Month: March 2022

The Russian dictator will have his new, greater Russia and will bomb and shell Ukraine into submission to get it. The man known for having critics poisoned with Novichok or thrown from windows has dropped all pretense of murders committed by his order being accidents.

Vladimir Putin “has ruthlessly fashioned a political system to eliminate dissent and reality itself [and] has the power to cause unfathomable human loss and misery,” Stephen Collinson writes at CNN. The rest of us watch with despair. There is little the West can do to stop him short of sparking a third world war that would compound the death, destruction and misery.

All this, and an unparalleled humanitarian crisis, because Putin wants the Cold War back. He hopes to rewind the joy the world witnessed three decades ago when the Berlin Wall fell and return Russia to global superpower status.

Collinson writes:

Putin’s apparent willingness to bombard Ukraine into submission and clearly gratuitous targeting of the innocent civilians he insisted are Russian kin mean the humanitarian disaster is likely only just beginning. More than a million refugees have already fled their homes, according to the United Nations. Millions more will likely follow — as family lives, jobs and communities are shattered. That’s without the thousands of civilians sure to die in a prolonged Russian blitzkrieg.

If the coverage were in black and white, Collinson adds, it would be mistaken for newsreels from World War II.

In under a week, western countries have supplied Ukraine with “17,000 antitank weapons, including Javelin missiles, over the borders of Poland and Romania” in scenes reminiscent of the Berlin airlift. Russian forces will eventually attempt to interdict land supply routes, but for now are focused on toppling Ukraine’s government.

In Russia itself, Putin has outlawed journalism. Russian police have jailed thousands of war protestors from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. Putin thought his invasion would go as quickly and easily as his invasion of Crimea. It is instead a bloody fiasco, and Ukrainians determined fighters. Now the dictator is not just fighting to hold territory in Ukraine, but to prevent being toppled by his own colleagues and citizens.

A year ago on this side of the Atlantic, Putin’s American Mini-Me inspired his antidemocratic rabble to attack and ransack the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Since failing, Republican-dominated legislatures across the land have passed laws restricting voting and allowing for the usurpation of the voters’ will under color of law. Donald Trump may be their champion, but Putin’s Russia inspires their dreams of rolling back post-war peace that expanded freedoms for racial, ethnic, and social minorities. Putin wants to recreate greater Russia. They want to recreate a white Christian homeland.

E.J. Dionne wonders if Putin’s war and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky might instead inspire a come-to-democracy moment:

This is already underway in Europe, where leaders of nationalist parties who once heaped praise on Putin are fleeing him in embarrassment. In France, the National Rally Party of far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has ordered its organizers to throw away 1.2 million pamphlets that featured Le Pen shaking hands with Putin. With French voting starting April 10, she doesn’t have a lot of time for her Putin cleansing operation.

In the United States, we can be grateful that Ukraine’s cause draws support across the political spectrum. Witness the applause when President Biden denounced Putin and embraced Zelensky and the Ukrainian people in his State of the Union speech. Especially well-received: Biden’s invocation of Zelensky’s promise that “light will win over darkness.”

That’s what friends of democracy are hoping for in the long run, despite Russia’s overwhelming advantage in firepower. But Zelensky should not be used as a source of cheap grace. We cannot ignore the shadows that have fallen across American democracy, cast largely by the power of an increasingly antidemocratic far right in the Republican Party.

Republican cravenness in the face of a party leader whose pretensions to petty dictator are even more laughable in the presence of a real one. But even now, Republicans seem beyond embarrassment over their submission to this emotionally stunted man-child and playground bully.

Dionne concludes:

With his criminal assault on Ukraine, Putin has reminded the world of where nationalist authoritarianism can lead and how costly a smash-mouth brand of politics that accentuates and exaggerates our differences can be. At the same time, the courage shown by Zelensky and his fellow Ukrainians in standing up to brutality should give heart to all defenders of democracy and self-rule.

If America is lucky, Republicans, like Le Pen, will have too little time before November to memory-hole evidence of their efforts to do to the United States what Putin is doing before the world’s eyes in Russia.

