Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Two red-state abortion bans fail

The conservative rush to turn post-Roe v. Wade United States into Gilead hit a couple of speed bumps on Thursday. The civil war against women halted first in South Carolina (of all places) and again in Nebraska hours later.

Washington Post:

In lengthy and often impassioned speeches on the South Carolina Senate floor, the state’s five female senators — three Republicans and two Democrats — decried what would have been a near-total ban on abortion. One, Sen. Sandy Senn (R), likened the implications to the dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” in which women are treated as property of the state.

Senn seems almost peeved about that. She said abortion laws “have always been, each and every one of them, about control — plain and simple. And in the Senate, the males have all the control.”

South Carolina and Nebraska currently allow abortions for up to about 22 weeks.

Nebraska’s bill that would have banned most all abortions after 6 weeks faltered for lack of a single vote when two senators did not vote:

Merv Riepe, a longtime Republican who would have been the decisive vote to advance the bill to a final round of voting, abstained over his concern that the six-week ban might not give women enough time to know they are pregnant.

Riepe told the Flatwater Free Press that he was concerned the Nebraska bill would be viewed as a total ban. “At the end of the day, I need to look back and be able to say to myself, ‘Did you do the best?’” Riepe told the paper. “No group came to me, asking me to do this. This is of my own beliefs, my own commitments.”

Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) seemed almost peeved that. He said it was “unacceptable for senators to be present not voting on such a momentous vote.”

What’s going on here? The 2024 elections may be 18 months away, but the growing fury of women over the Supreme Court’s unpopular 2022 decision overturning Roe is weighing on Republican minds. Especially after the party’s epic poor showing in the 2022 midterms.

Neighboring Kansas voters’ August 2022 rejection of a constitutional amendment stripping abortion protections there may have given a few Nebraska legislators pause to reconsider how Gilead they were prepared to go.

Your misogyny is showing

The five women in the South Carolina state Senate did not have to read between the lines:

“The total ban that’s being debated here today clearly places the rights of a fetus over the rights of the women and girls who will be forced by our male-dominated legislature to carry that fetus to term,” said Sen. Mia McLeod. “To be blunt, the majority has no frame of reference. There’s only five of us in this body who have actually given birth.”

“If this bill passes, a baby will be forced to carry and deliver another baby, even if it costs her her life,” added McLeod, an independent.

As other southern states have enacted near-total bans, South Carolina has become a destination for women seeking abortions, notes the New York Times:

Both states would have joined a growing list of Republican-dominated states with severe restrictions on abortion. So far, 14 states have active bans on nearly all abortions, though some allow exceptions for rape and danger to the life of the mother. Georgia and Florida also ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, but Florida’s ban is on hold pending a court challenge.

The state’s Supreme Court ruled in January that South Carolina’s constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy extends to abortion. The 3-2 majority wrote that “the decision to terminate a pregnancy rests upon the utmost personal and private considerations imaginable,” but the state retained an “interest in protecting unborn life.”

South Carolina could still pass a ban in the remaining six weeks of its session.

It remains unclear whether the legislative failures conservatives encountered in South Carolina and Nebraska represent speed bumps rather than attacks of conscience, or reassessments of how the GOP’s rush to Gilead will land with voters in 2024.

Riepe, a former hospital administrator, addressed colleagues after an amendment he offered failed. It would have moved the Nebraska ban out to 12 weeks.

The Associated Press reports, “Riepe took to the mic to warn his conservative colleagues that they should heed signs that abortion will galvanize women to vote them out of office.”

They might not lose sleep over their attitudes toward women, but they might over women’s attitudes toward them.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said Wednesday that President Joe Biden, 80, will likely die within five years and that his supporters would have to count on Vice President Kamala Harris if he were to win re-election next year.

“He announced that he’s running again in 2024, and I think that we can all be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris, because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely,” Haley, 51, said in an interview on Fox News.

It’s even less like that Nikki Haley will be in politics in five years so …

This piece by Tim Miller made me laugh. He’s so right:

Brokeback Party

The Republican party has barely tried anything in their effort to move on and they are already out of ideas. After a few bad weeks in the polls for Tiny D, the party poohbahs are throwing in the towel and getting back aboard the Trump Train. 

