This morning started for me with a powerful new Prevail piece by Greg Olear, Know Your Bad Guys, revolving around Putin's criminal invasion of Ukraine. He breaks it down into 6 sections:
Putin is bad
Looting by Putin’s puppet in Kyiv helped weaken Ukraine’s defenses in 2014, when Russia’s multi-phased invasion began
Organized crime helped install Putin and kept him in power
Donald Trump and many members of his inner circle have close ties to Russia
The Saudi regime is a brutal dictatorship that hates women, gays, dissidents, and Americans
Saudi money is blood money
And he concludes by asking, “How can we know the allegiances of other notable politicians, heads of state, TV talking heads, and so forth? We need only examine their statements and activities regarding the war in Ukraine— which, again, is as close to a battle between good and evil as we’ve seen in my lifetime.”
When the insurrectionist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene insists that “not another penny will go to Ukraine” when the GOP takes over the House in January, she is carrying water for Putin. When incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says that “Ukraine is important, but at the same time it can’t be the only thing, and it can’t be a blank check,” he, too, is— as Rep. Adam Kinzinger so eloquently put it— “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” And what’s more—he knows it. McCarthy spoke candidly about the insurrection in the days after January 6, only to backtrack after “going to Canossa” to kiss Trump’s ring. (In 2015, remember, he told Paul Ryan he believed Putin paid Trump; what changed?)
The new Twitter CEO pushed the Kremlin’s “Ukraine should just surrender the eastern parts of the country and bring peace” line regarding the war. He engaged chummily with Putin’s #2 on the platform. Starlink crapped out in Ukraine. So did Twitter’s two-factor authentication system, which means the app wasn’t working in the country. Musk has also re-platformed far-right accounts, including the odious Cat Turd, who posted a meme he found funny of a fallen Ukrainian on a field of blue and yellow, where the blue was tears and the yellow urine. There is little question whose side the emerald mine scion is on.
Rupert Murdoch may have repudiated Trump, but we’ve seen no signs of the diabolical nonagenarian doing the same with regards to Russia. Tucker Carlson, host of the top-rated Fox News show, has made it explicitly clear that he’s rooting for Putin in the conflict. He’s also repeatedly fluffed the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, a Putin ally, who was allegedly a bag man for Mogilevich.
And on it goes.
The surest barometer to determine who the bad guys are is their position on the war in Ukraine. This is a Manichean struggle. And anyone pushing Kremlin talking points— whether explicitly boosting Putin, spreading Russian disinformation regarding Zelenskyy, or else advocating for appeasement— is not on our side.
The traitors are easy to spot.
At this point, even Lauren Boebert (Q-CO) has had it with Marge, the easiest traitor to spot in the entire Congress. It's her middle name! Last night, the far right Daily Caller reported that the two deranged MAGA crackpots broke up after Traitor Greene sold out House fascists by sucking up to Kevin McCarthy. (I’m hearing it was whispers from anti-McCarthy fanatic/instigator Matt Gaetz that pushed Boebert into denouncing Marge.)
Boebert told the Daily Caller that she’s “been asked to explain MTG’s belief in Jewish space lasers, why she showed up to a white supremacist’s conference, and now why she’s blindly following Kevin McCarthy and I’m not going to go there. The only person who can answer for Marjorie’s words and actions is Marjorie. Let me be very clear, I support President Trump. Period. President Trump is a friend and the leader of the Republican party.” Click the image to watch Boebert go off on Traitor Greene, who is publicly laughing at her for almost losing her re-election bid and accusing her of not supporting Señor Trumpanzee:
While Marge and Lauren Boebert rip each other to shreds over who's more loyal to the incredibly shrinking Donald J. Trump, let me just conclude with one last quote from Olear's piece today:
I’m not going to rehash what the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded in Volume 5 of its report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, or list the individuals indicted and charged by Robert Mueller in the OSC’s extremely narrow investigation, or link to Dirty Rubles, or cite the work of Craig Unger, Luke Harding, LB, and the others who have laid this all out. I won’t discuss Helsinki, or Trump’s comments on members of our armed forces being “suckers and losers,” or his deliberate bungling of the pandemic response, or the fishy allocation of coronavirus relief funds. I won’t even bring up the fact that Trump tried to overthrow the fucking government, as Congress concluded yesterday. I will say this: Even as Putin commits war crime after war crime in Ukraine, Trump’s silence speaks volumes.