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I’ve got some for you right here. This piece is in the New Yorker so you can feel confident that it was thoroughly fact checked. It’s for real:

Mark Meadows, who grew up in Florida, moved to North Carolina in the nineteen-eighties and opened Aunt D’s, a sandwich shop in Highlands. He later sold the restaurant and started a real-estate company with a line in vacation properties. (He showed a few to my parents, in the nineties.) He became active in local Republican politics, and, in 2012, ran for Congress and won, going on to represent North Carolina’s Eleventh District until March, 2020, when he resigned the seat to become President Donald Trump’s chief of staff. Earlier that month, he sold his twenty-two-hundred-square-foot home in Sapphire. He and his wife, Debbie, also had a condo in Virginia, near Washington, D.C. But, as the summer passed and the election neared, Meadows had not yet purchased a new residence in what had been his home state. On September 19th, about three weeks before North Carolina’s voter-registration deadline for the general election, Meadows filed his paperwork. On a line that asked for his residential address—“where you physically live,” the form instructs—Meadows wrote down the address of a fourteen-by-sixty-two-foot mobile home in Scaly Mountain. He listed his move-in date for this address as the following day, September 20th.

Meadows does not own this property and never has. It is not clear that he has ever spent a single night there. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) The previous owner, who asked that we not use her name, now lives in Florida. “That was just a summer home,” she told me, when I called her up the other day. She seemed surprised to learn that the residence was listed on the Meadowses’ forms. The property sits in the southern Appalachian mountains, at about four thousand feet, in the bend of a quiet road above a creek in Macon County. She and her husband bought it in 1985. “We’d come up there for three to four months when my husband was living,” she said. Her husband died several years ago, and the house sat mostly unused for some time afterward, she said, because she had “nobody to go up there with anymore.”

She only rented it out twice, she told me. The first renter, she said, was Debbie Meadows, who, according to the former owner, reserved the house for two months at some point within the past few years—she couldn’t remember exactly when—but only spent one or two nights there. The Meadowses’ kids had visited the place, too, she said. The former owner was in Florida at the time, but her neighbors, the Talleys, whom she described as friends of the Meadowses’, debriefed her later. As for Mark Meadows, she said, “He did not come. He’s never spent a night in there.”

The former owner had put the mobile home on the market in the summer of 2020, but the Meadowses never expressed an interest in buying it, she said. The one other time she rented the place out, it was to someone who had: a retail manager at Lowe’s named Ken Abele, who bought the mobile home in August of the following year. Abele said that he’d heard that the Meadows family stayed there in the fall of 2020, when they were in the area for a Trump rally, because nearby hotels were scarce. The realtor who facilitated his purchase, whom I was unable to reach before we went to press, told him this, he said, and the realtor had heard it from the Talleys. It struck him as odd. “I’ve made a lot of improvements,” Abele said, of the mobile home. “But when I got it, it was not the kind of place you’d think the chief of staff of the President would be staying.” I asked him what he made of Meadows listing the property as his place of residence on his voter-registration form. “That’s weird that he would do that,” he said. “Really weird.”

Yes, it’s really weird. It’s also voter fraud.

Did Meadows potentially commit voter fraud by listing the Scaly Mountain address on his registration form? It’s a federal crime to provide false information to register to vote in a federal election. Under President Trump, the White House Web site posted a document, produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation, intended to present a “sampling” of the “long and unfortunate history of election fraud” in the U.S. Many of the cases sampled involve people who registered to vote at false addresses, including, for instance, second homes that did not serve as a person’s primary residence.

I called Melanie D. Thibault, the director of Macon County’s Board of Elections, and asked her what she made of the Meadowses’ registration forms. “I’m kind of dumbfounded, to be honest with you,” she said, after perusing them. “I looked up this Mcconnell Road, which is in Scaly Mountain, and I found out that it was a dive trailer in the middle of nowhere, which I do not see him or his wife staying in.” (It is not technically a trailer, but it is a modest dwelling.) She said that their registrations had arrived by mail and were entered into the system, and that a voter-registration card was sent to a P.O. Box they’d provided as their mailing address. “If that card makes it to the voter and it’s not sent back undeliverable, then the voter goes onto the system as a good voter,” she said. Meadows had voted absentee, by mail, in the 2020 general election, she added.