Whether it’s a pheremonal attraction to his rakish, devil-may-care persona, an addiction to the small donors and the retweets, an unquenchable desire to be invited to a disgusting dinner in a gaudy dining room, a cowardly fear of being shouted down at the airport by obese hillbillies, a boner for making the libs squirm—or a little from columns A, B, C, D, and E—the GOP grownups are signing up to Do It all over again. Like the besotted Jack Twist staring at their mountain man, these Republicans just don’t know how to quit Trump. 

In just the past week, the former guy has received endorsements from both the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Steve Daines, and Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in New York in 2022.

I think it’s important to step back and appreciate how insane these endorsements are, because these guys are not random backbench MAGA morons.

Zeldin was reportedly set to be a “top official” in the DeSantis campaign before he signed on with Trump. (Ouch!) This guy was puffed up as a future party leader by establishment favorite Tom Cotton on the Sunday shows and he was the secret candidate that “closet normal” Republicans were trying to recruit to take over the RNC from Ronna “Don’t-Call-Me-Romney” and the Trumpers after the midterm disappointment. 

As for Daines, it is his job to manage the campaign committee that has as its entire purpose the election of GOP senators. The sole individual responsible for tanking that mission in 2022 was Donald Trump—whose endorsed candidates crashed and burned in every competitive race.

Not to mention that seven of Daines’s colleagues voted—just three years ago!—to convict Trump over his attempt to overthrow the government, a vote that carried with it the consequence of prohibiting him from being elected to federal office again in an unprecedented rebuke of a president by members of his own party. (Four of the seven GOP “guilty” votes are still in the Senate, and one of them, Mitt Romney, is up for re-election next year.)

In what world does it make sense for the guy who is ostensibly in charge of winning elections for the GOP to throw in with Trump after all that? There’s still ten months until the voting begins!  And Daines decided to announce his endorsement on the disgraced, twice-impeached president’s nepo-baby’s podcast.

This is fucking madness! 

In any sane world, endorsing Trump on Don Jr.’s Triggered pod would be grounds for replacing Daines with someone, anyone, who was awake in 2022. It should be a disqualifying act. Politico should be littered with pieces sourcing privately concerned Republicans on background about how they are worried the NRSC chair has lost his mind. 

And yet news of the Daines endorsement was met with nary a peep from his colleagues, who are spending their time these days either hyperventilating over Bud Light or cowering in the corner in fear of a Trump bleat. Today, the big-foot Politico column about accepting a Trump nomination quotes a “shrewd” GOP strategist content to “go into the basement, ride out the tornado,” which raises the question, when exactly did you leave the basement, gimp? Yesterday, it was revealed that when the  RNC looked at why they lost in 2022 they were too scared to even mention Trump’s name.

These are just the latest pieces of evidence that the number of politicians left in the party who haven’t been completely corrupted by Trump can be counted on one hand. And while the fingers of their affection might be tiny and pudgy, Ennis does have those dreamy blue eyes . . .

As every writer has written more than once: “they just can’t quit him.”

Jack Texeira was a ticking time bomb

He appears to be one of those heavily armed, racist, incels with a propensity for grandiosity and violence. How in the hell did he get that top security clearance?

 Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of posting classified documents online, repeatedly tried to obstruct federal investigators and has a “troubling” history of making racist and violent remarks, Justice Department lawyers said in a court filing late Wednesday.

In an 18-page memo, released before a detention hearing scheduled for Thursday in a Massachusetts federal court, the department’s lawyers argued that Airman Teixeira needed to be detained indefinitely because he posed a “serious flight risk” and might still have information that would be of “tremendous value to hostile nation states.”

Airman Teixeira tapped into vast reservoirs of sensitive information, an amount that “far exceeds what has been publicly disclosed” so far, they wrote.

