Biden Mans Up; White House Wimps Out

 

Joe Biden spoke  in Warsaw to a crowd waving Polish, American and Ukrainian flags and he spoke directly to Vladimir Putin.

He did not say, "Mr. Putin, tear down this wall," because it was Mr. Putin tearing down and, in fact, sending tanks over walls already;  that, in fact, is the problem.

What President Biden did say was good enough: To say that Russian troops are blasting through Ukraine to "denazify" Ukraine is "obscene" Biden said, of a country which elected a Jewish President whose father's family was murdered in the Holocaust.

That many Ukrainians took part in the Holocaust nearly 80 years ago, should not be forgotten, but some protected Jews and the point is, they elected a Jewish President just lately. To talk of Ukraine today as being run by Nazis, Biden said, "Is just obscene."

"For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power."

The President is saying what is obvious to anyone paying attention to the news, even in New Hampshire. The problem is not some historic coalescence of grievances, or some geopolitical game; the problem is one man, as surely as the Third Reich was one man and his obsessions. The only way for this war to end cleanly is for Putin to go the way of Hitler, with a bullet in his head. There, I said it. Everyone knows it, but nobody wants to say it. There might be some minions supporting him, but if Putin died tomorrow, those Russian troops and tanks would stop in their tracks.

Were it not for Putin and his dreams of glory and empire, there would be no problem between Russia and Europe or the United States.

Of course, while the President was in Europe, back at the White House some self important staffers were saying, "The President's point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin's power in Russia, or regime change."

Oh, that's a very fine point there, darling. We don't care what he does inside his own borders, but when he crosses borders, we are staunch. (By that policy, had Hitler not invaded Poland, then we would be fine with all those concentration camps inside Germany--but that's an argument for another day.)

You can imagine all the meetings at the National Security Council, the State Department and the Defense Department where everyone agreed we should not say we wanted Putin's head, but simply we wanted him to use his power differently, because, "It risks confirming Russia's central propaganda claim that the West, and particularly the United States, is determined to destroy Russia."

And what do we care about confirming Russian propaganda? Are we afraid we'll lose the Russian public? As if anything we do or say will affect the opinions of the Russian public, given Putin's lockdown of opposition journalism? 

No, what Biden is saying, which he should be saying as President, is that but for Putin we would have no quarrel with Russia, but we cannot deal with a psychopathic dictator and we'll treat him and his country accordingly. He can't concern himself with how this message is received inside a slave state. He is speaking to the rest of Europe, to China and to his folks back home, and he is speaking clearly.

What is aggravating is to see the rest of the American government unable to realize that when it comes to foreign policy, the United States has one leader, the President, and if he wants to say Putin has to go, then everyone else must scramble to catch up.

Biden has spoken his mind before, confounding the underlings and even his boss. He said he thought gay marriage was fine before President Obama had got to that point, but ultimately, he convinced Obama, because Biden, while he might have lost some brain cells, is still functioning on enough cylinders to know what right is.

Lincoln once said, "If slavery is not wrong, then I do not know what wrong is."

Biden is saying the same thing.

Renny Cushing: A Good Life, A Good Man in Bad Times

 

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, 
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, 
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead 
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, 
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, 
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

--WH Auden

We got the news today we all knew was coming, but did not want to hear: Renny Cushing has died.

It does not seem right.

Death often does not seem right, but this man campaigned against death, against the death penalty in New Hampshire. Surely, death would respect that.

I met him only 14 years ago, which in Hampton time is the click of the second hand. Renny had lived his whole life in Hampton, graduated from Winnacunnet, travelled around the country and into Mexico but then came home.

He worked ceaselessly, often a boat beating against the tides, in the New Hampshire legislature, advocating for better health care, better mental health care, pushing against the death penalty even though his own father had been murdered, and by a policeman, at that.

I cannot say I knew him well, but I can say I knew enough of him to see the nobility, the grace, the enormous patience and the fastidious honor of the man.

It's a sad day for Hampton, for all those who knew him.

What's Really Happening with Putin and Ukraine?

 As a humble citizen, unschooled in military strategies and geopolitical oil and gas stratagems, and the psychological profile of Vladimir Putin, I have only youtube, the Atlantic, the New Yorker and NPR to help me understand why Mr. Putin pulled an Adolph Hitler and launched his invasion.

