREADY at war," she writes, which I found to be a useful reminder, since we in the West, especially, too often think merely of war's immanence. Also of interest is her concluding observation that Putin desires only a partial occupation of Ukraine — my first encounter with such an opinion.

She further enjoys spoofing Putin here and there: Putin as "the glory hound," keeping the Kremlin — as well as the world, we should note — "all atwitter" as he "glows from all the attention."

There's an additional passage in Yarosevych's post that deserves special attention. It's both biting and a bit humorous: "Putin soon will be a leader of a country that is fast becoming irrelevant to most nations of the world," she notes, "with the exception of Germany."

Ouch.

I can't know if Yarosevych had just read, as I had, the NY Times' latest story on Germany's recent, shall we say, diplomatic peculiarities. But her caustic remark mirrored the Times' reporting: "In recent days Germany ... has stood out more for what it will not do [for Ukraine] than for what it is doing.... Germany’s evident hesitation to take forceful measures has fueled doubts about its reliability as an ally" — a prospective Europe-shaking, NATO-shattering, Western-alliance nightmare. 

The nation's ruling Social Democratic Party (Chancellor Scholz's), Angela Merkel's formerly ruling Christian Democratic Union Party, even Germany's Green Party have coalesced into a kind of soft neutrality pact with Russia, and not only because of economic reasons. Ukrainian journalist Yarosevych has taken less than kindly to Germany's position, as, I imagine, most Ukrainians have.

And that's at least one win for Putin.

A push-pull argument on Western military involvement in Ukraine

I'm having a bit of trouble deciphering Bret Stephens' latest column — "Bring Back the Free Word" — which in large part I agree with. But some parts bewilder me. His gist:

The best short-term response to Putin’s threats is the one the Biden administration is at last beginning to consider: The permanent deployment, in large numbers, of U.S. forces to frontline NATO states, from Estonia to Romania. Arms shipments to Kyiv, which so far are being measured in pounds, not tons, need to become a full-scale airlift. NATO troops need not, and should not, fight for Ukraine. But the least we owe Ukrainians is to give them a margin of deterrence that comes with being armed before they are invaded, along with a realistic chance to fight for themselves.

The longer-term response is to restore the concept of the free world.

What’s meant by that term? It isn’t just a list of states that happen to be liberal democracies, some bound together by treaty alliances like NATO or regional trading blocs like the European Union.

The free world is the larger idea that the world’s democracies are bound by shared and foundational commitments to human freedom and dignity; that those commitments transcend politics and national boundaries; and that no free people can be indifferent to the fate of any other free people, because the enemy of any one democracy is ultimately the enemy to all the others. That was the central lesson of the 1930s, when democracies thought they could win peace for themselves at the expense of the freedom of others, only to learn the hard way that no such bargain was ever possible....

[I]t would be foolish to think that the loss of Ukraine would mean nothing to the future of freedom elsewhere, including in the United States.

Perhaps you share my bewilderment. He argues that "NATO troops need not, and should not, fight for Ukraine," as NATO fought for Afghanistan, since the 9/11 attack on the U.S. invoked NATO's Article 5 provision. So let us agree with Stephens on the inadvisability of NATO's military involvement in Ukraine, where no such Article 5 obligation would be in effect.

Yet Stephens then goes on — correctly, I think — to argue that "the free world is the larger idea that the world’s democracies are bound by shared and foundational commitments to human freedom and dignity; that those commitments transcend politics and national boundaries."

By "transcending" politics and national boundaries via "foundational commitments," Stephens thus confusingly readmits the advisability, or at least the acceptable possibility, of NATO's involvement, does he not?

Then, from Stephens, the even more bewildering kicker: "[I]t would be foolish to think that the loss of Ukraine would mean nothing to the future of freedom elsewhere, including in the United States."

Is that not a subtle exhortation for the U.S. — no matter what NATO does or doesn't do — to deploy troops in Ukraine? After all, if a Russian invasion threatens "the future of freedom" in the U.S., that, in itself, is something of a casus belli. (It's also something of an exaggeration, although a long-game argument could be made in its defense.)

And what are we to think of his incontestable assertion that "no free people can be indifferent to the fate of any other free people, because the enemy of any one democracy is ultimately the enemy to all the others"?  

My point, which may help to clear up my bewilderment, is this. Certain neocons of late, say, of the early Bush era, seem to be creeping with exceptional caution toward a vocal position of U.S. military involvement in Ukraine. But they were burned — and burned badly, in Iraq — so their advocacy is tepid, nearly indetectable.