Prosecutors pointedly questioned Airman Teixeira’s overall state of mind, disclosing that he was suspended from high school in 2018 for alarming comments about the use of Molotov cocktails and other weapons, and trawled the internet for information about mass shootings. He engaged in “regular discussions about violence and murder” on the same social media platform, Discord, that he used to post classified information, the filing said, and he surrounded his bed at his parents’ house with firearms and tactical gear.

Airman Teixeira was also prone to making “racial threats,” prosecutors said.

This behavior — so disturbing it was flagged by local police when he applied for a firearms identification card — is certain to raise new questions about how Airman Teixeira obtained a top-secret security clearance that gave him access to some of the country’s most sensitive intelligence reports.

Mr. Teixeira’s court-appointed lawyers dismissed the claim that he would be in a flight risk, and proposed that he be released on a $20,000 bond to his family’s custody, in a response filed several hours before the hearing.

The episode in high school took place during his sophomore year and was never repeated, they said. The lawyers also played down the idea that he would have an opportunity to turn information over to the United States’ enemies.

The government provided “little more than speculation that a foreign adversary will seduce Mr. Teixeira and orchestrate his clandestine escape from the United States,” they wrote.

His legal team also offered a fleeting first glimpse at possible defense arguments, claiming that the government has not offered proof Mr. Teixeira ever intended for the information posted to a private social media server “to be widely disseminated.”

Mr. Teixeira’s lawyers described him as compliant — and said he sat on the porch reading a Bible as he waited to be arrested — but the government painted a starkly different picture.

In arguing for his confinement, prosecutors described a panicked effort by Airman Teixeira to cover up his actions as law enforcement closed in, including telling a member of a chat group to “delete all messages,” and instructing a user to stonewall investigators.

He also tried to destroy evidence, prosecutors said. The filing includes a series of photos of electronic equipment, including a tablet and an Xbox console, that he hurriedly smashed, then tossed in a dumpster near his home in North Dighton, Mass., before his arrest this month. A witness told the government that he threw his phone out the window of his truck as he was driving.

“These efforts appeared calculated to delay or prevent the government from gaining a full understanding of the seriousness and scale of his conduct,” the department wrote. “Any promise by the defendant to stay home or to refrain from compounding the harm that he has already caused is worth no more than his broken promises to protect classified national defense information.”

I don’t know if he’s in danger of defecting or whatever they think but he’s not a normal person and it’s probably a good idea to keep him under lock and key until his case is decided. He’s very weird, he likes guns and he liked to google mass shootings. Any one of those things might not mean anything but combine that with the illegal behavior online and his need to lead a strange little crew of misfits, and it just seems wise to keep him under wraps.

Jonathan Martin, Politico’s answer to Maureen Dowd (when she was a snotty reporter) says that the GOP is starting to come to terms with the fact that they are stuck with Trump for another round. I have always thought so (barring some intervening event like Trump dropping dead on the golf course.) He addresses the biggest problem they face — the fact that Trump will never concede gracefully if he loses:

Just as progressives privately worried that Hillary Clinton and her party’s moderates would never truly embrace Bernie Sanders if he prevailed, many pessimistic Republicans wonder the same about Trump next year.

That ridiculous. The test was in 2008 when the delegate count in the primary was super, super close and yet Clinton endorsed Obama at the convention (saying “were you in it for me or were you in it for the country” to her disappointed followers) worked to get him elected and was then brought into the cabinet as Secretary of State. Both of the primaries in 2008 and 2016 were very tough (I hope to never relive them) but to assume that Clinton would never have “truly embraced” Sanders is typical. She would have been a good soldier as always and her followers would have come around. (I omitted his reference to Trump being the Hillary Clinton of 2024 because it’s stupid. )

Anyway:

It’s preposterous to imagine him, arms held aloft with DeSantis or whoever beats him, at a Unity Breakfast the morning after the nomination is decided. At best, Trump will be an irritant to who defeats him.

So why not, as Christie alluded to last week, stop fighting political gravity, submit to Trump and then, if he again loses, begin the Republican reformation in 2025. After all, it took Democrats three consecutive losses in the 1980s for the Democratic Leadership Council to finally gain traction and elevate one of their own in 1992.

