From the New York Times, March 14, 2024
Schumer Urges New Leadership in Israel, Calling Netanyahu an Obstacle to Peace
By Annie Karni Reporting from Washington
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, on Thursday delivered a pointed speech on the Senate floor excoriating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as a major obstacle to peace in the Middle East and calling for new leadership in Israel, five months into the war.
Many Democratic lawmakers have condemned Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership and his right-wing governing coalition, and President Biden has even criticized the Israeli military’s offensive in Gaza as “over the top.” But Mr. Schumer’s speech amounted to the sharpest critique yet from a senior American elected official — effectively urging Israelis to replace Mr. Netanyahu.
“I believe in his heart, his highest priority is the security of Israel,” said Mr. Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States. “However, I also believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”
Mr. Schumer added: “He has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”
The speech was the latest reflection of the growing dissatisfaction among Democrats, particularly progressives, with Israel’s conduct of the war and its toll on Palestinian civilians, which has created a strategic and political dilemma for Mr. Biden. Republicans have tried to capitalize on that dynamic for electoral advantage, hugging Mr. Netanyahu closer as Democrats repudiate him.
In response to Mr. Schumer, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said on the Senate floor that it was “grotesque and hypocritical” for Americans “who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of the democratically elected leader of Israel.” He called the move “unprecedented.”
“The Democratic Party doesn’t have an anti-Bibi problem,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “It has an anti-Israel problem.” House Republicans, gathered in West Virginia for a party retreat, hastily called a news conference to attack Mr. Schumer for his comments and position themselves as the true friends of Israel in Congress.
Mr. Schumer’s remarks came a day after Senate Republicans invited Mr. Netanyahu to speak as their special guest at a party retreat in Washington. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, asked Mr. Netanyahu to address Republicans virtually, but he could not appear because of a last-minute scheduling conflict. Ambassador Michael Herzog, Israel’s envoy to the United States, spoke in his place and also addressed the House G.O.P. gathering on Thursday.
In his speech at the Capitol, Mr. Schumer, who represents a state with more than 20 percent of the country’s Jewish population, was careful to assert that he was not trying to dictate any electoral outcome in Israel. He prefaced his harsh criticism of Mr. Netanyahu with a long defense of the country, which he said American Jews “love in our bones.”
Mr. Schumer said there had been an “inaccurate perception” of the war that lays too much blame on Israel for civilian deaths in Gaza without focusing enough on how Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. And he acknowledged how difficult it was for traumatized Israelis to contemplate the possibility of a two-state solution at this time.
But he was unsparing in his criticism of Mr. Netanyahu, calling the prime minister one of the top obstacles to achieving peace in the Middle East, along with Hamas, “radical right-wing Israelis” and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, who he also said should be replaced.
“The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after Oct. 7,” Mr. Schumer said, referring to the day of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. “The world has changed — radically — since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.”
Mr. Schumer said the only solution to the decades-old conflict was a two-state solution: “a demilitarized Palestinian state living side by side with Israel in equal measures of peace, security, prosperity and dignity.” He said Mr. Netanyahu, who has rejected the idea of Palestinian statehood, was jeopardizing Israel’s future.
At this critical juncture, I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel, at a time when so many Israelis have lost their confidence in the vision and direction of their government,” Mr. Schumer said, adding that he believed a majority of the Israeli public “will recognize the need for change.”
“As a democracy, Israel has the right to choose its own leaders, and we should let the chips fall where they may,” he said. “But the important thing is that Israelis are given a choice. There needs to be a fresh debate about the future of Israel after Oct. 7.”
Mr. Schumer’s speech was the second time since Oct. 7 that he has taken to the Senate floor to address the Israeli-Hamas war. The conflict has prompted him to think more deeply and speak more openly about his Jewish faith and heritage, as well as the moral and political dilemmas the war has presented for Jews in Israel and the United States.
In November, Mr. Schumer made a deeply personal speech condemning the rise of antisemitism in America that has flared since Israel began retaliating against Hamas for its attack. Those remarks appeared to be mostly directed at members of his own party; he warned that some liberals and young people were “unknowingly aiding and abetting” antisemitism in the name of social justice. Mr. Schumer has since spoken to publishers about writing a book on antisemitism.