I wonder, though, just how tepid it will remain, should Putin begin to make easy work with a Ukrainian invasion. (Which appears inevitable. Putin has labored for two decades to create "a far different fighting force" from that which once embarrassed Russia. He has "overhauled [it] into a modern sophisticated army, able to deploy quickly and with lethal effect in conventional conflicts.... It features precision-guided weaponry, a newly streamlined command structure and well-fed and professional soldiers.")

Given what I believe is Stephens' correct assessment of a needed reinvigoration of the free world, could the once-burned neocons, in this particular go-around, be right? It's a question on which I'm rather unsettled.

Unsettled, largely because of a haunting op-ed published three days ago by Fiona Hill, the Russia expert who testified so fluently at Trump's impeachment hearings. Wrote Hill: "This time, Mr. Putin’s aim is bigger than closing NATO’s 'open door' to Ukraine and taking more territory — he wants to evict the United States from Europe.... Mr. Putin plays a longer, strategic game and knows how to prevail in the tactical scrum. He has the United States right where he wants it.... Barring ill health, the United States will have to contend with him for years to come. Right now, all signs indicate that Mr. Putin will lock the United States into an endless tactical game, take more chunks out of Ukraine and exploit all the frictions and fractures in NATO and the European Union.... This saga could indeed mark the beginning of the end of America’s military presence in Europe."

And that takes us back to the cherished concept of the, of a, free world, one in which "democracies are bound by shared and foundational commitments to human freedom and dignity." But what, precisely, defines "commitment"? It's a hard question.    

Wow! Justice Breyer is leaving. Next up: McConnell's hijinks.

From Politico's Breaking News:

"The Supreme Court’s oldest member — Justice Stephen Breyer — plans to retire ... giving President Joe Biden his first, highly coveted opportunity to nominate a member of the nation’s top court."

The news of Breyer's retirement is a combination of both the expected and unexpected. For some time now he's been under immense pressure from assorted liberal camps to let loose of his seat, so that President Biden can nominate a rational human being to the Court before nature has its way, under less politically salubrious circumstances, with the 83-year-old justice. Yet Breyer has, till now, resisted liberal entreaties — and rather adamantly.

Politico notes that "Breyer’s resignation is welcome news for many Democrats and left-leaning attorneys," even though it's "unlikely to have a dramatic impact on the court’s decidedly conservative bent."

I doubt Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is comfortable with that "unlikelihood" prognosis. Biden's probable, young Black woman nominee "is very likely to serve for decades," adds the Times. McConnell knows that, just as McConnell knows that nature could also have its way with any right-winging justice at any time. Life is a crapshoot, as they say, and McConnell is no gambler. He's a fixer.

Thus time is of the greatest urgency for Senate Democrats. What hijinks might Mitch pull to delay, delay, delay the confirmation of Biden's nominee? This grimmest of reapers is full of surprises; this time, though, perhaps not that surprising. The midterms are coming up, so my guess is that he'll commence — or rather re-commence — outlandish complications by arguing that only the newly elected Senate should confirm a new justice.

You know, "the will of the people" and all those other Americanisms in which McConnell hasn't the faintest interest. Power, though, he's rather keen on.

***

In a lengthier update, the Times reports that "Republicans can take some steps to try to slow down the process ... including demanding that all members be physically present in the chamber to conduct business; forcing roll-call votes; and boycotting the Judiciary Committee vote to force the majority party to break Senate rules to advance the nominee. Those delay tactics could slow down the confirmation by a matter of hours or even days, but not block it."

That's an optimistic take on a Biden nomination — one I'm not sure of, not when contemplating the McConnell art of political shenanigans. (Democrats', too; just in another form: utter chaos.)

"McConnell did not weigh in on Wednesday with his views on the coming vacancy.... He said it was too early to know what his party’s response would be." Translation: He hasn't yet decided how to sabotage this thing.

One possibility: "Senate officials said the 11-11 split on the [Judiciary] panel because of the evenly divided Senate could create difficulties of its own and that research was already underway on how to address some potential problems, such as making sure Republicans are not able to block action by refusing to participate."

"The gloves should come off."

About Russia's potential invasion of Ukraine, there's a military parlor game going on. The Times reports that "most military analysts" seem to be in agreement that Putin would forego a Blitzkrieg strategy, which is somewhat akin to the more complicated Powell Doctrine — put simply, the immediate use of overwhelming force. "Rather, it would start with a more ambiguous, limited action," which "Moscow would use as justification for a wider intervention."

Putin's initial tack, then, would be  — or so it's assumed — more for propaganda than military-effectiveness purposes, even though the latter could be more than effective. As a former U.S. Marine and PhD candidate in Russian military affairs at London's King College notes, "If Russia really wants to unleash its conventional capabilities, they could inflict massive damage in a very short period of time. They can devastate the Ukrainian military in the east really quickly, within the first 30-40 minutes."