Republicans would only have to suffer two White House defeats to finally move on from Trump and, in the meantime, there’s that Supreme Court majority he helped deliver as the political backstop.

As a shrewd Republican strategist, and no NeverTrumper, put it to me recently: “We’re just going to have to go into the basement, ride out the tornado and come back up when it’s over to rebuild the neighborhood.”

This Republican, as with a number of his like, has been hoping for a strong Trump alternative to emerge but has grown more pessimistic, DeSantis’ early stumbles confirming his doubts about the Florida governor. Moreover, there’s the matter of Roe being overturned and the political vise the party is caught in between its unyielding anti-abortion activists and a broader electorate that supports legal abortion. “We’re the dog that caught the car on Trump and abortion.”

So, yes, there are some doubts in GOP ranks about 2024. And not just from the self-hating type.

I would hope so. Trump has turned the GOP into a toxic waste dump and there’s no cleaning it up until he’s gone. And frankly, like all toxic waste dumps, it’s going to take years or perhaps it should be completely condemned.

Okay, who did this??!! 🤣🤣
pic.twitter.com/JGMpeMtLZO

— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) April 26, 2023

… and created a bunch of jobs. Was it worth it?

There is a tendency among some on the left to reflexively adopt the enemy of my enemy is my friend concept when it comes to certain critiques of “neoliberalism” and the Democratic establishment. In my view it’s a lazy kind of thinking and I don’t pay much attention to it. That impulse was on display yesterday when The American Prospect published a lauditory piece on Tucker Carlson and the internet blew up. It was a very bad piece.

Today the magazine offered a response and it’s quite good:

On Tuesday afternoon, the Prospect posted an article about Tucker Carlson on its home page. Focusing almost solely on Carlson’s opposition to corporate globalism, it missed a very large forest for some very cherry-picked trees. It failed to note the roots of Carlson’s positions, in a broader sense failing to note that opposition to neoliberal orthodoxy is an element of both progressive and fascist politics, and hence, depending on whence it comes, not automatically worthy of celebration. The piece failed to take into account Carlson’s racism, xenophobia, misogyny, disdain for democracy, affinity for autocrats and autocracy, habitual lying, and demands to Fox management that they muzzle or fire reporters who had the chutzpah to acknowledge that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election. It omitted the fact that Carlson had been second only to Donald Trump in building the neofascist right that threatens American democracy.

The Tucker Carlson who actually impacted American politics is the guy who promoted the “great replacement” theory, through which Democrats supposedly make war on white people by supporting immigration, and conspiracy theories about the deep state. Nothing Carlson offered to viewers was unique to the Republican tradition. Phyllis Schlafly was getting on television to talk about the globalist banker cabal and criticize establishment conservatives long before Tucker’s career began. Rush Limbaugh’s response to the utter failure of the Iraq War, which Tucker initially supported, was to suggest the “deep state” faked evidence of weapons of mass destruction to discredit President Bush. A feigned interest in the working class is nothing new for the GOP, but the left’s propensity to take such at face value is a concerning trend.

There is a distinct kind of credulousness masquerading as sophistication that is popular within some media circles, where the goal seems to be to inspire shock and awe within the center-left. Most of the time, it’s harmless, and sometimes even worthwhile. When it becomes dangerous is when that becomes the standard for political discourse. Tucker Carlson has said many things that challenge liberal orthodoxy, because racist and nationalist populists have a critique of liberalism just as progressive populists do. That doesn’t mean they have anything in common with you.

It reveals a certain disrespect for the opinions of the public to suggest that Carlson’s large audience makes him the working-class whisperer. Carlson’s anti-elitism is highly selective. It doesn’t include Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, or Donald Trump. In fact, Fox stood by him for years, giving him the backing of the Republican Party’s most powerful media organ and putting him, in that sense, firmly within the party establishment. When he’s criticized tech companies, it was only because they’ve occasionally banned white supremacists from their platforms. He’s anti–big business in the sense that Ron DeSantis is anti–big business: deregulating anything that would diminish its profits, but regulating any corporate expressions of social moderation.

Carlson has been second only to Donald Trump in building the neofascist right that threatens American democracy.