“The state board tells us we’re not the police,” she went on. “It’s up to the voter to give us the information.” A candidate or voter can challenge another voter’s address, she explained, but the burden of proof, at least at the outset, rests with the challenger. In this case, then, Meadows wouldn’t need, initially, to prove that he had listed a true place of residence—the challenger would need to prove that Meadows hadn’t. These challenges can be tough to win and are not frequently brought.

One of the authors of North Carolina’s voter-challenge statute is Gerry Cohen, who wrote it during his time as a staff attorney for the state’s General Assembly. He’s now on the Wake County Board of Elections; he teaches public policy at Duke. Cohen told me that, legally speaking, you can have more than one residence but only one domicile, and that your voter registration must be linked to the domicile. For something to qualify as such, he said, it must be a “place of abode” where you have spent at least one night and where you intend to remain indefinitely—“or at least without a present intent to establish a domicile at some other place.” (Elected officials who move—to D.C., for example—are allowed to remain registered in their home county or state as long as they don’t register to vote in the new location.)

I asked Cohen about the mobile home. “If Debra Meadows stayed there a single night, and Mark Meadows didn’t stay there, then he didn’t meet the abode test,” Cohen said. What if Meadows had stayed there, I asked? How would he establish that he intended to live there for an indefinite period of time? There isn’t a single determinative test, Cohen said, but a driver’s license, cable bill, W-2, or car registration listing the address would each suffice. “It’s a question of intent and evidence,” he added. I called the previous owner again, and asked her whether the Meadows family might have received any mail there. “It didn’t even have a mailbox,” she said. Abele has since installed one. He told me that he has never received any mail for the Meadows family at his home.

The utter gall of this Trump sycophant committing voter fraud. If you ever doubted that these people think they are above the law, this settles it.

I’ve written a lot about Meadows over the years. He’s an ignoramus so this really shouldn’t surprise anyone. But after Trump’s ongoing, years long tantrum about voter fraud to have his Chief of Staff exposed as having committed it is as rich as it gets.

If this is staged propaganda or coerced confession it’s the best that’s ever been done:

If you watch that whole thing it’s very, very hard to believe he isn’t the real deal. I suppose anything is possible in this wild (dis) information environment but it is certainly convincing on its face. If it’s real he is a very brave person.

I read the piece Dan Froomkin describes below and honestly thought it had to be an op-ed by someone like Ari Fleischer trying to sound “objective.” It was so weighted with “savvy” insiderism (and wrong savvy insiderism, in my opinion) that I literally rolled my eyes when I read it:

The March 4 edition of the New York Times’s daily politics newsletter was a masterpiece of amoral and irresponsible political relativism. Headlined “Republicans Sharpen Their Message on Ukraine,” and written by Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam — recently of Politico and Hotline, respectively – it exemplified how New York Times political reporters don’t seem to care whether what Republicans say is true, or fair. All they care about is whether it works.

The premise of the story was that after a “free-for-all” response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Republicans are coalescing around a new narrative: That the invasion was bad, but the real villain is Joe Biden.

Then came this astonishing paragraph:

Although some aspects of the Republican critique crumble upon closer inspection, the newly coordinated message is unifying the right after the fractious intramural debate over Putin. And with inflation soaring, linking Biden’s handling of the war in Ukraine to his domestic woes could prove to be a potent argument with voters in the fall.

The idea of “closer inspection” is dismissed as irrelevant, and the authors never come back to explain what parts of the message are, in fact, groundless and gratuitous.

They casually adopt the Republican framing of Biden’s “domestic woes” – just a day after a jobs report that indicated a roaring recovery is under way. (They are not alone in ignoring things that are good news for Biden.)

And they pass judgment not on the merits of the Republican narrative, but merely on its tactical effectiveness, to which they give a big thumbs-up.

