Yesterday, Sen. Rand Paul made an Elmer Fudd Looney Tunes point in committee session while adding that he wasn't actually making the point. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was understandably shocked by Paul's fatuity, while leaving the rest of us just as shocked.
"The countries that have been attacked, Georgia and Ukraine, were part of the Soviet Union ... since the 1920s," observed the senatorial international relations expert. (Film follows, below.) Blinken then attempted to educate Paul on the elementary facts of unacceptable international misbehavior, which, also in fact, even an elementary school student could understand without being so instructed.
The senator was clearly defending Vladimir Putin's revanchist aggression and inexpressible atrocities in Ukraine. He did so, one gathers, because Donald Trump is a pal of the autocratic mass murderer. After all, said Trump less than one month into his one, wildly corrupt, unspeakably ignorant term: "There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?"
Hence Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia were just everyday parts of the globe's mainstream conduct; even the oft-sainted U.S. goes around slaughtering thousands of innocent foreigners, don't you know. Why all the fuss about Putin's Russia? It's no worse than Paul's America today.
You may recall when American conservatives extolled America as God's blessed gift to the world; it is, and always has been, they argued, a glorious beacon of liberty, human rights and religious freedom. Theirs was as one-dimensional and foolishly simplistic as any American-exceptionalist argument, and yet, like most argumentative oddities, there was some truth in it.
Far-right pseudoconservatives such as the roundly disgraced Donald Trump and benighted Rand Paul have merely taken the argument and — on good buddy Russia's behalf — turned it on its head.
The logical conclusion? The United Kingdom has every right to reclaim its former outposts, those rebellious united states, violently if necessary. After all, America was once part of Great Britain.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): “The countries that have been attacked, Georgia and Ukraine, were part of the Soviet Union ... since the 1920s.”
— The Recount (@therecount) April 26, 2022
Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “That does not give Russia the right to attack them.” pic.twitter.com/jnlRP6wAsN