Ukraine's head of military intelligence, Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, is of similar mind. "There are not sufficient military resources for repelling a full-scale attack by Russia if it begins without the support of Western forces," says Budanov. His country's defenses would be "incapacitated ... very quickly," as the Times paraphrased his assessment. "His nightmare vision of a Russian invasion ... begin[s] with airstrikes and rocket attacks aimed initially at ammunition depots and trench-bound troops." Ukraine, concedes Budanov, "is outgunned on land, at sea and in the air."

On the other hand, "Ukraine’s military is not the pushover it once was," continues the Times. The country has fought Russia to a virtual stalemate in its eastern region, first with citizen fighters, then the Ukrainian military itself. But, without significant Western aid in war matériel and possibly manpower, a senior Ukrainian military official "said that if all else failed, the military would simply open its weapons depots and allow the Ukrainian people to take whatever they need to defend themselves and their families." The result: a long, bloody, even hand-to-hand conflict that could last for years.

Hence the need for Western military assistance. That too, however, could set a stage for nearly endless bloodshed.

In an op-ed for the Atlantic Council, Ukraine's former defense minister somewhat optimistically wrote that, along with Western aid, "by combining serving military units with combat veterans, reservists, territorial defense units and large numbers of volunteers, Ukraine can create tens of thousands of small and highly mobile groups capable of attacking Russian forces. This will make it virtually impossible for the Kremlin to establish any kind of administration over occupied areas or secure its lines of supply." True, perhaps, yet the bloodshed could go on, indefinitely.

It is this outcome — or rather, the lack of any decisive outcome — that the Biden administration has been trying to impress on President Putin. In December the administration began "signaling ... that even if [Russia] managed to swiftly capture territory, Mr. Putin would eventually find the costs of an invasion prohibitively expensive in terms of military losses."

Retired four-star Navy admiral James Stavridis compared what the U.S. could do in Ukraine to what it did in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 80s: arming and training the mujahedeen against the invading Soviets — which, ultimately, exhausted the Russians into withdrawal. Again, though, a long and bloody slog.

And Ukrainians might not even be up for a yearlong fight. Morale could decline rapidly, especially since Russian reprisals against insurgent acts could be "swift, direct and very brutal," as the Center for Strategic and International Studies' director put it.

All of which would seem to call for more urgency — more concrete urgency — on the administration's part.

I was struck by this comment from President Obama's deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, Evelyn Farkas. She lived through Putin's successful bullying in Crimea, which, of course, he hasn't ceased with respect to all of Ukraine. This time, said Farkas, "I think the gloves should come off."

The Doocy-Biden Moment. It gets worse.

You know the Doofusy background — As reporters were being herded out of the White House East Room, where President Biden was at the podium, "Fox News" correspondent Peter Doocy yelped out, "Would you take a question on inflation ... ? Do you think inflation is a political liability in the midterms?"

To which the president, shaking his head in near disbelief, replied: "It's a great asset — more inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch."

The president's sarcasm was both perfect and perfectly intoned, and his character assessment of Mr. Doocy — who seemed to think his question was brilliantly incisive — was, again, perfect.

I have heard such inane questions being thrown at U.S. presidents for decades. And for decades I have wondered, How does the president keep a straight face? How does he resist hurling sarcasm at the "inquiring" reporter? How can he possibly stop himself from observing — vocally — that the reporter is a stupid son of a bitch?

"Do you think inflation is a political liability?" was perhaps the Platonic Ideal of all such reportorial stupidities deserving of seething mockery. Indeed, watching the video replay this morning of the White House contretemps was a classic lesson in the understudied philosophy of Had Enough.

Still, Doocy's doofusness and Biden's derision were not what bubbled my red blood cells. It took CNN's online reporting of the "the incident" to do that. And what CNN did was this:

It reported that "the President has grown increasingly frustrated when facing tough questions publicly in recent days."

What an insipid assessment of Scoop Doocy's leading, answered-in-asking, freshman-class question, as well as that of President's Biden's reaction.

"Frustrated"? More like stunned by its stupidity.

But we can thank the heavens for Biden's hot mic. For now we know what every president has at least privately thought about such idiotic questions.

***

Update:

Putin, Europe, and the Evil of Banality

My earthly presence had not yet landed in the age of Alger Hiss, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Sen. McCarthy's wheeling around West Virginia and in general the whole Russkie menace, but Saturday's extraordinary unveiling by the British government of the Kremlin's Ukrainian cloaking, daggering and derring-do swept me up in a ghostly cloud of cold, postwar nostalgia.

