BARI WEISS

 I’m going to save that post for Sunday, because I was just sent this letter that has my jaw on the floor. It was written by a Brearley parent named Andrew Gutmann.

If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)

Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week. Among the lines:

If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity,” it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

I’m pasting the whole thing below.

Meantime, I’m going to ask Andrew Gutmann to join Paul Rossi and me for our subscriber-only conversation this coming Tuesday night. I hope he’ll join. Details about that event will be in Sunday’s post.

I promise: this newsletter won’t be exclusively about education. But my gosh is it a wild right story to follow right now. . .

See you Sunday.

---

April 13, 2021 

Dear Fellow Brearley Parents, 

Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley for the 2021-22 school year. She has been at Brearley for seven years, beginning in kindergarten. In short, we no longer believe that Brearley’s administration and Board of Trustees have any of our children’s best interests at heart. Moreover, we no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened, and civic minded adult. I write to you, as a fellow parent, to share our reasons for leaving the Brearley community but also to urge you to act before the damage to the school, to its community, and to your own child's education is irreparable. 

It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley's antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed. 

I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died. 

I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades. Ask any girl, of any race, if they have ever experienced insults from friends, have ever felt slighted by teachers or have ever suffered the occasional injustice from a school at which they have spent up to 13 years of their life, and you are bound to hear grievances, some petty, some not. We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country's history and adds no understanding to any of today's societal issues. If anything, longstanding and widespread policies such as affirmative action, point in precisely the opposite direction. 

I object to a definition of systemic racism, apparently supported by Brearley, that any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression. Facile and unsupported beliefs such as these are the polar opposite to the intellectual and scientific truth for which Brearley claims to stand. Furthermore, I call bullshit on Brearley's oft-stated assertion that the school welcomes and encourages the truly difficult and uncomfortable conversations regarding race and the roots of racial discrepancies. 

I object to the idea that Blacks are unable to succeed in this country without aid from government or from whites. Brearley, by adopting critical race theory, is advocating the abhorrent viewpoint that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims, and are incapable of success regardless of their skills, talents, or hard work. What Brearley is teaching our children is precisely the true and correct definition of racism. 

I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna. These sessions, in both their content and delivery, are so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane, that I would be embarrassed if they were taught to Brearley kindergarteners. They are an insult to parents and unbecoming of any educational institution, let alone one of Brearley's caliber. 

I object to Brearley’s vacuous, inappropriate, and fanatical use of words such as “equity,” “diversity” and “inclusiveness.” If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity,” it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Instead, the school would foster an environment of intellectual openness and freedom of thought. And if Brearley really cared about “inclusiveness,” the school would return to the concepts encapsulated in the motto “One Brearley,” instead of teaching the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only, and always, two groups in this country: victims and oppressors. 

l object to Brearley’s advocacy for groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter, a Marxist, anti family, heterophobic, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic organization that neither speaks for the majority of the Black community in this country, nor in any way, shape or form, represents their best interests. 

I object to, as we have been told time and time again over the past year, that the school’s first priority is the safety of our children. For goodness sake, Brearley is a school, not a hospital! The number one priority of a school has always been, and always will be, education. Brearley’s misguided priorities exemplify both the safety culture and “cover-your-ass” culture that together have proved so toxic to our society and have so damaged the mental health and resiliency of two generations of children, and counting. 

I object to the gutting of the history, civics, and classical literature curriculums. I object to the censorship of books that have been taught for generations because they contain dated language potentially offensive to the thin-skinned and hypersensitive (something that has already happened in my daughter's 4th grade class). I object to the lowering of standards for the admission of students and for the hiring of teachers. I object to the erosion of rigor in classwork and the escalation of grade inflation. Any parent with eyes open can foresee these inevitabilities should antiracism initiatives be allowed to persist. 

We have today in our country, from both political parties, and at all levels of government, the most unwise and unvirtuous leaders in our nation’s history. Schools like Brearley are supposed to be the training grounds for those leaders. Our nation will not survive a generation of leadership even more poorly educated than we have now, nor will we survive a generation of students taught to hate its own country and despise its history. 

Lastly, I object, with as strong a sentiment as possible, that Brearley has begun to teach what to think, instead of how to think. I object that the school is now fostering an environment where our daughters, and our daughters’ teachers, are afraid to speak their minds in class for fear of “consequences.” I object that Brearley is trying to usurp the role of parents in teaching morality, and bullying parents to adopt that false morality at home. I object that Brearley is fostering a divisive community where families of different races, which until recently were part of the same community, are now segregated into two. These are the reasons why we can no longer send our daughter to Brearley. 

Over the past several months, I have personally spoken to many Brearley parents as well as parents of children at peer institutions. It is abundantly clear that the majority of parents believe that Brearley’s antiracism policies are misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous. Many believe, as I do, that these policies will ultimately destroy what was until recently, a wonderful educational institution. But as I am sure will come as no surprise to you, given the insidious cancel culture that has of late permeated our society, most parents are too fearful to speak up. 

But speak up you must. There is strength in numbers and I assure you, the numbers are there. Contact the administration and the Board of Trustees and demand an end to the destructive and anti-intellectual claptrap known as antiracism. And if changes are not forthcoming then demand new leadership. For the sake of our community, our city, our country and most of all, our children, silence is no longer an option. 