Here's what I've got so far:

1/ Mr. Putin has some psychological buzz going on in his brain regarding things that have to do with the vagaries of respect, power, prestige and all like that. As Nina Khruschev has described him: He is a 5 foot five man trying to look 5 feet six. 

So there's that, the small man syndrome. 

And he has been reported to have commented on the demise of Omar Ghaddafi on multiple occasion, and he may well fear suffering a similar fate, should he ever relinquish  a scintilla of power. 

Masha Gessen and others have suggested Putin's invasion is simply pay back for the humiliation he felt when Clinton bombed Kosovo, when Russia was too weak to do much about it. It's a long revenge game, according to Gessen. 

That sounds titillating, but I'm not sure I buy that.

2/ But there are other concerns you can find on various youtube podcasts:

A very elaborate explanation about the geography of the great Russian/European plane which allows armies to sweep across the areas between the Baltic states, Germany, Poland, Byelorussia, Romania and Ukraine, and if you have Ukraine within Russia, that protects a flank. 

The problem with all this is it applies only if armies are sweeping across that vast plane on horseback, or even in tanks, and with airplanes, but how much does that sort of large World War II type battle scene matter when Russia is stacked high with nuclear missiles? 

Get too close to Moscow or Volgograd and poof: you are nuclear toast. 

It's the Jungian Thing

3/ The Gas/Oil theory: Now this makes a lot more sense. Apparently, Ukraine is not only the breadbasket of that part of Europe, but it has lots of oil in both eastern and western Ukraine on land, and off shore lots of natural gas, and the Crimean peninsula is particularly rich in oil and off shore natural gas.

With Russia providing 1/3 to 1/2 of Western Europe's gas and oil, and most of that crossing Ukraine, for which Ukraine exacts a large fee, it would be nice to control the gas line territory, so this invasion, bringing Ukraine back to mother Russia, makes sense as blood for oil.  

Russia, apparently, pumps more oil than Saudi Arabia. Who knew?

Enjoy the Beach, But we're watching you

It's a petrol state and it's more of a petrol state if it owns Ukraine.

So now we don't have to invoke Imperial Russia and Putin's psychopathology; we've got good old fashioned oil and power and we can certainly understand that. 

Then you get all the shenanigans about Russia and Ukraine being one country, or maybe one family with a divorce and whenever you get into the history, it gets really confusing. 

Khrushchev, who was born in Ukraine, apparently gave the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine sometime in the 20th century, not all that long ago, as a sort of consolation prize for becoming a republic in the USSR. And Crimea has not only all that natural gas and oil but it also has one of Russia's only big warm water ports, which does not ice over and allows the Russian Navy to rule the Black sea and to get into the Mediterranean. 

Putin has for years told anyone who would listen that Ukraine isn't even a real country, just part of Russia, which is like telling Jacqueline Onassis she isn't really an Onassis because she's really a Kennedy and then one of her sisters shows up and tells you she's actually a Bouvier. Gets very confusing.

What we all can see are the soldiers in tanks and Russians firing rockets into Ukrainian buildings and fighting their way into nuclear power plants and none of this looks like a humanitarian operation or a peace keeping mission.

And, except in the eastern part of Ukraine, the Ukrainians do not appear to be terribly fond of the Russians right now, even though many of them have relatives in Russia.

I imagine it's sort of like how people in Massachusetts feel about people from Texas, Louisiana and Kentucky: you know there's a connection there, and we speak more or less the same language,  but right now, we're not inviting any of them over for Thanksgiving dinner.

 

Charismatic Leaders

When Amy Klobuchar visited New Hampshire, during the Democratic primary season,  I asked her how she planned to run against a candidate of charisma with a campaign based on policy. She clearly had not been asked that question before and she smiled, thought for a moment and said, "Well, I think I have charisma, too."

She may have had some charisma, but clearly, nothing like Donald Trump. She did not become the candidate on the Democratic ticket.  Elizabeth Warren was a crowd pleaser, but she has a wispy voice  and she's a wisp of a woman, just not physically imposing. Bernie Sanders has plenty of charisma, and I thought he would stand up on stage best against Trump, but his policies scared Democrats. His policies were so extreme, he scared too many people.

Beyond Sanders, the Democrats have trouble finding leaders who can speak above a whisper. 