Political and journalistic Twitter reacted with outrage. (See, for instance, the response to my tweet, including the quote tweets. Also see Hounshell’s response, and the response to that.)

The piece also inspired a fellow journalist, who wishes to remain anonymous, to speculate about what the New York Times politics newsletter would have reported after the 1929 stock market crash. I think it’s a brilliant parody:

BERLIN — Immediately after the U.S. stock market plunged, the political debate in the Reichstag was a free-for-all. The governing Social Democrats and their coalition allies — the conservative People’s Party and the Centre Party — aligned behind Chancellor Hermann Müller, exhibiting what was once considered a traditional show of unity in a crisis. But from the left and right, Communist and Nazi lawmakers portrayed Mr. Müller as weak and indecisive. In perhaps the strangest twist, the Nazi leader seemed to exult over the Wall Street crash, saying it foretold the coming collapse of global elites.

Now, Nazi leaders are fine-tuning their message.

The party leader, Adolf Hitler, will declare Friday that “Jews and Bolsheviks are to blame for America’s stock market crash, and Germany must free itself from both,” according to excerpts from a speech that the war veteran will deliver at a party retreat today in Munich.

Other Nazis have urged Mr. Hitler to keep his focus on criticism of Mr. Müller, tying the new economic turmoil to longstanding mismanagement of inflation and unemployment.

Twelve Nazi members of the Reichstag — all elected last year — have hammered the chancellor all week.

“We can only protect our economy by rebuilding the German military,” Nazi lawmakers from Prussia and Bavaria said in a statement. “People in our states cannot afford another bout of inflation, and cannot afford to be held hostage by Jewish bankers in New York and London and Communist agitators in Hamburg and St. Petersburg.”

Although some aspects of the Nazi critique crumble upon closer inspection, the newly coordinated message is unifying the far right after a fractious intramural debate over how to handle America and, to a lesser extent, Britain and France. And with inflation and joblessness already high, linking Mr. Müller’s handling of the stock market crash to his domestic woes could prove to be a potent argument with voters.

The danger, foreign policy experts say, is that a depression in the United States, given its vast wealth and industrial might, could have a contagion effect, taking down many other economies with it, including those of Western Europe and Japan, and unsettling a world that is still slowly recovering from the Great War of 1914-18.

“It’s like foreign policy is a blank screen on which we project all our internal divides,” said Hans-Georg Miller, co-editor of The Liberal Patriot, a website focused on the politics of national security. “As if the Americans are just props in our own political story.”

A fragile coalition

In focusing on American capitalism — and, in their view, its Jewish sponsors — the Nazis are aggravating divisions in Mr. Müller’s coalition that have emerged since the death last month of Gustav Stresemann, the widely admired centrist statesman who was very close to Mr. Müller, despite their political differences.

The Social Democrats recognize how fragile their Reichstag coalition is. They have to manage anger from their working-class base over painful budget cuts. The party’s left flank is demanding nationwide unemployment insurance, accident insurance for workers in dangerous jobs, and pensions for unemployed Germans starting at 60 — and is threatening to defect to the Communists if its demands aren’t met. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats’ coalition partners have wildly diverging agendas: the People’s Party wants to restore the power of Prussian elites, while the Centre Party’s priority is defending the prerogatives of the Catholic Church.

Senior Social Democrats in the Reichstag support legislation to prop up the Reichsmark, restrict stock speculation, issue new government bonds, and increase taxes on industrialists. Coalition partners, however, oppose such measures, noting that the Reichsbank has been formally independent from the government since 1925 and arguing that Germany cannot afford to take on any more debt. They are threatening to block any economic relief package the chancellor sends to the Reichstag unless unemployment benefits are reduced first.

Mr. Müller may have to relent. Other influential Social Democrats have signaled their support. “It just infuriates me to think that our economy is dependent on the American stock market,” a senior Social Democrat told the ring-wing paper Der Stürmer.

The case for ultra-nationalism

The Nazis say that Germany’s still-young democratic republic is already near the brink of collapse, and that political pluralism is a sign of cultural decadence and governmental dysfunction. Riding a wave of support from voters sympathetic to their populist message of restoring national greatness, the Nazis entered the Reichstag for the first time last year.