The left is generally capable of recognizing when centrists appropriate messages of solidarity and resistance to fit the needs of capital. Why, then, do some miss the fact that it routinely happens on the right?

Distinguishing between left and right populism, between progressive populism and fascism, should be one of the tasks that a left publication routinely undertakes. Both historically and today, fascism is a doctrine that elevates racial solidarity over laissez-faire capitalism. An approach that salutes Carlson for his economics could also engender a salute to Marine Le Pen, who, like the French left, has opposed French President Macron’s circumventing the parliament to raise the retirement age.

In the same vein, a survey of world economics in 1937 might note that only three nations had broken from the laissez-faire orthodoxy that was prolonging the Great Depression: the United States, through Roosevelt’s public-works and employment programs; Sweden, through similar programs as part of its commitment to planned full employment; and Germany, where Hitler’s commitment to building the autobahns and rearming the country for its coming wars significantly reduced the unemployment rate. It is, to put it very mildly, possible to document this semi-convergence of economic policies without hailing (or heiling) Hitler for his break with economic orthodoxy.

What Tuesday’s article failed to do was to report on something so obvious as, say, the reason why Carlson opposes U.S. support for Ukraine. It noted his opposition as something he shares with a portion of the American left; it praised Carlson for his anti-establishment chops. It neglected to note that what led him to this position was his proudly proclaimed affinity for the illiberal, gay-bashing, autocratic policies and practices of Putin and Carlson’s beloved Viktor Orban. (In his college yearbook, Carlson described himself as a member of the “Dan White Society,” which was a nonexistent organization but a way that Carlson could make a not-so-veiled tribute to Harvey Milk’s murderer.)

Carlson’s anti-intervention reasons are not those of the left-wing opponents of U.S. aid to Ukraine, and any discussion of his stance requires a discussion of why he holds them. Historians note the very different set of beliefs that distinguished the pacifists and socialists who opposed our entry into World War II from the pro-German, Nazi fellow traveler Charles Lindbergh. A historian who wrote about that movement and didn’t delve into the wildly dissimilar motivations of its members wouldn’t be much of a historian.

To argue that the media celebrated Carlson’s firing because it couldn’t stand his critique of global corporatism is to miss the fact that many of the journalists who celebrated have been critiquing global corporatism for decades—a critique that has defined the Prospect from its inception to today. That critique, distinguishing left from fascist, was evident yesterday when we posted on our home page Prospect managing editor Ryan Cooper’s weekly podcast, with the headline “Farewell to a Crypto-Nazi Blowhard.” That succinctly sums up who Tucker Carlson really is.

GOP wants to cut $30 billion from veterans spending

“The Republican Party is always looking to ‘thank Veterans for their service’ but when it comes time to put your money where your mouth is this is what they do,” tweets Rep. Eric Ager, one of our local Democratic state House members. “So many veterans in NC like me rely on the VA for healthcare and this won’t help.”

This is what the GOP wants to do to those veterans. Democrats Rep. Mark A. Takano (Calif.), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.) and Rep. Chris Deluzio (Pa.) write at Military Times:

Thirty million fewer healthcare visits. Fewer staff, increased claims backlog, longer wait times for benefits. Almost a $30 billion shortfall for veterans funding. That’s the uncertainty that awaits America’s veterans, should Congressional Republicans succeed in dramatically slashing federal spending as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed on April 19.

Last Congress, we honored our promise to toxic-exposed veterans by providing benefits and care to approximately three million veterans exposed to toxins, including burn pits. However, this achievement is meaningless if the funding to implement it is gutted. Republicans have promised to reduce funding to fiscal year 2022 levels —which risks a 22% decrease in resources for veterans’ care and benefits. And many of them are calling for even deeper cuts.

Cutting care and services by nearly a quarter is a disservice to the men and women who have served this country, and befuddling given how often Republicans wrap themselves in the flag and embrace the veteran community.