On Thursday, his speech was aimed squarely at Mr. Netanyahu and far-right members of his governing coalition, who Mr. Schumer said were falling short of Jewish values.
Mr. Herzog had a stern response. “Israel is a sovereign democracy,” he wrote on social media. “It is unhelpful, all the more so as Israel is at war against the genocidal terror organization Hamas, to comment on the domestic political scene of a democratic ally.”
In his remarks, Mr. Schumer said that Mr. Netanyahu refused to “disavow Ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and their calls for Israelis to drive Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank.”
“He won’t commit to a military operation in Rafah that prioritizes protecting civilian life,” Mr. Schumer said. “He won’t engage responsibly in discussions about a ‘day after’ plan for Gaza, and a longer-term pathway to peace.”
Mr. Schumer said that if Mr. Netanyahu and his current coalition remained in power, “then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.”
Underscoring how contentious the issue of Israel is in American politics, Mr. Schumer’s speech was criticized by both the right and the left.
Layla Elabed, the campaign manager for Listen to Michigan, an antiwar group of activists who voted “uncommitted” in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, said that “Senator Schumer is beginning to shift but far too slowly and with little substance for what actions Biden can take now to stop the outrageous civilian death toll in Gaza.”
Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership.
DID YOU WATCH THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS?
Biden Rocked! The Republicans Grimaced!
The Presidential Campaign is Surely Underway and Biden is off to a Great Start!
Here's an inspiring statement from Biden-Harris Campaign Communications Director Michael Tyler:
“Y'all want to talk about age? Let's talk about age. At 77, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. At 78, he led us through the COVID crisis, put us on a path to creating nearly 15 million new jobs since the day he took office, and passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to repair our roads and bridges and expand access to broadband internet to every community. At 79, he got us the most significant gun safety legislation in a generation and became the first president to beat Big Pharma and cap the cost of insulin at $35 for seniors. At the same time, he made the single largest investment in history to combat climate change – all before his 80th birthday. Meanwhile, the only helpful thing Donald Trump did for the American people in four years was lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden – and it’s the one thing he won’t take credit for.
“Now, Joe Biden is 81 and he's going to beat Donald Trump again because he wakes up every single day fighting for the American people while Trump wages a campaign of revenge and retribution focused on himself. Trump may be four years younger than Joe Biden, but his ideas are old as hell and they've already been rejected by the American people. Joe Biden is running to make sure we reject them for good.”
DID YOU WATCH THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS?
Biden Rocked! The Republicans Grimaced!
The Presidential Campaign is Surely Underway
and Biden is off to a Great Start
Here's an inspiring statement from Biden-Harris Campaign Communications Director Michael Tyler:
“Y'all want to talk about age? Let's talk about age. At 77, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. At 78, he led us through the COVID crisis, put us on a path to creating nearly 15 million new jobs since the day he took office, and passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to repair our roads and bridges and expand access to broadband internet to every community. At 79, he got us the most significant gun safety legislation in a generation and became the first president to beat Big Pharma and cap the cost of insulin at $35 for seniors. At the same time, he made the single largest investment in history to combat climate change – all before his 80th birthday. Meanwhile, the only helpful thing Donald Trump did for the American people in four years was lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden – and it’s the one thing he won’t take credit for.
“Now, Joe Biden is 81 and he's going to beat Donald Trump again because he wakes up every single day fighting for the American people while Trump wages a campaign of revenge and retribution focused on himself. Trump may be four years younger than Joe Biden, but his ideas are old as hell and they've already been rejected by the American people. Joe Biden is running to make sure we reject them for good.”
SENATOR KATIE BRITT (R Alabama)
GAVE THE SHOCKING "Fundie-Baby" REPUBLICAN RESPONSE
The two articles below are surely worth reading in their entirety, whether you lasted through the entire rebuttal or not. Richardson provides an historical perspective on women's rights, while Piper explains Katie's subliminal message delivered by her girlish voice and overall performance.
Heather Cox Richardson
Letters from an American, March 8, 2024
Last night, Republicans and Democrats offered very different visions of the roles and rights of women in American society.