A chilling nostalgia, actually — a search of lost time in which I never lived. Back then we had spy rings, iron curtains and rather unsettled "spheres" that kept the world edgy. Today, the spheres are more uncertain than ever, spy rings are again thriving — The Bear, say the Union Jack's spooks, is plotting a Ukrainian coup — and Vladimir P. is doing his damnedest to drop fresh, dreary, ferric curtains over much of Eastern Europe.

"Russia must ... end its campaigns of aggression," declared the U.K.'s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, via "an insight into Kremlin thinking." The U.S. happens to agree with Great Britain on Russia's thinking and aggressive meddling — i.e., Putin's coup designs for Kyiv — as does Ukrainian intelligence. Meanwhile, much notice had been taken, as they say, about Defence Secretary Ben Wallace's scathing op-ed in The Times of London, accusing Putin of mustering a series of "straw man" arguments against the West, what-what.

And straw man arguments they are. Granted, Britain's sudden, surprising and somewhat splashy intervention into the Russia-Ukraine affair is, politically and domestically speaking, frightfully suspicious. Boris Be in Big Trouble at home, as we know; all that unmasked Downing Street partying has settled rather unwell with the commoners ordered facially cloaked. As we also know, there's nothing quite like a foreign crisis to distract from such FUBARs. But domestic diversions do not, in themselves, invalidate the legitimacy of foreign crises. Russia's Putin is Soviet sleaze personified; he's grasping for straws — and from them, creating green-khakied little men.

More than a hundred thousand, in fact, nearly encircling Ukraine. He's infiltrating his sovereign neighbor with saboteurs who could trigger false-flag provocations — pretexts for a Russian invasion, says U.S. intelligence. His persistent demand that NATO return to the 1997 status quo ante is simply preposterous, as are his accusations of Western "hysteria." And as for Putin's November statement that "Russia cannot constantly be thinking about what could happen [in Eastern Europe] tomorrow" — that is, in terms of Russia's territorial security, as though NATO presents a military threat to the motherland — well, one is tempted to add laughter to the asininity of it all.

Tempted, perhaps, though Putin's sleaze is now more ominous than amusing. There's this abominable, inescapable truth from the NY Times of just two days ago: "Putin’s agenda would represent ... a return to Russian sway over much of Eastern and Central Europe." And, more prophetically than it was to be hoped, the Washington Post observed nearly three years ago that "the misdeeds of Putin’s regime pale in comparison to the scale of Stalin’s crimes. But increasingly, the Russian president is actively rehabilitating the Soviet dictator’s record."

Should you wish to mentally evoke what life would be like in Eastern or Central Europe under Putin's — which is to say, under a Stalinesque — "sway," I recommend (to use that tocsin word again) the chilling, 1953 nonfiction work, The Captive Mind, by Czesław Miłosz (pronounced 'chez-laa 'mee-wash). The Polish poet's principal critique was that of Eastern European life for intellectuals — i.e., the lives of thinkers, lives probably much like yours. Of course one must remember while reading Miłosz that he surveyed intellectual life under the sternest brutalities of actual Stalinism. Nevertheless, one is able to gather at least some notion of what an everyday, thinking existence would be like for Ukrainians under Putin's thumb.

"[The intellectual's] chief characteristic," wrote Miłosz, "is his fear of thinking for himself." An artistic colleague, a young Polish poet, once told him, "I can't write as I would like to.... I get halfway through a phrase, and already I submit it to [the regime's] criticism. I imagine what X or Y will say about it, and I change the ending." What I found to be The Captive Mind's most jarring passage was this: "The fact [is] that the capacity to follow the political line is a selective criterion by which the most mediocre often attain the greatest renown" (emphasis mine).

Such would be life within Vladimir Putin's would-be, sprawling "sphere" of totalitarian influence: The Evil of Banality.

The very thought of millions of lives thus subjected is heartbreaking — an inadequate description, to be sure. Also infuriating. So much so, I have found myself questioning the West's repeated vow to absolutely avoid any direct military involvement in Ukraine's defense against Putin's voracious, freedom-crushing, thought-policing Bear.

I ask, simply, Why? I appreciate the immense political, diplomatic, economic and military complexities entangled in such a venture. But if Ukrainians aren't worth the West's saving, who is? Who's next? Who's next, for instance, in President Xi's totalitarian sphere, egged on perhaps by Putin's ease in Ukraine? Is it really inconceivable that Russia's aggression in Ukraine may adversely affect the U.S.'s larger security interests?  

These questions are, I think, at least worth asking. Just asking. No, I haven't gone neocon on you, never will; it's just that the responses I have read in the press so far have been less than altogether convincing. What's not worth asking is if Republicans would accuse President Biden of creating a Boris-like distraction from his troubles at home. That, we know.  