They are now pushing for even more aggressive moves, such as resuming military spending, remilitarizing the Rhineland, and even asserting territorial claims in Central Europe, although scholars say such actions could violate international law. And they are calling for a few-holds-barred crackdown on Jews, Communists and homosexuals, even as the Müller government argues that those groups are a punching bag and a distraction from Germany’s deep-seated economic and governance problems.

The Müller defense

The chancellor’s team says they’ve been aggressive — and they point to an unprecedented series of steps Germany has taken in a matter of days.

Right after the Wall Street crash, the Reichsbank opened new lines of liquidity, regulators suspended trading in volatile assets, and industrialists began building up their inventory. German banks have pulled Reichsmarks out of the United States. They’re even seizing financial assets held in Germany by associates of President Herbert Hoover.

“We are ensuring that the Wall Street crash does not jump across the Atlantic,” said a chancellery official who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record.

Mr. Müller’s officials liken their actions to gradually building a moat around the American economy.

“They’re not intended to max out at the beginning,” said the chancellery’s secretary. “They’re long-lasting and sustainable, and they’re intended to buffer the German economy.”

The problem Germany faces, current and former officials say, is one of timing. How long can Mr. Müller’s fragile coalition keep the economy stable in the face of a potential economic downturn? Can the economy be stabilized quickly enough — if at all — to insulate Germany from the aftershocks of the Wall Street crash? And how can the chancellery juggle all this without triggering another no-confidence vote in a Reichstag that is already deeply divided over foreign policy and high inflation and that is losing faith in democracy?

“Look, conceivably the Nazis win power as early as 1932, begin a genocidal campaign against vulnerable minorities, and then declare war on Britain and France and, later, the Soviet Union,” said a former Finance Ministry official. “But that’s highly speculative and world war wouldn’t possibly come as fast as an economic depression.”

That’s so on point it’s scary.

There’s a lot of this going on in the Times lately (looking at you David Leonhardt) and if you are on twitter you are very much aware of the reflexive defensiveness of the thin-skinned Big Foot reporters when it’s pointed out to them. They call this sort of boiler plate “analysis” objective but it just shows how wired the establishment press is for the GOP’s narratives.

The one they lazily fall back on is the same one they lazily fell back on with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden was stuck with Trump’s deal with the Taliban and on a short timetable refuses to escalate the war again and gets blamed in the press when the evacuation is not peaceful and orderly. The media lost their minds and it set Biden’s approval on a downward course ever since.

The GOP and their Dear Leader always leave a massive set of crises for Democrats to fix, whether it’s global financial meltdowns, wars, or pandemics and foreign policy in shambles, and because those problems are difficult, the Democrats have to pay the price when the Republicans blame them for it. Largely, thanks to the media which consistently plays this game.

The fact is that nobody on this planet can know how this Ukraine invasion is going to affect the election in the fall. There’s nothing more unpredictable than war on politics and anyone who says otherwise is getting way ahead of themselves.

Pure horror: Russian soldiers are deliberately killing Ukrainian civilians trying to flee. A mother & 2 children were killed and father wounded by a mortar shell as hundreds of civilians sought safety. @nytimes photographer Lynsey Addario witnessed it.

This video appears to show the mortar shell exploding among the Ukrainian civilians. I worked w/ @lynseyaddario in Iraq and think that’s her yelling. @nytimes security employees raced out first to give aid. Colleague @mgdowney might have more info.

@nytimes editors have made an important decision to put the photo by @lynseyaddario on the home page. Again, Russian forces fired mortar shells at hundreds of Ukrainian civilians as they fled. A mother and her two children were killed here. This is happening across Ukraine.

Originally tweeted by Edward Wong (@ewong) on March 6, 2022.

Here’s the story:

A Russian force advancing on Kyiv fired mortar shells on Sunday at a battered bridge used by evacuees fleeing the fighting, sending panicked civilians running, kicking up a cloud of dust and leaving three members of a family dead on the pavement.