In the State of the Union address, President Joe Biden thanked Vice President Kamala Harris “for being an incredible leader defending reproductive freedom and so much more.” Biden condemned “state laws banning the freedom to choose, criminalizing doctors, forcing survivors of rape and incest to leave their states to get the treatment they need,” and he called out Republicans “promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom.”
Biden quoted back to the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, sitting in front of him in the chamber, their words when in June 2022 they overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion. The justices wrote: “Women are not without electoral or political power.”
Biden responded: “You’re about to realize just how much you were right about that.” “Clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women. But they found out. When reproductive freedom was on the ballot, we won in 2022 and 2023. And we’ll win again in 2024.” Biden promised to restore Roe v. Wade if Americans elect a Congress that supports the right to choose.
Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) gave the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union address. Sitting in a kitchen rather than in a setting that reflected her position in one of the nation’s highest elected offices, Britt conspicuously wore a necklace with a cross and spoke in a breathy, childlike voice as she wavered between smiles and the suggestion she was on the verge of tears.
“What the hell am I watching right now?” an unnamed Trump advisor asked Nikki McCann Ramirez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone.
Britt’s performance was the logical outcome of right-wing demonization of women’s rights advocates since the 1960s. That popular demonization began soon after women calling for “liberation” from the strict gender roles of the post–World War II years protested the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The protesters tossed items related to women’s roles as homemakers and sex symbols—bras, girdles, pots and pans, and Playboy magazines—into a trash can. That act so horrified traditionalists that a journalist likened the women to young men burning their draft cards, starting the myth that the protesting women had burned their bras.
Two years later, with his popularity dropping before the 1972 election, President Richard Nixon wooed Catholic Democrats by abandoning his support for abortion rights. The following March, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, declaring that “[e]quality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” and sent it off to the states for ratification.
Advocates of traditional gender roles used abortion as a proxy to attack women’s rights in general. Railing against the Equal Rights Amendment in her first statement on abortion in 1972, activist Phyllis Schlafly did not mention fetuses, but instead attacked “women’s lib”—the women’s liberation movement—which she claimed was “a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society.”
The Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, including women in the ranks of marginalized Americans whose civil rights were protected by the federal government. Since the 1950s, opponents of such federal protection for Black and Brown Americans had tied such federal action to communism because it meant the government used tax dollars for the benefit of specific groups. In their minds, this amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers to undeserving special interests.
The cultural backlash to the idea of women’s equality strengthened. In 1974 the television show Little House on the Prairie, based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, began its nine-year run. It portrayed western women as wives and mothers cared for by menfolk, complementing the image of the cowboy individualist championed by the antigovernment right wing.
As historian Peggy O’Donnell noted in Jezebel in 2019, prairie dresses, with their image of “traditional” femininity and motherhood, the female version of cowboy clothing, became fashionable, even as the era’s popular televangelists railed against feminists. Constantly evoking the image of the western cowboy, Ronald Reagan won the White House. Four years later, sociologist Kristin Luker discovered that "pro-life" activists believed that selfish “pro-choice” women were denigrating the roles of wife and mother and were demanding rights they didn’t need or deserve.
Increasingly, Republicans portrayed women who demanded equality as a special interest made up of feminist scolds who wanted federal support they did not deserve. In 1984, when Democratic presidential candidate Walter “Fritz” Mondale tapped the very well qualified Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York as his running mate, opponents circulated fake campaign buttons backing “Fritz and Tits,” and even 60 percent of Democrats thought Ferraro was there only because Mondale was under pressure from women's groups who wanted special legislation.
Powerful women either fell out of public view or were pilloried for intruding on a man’s world as those opposing women’s equality portrayed women either as wives and mothers, who looked to their husbands for financial security and safety, or as sex objects available for men’s pleasure.
By 1988, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh had begun to demonize women’s rights advocates as “feminazis” for whom “the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur.” After the 1993 siege of the headquarters of a religious cult near Waco, Texas, that left 76 people dead and inspired the rise of right-wing militias to resist the federal government, Limbaugh emphasized that the attorney general who ordered the operation was the first female attorney general: Janet Reno.
Such rhetoric turned out Republican voters, especially the white evangelical base, and after it launched in 1996, the Fox News Channel (FNC) reinforced the idea that individualist men should be running society. Most FNC personalities were older men; the network’s female personalities were young, beautiful, and deferential. (FNC chair and chief executive officer Roger Ailes resigned in 2016 after accounts emerged of alleged sexual harassment.)