Here’s what House Republican’s proposed cuts would mean for veterans — reduced veterans’ access to care, fewer staff to process claims, longer wait times for benefits, less support for national cemeteries, weakened VA cybersecurity and telehealth services, and a further deteriorated VA infrastructure. VA Secretary McDonough says the cuts could mean a potential reduction of 30 million healthcare visit for veterans and the loss of over 81,000 VA employees providing benefits to veterans.

This news is guaranteed to land with a thud in veterans’ communities nationwide. As members of Congress who sit on committees with jurisdiction over veterans issues, we hear from veterans, and the organizations that advocate on their behalf every day. We encourage our House Republican colleagues to ask our country’s 19 million veterans whether they think slashing investments in their well-being makes sense. Our guess is they won’t like the answer.

There’s a saying, “either put up or…” It’s time for Republicans to put their money where their mouth is, and demonstrate their commitment to America’s veterans by producing a budget that honors those who served, lest they allow veterans’ healthcare and benefits to be held hostage by the extreme wing of their party.

Veterans’ care and benefits are sacred promises we pay to our veterans as part of the cost of war and in acknowledgment of their sacrifice. We owe it to our nation’s veterans to honorably recognize their service — not subject them to political hijinks with potentially disastrous consequences.

“This is what they do”

How many times have we seen this movie? Plenty, in Ager’s view. “This is what they do.”

Robert Reich wrote in 2020:

But now Trump and Senate Republicans are repeating history. In 2016, when Trump was asked about the debt, he claimed “We pay it back so easily.” Then he blew up the debt by passing a giant tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. 

So even though Trump inherited the longest economic expansion in history, he increased the ratio of debt to GDP to over 105 percent. And Republicans have reverted to the same, old playbook – threatening to cut Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare because, they say, “we can’t afford” these programs.

Time and again, Republicans scream about the national debt when a Democrat is in the White House, cleaning up the mess they caused. But when there’s a Republican administration, they couldn’t care less about the debt. When Mitch McConnell was asked about soaring debt and deficits his response was, “It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem.”

Neither are veterans. Let one know every chance you get.

“One of the great renewable resources”

“You can’t keep a good homicidal maniac down” is an essential trope from slasher films. In the zombie genre, the lingering question of, “How long can they last?” persists alongside the infectious, shambling dead.

Given the Outrage Industrial Complex extant since the 1980s, the same uncertainties apply to MAGA. How long can people addicted to daily outrage keep going before burning out?

“What used to rule the day on the American right was ‘owning the libs.’ But now they are owning one another,” writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. How long can political meth addicts maintain before finally, beset by paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, they crash and/or devour each other?

With Dominion’s massive defamation settlement against Fox News, with Tucker Carlson’s ouster from the network, and with looming legal accountability for Donald Trump, perhaps MAGA’s collapse is, if not as imminent as that Fani Willis indictment, on the horizon.

Wehner writes:

It is a lesson nearly as old as time itself: Those whose passions are inflamed—and Trump supporters are nothing if not perennially inflamed—are drawn to destruction. “Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in a half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years,” the 18th-century conservative statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke warned.

Lack of restraint is the essence of the Trump movement. Shattering guardrails is what they find thrilling. But what MAGA adherents forget is that those guardrails exist to protect not only others, but also ourselves from excess, self-indulgence, and self-harm. There’s a reason that temperance—self-mastery, the capacity to moderate inordinate desires, balance that produces internal harmony—is one of the four cardinal virtues.

The extremism, aggression, and lack of restraint in MAGA world are spreading rather than receding. They are becoming more rather than less indiscriminate. Those who are part of that movement, and certainly those who lead it, act as if they’re invincible, as if the rules don’t apply to them, as if they can say anything and get away with anything. That has certainly been true of Trump, and it is often true of those who have patterned themselves after Trump, which is to say, virtually the entire Republican Party.

But it goes even beyond this. MAGA world directs its ridicule at those who exercise temperance, who embrace restraint, and who ask themselves what they should do rather than what they can get away with. Those who reject the ethic of Thrasymachus—the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who believes might makes right and injustice is better than justice—are dismissed as weak and delicate. The denizens of MAGA world not only relish discarding guardrails; they scorn those who abide by them.

