Kiev Chickens

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

"I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, 'This is genius.' Putin declares a big portion of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful. I said, 'How smart is that?' And he's gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. ... We could use that on our southern border." -Donald Trump, 2/23/22

The Republican Party is split into two factions regarding Russia: One sect is screaming about Putin invading Ukraine today. The other is loudly cheering on Putin and totally forgetting that Ukraine is an ally. The only thing they can seem to agree on is, come whatever may, it's all Joe Biden's fault.

    One hardly needs a scorecard to see who's on whose side. All one needs is access to Russian state TV, starting with RT. The ones who are firmly on Putin's side and waving red, white and blue foam rubber fingers over the invasion consist of Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and, of course, Donald Trump.

    The slightly less batshit Republicans, the establishment ones, are harrumphing and waggling their fingers in lieu of actual sabres, are against the invasion but, of course, it's Joe Biden's fault. Biden, meanwhile, is stammering about sanctions (that President Zelensky rightly said won't do Ukraine a fucking bit of good once the invasion starts) and promising the G7 will follow suit. Of course, economic sanctions that will take months or even years to make their effect felt will not do a bit of good to the dead Ukrainians who have already died and will die.

    But, really, the last three administrations, including the current one, are all to blame for the clusterfuck going on in the Donbass and beyond. Obama gave aid to Ukraine the last time they were invaded in 2014 (when Ukraine lost the Crimean peninsula) but it was humanitarian aid only. Trump, of course, did nothing to oppose Putin lest he miss out on the Kremlin's Employee of the Month. In fact, he got impeached for trying to withhold over $300,000,000 in military aid as a bargaining chip in exchange for Zelenski announcing on CNN an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden.

     Then there's the Biden administration and its mealy-mouthed threats of economic sanctions that Putin now no longer cares so much about as much as he and his stooges had during the Trump years. Instead, in keeping with Russian dictators going back nearly a century to Stalin, Putin is obsessed with taking back Ukraine, Europe's largest nation, and beating the Ukrainian people like the red-headed stepchildren of Eastern Europe.

     Putin, like a lot of other hardliners in Russia, feel the Ukraine rightfully belongs to Russia and that Ukrainians have no legitimate claim to a national identity despite the fact they're officially a sovereign nation and speak their own language. But post-Soviet holdovers like Putin, a former KGB agent, hold such quaint notions with undisguised contempt.

Comrade Carlson

"Very shrewd, very capable. I have enormous respect for him .. he is very savvy." -Mike Pompeo

Meanwhile, during these rapidly unfolding developments in Ukraine, we've seen and heard things from our own that are like something out of a dark Paddy Chayefsky political comedy. And it would be darkly comic if real people weren't losing their lives even as I write this. If anything, the Republicans have been spectacularly incoherent since before the invasion and even CNN is contributing to the lunacy.

    Last night on Laura Ingraham's show, we heard Trump babbling about an American amphibious landing in Ukraine and lambasting the current administration about letting out that top secret tidbit. Ingraham had to correct him and say it was the Russians who were rumored to have carried out the amphibious invasion before he began mumbling, again, about the southern border. Then this morning we were treated to a screengrab from Russian State TV showing a Tucker Carlson monologue about Putin broadcast in its entirety and subtitled in Russian.

 

     To add an extra fillip of insanity to the mix, some genius at CNN thought it would be a great idea to place an ad from Applebee's during a somber moment showing air raid sirens going off across Kiev, a moment that will live, or should live, in infamy as the most stereotypically, tragically and hideously American moment in US television history. Yes, some shit-headed technical director who'd somehow cadged a degree in television communications thought it would be a corker of an idea to supplant the site of Kiev under siege with a commercial literally nine times the size of the inset of the live feed and to even mute the air raid sirens with the audio loudly telling us about the five chicken wings for a dollar with the purchase of a burger, complete with a redneck's wiggling ass, in triplicate.

     Unfortunately, these weren't the only chickens in connection with Kiev.

     So you have Tucker verbally fellating Putin long distance and claiming it's unAmerican to hate him since he's really such a nice guy who never poisons, imprisons or defenestrates his enemies while calling Justin Trudeau a "tyrant". We have Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy blaming Biden for his appeasement of Putin, not altogether without just cause.

    And, as usual for the past year or so, almost the only Republican on Capitol Hill who makes sense and sees the situation in Ukraine the way it is and knows precisely where to squarely lay the blame is Liz Cheney, of all people.

    But outside of Cheney and a handful of other establishment Republicans, the Usual Suspects, let's call them, have been bloviating about hoew righteous Putin's invasion is, perhaps knowing that doing so on American TV will eventually land on Russian State TV and further expose them to an international viewership. The only thing they can seem to decide on is that it's the Democrat's fault. But in reality, the parroting of Russian propaganda by feckless, chickenhawk Republicans is what helped set this bloody invasion of Ukraine in motion by giving the Russian people, and the Ukrainians, the false sheen of global consensus.