By 2016 the competing ideologies concerning the role of women in American society were encapsulated by the contest between Donald Trump and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton was highly educated and extremely well qualified. She advocated protecting the rights of women and minorities and warned that Trump would pack the Supreme Court with extremists who would undermine abortion rights. She provided detailed policy papers.
Trump, in turn, bragged of sexual assault and called for Clinton to be arrested: “Lock her up!” became the call and response at his rallies. Ending access to abortion had become the rallying cry for the evangelicals who supported Trump, and he promised to end those rights, even flirting with the idea of criminal punishments for women seeking abortions. Far from being disqualifying, Trump’s denigration of women embodied the sort of traditional gender roles fundamentalists embraced.
Once in office, Trump nominated and the Republican-dominated Senate confirmed three radical Supreme Court justices who in June 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, taking away the recognition of a constitutional right Americans had enjoyed for almost 50 years.
When Britt delivered the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union from a kitchen, wearing a cross and using a submissive speaking style, she represented the outcome of the longstanding opposition to women’s equal rights in the United States.
The Democrats’ position last night was a sharp contrast. Biden stood in front of the nation’s first female vice president as he denounced the Republican assault on women’s rights. He warned the country: “America cannot go back.”
Perfect timing for celebration of International Women’s Day.
The View from Rural Missouri by Jess Piper, March 8, 2024
“THE FUNDIE BABY VOICE”
As soon as Senator Katie Britt started speaking, I knew exactly who she is. She is so many of the pastor's wives and Sunday School teachers I knew growing up in an Evangelical church. Be sweet. Obey.
I was about to head to bed after the State of the Union last night, when I heard a voice coming from my television that stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t know who was speaking, but it really didn’t matter—I recognized the voice. It was so many voices from my childhood. It was so many Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. It was potlucks, and baby showers, and graduations, and birthday parties.
It was Senator Katie Britt using her well-practiced fundie baby voice.
I threw so many folks for a loop last year when I discussed the voice in a video. I used my “training” as a former Evangelical, a Southern Baptist, to describe the breathy cadence and the soft, child-like high pitch. Folks outside of Fundamentalist culture had never heard the term—they just knew the voice made them uncomfortable.
I know that voice well…in fact I can’t shake it myself. It was engrained in every woman I knew from church and every time I speak about it, folks will point out that I sound that way myself. Yes, friends. That’s the point. Be sweet. Obey. Prove it by speaking in muted tones.
You all know Michelle Duggar. Remember her voice? Too high pitched? Too much like a little girl? Too breathy. That’s purposeful. Michelle has to show submission to her husband in all interactions public. She stared at Jim Bob anytime he spoke. She was quiet until given a question or prompt. She was also harboring secrets and that’s something I can’t forget. Terrible secrets behind that voice.
Christian nationalist Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is married to a woman who also uses the voice. I first heard her speak in a Fox News interview. I had the same reaction I had to Senator Britt. I turned the video up and listened…and got a cold shiver. Kelly Johnson says nothing too awfully problematic during the interview, but we all know she holds anti-LGBTQ views and even once correlated gay folks with bestiality and incest.
Johnson removed a document from her Christian Counseling site that said, ““We believe and the Bible teaches that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God,”
Some women use their fundie baby voices from habit. From years of lessons, but some have something to hide which they cover for in fundie baby voice and a good-natured temperament. From an abusive husband, to a drinking problem, to hiding a pack of cigarettes in the kitchen, it was often something.
Many of these women also couldn’t keep it up at all times, and I saw lots of masks slip when these women spoke to their children. I remember staying the night with a friend and her mom dropping the voice at home. It can be a little creepy to watch the venom spewed at a child who has spilled his milk when his mother was dripping honey from her mouth just the instant before. It feels cold.
Back to Sen Katie Britt and the Republican response to the State of the Union speech; it was filled with Fundamentalist ideology and the fundie baby voice. The setting was her kitchen—that is not by accident. It is likely that she thinks this is where most women should spend their time. She’s wearing a modest shirt, opened just far enough to see her cross necklace. She started her speech by indicating that she’s “just a mom” mentioning her children’s names to assure other fundamentalist Christians that she understands her role in society.
