excerpts
"The Smart Guys from the Meritocracy -- J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Tucker Carlson, et al. -- have all leaped into the arms of a Russian autocrat hell-bent on realigning the entirety of Europe in his image. They engage in endless moral panics over immigrants, Muslims, "duh Chinese Communist Party" -- and laugh off Putin's unjustified, illegal, and brutal campaign of war crimes and the deliberate targeting of civilians."
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"These are not serious people.
They are not moral people. They are the Guilty Men of our era, more morally culpable than Chamberlain, Halifax, and the rest of pacifist magical thinkers in the days before World War II.
The entire charade of elaborate maneuvers in Washington in the last few weeks over the border issue has resolved down to a single cause: the desire by a meaningful and growing fraction of the Republican party to ensure Vladimir Putin's victory in Ukraine."
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"I was baffled by it for a while, wondering if the fever would break, but these days, if you place your bets on the fever never breaking and Republicans doing the worst possible thing for America and the world, you're always much better off.
Republicans in Washington have embraced Trumpism, Putinism, and the rest of the slurry of autocratic tendencies across the globe, from Orban to MBS.
Putin cannot believe his good fortune; he desperately wants Trump back if office, but in the meantime, owning the Republican party is getting him more leverage than he ever imagined."
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The America Firsters today are the same as the ones in the 1930s who would have stood and watched as the Axis Powers took control of the rest of the world.... and then came for the USA.
FDR, and those like him, are the only reason we aren't all speaking German here today.