Here are both Senator Mike Lee and a former Trump Administration employee falling for a truncated video that appears to show Volodomyr Zelenskyy suggesting that US troops would defend Ukraine. The expanded version is Zelenskyy's opinion that if Russia is not stopped at Ukraine, then they will encroach NATO space and once NATO Article 5 is in effect, the conflict we've been dreading will come to pass. The lack of context is significant, and that these two individuals went with the outrage instead of exploring the context first, tells me a lot about what I dread from social media-oriented foreign policy.Zelensky has no right to presume that our sons and daughters will fight his war. Shame on him. We’ve somehow sent the message that we work for him. Shame on us! https://t.co/l84guBiIsk
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) March 1, 2023
It's bad enough that US foreign policy has become subject to the election cycle, partisanship, and the willingness of ambitious tools to subordinate the long-term interests of this country to their own short-term desire to be seen as standing up to the Administration of the opposite party. If people--responsible people with actual jobs making decisions about our foreign policy, can so easily fall for an outrage-farming post, I'm just sick inside.
Sen. Lee is calling himself "Based" in his personal Twitter handle, but he's got severe "Ok, Boomer" energy if he can't figure out when he's being played by an inauthentic clip. And he's not alone, but I'm going to pick on him, because he earns it by trying to do foreign policy by Twitter in not just this but other instances. You whinge on Twitter because you can't get hold of customer service for your three year old washer/dryer. You do not complain about US citizens held abroad by foreign nations on Twitter--you figure out a backchannel. It's just bush league and embarrassing.
Zelenskyy was talking about a very real hypothetical, which our distance has insulated many opinion-makers from--where does Putin go if Ukraine falls? Where is he trying to cause a situation outside of Ukraine even now--like Moldova?
Rational actors in Europe have embraced NATO because they are looking right at what Putin is doing and understand what he means to do. We need to recognize this is not a drill nor a Dril post, this is real life. We have a possible lunatic with nukes and a pitiable economy looking to expand his influence--
Do you kneel to a second-rate power, or do you stand up for Democracy and freedom?
I think some people who would abandon Ukraine are fine with a little kneeling. And they will do so with little more than a dubious text message of "RU up?"
Pathetic.
UPDATE: See Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis for who wants to run on appeasement and being the US's Neville Chamberlain. Except probably worse because they might be competing for Putin's own Celebrity White House Apprentice.
3 comments:
I would suggest that Mike Lee given his track record with Russia did not fall for a fake video but pushed the narrative knowing full well the video was false.
It feels coordinated--Monica Crowley Tweeted something to the effect of her sons shouldn't go to fight in Ukraine (well no, we have a volunteer military and are not under Article 5, etc, but then again, this is the dipshit who said the Berlin wall was proof Trump was on the right track because "walls work!" (Gruss Gott im Himmel, has she got some shit very historically wrong there). And Marjorie Taylor Greene pushed this same fake news at CPAC.
The inauthentic post and its dissemination feel like cover for some GOP people to do Russia's dirty work in abandoning a western nation and ally and to pretend Russia is somehow not the bad guy here. Russia is very much the bad guy.
I am disgusted with them for this. Is it oligarch money? The promise of an insular Christian Nationalist isolationist fiefdom? How is anything supporting Russia's human rights abuses okay with so-called Christians--just because he mouths rubbish about being anti-gay and anti-trans and some utter crap about how he supports nuclear families and so on?
They want to believe, and that is disgraceful. They want to hate their neighbor so badly they would sell out their allies--and they would sell out their country and don't even understand that yet. Like stupid babies. They are given a cookie for their tantrums by Putin and would burn their own house down for another.
"He" being Putin, above. And the fucked up thing is, it could actually just be GOP needs to be opposite of whatever Democrats stand for. For no good reason other than that's where their rhetoric has left them and what their electorate expects. And they don't know how to reverse that thing and just ever do bipartisan "because it's right" stuff again.
Post a Comment