I also ask because I think we'll be hearing that question a lot in the coming days. Just getting ahead of the curve. 

Be careful in what you read. Election subversion is no phantom threat.

Yesterday I once again encountered the insidiousness of conclusory reading obtained at the hands of subtle propagandistic writing. It came from Andrew Sullivan, who, in scoffing at Democrats' overreaction to Republicans' antidemocratic threats, wrote:

"Why have they wildly inflated the threat to election security and engaged in the disgusting demagoguery of calling this 'Jim Crow 2.0'? The WSJ this week tracked down various unsavory GOP bills to suppress or subvert voting in three states ... and found that they had already died in committee."

This is a much-favored trick by that particular publication. (By the way, it wasn't the Wall Street Journal that publicized the presumably deceased bills; it was the WSJ editorial board, which Sullivan failed to note — and that's one helluva distinction.) The Journal's editors are fond of braying about some abnormally offensive piece of Republican legislation that went nowhere, while citing unfounded, Democratic paranoia surrounding it. I'll give the editors credit for further observing, however, that the dead bills ["[don’t] mean legislators won’t call for overturning results after an election is over." Or, for that matter, that legislators won't try to revive the bills before the election is over.

I had already read of the election-subversion bills adduced by the Journal; bills that would allow state legislators to suddenly, single-handedly and shockingly throw out the will of voters, substituting the legislature's will in their place. And it's true that such bills, so far, are going nowhere. What the Journal, Sullivan and others forget or dismiss, though, is that election subversion is about much more than a state legislature deep-sixing an unwanted, popular vote. There are other means — lots of 'em — to achieve that partisan goal.

I consulted the latest, relevant entries from the Voting Rights Lab, whose reporting, unfortunately, is four months old. Nevertheless, here's what the Lab had found by late September. It's important to note that these are bills that states have enacted; they're not merely introduced or pending:

Georgia: "A provision in the omnibus election bill (S.B. 202) enacted in March would allow a partisan majority of the State Election Board to remove and replace local election administrators. The Board has already begun the process of taking over election administration in Fulton County, the state’s most populous and diverse county. Additionally, the law newly empowers the legislature to appoint the chair of the State Election Board, making a majority of the board beholden to partisan state legislators who have a clear interest in the outcome of elections and how they are administered. S.B. 202 also explicitly allows partisan actors to make unlimited frivolous challenges to voter qualifications, forcing counties to allow hundreds of thousands of voters’ registrations to be challenged wholesale."

Iowa: "A provision in the omnibus election bill enacted in March, S.F. 413, increases the Secretary of State’s oversight of local election officials during the 60 days before and after an election.... An omnibus election bill threatens election officials with felony prosecution for 'failing to perform election duties' and a misdemeanor for failing to conduct voter list maintenance as prescribed by law. The new law also permits the Secretary of State to impose fines against local election officials of up to $10,000 for each 'technical infraction' of the state’s election code."

Texas: "The recently-enacted election omnibus bill, S.B. 1 ... increases the likelihood of partisan poll watchers disrupting polling places and ballot verification and counting locations. The bill increased the ability of poll watchers to move freely throughout an election location, including areas containing voters waiting in line, checking in, or casting their ballots. Election judges may not remove disruptive poll watchers from election locations unless the judge first witnesses the poll watcher commit a violation of law, warns the poll watcher, and the watcher then commits a subsequent offense. Voters’ reports of harassment or intimidation by poll watchers, if not witnessed by election judges, will not be sufficient to remove poll watchers.... Local officials will also face greater oversight of registered voter list maintenance that includes the possibility of termination of their employment and civil penalties. Election judges who remove disruptive poll watchers contrary to new, specific requirements in S.B. 1 can also be subject to prosecution for a Class A misdemeanor.

Arizona: "A bill enacted in June threatens local officials with felony prosecution for providing mail ballots to voters who do not first request them."

Florida: "An omnibus election bill enacted in May imposes a $25,000 civil penalty on election supervisors who operate a ballot drop box contrary to statutory requirements."

Along with the exaggerated severity of fines, penalties and potential prosecution of poll workers contained in these enacted laws — all of which are meant, of course, to alienate nonpartisan workers — what's striking is the partisan interference permitted in both the run-up to elections and on Election Day itself.

In reading what is now permissible in various Republican-controlled states, one is reminded of those 19th-century days of corrupt urban machines harassing and intimidating voters into doing the partisan machine's will.

Today's in-place subversion stops only at outright ballot-box stuffing, though in the Age of Trump, neither is that out of the question. And, again, as for Republican state legislatures legalizing brazen election theft via the trashing of thousands of "fraudulent' ballots? There's still time.