Her face says as much as her voice in fundie culture—that hyperbolic wince that she performed each time she said “Biden.” It means, “I’m going to say something here that isn’t very nice, but y’all know I’m going to keep it sweet.”
The bless your heart effect. The breathless speech, the incongruent facial movements and smiles. The cadence of condescension. I am better than you, and here are the ways. I have children. They are perfect. I have a marriage. It is perfect. I am pretty and well-educated. I am a Christian—I am god fearing and I prove it by holding hands with my family and praying for the rest of you. I am better than you.
Now that you know the term and what to look for, I want to warn you that the voice doesn’t always equate to a terrible woman or even a submissive one. I grew up with so many who used the voice because they were trained to use it. They are kind women who show up for others in sickness and in need. They take care of their families and their neighbors and their church sisters and brothers. They are living the life they feel called to lead—I give them grace and understanding. They are not out to harm others.
But, I pay attention to the voice when I hear it from folks in power. I am jolted awake when I hear the voice dripping sugar from a mouth that claims to love all while stripping rights from many. I know that they believe proximity to power, submitting to men in power, will save them and their families and keep them in the good grace of the men truly in power.
I know they are wrong.
~Jess
Reprinted by permission from Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson, February 17, 2024
Although few Americans paid much attention at the time, the events of February 18, 2014, in Ukraine would turn out to be a linchpin in how the United States ended up where it is a decade later. On that day ten years ago, after months of what started as peaceful protests, Ukrainians occupied government buildings and marched on parliament to remove Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych from office. After the escalating violence resulted in many civilian casualties, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, returned power to Ukraine’s constitution.
The ouster of Yanukovych meant that American political consultant Paul Manafort was out of a job. Manafort had worked with Yanukovych since 2004. In that year, the Russian-backed politician appeared to have won the presidency of Ukraine. But Yanukovych was rumored to have ties to organized crime, and the election was full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, while Russia’s president Vladimir Putin congratulated Yanukovych even before the results were officially announced.
The government voided the election and called for a do-over.
To rehabilitate his reputation, Yanukovych turned to Manafort, who was already working for a young Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska worried that Ukraine would break free of Russian influence and was eager to prove useful to Vladimir Putin. At the time, Putin was trying to consolidate power in Russia, where oligarchs were monopolizing formerly publicly held industries and replacing the region’s communist leaders. In 2004, American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered as he tried to call attention to what the oligarchs were doing.
With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych finally won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In November 2013, Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union, refusing to sign a trade agreement and instead taking a $3 billion loan from Russia. Ukrainian students protested the decision, and the anger spread quickly. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.
Manafort, who had borrowed money from Deripaska and still owed him about $17 million, had lost his main source of income.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. These sanctions were intended to weaken Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.
By 2016, Manafort’s longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone—they had both worked on Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign—was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort was happy to step in to help remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”
Manafort began as an advisor to the Trump campaign in March 2016 and became the chairman in late June. hanks to journalist Jim Rutenberg, who pulled together testimony given both to the Mueller investigation and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, transcripts from the impeachment hearings, and recent memoirs, we now know that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded, and -directed ‘separatists’ were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead.”
In exchange for weakening NATO, undermining the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its attempt to throw off the Russians who had invaded in 2014, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.
Now, ten years later, Putin has invaded Ukraine in an effort that when it began looked much like the one his operatives suggested to Manafort in 2016, Trump has said he would “encourage Russia to do whatever they hell they want” to NATO allies that don’t commit 2% of their gross domestic product to their militaries, and Trump MAGA Republicans are refusing to pass a measure to support Ukraine in its effort to throw off Russia’s invasion.
The day after the violence of February 18, 2014, in Ukraine, then–vice president Joe Biden called Yanukovych to “express grave concern regarding the crisis on the streets” and to urge him “to pull back government forces and to exercise maximum restraint.”
Ten years later, Russia has been at war with Ukraine for nearly two years and has just regained control of the key town of Avdiivka because Ukrainian troops lack ammunition. President Joe Biden is warning MAGA Republicans that “[t]he failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.”
“History is watching,” he said.