Crowds of hundreds have clustered around the damaged bridge over the Irpin River since Saturday. Ukrainian forces had blown up the bridge earlier to slow the Russian advance. Only a dozen or so Ukrainian soldiers were in the immediate area of the bridge on Sunday, not fighting but helping carry civilians’ luggage and children.

To cross a hundred yards or so of exposed street on the side of the bridge closer to Kyiv, people seeking to flee to the capital formed small groups and made a run for it together. Soldiers ran out, picked up children or luggage, and ran for cover behind a cinder block wall.

The mortar shells fell first 100 or so yards from the bridge, then shifted in a series of thunderous blasts into a section of street where people were fleeing. Video showed the moment that civilians were fired upon by Russian forces in the city of Irpin outside Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

As the mortars got closer to the stream of civilians, people ran, pulling children, trying to find a safe spot. But there was nothing to hide behind. A shell landed in the street, sending up a cloud of concrete dust and leaving one family — a mother, a father, a teenage son and a daughter who appeared about 8 years old — sprawled on the ground.

Soldiers rushed to help, but the woman and children were dead. The father still had a pulse but was unconscious and severely wounded.

Their luggage, a blue roller suitcase and some backpacks, was scattered about, along with a green carrying case for a small dog that was barking.

Ukrainian forces were engaged in clashes nearby, but not at the site where civilians were moving along the street. Outgoing mortar rounds could be heard from a Ukrainian position about 200 yards away.

The shelling suggested either targeting of the evacuation routes from Irpin, something of which the Ukrainian authorities have accused the Russian army after a railroad track used for evacuations was hit on Saturday, or disregard for the risk of civilian casualties.

Russian forces have for days been pushing through three small towns on Kyiv’s northwestern rim, Hostomel, Bucha and Irpin, and the fighting has driven evacuees from the area toward the capital.

This is like something out of a 1980s cold war flick:

The “Z” they are all wearing is quite evocative, is it not? I won’t say what it evokes…

Pro-Putin politicians, activists, and influencers have been spotted wearing clothes and badges with the letter ‘Z’ on to show their support for the invasion of Ukraine.

The insignia, which is Latin script, has been seen on Russian tanks and military vehicles coming into Ukraine and become a symbol of the invasion.

‘Z’ merchandise is being sold by Russia Today, the Kremlin-funded TV channel.Proceeds from the sales are supposedly going towards a charity which supports ‘children of war.’

T-shirts which are unisex are on sale for 1,190 roubles (£8).

Russian MP Maria Butina, who was convicted in in the US in 2018 for acting as a foreign agent, posted a picture of her and colleagues in ‘Z’ t-shirts this week. The photograph was captioned: ‘The team in support of our army and president! Let’s get to work guys!

Now we just call them idiots but it turns out they’ve been quite useful as well. Margaret Sullivan writes about Putin’s massive success in recruiting right wing celebrity hosts to his cause:

The former presidential adviser and Russia expert Fiona Hill made headlines last week when she stated bluntly in a Politico interview that Vladimir Putin would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons.

But it was another part of that long interview that I found almost as arresting. Hill described how Putin, as he reaches for domination, relies heavily on his skills at the influence-and-information game.

“What happens in a Russian ‘all-of-society’ war, you soften up the enemy,” she told her interviewer, Maura Reynolds. Hill named some names: “You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you.”

And now, after a few years of their apologetic rhetoric on behalf of Russia, Putin “has got swaths of the Republican Party” and “masses of the U.S. public saying ‘Good on you, Vladimir Putin,’ or blaming NATO, or blaming the U.S.” for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she added.

It was quite an indictment from a well-respected intelligence officer, who worked inboth Republican and Democratic administrations. She became known to the American public for her unsparing analysis when she testified during Trump’s first impeachment hearings.

But while it’s startling to hear it said so directly — a Fiona Hill specialty — the proof is there for anyone to see.

In addition to the many times that Trump has praised Putin as strong and admirable, while failing to criticize his human rights offenses, our previous president helped the Russian cause in more specific ways. He reportedly argued to fellow world leaders in 2018 that Crimea — the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia invaded and annexed in 2014 — was Russian because, after all, people who live there speak Russian.