A Democratic strategist takes progressives to the woodshed

​​​​After assessing the left's "ascendence" in the Democratic Party, ​political scientist Ruy Teixeira titles his analysis, "How Not to Build a Coalition." To borrow a succincter phrase from the author's overall assessment: "It's not a pretty picture."

Teixeira identifies "five key aspects" of what the left promised in its role as a, or the, major player in Democratic politics, and what actually ensued. I shall quote each promise as briefly framed by Teixeira, and then provide a synopsis of his arguments (one of which I disagree with).

"1. Turnout, turnout, turnout!" Progressives love to tout the fresh, young, minority masses who will show up on Election Day, largely because of the far-reaching policies promulgated by the left. To some degree this works. But it comes with a significant problem: The far-reaching progressive policies thus promulgated energize the other side as much if not more so. As Teixeira notes: "2020 ... was indeed a high turnout election," however everyone’s "turnout went up, including among groups the left would have preferred stayed home." Hence Democrats took a pounding in House and state legislative races. The old axiom holds: The other side gets a vote, too.

"2. 'People of Color'!" Here, there's little more than an assumption at work: that America's nonwhite population possesses an "unshakeable loyalty to the Democratic party and loathing for the Republican party." And in 2020, that assumption took a major hit. Although the left tied virtually all its proposals to what it saw as the overriding issue of systemic racism in America, the black Democratic vote dropped by 7 points from 2016, and a whopping 16 points among Hispanics. Shockingly, "nonwhite voters contributed less to Biden’s margin over Trump" — after four years of the racist clown, mind you — "than they did to Clinton’s margin over Trump in 2016." Concludes Teixeira: "The left’s recommended approach here is clearly not paying dividends. It should be discarded."

"3. Cultural Leftism Is a Winner!" For Teixeira, this key calling card is an especially intolerable humbug. The issue is tethered to #2 — that of an "increasingly multicultural, multiracial America," which, as noted, the left sees as wholly devoted to its side. Consequently, progressives have adopted "a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, schooling, free speech and of course race and gender that are quite far from those of the median voter" — in fact, I would add, quite far from those of the average Democratic voter. What's more, Teixeira observes that "it’s not just white voters who are put off by these cultural positions — the nonwhites in whose name many of these positions are adopted are not enthusiastic about them either."

The even bigger problem is the growing trend of nationalization of political races, which, however unfairly, identifies Democrats at all electoral levels with the cultural left. Teixeira's sensible, if understated, conclusion: "The logical response of a party to unpopular cultural positions that are hurting it electorally should be to moderate those positions."

"4. The Crisis of Democracy!" Here I'm at philosophical as well as practical odds with Teixeira. He argues that what is clearly the crisis of our time — Republican assaults on American democracy — is "another key link" in the left's "theory of [their] case" for ascendence, as though progressives are somehow unique in inveighing against creeping Trumpian anocracy. "[Their] approach is being repeatedly put to the test and repeatedly failing," he writes.

Such failure is unmistakable when perusing the trends of party self-identification, which, in the past year, have undergone a swing from a 9-point Democratic advantage to a Republican advantage of 5 points. It's also generally agreed that House Democrats will lose their majority in 2022, possibly in the Senate, too. Hence, failure there has been. Yet it is Teixeira's larger argument, I believe, that fails in its internal presentation:

"Most recently, Democrats, cheered on by the left of the party, pursued a doomed attempt to push extensive voting rights bills through the Senate, accompanied by a truly astonishing level of rhetoric on how only passage of the bills could save American democracy. This was all pursued despite an abundance of evidence that most voters, including nonwhite voters, were not particularly animated by the issue and the rather embarrassing fact that the bills would actually have done little to counter the threat of election subversion, the most common target of Democratic messaging. The signal failure of the crisis of democracy issue to galvanize voters to support Democrats is another example of an issue that obsesses the Democratic left but just does not build the electoral coalition their theory says it should."

Integral to Teixeira's criticism is that the left has overemphasized threats to voting rights as opposed to the far greater threat of election subversion. This is true — sadly, bewilderingly, unmistakably true. I'm a trifle unclear on his remark that election subversion is "the most common target of Democratic messaging," however. Which Democrats? Plus, has subversion actually been the party's "most common target"? I'd say no. And that, again, can justifiably be laid at the feet of progressives' outsized, over-influential pushback against voter suppression, as Teixeira critically notes.

Where I philosophically and pragmatically disagree with Teixeira (I think?) is on the proper emphasis of election subversion in upcoming elections — if in fact (and I'm not sure it is a fact) he is including subversion as a losing issue. In a separate post, he reiterates that "the real threat is not how easy or hard it is to vote but rather in certifying the results of the voting process." Correct. Yet I'm thrown into confusion by his sweeping charge that "the signal failure of the crisis of democracy issue to galvanize voters to support Democrats is another example of an issue that obsesses the Democratic left but just does not build the electoral coalition their theory says it should."