—
Notes:
https://www.voanews.com/a/court-ukraine-can-try-to-avoid-repaying-3b-loan-to-russia/7007119.html
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-manafort-american-hustler/550925/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
New York Times, February 19, 2014, p. A1, A8N.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/17/politics/biden-zelensky-congress-ukraine-aid
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
Reprinted by permission from the Virginia Mercury, January 5, 2024
by Peter Hall
WHITPAIN TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Reflecting on the fight to establish America as a democracy and the events that nearly toppled it three years ago, President Joe Biden warned of the danger he believes former President Donald Trump poses to American ideals.
“Today we’re here to answer the most important question. Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” Biden said. “It’s what the 2024 election is all about.”
In his first campaign speech of 2024, Biden said there is a clear choice between him and Trump, his likely Republican opponent. “Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you,” Biden said. “He’s obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”
Biden said his campaign, in contrast, would strengthen and preserve American democracy and reflect people of every age and background. “It’s about the future we’re going to continue to build together,” he said.
Biden, who walked out on stage with First Lady Jill Biden to chants of “four more years,” delivered his speech a few miles from Valley Forge National Park, which he visited after landing there in Marine One on Friday afternoon. Biden invoked the imagery of the harsh winter that the Continental Army spent at Valley Forge, without proper clothing or supplies, under the leadership of Gen. George Washington, who led Americans to victory in the Revolutionary War.
“This ragtag army, made up of ordinary people, their mission, George Washington declared, was nothing less than a sacred cause … freedom, liberty, democracy, American democracy,” Biden said. Biden spoke, he noted, one day before the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when the United States came close to losing everything Washington and his troops had suffered and fought for.
Throughout his speech, Biden referred to Trump by name nearly 40 times, invoking the string of lawsuits, personal attacks, false statements and what he called the former president’s dereliction of duty in the lies and incitement that led to the insurrection.
“As America was attacked from within, Donald Trump watched on TV from a small private dining room off the Oval Office. The entire nation watched in horror, the whole world watched in disbelief and Trump did nothing,” Biden said. "In the years since the insurrection", Biden said, Trump has embraced the violence of that day, calling the people arrested for their role in the attack “patriots,” and even cracking jokes in a campaign rally about the hammer attack by a supporter “whipped up by the big lie” that left former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul severely injured. “He laughed about it. What a sick …” Biden said, without finishing the sentence.
Biden, who was fiery for most of the speech, paused to contain his anger as he recalled Trump referring to soldiers as “suckers and losers” during a visit to a cemetery where U.S. soldiers killed in World War I were interred in France. “How dare he? Who in God’s name does he think he is?” Biden asked. His late son, Beau Biden, was an Army officer.
In the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, conservative members of Congress and political commentators publicly and privately condemned Trump’s conduct, Biden noted, calling it embarrassing and humiliating for the nation. But as time went on, many have renewed their allegiance to Trump and abandoned democracy. Those who remain, Democrats, independents and mainstream Republicans, must make a hard choice, Biden said. “Today I make the sacred pledge to you, the defense, protection, and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency,” Biden said.
The war being fought on Ukraine’s soil is entering its third year and has exhausted the patience of some in the United States. They argue for Ukraine to accede to Vladimir Putin’s call for all Russian-speaking peoples to fold themselves in the warm embrace of “Mother Russia,” even if compelled by brute force. Acquiescing is a fools’ errand, as history teaches us. Putin’s aim to unite all Russian-speaking peoples under his “benevolent” charge is ridiculous and dangerous.
Unification is ridiculous: consider Spain deciding to annex Spanish-speaking Central and South America, parts of the western U.S. and the Caribbean, and the Philippines be annexed by Spain. Or the U.S., English-speaking Canada, Australia, and other former colonies being forced to form a reconstituted British Empire. Unification is dangerous because it leads to war: the Second World War was the costliest war – in treasure and lives – the world has yet seen.
Hitler began his campaign to expand German political and economic power in central Europe by declaring all ethnic Germans and the territory where they lived be incorporated into a “Greater Germany.” One by one, bits of territory were annexed and swelled the Reich. At first, the guarantors of European stability, Britain and France, feared a repeat of the First World War’s ruinous toll, if they tried to force a halt to this relentless expansion.
