It's Not That Complicated to Say Putin Is a Bad Guy

It's easy to laugh at a United States senator who thinks Russia is a Communist state invading Ukraine to supply the Soviet bread lines. When you hire a football coach to help provide oversight of foreign policy, you get what you get. And besides, Tommy Tuberville probably represents a significant chunk of Americans with this. It's not so much that people are unaware the Soviet Union fell in 1990. It's that many people seem to think Communism and/or socialism are defined as "things I do not like." Putin's problem is that he did a Green New Deal, or whatever.

And more to the point, Senator Tuberville may well be preferable to the faction on the American right that feted Vladimir Putin for weeks, months, and years as a Big Strong Macho Man who makes them feel all tingly. This is longstanding. When Barack Obama was president, the folks over at Fox News were openly saying they wished Vlad was their dad because he rides a horse shirtless. Some of this continues to this day, as right-wing luminaries proclaim their preference for a dictator over their fellow citizens in a different political party. Or, in the case of former Secretary of State(!) Mike Pompeo, it involves some pathetic revisionism with an added dollop of...anti-Communist freedom-fighting?

Good on NBC's Vaughn Hillyard for pressing the issue here, but a man of Pompeo's elastic spine was never going to admit that praising Putin right before he invaded a peaceful sovereign nation next door was maybe a bad move for an American statesman. (It might remind you of the time he joked about a "smooth transition to a second Trump administration" in the period between when his boss lost the election and when his boss summoned a mob to attack the national legislature as part of a wide-ranging campaign to overturn the results.) I'm fighting Communism, the former chief diplomat of the United States suggested, the kind of statement that is so stupid in this context it might just work by shutting the listener's brain down. The absolute disdain Pompeo has for the listening audience, his willingness to insult our intelligence with this crap, ought to matter in his inevitable presidential run. It will not.

Speaking of which, his former boss—the guy who tried to, in essence, stuff the ballot box in Georgia—also has had relentless praise for his good friend Vlad, who could have offered him a few tips on the stuffing. Donald Trump remains the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, and he's spent the last few weeks lavishly praising the dictator who's currently ransacking a peaceful neighbor. Putin is "pretty smart," Trump told a bunch of donor vampires in Florida on Wednesday. As the New York Times slyly pointed out, it sounded like he was assessing a massive invasion that will kill countless innocent people as a real-estate deal. "He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions," he said, "really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people—and just walking right in." It brings to mind his assessment of North Korea's beaches, and also everything else he's ever said about Putin, for whom he's never had a single bad word.

The Liberal Media got out over its skis in some quarters around some secret spy relationship between the two of them, but the fact is they have been marching in lockstep for years now because their incentives are aligned. (Trump did oppose the Nord Stream 2 pipeline publicly, but it's not clear that his intent was to blunt Russia's aims with it.) At no point have human rights—or really basic empathy—entered into the equation for Trump, an emotional cripple bred to recognize strength as an all-encompassing virtue. Also, he is incurably greedy. He and Putin are perfect bedfellows, and he would continue praising ol' Vlad if he marched on Paris. It is astonishing, sometimes, to gaze into this abyss, a kind of wormhole they'd like to drag us all down until we come out the other side in the Dark Ages of might is right. If you are an American who believes anything you say you do about this country, this man and his every public utterance about a dictator who murders people who speak out against him, who has all but outlawed public protest, ought to register nothing but disgust.

Whoops, got a bit sidetracked there. Because there are still more versions of the coward's two-step on this. Take Marco Rubio, a self-styled Russia hawk who relentlessly supported Donald Trump. "The one thing I think everyone can agree upon is that the people of Ukraine are inspiring to the world," the Florida senator told CPAC, as recorded by the WaPo's Dave Weigel. "These are people saying, we refuse to be Putin's slaves." Can we all agree on that? It seems like plenty of Rubio's political bedfellows aren't thinking about the Ukrainian people at all. And speaking of which, again, Rubio relentlessly supported Donald Trump, who betrayed our commitments to the Ukrainian people while attempting to extort their democratically elected president for Trump's own personal political gain here at home. (That entire fiasco was also a boon to Russia.) Rubio voted against his impeachment for that, and he will support Trump if he takes the nomination in 2024.

But they all pale in comparison to the grandaddy of 'em all, the heir to a frozen-food fortune who traded in his bowtie for an extra layer of smarmy dickitude.

No wonder they ran this guy's stuff on Russian state TV with subtitles. Thank you for your service, Tucker. It's hard to pick out any one moment of the last half-decade, but this does feel like the week in which many people proved themselves completely irredeemable. The Carlson monologue that the Russians liked so much saw him boil down this whole thing to people's supposed personal hatred of Putin. Tucker doesn't hate Putin, you see, because Putin has never called him a racist, which is the worst thing that could ever happen. Worse than a bomb crashing into your apartment, presumably. Carlson has now changed his tune. Maybe he thought that Putin's behavior, like his own, was only ever a show for the cameras.

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