First, this is not an issue exclusively obsessed over by the left. Nearly all Democrats and more than a few independents are obsessed by it, and rightly so. Of vaster criticality, though, is that this is a test, as they say: It's a test of the American democratic tradition at large — and therefore it is an issue that must be tested front and center, whether or not voters are ultimately "galvanized" by it.

President Lincoln faced similar tests, with no guarantee of favorable results: first, that of the sanctity of the Union; then, the evils of slavery. It was do or die. Today we gaze into the loaded barrels of Trumpism, and again, it's do or die.

"5. It’s Transformation Time!" Teixeira's fifth objection can be swiftly dispatched to familiarity. "Any reasonably clear-eyed look at the election strongly indicated that Biden was elected to get the country back to normal by containing the covid pandemic and fixing the economy," he writes. "But the need to barrel ahead with transformation was pushed consistently by the Democratic party left — pushed in fact to the point of collapse in 2021." We needn't add more about the left's delay of infrastructure, Build Back Better's mayhem, progressives' utter incomprehension of "the limitations of a narrowly divided Congress" and the now-appreciated consensus on a lost "normalcy." Some of this criticism is, for sure, hindsight. The everyday outcome, though, was that "this was a terrible look for the Democrats, making them seem out of touch with the country and ordinary voters."

Mr. Teixeira's final words: "The left’s theory of the case now lies in ruins and it is up to Democrats to come up with a theory of the case that gives them a fighting chance of staving off disaster."

Which allows me yet another shot at advancing this prudent, though vastly improbable, alternative Democratic theory, which I propose (as I must always remind readers) as a democratic socialist myself: In purple and center-right districts and states, Democratic pols would do well to position themselves as America's true conservatives; not in the sense of Reaganites or Romneyites, for heaven's sake, but in this sense of their party as singularly upholding the best of America's conservative traditions — of democracy, the rule of law, belief in truths and the virtues of constitutional intents.

At long last: the breakup of BBB?

The most encouraging news I read while sojourning in Seattle — which was wonderful, by the way — was that Democrats are finally strategizing a breakup of the Build Back Better plan. Some Democrats, that is. But with President Biden's endorsement of the idea in his press conference yesterday, which I listened to on my way back from the airport, momentum would seem to be on the side of severing the bill.

The push is coming from House moderates, who, understandably, are the members most worried about reelection. They're known as "front-liners" since their seats are the ones which determine which party is in control. Their plan for busting up BBB is, therefore, a logical midterm strategy: It would take portions of BBB and attempt to pass them individually throughout an election year — each portion of which is popular with the public, such as universal pre-K and the childcare tax credit.

"We have to do something," said one front-liner aide to the Washington Post: "something to run on." Insert here, "Well, duh."

Which is what makes resistance to the plan from House leadership, so far, so baffling — or, perhaps I should say instead, frustrating. Reported the Post: "The tension [over the moderates' plan] was surfaced in a meeting early this month with House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer.... Members pushed back when Hoyer, reflecting the continued view of House leadership, argued that breaking up the spending bill would mean abandoning the potentially transformative giant package, which he said still has a chance of passage."

Was that a joke? In a way it was, for what Hoyer's position reflected was, undoubtedly, immense, internal resistance from the progressive caucus, which simply dislikes any plan to which the words "giant" and "transformative" are unattached — though there ain't a chance in hell that anything close to the original or even modified BBB "still has a chance of passage." But they've an image to maintain before their own voters. Even Speaker Pelosi has been captive to such majority-destructive thinking: "[Front-line] aides described Pelosi as 'receptive' to their concerns but did not make any promises on what the House will focus on in the coming months."

That, however, may be old news by the time of this writing. As noted, Biden, in yesterday's press conference, seemed to accept the inevitability of a BBB breakup. (The White House may also regret having rejected Sen. Manchin's $1.8t counterproposal — rejected for its lack of a child tax credit — and now just wants to move on with something, anything.)

Granted, if House moderates get their way, we'll still be looking at Republican filibusters — the Death Star of all legislative progress, and, possibly, American democracy itself. But, bill after labored bill, Democrats will at least be trying, which is something to show voters. 

WHY is America falling apart at the seams?

NY Times political columnist David Brooks, who doubles as the paper's lay sociologist, wrote a piece last week whose headline was as jarring as it was suspiciously accurate: "America Is Falling Apart at the Seams."