“Appeasement” (acceding to the demands of a hostile nation) as their answer to the challenge. Neither France nor Britain voiced opposition to the German army’s advance into Austria in March 1938. Nor did they vigorously protest Nazi propaganda, threats, and coercion in the April Austrian plebiscite that approved Austria’s annexation by Germany. Those governments, along with that of Fascist Italy, took an active role that September in handing over part of then-Czechoslovakia, the German-speaking Sudetenland, to the Reich. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain believed war was averted, declaring that this Munich Agreement achieved “peace in our time.”
The world soon learned that “peace” so purchased from a dictator is a mirage. Emboldened by such easy concessions, Hitler plunged his military forces into western Poland a year later, on September 1, 1939. Britain and France finally abandoned appeasement and declared war, beginning six years of conflict that cost scores of millions of lives and destroyed nations.
Putin’s intentions and actions repeat the Hitler pattern. Lebensraum living space) for ethnic Germans translates very nicely into yestestvennaya sreda (living space) for ethnic Russians. Provocations in Ukraine and other nations on Russia’s western border, followed by occupation, “annexation” of Crimea, and outright invasion of the rest of Ukraine perfectly parrots the Nazi 1930s playbook. Negotiation with Putin will prove as fruitless and dangerous as negotiation with Hitler.
There is but one lesson history is desperately trying to teach us: The cost of steadfastness in the face of assault is nothing as compared to the cost of appeasement.
WORTH READING: A FEW REPUBLICANS SHOWED A BACKBONE YESTERDAY ON AID TO UKRAINE AND ISRAEL, FOLLOWED BY BIDEN AND TRUMP'S VIEWS ON NATIONAL POLICY AND PUTIN'S AND TRUMP'S COLLABORATION TO DESTROY DEMOCRACY.
A key story that got missed yesterday was that the Senate voted 64–19 to allow a bill that includes $95.34 billion in aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to advance a step forward. In terms of domestic politics, this appears to be an attempt by those who controlled the Republican Party before Trump to push back against Trump and the MAGA Republicans.
MAGA lawmakers had demanded border security measures be added to a national security supplemental bill that provided this international aid, as well as humanitarian aid to Gaza, but to their apparent surprise, a bipartisan group of lawmakers actually hammered out that border piece. Trump immediately demanded an end to the bill and MAGA obliged on Wednesday, forcing the rest of the party to join them in killing the national security supplemental bill.
House Republicans then promptly tried to pass a measure that provided funding for Israel alone. At stake behind this fight is not only control of the Republican Party, but also the role of the U.S. in the world—and, for that matter, its standing. And much of that fight comes down to Ukraine’s attempt to resist Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.
Russian president Vladimir Putin is intent on dismantling the rules-based international order of norms and values developed after World War II. Under this system, international organizations such as the United Nations provide places to resolve international disputes, prevent territorial wars, and end no-holds-barred slaughter through a series of agreements, including the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, deliberate targeting of civilian populations, and war crimes are his way of thumbing his nose at the established order and demanding a different one, in which men like him dominate the globe.
Trump’s ties to Russia are deep and well documented, including by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was dominated by Republicans when it concluded that Trump’s 2016 campaign team had worked with Russian operatives.
In November 2022, in the New York Times Magazine, Jim Rutenberg pulled together testimony given both to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the Senate Intelligence Committee, transcripts from the impeachment hearings, and recent memoirs.
Rutenberg showed that in 2016, Russian operatives had presented to Trump advisor and later campaign manager Paul Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded, and -directed ‘separatists’ were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead.”
But they were concerned that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) might stand in their way. Formed in 1947 to stand against Soviet expansion and now standing against Russian aggression, NATO is a collective security alliance of 31 states that have agreed to consider an attack on any member to be an attack on all.
In exchange for weakening NATO, undermining the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its attempt to throw off the Russians who had invaded in 2014, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to put their finger on the scales to help Trump win the White House.
When he was in office, Trump did, in fact, try to weaken NATO—as well as other international organizations like the World Health Organization—and promised he would pull the U.S. out of NATO in a second term, effectively killing it. Rutenberg noted that Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine looks a lot like an attempt to achieve the plan it suggested in 2016. But because there was a different president in the U.S., that invasion did not yield the results Putin expected.