Toothlessness and destitution await as the buzz loses its kick. “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children,” wrote Jacques Mallet du Pan in 1793, whom Wehner quotes in French. Our charge, Wehner advises, is to contain the damage.

Isn’t that every Democratic president’s inheritance after each spasm of Republican plunder? In fact, the GOP counts on it. Let ” weak and delicate” Democrats “who ask themselves what they should do” repair the damage so the plunder might begin anew after four years or eight.

As P.J. O’Rourke once said, “Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.”

This truly shows that DeSantis is not ready for prime time. He sounds confused at best and shifty at worst. I’m not sure what he believes but whatever it is he’s communicating it very poorly:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that it’s in the world’s interest for a cease-fire to be negotiated in Ukraine.

DeSantis made the comments during a wide-ranging interview with Nikkei Asia on Tuesday while the Florida governor is in Japan on an international trade mission.

In the interview, DeSantis warned that an extended war is possible in Ukraine.

“You don’t want to end up in like a [Battle of] Verdun situation, where you just have mass casualties, mass expense and end up with a stalemate,” DeSantis said. “It’s in everybody’s interest to try to get to a place where we can have a cease-fire.”

DeSantis also called out Europe, and Germany in particular, for allegedly not doing enough to help Ukraine.

“The Europeans really need to do more [on Ukraine]. I mean, this is their continent. The U.S. has provided security for them. And yes, Poland – there’s some that are doing stuff, and that should be appreciated. But Germany, they’re not doing anything,” DeSantis said.

“We have foreign policy elites that do things without having a concrete objective in mind,” DeSantis added.

DeSantis’ comments come after he told Fox News that the United States shouldn’t become further involved in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

​”While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis said.

He later told Fox Nation’s “Piers Morgan Uncensored” that the comments were “mischaracterized,” after criticism from Republicans, and called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” and “basically a gas station with a bunch of nuclear weapons.” 

“Well, I think it’s been mischaracterized. Obviously, Russia invaded that and that was wrong,” DeSantis said. “They invaded Crimea and took that in 2014. That was wrong. What I’m referring to is kinda where the fighting is going on now, which is that western border or eastern border reaching Donbas and then Crimea.”

DeSantis said that his earlier comments calling the war a “territorial dispute” were referring to “the conflict area” instead than expressing that “Russia had a right to that.”

“And so, if I should have made that more clear, I could have done it,” DeSantis said. “But I think the larger point is, OK, Russia is not showing the ability to take over Ukraine, to topple the government or certainly to threaten NATO. That’s a good thing. They’ve been weakened. You now have the fighting in those areas.” “If I could snap my fingers, I’d give it back to Ukraine 100 percent,” DeSantis added. “Russia did not have the right to go into Crimea or to go in February of 2022, and that should be clear.”

A cease-fire would be great. But at this point it would seal in Russia’s gains, which the Ukrainians, not the US, must decide is worthwhile. We are not in charge of those decisions. All we can do is help our allies, which includes Ukraine and all of Europe. It’s a moral imperative.

He’s trying to have it both ways (or all ways) and it’s incoherent. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine with the intention of either taking over the country outright or installing a puppet government beholden to him. He wanted to destroy their budding democracy and send a message to the rest of eastern Europe that he would take what he wanted. If DeSantis thinks this is ok, he should just say it out loud.

But even Trump won’t do that — he just says, “it wouldn’t have happened with me in charge” and promises to magically end the war the minute he re-elected. But it’s pretty clear that Trump believes Russia can do whatever it wants because Vladimir Putin is a big pal of his and he’s strong and manly and that’s what strong, manly leaders do. He thinks that by pouring vast, epic sums of money into the military industrial complex in America it will deter anyone from “messing” with America. And that’s because he’s monumentally stupid and thinks the US can simply watch the world burn while we carry on, self-contained and prosperous. As I said, he’s a moron. I doubt he’s ever read a book.

I don’t know if DeSantis agrees with all that. In fact, I have no idea what DeSantis thinks about foreign policy at all. But it’s clear that he’s not going to run from a position of principle. He doesn’t have any.