When 11 candidates presented themselves for consideration for the Congressional seat in the 1st district of New Hampshire, the candidate of charisma, Terrence O'Rourke, got 900 votes. He scared women. He seemed too angry for Democratic women. Chris Pappas, who barely speaks above a whisper, got 21,000. Pappas comes from the state's most populous city and his family owns a big restaurant and he has lots of friends in town, but he is a house cat. A woman who looks like she could win a spot on FOX News, Maura Sullivan, got 19,000 votes, even though she had no base of friends in New Hampshire, had only moved to the state recently, but she had tons of dark money running TV ads constantly. She had a modicum of charisma, but no policies. 

Great Charisma, Horrific Cause

When it comes to charisma, nobody beats Hitler. Crowds of women wept has they saluted him rolling by in his open Mercedes, standing up arm outstretched, brow in a stern frown. A man of strength.

The man had appeal, Heaven knows why.

George Washington had charisma. He was over six feet tall at a time most men were five feet eight. 

Had someone put a bullet in Hitler's brain somewhere around the beer hall Putsch, in 1929, would the Holocaust or World War II ever happened?

We'll never know. But I'm betting, none of those co conspirators could ever have pulled off the Third Reich without him: Himmler, Hess, Goring, Goebbels. Just to banal or too ugly. 

Now, we have Putin, that little man, who Nina Khrushchev says is a 5 foot five inch man who is trying to sell the idea he is five feet six.

He marches down long red carpets, against a back ground of golden drapes and walls, with those peculiar guards, who look not just like wooden soldiers from the time of Catherine the Great, but like wind up toy soldiers of the Nutcracker ballet. There's something weird they do with their necks and chins and heads, which is a little creepy.

What is that all about?

I'm guessing it's about projecting of not just power but past glory.

But it's all in the mind of a single man. A little man trying to be big. A little man who wants Russia to be a goliath again.

And he is a man who orders other men poisoned.  Firing squads are not his favored expedient. He likes poison. Poison is a little more worrisome. You just never know when it might get to you. 

Fiona Hill noted Putin never touched a bite or sipped a drink at the state dinner she attended, sitting next to him. Fear of poisoning?

Another favorite Russian tactic is throwing people out of windows.  Don't ask me why. I suppose it's one of those things about plausible deniability. Russians like to lie to your face with a wink, saying they know you know they are lying, but they enjoy lying while you know they are lying.

So, Mr. Putin's current project in Ukraine is a "humanitarian intervention."

Obadiah Youngblood

Senator Lindsey Graham has expostulated that someone needs to kill Putin. Put a bullet in his brain. For once, Graham has spit out the truth. But Putin, like most dictators, has taken great care to protect himself, to hunker in the bunker. 

Putin, it has been written, obsesses over the demise of Omar Ghaddafi. Apparently, he was sodomized before he was shot. That, if what we are told is true, disturbs Putin greatly. 

John F. Kennedy remarked, "Any man who is willing to trade his life for mine can kill me."

As it turned out, his killer or killers did not actually have to do that.

The men who killed Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy did not hang for their deeds.

In a day of drones and remote killing machines, one would think a leader, even Putin, could be reached.

But, apparently not. 

And so we have Ukraine.

But we also have, unexpectedly, Zelensky, that guy nobody had ever heard of in the West--like Trump, a TV creation, but in the case of Ukraine, a good creation, who actually had brass balls when the time came. 

And he had great timing and delivery.  When Putin claimed Zelensky had fled the country or was cowering in hiding, Zelensky said, "I am here. I'm not going anywhere." And he smiled that faint, economical smile and he was, in an instant a man of more charisma than either Trump or Putin, because he was a real patriot. America offered to whisk him away to safety. "I don't need a ride," Zelensky said. "I need ammunition."

A patriot needs to take a risk, to put his fortune or his life at risk in the face of palpable threat, something neither Trump nor Putin have ever done nor ever would do. That, Trump would say, is for suckers.

There is no such thing as patriotism without risk or without cost or sacrifice. The Proud Boys and FOX News staff are all about phony patriotism: tough talk, posing with guns, slogans, flags. None of that easy, safe patriotism is anything more than posing. Zelensky is at the front. 

Zelensky says, "No." That is what heroes do. 

And therein lies the difference.