President Joe Biden stepped into office more knowledgeable on foreign affairs than any president since Dwight Eisenhower, who took office in 1953. Biden recognized that democracy was on the ropes around the globe as authoritarian leaders set out to dismantle the rules-based international order. He also knew that the greatest strength of the U.S. is its alliances. In the months after he took office, Biden focused on shoring up NATO, with the result that when Russia invaded Ukraine again in February 2022, a NATO coalition held together to support Ukraine.
By 2024, far from falling apart, NATO was stronger than ever with the addition of Finland. Sweden, too, is expected to join shortly.
But far more than simply shore up the old system, the Biden administration has built on the stability of the rules-based order to make it more democratic, encouraging more peoples, nations, and groups to participate more fully in it. In September 2023, Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained to an audience at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies that the end of the Cold War made people think that the world would inevitably become more peaceful and stable as countries cooperated and emphasized democracy and human rights.
But now, Blinken said, that era is over. After decades of relative stability, authoritarian powers have risen to challenge the rules-based international order, throwing away the ideas of national sovereignty and human rights. As wealth becomes more and more concentrated, people are losing faith in that international order as well as in democracy itself. In a world increasingly under pressure from authoritarians who are trying to enrich themselves and stay in power, he said, the administration is trying to defend fair competition, international law, and human rights.
Historically, though, the U.S. drive to spread democracy has often failed to rise above the old system of colonialism, with the U.S. and other western countries dictating to less prosperous countries. The administration has tried to avoid this trap by advancing a new form of international cooperation that creates partnerships and alignments of interested countries to solve discrete issues. These interest-based alignments, which administration officials refer to as “diplomatic variable geometry,” promise to preserve U.S. global influence and perhaps an international rules-based order but will also mean alliances with nations whose own interests align with those of the U.S. only on certain issues.
In the past three years, the U.S. has created a new security partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom, known as AUKUS, and held a historic, first-ever trilateral leaders’ summit at Camp David with Japan and the Republic of Korea. It has built new partnerships with nations in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as with Latin American and Caribbean countries, to address issues of immigration; two days ago the Trilateral Fentanyl Committee met for the fourth time in Mexico. This new system includes a wider range of voices at the table—backing the membership of the African Union in the Group of 20 (G20) economic forum, for example—advancing a form of cooperation in which every international problem is addressed by a group of partner nations that have a stake in the outcome.
At the same time, the U.S. recognizes that wealthier countries need to step up to help poorer countries develop their own economies rather than mine them for resources. Together with G7 partners, the U.S. has committed to deliver $600 billion in new investments to develop infrastructure across the globe—for example, creating a band of development across Africa.
Biden’s is a bold new approach to global affairs, based on national rights to self-determination and working finally to bring an end to colonialism.
The fight over U.S. aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and the other countries with which we have made partnerships is not about saving money—most of the funds for Ukraine are actually spent in the U.S.—or about protecting the U.S. border, as MAGA Republicans demonstrated when they killed the border security bill. It is about whether the globe will move into the 21st century, with all its threats of climate change, disease, and migration, with ways for nations to cooperate, or whether we will be at the mercy of global authoritarians.
Trump’s 2024 campaign website calls for “fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission,” and in a campaign speech in South Carolina today, he made it clear what that means. Trump has long misrepresented the financial obligations of NATO countries, and today he suggested that the U.S. would not protect other NATO countries that were “delinquent” if they were attacked by Russia. “In fact,” he said, “I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.”
Notes:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ukraine-aid-bill-inches-forward-us-senate-2024-02-10/
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/09/african-union-g20-world-leaders/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/10/trump-nato-allies-russia/
Twitter (X):
Acyn/status/1756412015793279117
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin had a plan to save his Republican colleagues from the same fate suffered by anti-abortion GOP candidates since the Supreme Court took away the guaranteed right to an abortion: He proposed what he called a "compromise" on the politically volatile issue, a 15-week ban Youngkin said would isolate "extremist" Democrats and give Republicans full control in Virginia government.
It failed spectacularly, with Democrats keeping control of the state Senate and flipping the Virginia House of Delegates, according to projections by the Associated Press early Wednesday morning.
Copyright © 2024 Greene Democrats - All Rights Reserved.
This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.