Biden's Speech Was Warmed Over Cold War Porridge

Will the US let Zelensky make a deal or are we to into Cold War II.

I sent this piece out last week but I discovered lots of people did not receive it. I can’t re-send it just to those people but only to the whole list. Just delete if you saw it already or don’t want to for any reason. I changed it just a bit (the images & title).

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Just when I thought the world couldn’t get more awful, it has.

Although I think it is right to do whatever the United States can to help Ukraine (short of anything that might trigger world war) I cannot stand hearing another president seeming to embrace confrontation abroad with enthusiasm.

Biden’s speech made me miss LBJ (as he so often does). Johnson always seemed so sad about having to be in Vietnam. Even though it was he, himself, who chose escalation after escalation, he always seemed to have tears in his eyes. In fact, he was sad and not only by the loss of life but also by the loss of his Great Society dreams for America in an Asian land war.

Vietnam did the Great Society in. Once he went from the greatest domestic reformer since FDR to war president, he never was able to get back to his heart’s desire: remaking America into a better place for minorities, the poor, immigrants, and all the disenfranchised. That broke his heart.

This would be true even if Vietnam was a just war which it was not. Both World War 1 (a dumb war) and World War II (the ultimate just war) destroyed the domestic agendas of two Democratic presidents. That is how it works.

So I’m sad. Of course for Ukraine whose people are being slaughtered for no reason other than one man’s demented delusions. But also for this country which is embracing with fervor another messianic war against another satan.

That became especially clear to me when Biden, in one paragraph, turned post-Soviet Russia into the Soviet Union and made the war to save Ukraine another battle against the USSR.

Today's fighting in Kyiv and Melitopol and Kharkiv are the latest battle in a long struggle. Hungary, 1956. Poland, 1956, and then again, 1981. Czechoslovakia,1968. Soviet tanks crushed democratic uprisings, but the resistance continued until finally in 1989, the Berlin Wall and all the walls of Soviet domination, they fell. They fell! And the people prevailed.

No, Joe. Russia is not the Soviet Union anymore. Putin may be as bad as Stalin but he isn’t Stalin. An Putin’s Russia is not Communist. It’s fascist. As for its heartless oligarch infested economic system, the United States exported it from Washington with some help from Harvard.

In fact, the monster Putin most resembles is not Stalin but the once (and future) president of the United States, Donald Trump. And the United States has gone from being Roosevelt’s “Arsenal of Democracy” to the world capital of rightwing fascism, racism and hate. It’s not Putin who inspires all the fascist dictators and would-be dictators that have sprung up on the international stage, it is Trump (and his would-be successors some of whom we saw race-baiting a future Supreme Court justice last week).

So enough with the self-righteous talk about democracy abroad as we are destroying it at home. A failing democracy should leave it to others to lecture about democracy. In any case, we lost the moral standing to do that decades ago.

Can a fight for good (like saving Ukraine) also be a gigantic diversion from confronting problems that threaten the survival of American democracy. It can. And it will be.

Trumpism at home is the biggest threat we face. And Biden and his Attorney General have done nothing to combat it. Nothing. Referrals from the Jan. 6 committee sit on Garland’s desk. And sit and sit.

Are you outraged by the massive minority voter disenfranchisement that is taking place right now, almost guaranteeing that Democrats will lose Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024? Or the various secretaries of state offices in the red and a few purple states that are being taken over by people who promise to certify only the elections of Republicans? Or the war on public schools in places like Virginia (just a few months ago a progressive state) where teachers are being attacked for pointing to slavery as the cause of the Civil War? Or by the news that Virginia Thomas has been using her husband’s Supreme Court seat to serve as the court’s inside insurrectionist in the name of Jesus Christ? Or that Lindsey Graham demanded to know the depth of Kentanji Brown Jackson’s Christian faith, asking her to rate how “faithful” she is “on a scale of one to ten.”

But you must know that no one in power is likely to do anything about any of it. That DA in Manhattan who dropped the idea of Trump indictments because he feared they might fail and hurt his career was the fresh handwriting on the wall. New York is not going to save us from Trump…or an Attorney General (and maybe a president) who don’t seem to give a damn.

Not even Putin’s death (please, God) and a rebuilt revitalized democratic independent Ukraine would change our plight here at home.

I’m not an isolationist although I may sound a little like one. But I do care about the country my children and grandchildren live in more than anyplace else. Ukrainians feel the same way about their country. It’s only natural. It is especially natural for me whose own children’s mother (my wife) was born in a refugee camp after her parents fled their ancestral home just a few dozen miles from Lviv.

America is where they escaped to. Given the rightist Republican surge here, and the refusal of feckless Democrats to do anything about it, it could be the place their great-grandchildren escape from.