More Billions for Ukraine! Israel Too!
Democrats and Their Love of War
Joe Biden and the Democrats are fighting tooth-and-nail for more than $60 billion for Ukraine to further its war with Russia. If only they fought with the same tenacity to help the homeless and mentally ill in America.
According to Heather Cox Richardson:
Funding Ukraine is popular in the U.S., even among a majority of non-MAGA Republicans. Americans recognize that Ukraine’s forces are not simply defending their sovereign territory, they are defending the rules-based international order that protects the United States. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is trying to destroy that order, replacing it with the idea that bigger countries can conquer smaller countries at will.
Meanwhile, at the New York Times, Julian Barnes had this to say about Ukraine:
If the proposed $60 billion U.S. aid package ever comes through, it could enable more audacious Ukrainian strikes behind Russian lines — the kinds of operations that keep Moscow off balance.
The money from Congress, in short, could be the difference between a bad deal and a better one. Having it would strengthen Ukraine’s hand at the negotiating table. Without it, Putin may prove right in his theory that he can outlast the West.
So, America needs to send another $60 billion plus to Ukraine so that maybe Zelensky could have a stronger bargaining position vis-a-vis Putin and the Russians. Makes perfect sense to me.
I cite Richardson above because her posts seem to reflect the conventional wisdom of the Democratic Party. She claims without evidence that funding war in Ukraine is “popular” among Americans and that by sending billions in weaponry there, America is actually defending itself and the mythical “rules-based international order.”
She’s apparently never heard of the folly of throwing good money after bad.
She’s not alone here. Senator Chuck Schumer is on record as saying that without the “investment” of another $60 billion in Ukraine, U.S. troops will soon be fighting their Russian counterparts in Eastern Europe. Thus the only way to prevent this war is to fund more war and sacrifice tens of thousands of additional Ukrainian troops.
Well, thank goodness for Ukraine, else America would already be fighting Russia in World War III.
I remember a time when the Democratic Party was skeptical of war, even anti-war when Senator George McGovern ran for the presidency in 1972. Those days are long gone. Today’s Democratic leaders are even more devoted to war than their Republican counterparts.
Certainly this is true of Joe Biden’s tight embrace and full support of Israel’s war of annihilation against Gaza. Under the same bill proposed by the Senate, Israel is set to receive another $15 billion or so in military aid toward its genocide-in-slow-motion in Gaza.
Joe Biden is merely a figurehead on the warship that is the United States of America.
The war machine in this country is led by a coalition of liberal hawks and neocons. The liberal hawks are mainly Democratic Party politicians such as Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer. They tend to be "liberal" on domestic issues but rabid war mongers in foreign policy. The neocons are mostly GOP politicians, such as Lindsey Graham, John Bolton, and Tom Cotton, who try to outdo the liberal hawks in the Democratic Party in their rabid war mongering. The liberal hawks tend to focus on Russia, the neocons on China. They all share in common an addiction to militarism and US global hegemony as well as total allegiance to the military-industrial complex and endless war making. Sociopaths and psychopaths one and all.
Genocide Joe already has the Ray-bans, Mr. Astore. Heather Cox Richardson and Julian Barnes expose themselves as toxic morons. I guess that neither of them has any difficulty getting along from month to month like so many Americans; so, sure, go ahead and spend that 60 billion on the Ukraine war and to hell with Americans. Senator Chuck Schumer is an egregious, scheming son-of-a-bitch rather than a moron. (He may possibly lack intelligence, but he's chock full of low cunning.) He thinks of that 60 billion as campaign money to keep him in office and get Genocide Joe get reelected so that they can all go on feeding at the trough. I think, to edit Heather Cox's idiotic sentence, that "Americans are coming to recognize that Ukraine’s forces are being used as cannon fodder and that American and EU support are not benefiting Ukrainians in any way—quite the reverse—in defending the 'rules-based international order' that the United States attempts to use for global dominance and most especially to 'hurt Russia'". I even think that the demonization of Putin has finally run up against a brick wall, and that many Americans have concluded that Putin is actually a more benign—and certainly a much more competent—leader than anyone in the US political élites or in the EU (which has somehow morphed into NATO) "leadership". Most of the 60 billion, if paid, will go he military-industrial-congressional complex (to which Senator Chuck Schumer belongs; he'll get his cut) and the left-overs into the pockets of Zalenskyy and his cronies. I highly recommend the books Putin, Game Master? and Operation Z, both published by Max Milo, Paris, 2022 and written by Jacques Baud, who was formerly a member of the Swiss Strategic Intelligence, a specialist in Eastern Europe and head of the UN peace operations doctrine. He was also a NATO insider, followed the Ukrainian crisis of 2014 and participated in the assistance programs for Ukraine. These books provide the best exposure of "the narrative" that all of the corporate media are dedicated to defend to the hilt (since that's what they get paid for). If you can, read Baud's books in French, which is his native language and which he writes well. The English-language editions (self-translated, as far as I can make out) are loaded with weird typos and malapropisms that you have to skirt around. No matter. It's the bees knees. Why anyone at all goes on listening to Richardson, Barnes, and Schumer and their ilk is beyond me, and it's liable to cost those who listen 60 billion bucks (and doubtless more later) . . . for nothing but the slaughter of Ukrainian soldiers (mean age now about 55) and the utter destruction of Ukraine. If someone supports that, don't let them get away with saying that they are "standing with Ukraine", which is about as far from the truth as one can get. They are standing with war profiteers and greedy, evil politicians with no morals whatsoever but very, very receptive pockets. (These people are criminally complicit in genocide as well, as may be proven in the not-too-distant future, if we're lucky.)