Carlson, meanwhile, recently wondered on air why Putin is hated by “permanent Washington,” describing Ukraine as “not a democracy” but a “pure client state of the United States State Department.”

In more recent days, Carlson has changed his tune to oppose Putin — while managing to fault Democrats as not sending a clear message about the impending crisis.But, to a large extent, the propaganda mission had already been accomplished. In 2019, Carlson had even asked on the air, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia, which by the way I am?” (He tried to walk that comment back after it went viral, saying he was only kidding.)

Do these pro-Putin messages sink in? No doubt they do, here in the United States and in Russia itself.

Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) said that in the run-up to the invasion, his office heard complaints from constituents who watch Carlson and “are upset that we’re not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia’s ‘reasonable’ positions.”

That Russian state TV has repeatedly played clips of Carlson’s rants, complete with Russian subtitles, is a tribute to just how well-received his rhetoric has been by Putin and his allies.

Laura Ingraham’s show was a big help late last month as she trashed a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “really pathetic” and brought Trump on as a guest. The former president’s analysis: His strongman idol would merely have taken over two regions in eastern Ukraine but went further because “he sees the weakness and the incompetence and the stupidity” of the Biden administration.

The circularity and symbiosis of right-wing media and Russia’s own talking points can be quite remarkable.

On Tuesday, former Trump-eraassistant treasury secretary Monica Crowley told Fox News’s Jesse Watters that economic sanctions were so severe that “Russia is now being canceled.” Within days, we heard about Russian Foreign Intelligence Director Sergei Naryshkin using the same cancel-culture rhetoric. “The West isn’t simply trying to close off Russia behind a new iron curtain. This is about an attempt to ruin our government — to ‘cancel’ it, as they now say in ‘tolerant’ liberal-fascist circles,” Naryshkin said.

As one Twitter wag responded, “sounds like a press release from the Republican National Committee.”

They helped, there’s no doubt about it. I don’t know what changed their minds to tell you the truth. They’ve been pro-Putin for years. I suppose the footage of people running for their lives may have awakened their consciences but I doubt it. They don’t really have those. It was probably polling that showed most of their audience was not amused.

Whatever it was, their abrupt pivot to criticism rings hollow now. The internet never forgets.

Could you do this? Could I? Even if the troops were firing into the air?

Radio Free Europe has additional footage from another angle:

Residents of Melitopol, a city in southern Ukraine, gathered to protest the arrival of Russian troops on March 2 as Moscow continues its military invasion for the seventh day. Shots can be heard in the background of an amateur video shot by a protester who says, “They are trying to intimidate us.” The shots appear to be fired into the air by Russian forces in an attempt to disperse the protest, while demonstrators remain defiant.

Even given the videos above, the following tale from journalist and reporter at The Kyiv Independent, Liubov Tsybulska, is unconfirmed and may be pro-Ukraine propaganda, but it’s a good one. The only other reportage on it comes from British tabloids:

The Ukrainian military is recruiting an army of hobby drone operators for spotting Russian troops and vehicles, says Denys Sushko who heads a Kyiv-based drone technology company (ABC News):

“We try to use absolutely everything that can help protect our country and drones are a great tool for getting real-time data,” said Sushko, who doesn’t have a drone with him but is providing expertise. “Now in Ukraine no one remains indifferent. Everyone does what they can.”

Unlike the much larger Turkish-built combat drones that Ukraine has in its arsenal, off-the-shelf consumer drones aren’t much use as weapons — but they can be powerful reconnaissance tools. Civilians have been using the aerial cameras to track Russian convoys and then relay the images and GPS coordinates to Ukrainian troops. Some of the machines have night vision and heat sensors.

But there’s a downside: DJI, the leading provider of consumer drones in Ukraine and around the world, provides a tool that can easily pinpoint the location of an inexperienced drone operator, and no one really knows what the Chinese firm or its customers might do with that data. That makes some volunteers uneasy. DJI declined to discuss specifics about how it has responded to the war.

It is a risk these operators are willing to take.