I say suspiciously (or troublingly) accurate, since Brooks arrived at his general, headlined conclusion inductively. That is to say, his argumentation's parts fail to justify the whole, yet the whole of his argument seems pretty much undeniable.

America is falling apart, it's in a clinical funk, something or somethings are terribly, terribly wrong, out of kilter, discombobulated and all that. Brooks-colleague Bret Stephens was as "struck" as I was by his column, which Stephens summarized as a "catalog[uing of] all the ways in which socially destructive behavior has been on the rise: reckless driving, hate crimes, drug overdoses, homicides, you name it."

Stephens added that "obviously the pandemic has a lot to do with this, but there’s got to be more at work here." Indeed, because just as obvious is that upticks in the number of reckless driving cases or even homicides are scarcely signboards of an entire nation unraveling. Nevertheless, it is.

The pandemic aside, then, what else can we blame? Or, rather, should we blame? One quite popular contestant in the blame game is social media, which Brooks cited, as did Stephens and yet a third Times columnist, Gail Collins, who also entered the America-is-falling-apart fray. Any precise or even rough measurability of social media's malign influence is an impossibility, though.

In fact, a guess is as good as a statistic. SocialMediaToday.com reported in Jan. 2021 that "the latest data from Pew Research ... [showed] around 71% of people now get at least some of their news input from social media platforms." Yet Pew Research itself reported in 2020 that only 18% of Americans "rely primarily on social media for news." The spectrum its wide, interpretive, shifting and muddled.

Brooks then mentioned — and I do mean mentioned — the influence of "rotten politics," noting that "when President Donald Trump signaled it was OK to hate marginalized groups, a lot of people were bound to see that as permission" for wretched behavior.

There he left it. There, however, is where Brooks should have begun. And continued. And finished.

The least readable, most amateurish volume ever penned by the otherwise enchanting Christopher Hitchens was God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I shall trouble you not on its unreadably amateurish specifics. But Hitch provided us with a magnificent subtitle, which is also conveniently malleable: i.e., How Trump Poisons Everything. How Trump Poisoned Everything. How Trump is Still Poisoning Everything.

That one man — that loathsome creature, that ghoulish Philistine, that squalid, grotesque figure of inhuman turpitude — poisoned America. He poisoned it prior to 2016, he poisoned it in 2016, he poisoned it for four ghastly years in the White House, and he's still at it, poisoning every vulnerable artery and vein of American civilization.

While it's true that Trump was, and is, merely a symptom of the Republican Party's gathering historical rot, he alone deracinated the GOP from every last vestigial grounding of its politico-ethical decencies. He murdered Burke's shadow, killed Eisenhower and finished off Dirksen. He created the Frankensteinian hobgoblins of Kevin McCarthy and Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis. In so doing he catastrophically poisoned not only the party but nearly half of America's minds — which the other half must daily endure.

It's the longest of Rumsfeldian slogs, this foul, fetid, American captivity of the poisonous Trump Era. Columnist Brooks winced under the oppressive stench of it all, without ever recognizing the hovering face of the rancid beast. "What the hell is going on?" he asked. "The short answer: I don’t know," he wrote. "As a columnist, I’m supposed to have some answers. But I just don’t right now."

Mr. Brooks, take another look around. The cause of America's hell is all too obvious.

Communist chic?

One of my favored landmarks in Seattle — favored because it's kitschy, not commie.

From Wikipedia (sorry for all the included, cluttering links):

"The Statue of Lenin is a 16 ft (5 m) bronze statue of Russian Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, United States. It was created by Bulgarian-born Slovak sculptor Emil Venkov and initially put on display in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in 1988, the year before the Velvet Revolution. In 1993, the statue was bought by an American who had found it lying in a scrapyard. He brought it home with him to Washington state but died before he could carry out his plans for formally displaying it.

"Since 1995, the statue has been held in trust waiting for a buyer, standing on temporary display for the last 27 years on a prominent street corner in Fremont. It has become a local landmark, frequently being either decorated or vandalized. The statue has sparked political controversy, including criticism for being communist chic and not taking the historic meaning of Lenin and communism seriously (or taking it too seriously), or by comparing the purported acceptance of such a charged political symbol to the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials. Much of the debate ignores the statue's private ownership and installation on private property, with the public and government having virtually no say in the matter."

I for one see no conflict in permitting Vladimir to stand while toppling Robert E. What I do see when passing by the statue are giggles or gawks from onlookers, nothing more. And most of the gawkers probably possess as little comprehension of who Vladimir Lenin was than they do General Lee. Such is the deplorable state of historical knowledge among Americans. Not that we as a nation are unique in our ignorance. I recently heard that eminent scholar of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts, mention on C-Span that 15 percent of Britain's high school students think Winston Churchill was a fictional character.