Tsybulska offers additional stories of bravery among Ukrainian civilians in the face of occupation and concludes (The New York Times):

After over a week of war, the Kremlin’s aim appears to be to encircle and capture major cities, heedless of the death and destruction Russian forces leave in their wake. Already, the toll is heavy: In the first week of conflict, according to the United Nations, 227 civilians were killed and 525 were wounded. The Russian Army, loaded up with artillery, is going to continue its brutal bombardment of the country. For Ukrainians, in flight, fight or shelter, there will be no respite.

But we are defiant. With every act of bravery and courage, Ukrainians show that we are ready to pay the highest price for democracy — ours and the world over. In this battle, we will not surrender and we will not capitulate. Because our freedom is immutable.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

The headline on The New York Times’s landing page holds a bitter irony: “The War in Ukraine Holds a Warning for the World Order.” That warning about the world order is a couple of decades late.

We thought we’d left that old order behind in the previous century. Vladimir Putin had other ideas. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked “the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II,” said UN refugee agency commissioner Filippo Grandi this morning. Germany is rearming to meet the threat. Even neutral Switzerland and Sweden are spooked.

The Times’ Australian bureau chief Damien Cave begins by admitting that the liberal world order “has been on life support for a while.” This new war in Europe is an omen, “a warning that the American-led system of internationalism needs to get itself back into gear, for the war at hand and for the struggle against authoritarianism to come.”

Cave writes:

Almost universally, from leaders in Europe and Asia to current and former American officials, Ukraine is being viewed as a test for the survival of a 75-year-old idea: that liberal democracy, American military might and free trade can create the conditions for peace and global prosperity.

Because the founder of that concept, the United States, continues to struggle — with partisanship, Covid and failure in distant war zones — many foreign policy leaders already see Ukraine in dire terms, as marking an official end of the American era and the start of a more contested, multipolar moment.

For at least a decade, liberal democracies have been disappearing. Their numbers peaked in 2012 with 42 countries, and now there are just 34, home to only 13 percent of the world population, according to V-Dem, a nonprofit that studies governments. In many of those, including the United States, “toxic polarization” is on the rise.

Ukraine may be “a global air raid siren,” but klaxons have blared in careful observers’ heads for 20 years. Putin’s invasion simply put them on our TVs.

Not so long ago, George W. Bush justified his invasion of Iraq on trumped-up allegations of an imminent threat to North American peace by arguing we needed to “fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.” Them being Islamist extremists. Bush’s invasion of a country half a world away was built on the kind of phony threat Putin used to justify invading a country next door.

The Bushies’ belief that somehow their war of choice would lead to a flowering of democracy in the Persian Gulf was beyond hubris. They committed war crimes. The collapse of Iraq displaced and/or killed countless numbers and sparked the rise of ISIS and even more death, destruction, and human suffering.

If Bush issued Putin a permission slip to behave similarly, Donald Trump laid out a red carpet. Trump weakened NATO and meant to withdraw from the alliance in a second term, says former national security adviser John Bolton. He and his truth-denying grievance cult (with Russian help) have all but repudiated everything the United States stands for and reduced its democratic aspirations to flags, shibboleths, and a thirst for strong men. On Jan. 6, 2021, Putin watched American conservatives attack their own democracy. Why would they defend Ukraine’s? Even now, they cheer on Putin’s aggression as a sign he is a real man, a real Christian, and the kind of leader to restore white men to their proper place in the world.

Cave cites experts who see the rapidity with which the West has snapped out of its funk as a sign there is still a spark left in the liberal order. Ryan C. Crocker, a retired former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan see the near future in more precarious terms, and a choice:

“If we emerge from Ukraine with the narrative being that a united NATO, a united Europe, were able to face down Putin,” he said, then “we move forward to deal with the inevitable challenges ahead from a position of unity and American leadership.”

If Russia takes over most or all of Ukraine and Mr. Putin is still in charge of a largely stable Russian economy, he added, “welcome to the new world of disorder.”

That disorder formally arrived here in November 2016. Americans must commit to fighting it over here as well as over there.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.