Respectfully,

Andrew Gutmann

AN OBESE IMBECILE FROM QUEENS

 

I hope everyone in America, looking at the courage of Ukrainian leaders and ordinary

 people is disgusted by the cowardice that has run riot in the United States. GOP

 politicians in America were never asked to fight for anything. They couldn’t hold the

 line at mean tweets from an obese imbecile from Queens. When the citadel of

 American democracy was attacked, these despicable GOP politicians sided with the

 insurrectionists. They have served Putin as useful idiots for years. Nations don’t

 survive without courage. That is the crisis in America and it is the reason Ukraine will

 prevail against this barbarism

 

 Steve Schmidt

@SteveSchmidtSES

 

 

Barr’s Lies Made It All Possible

 Barr’s Lies Made It All Possible

Bill Barr NOW Says Donald Trump Lost The Election & GOP Should Dump Him Now

FEBRUARY 27, 2022 

STEPH BAZZLE

Bill Barr, who served as Attorney General during Donald Trump’s presidency, can be added to the long list of former insiders who has waited until the Trump regime ended to write a book and tell his story. Like so many others, he now admits much that no one in the Trump Administration was willing to say openly while serving under the ex-president.

The Wall Street Journal received an advance copy of the book, One Damn Thing After Another, which will be released to the public on March 8th, and has revealed some of the contents. Among other things, Barr admits that Trump lost the 2020 election, and that it wasn’t rigged — something that Trump himself will not admit to this day, even after the Big Lie encouraged a mob to attack the Capitol Building, threatening democracy and the lives of legislators.

Moreover, Barr joins the many rational voices that have called for the Republican Party to let go of Donald Trump, and focus on new leaders. He even states that Trump “has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed” — something that a lot of MAGA-branch Republicans still aren’t ready to admit.

Admitting that the election wasn’t stolen isn’t really new for Barr, though — he has made a trip through positions on the matter, as Trump’s power waned.

       

Barr’s Lies Made It All Possible

While the election was still in the future, and there was still a possibility of Trump retaining the office, Washington Post described Barr as “carry[ing] Trump’s election fraud water with a smile” as he echoed the then-president’s false claims about mail-in ballots, and insinuating that election fraud was a widespread issue.

However, by December, as Trump’s loss was cemented, Barr was making public statements to say that there was no evidence of voter fraud sufficient to overturn the election — and last summer, with Trump out of office and re-ensconced in his Florida resort home, Barr was ready, according to Forbes, to admit that he suspected all along that the election fraud claims were “bullsh*t” and to pass the buck, saying he was pressured by Justice Department officials and Mitch McConnell, who was then trying to maintain his position as Majority Leader, to repeat the lies.

TRUMP IS SCUM

 

Watching Zelensky’s conduct over the last few weeks makes Donald Trump’s attempt to use the power of the United States government to blackmail him even more obscene. Trump is not fit to shine Zelensky’s boots. That Trump’s actions were taken not as a private citizen, but as the American head of state should make all of us deeply ashamed.

WHY BIDEN WANTED AMERICANS TO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT PUTIN WAS PLANNING

 

WHY BIDEN WANTED AMERICANS TO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT PUTIN WAS PLANNING

The president’s diplomatic efforts may have failed at foiling Russia’s attack on Ukraine, but they worked to build global unity and remind Americans, post-Trump, what government is. It’s about “what’s best for the American people, as opposed to our leaders’ personal interests,” one senior administration official says.

BY CHRIS SMITH

FEBRUARY 24, 2022

President Joe Biden was right. His administration issued public warnings in January that Russia was moving large numbers of troops into position for a possible invasion of Ukraine. In the past few weeks, as diplomacy faltered and intelligence reports showed preparations for an attack escalating, the president has been even more explicit, declaring clearly and repeatedly that Russian president Vladimir Putin had decided to violently seize Ukrainian territory.

Now, with tanks rolling and bombs falling, just as predicted, Biden very much wishes he’d been wrong. There is no second-guessing among administration insiders, however, that the president chose the correct strategy in speaking bluntly and often about Putin’s intentions. They believe that calling out Russian false flag tactics slowed down the attack’s timeline. The messaging, combined with attempts to find a diplomatic solution, also placed blame squarely and completely where it belongs—on Putin’s shoulders. Harsher actions, like imposing sanctions before an invasion, would have given the Russian leader an excuse to shift responsibility. 

Biden’s public statements were also intended to aid American efforts to forge a unified front with European allies—a task in rebuilding trust that was made tougher because it followed four years of blustery Trump administration divisiveness toward NATO. “In many instances we downgraded the intelligence rating to enable us to share it with our allies and partners, to make sure everyone’s got the same understanding of the facts on the ground,” a senior administration official says. “So that was the strategy we adopted from the beginning, because we believed we will be much stronger if it isn’t just the U.S. responding. And it was important to do that not just behind the scenes, but in what we were saying publicly. On December 7, for instance, the president talked with Putin, and then Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, went to the podium right afterwards and laid out specific parts of the call. It’s about returning government to foreign policy driven by national interests, what’s best for the American people, as opposed to our leaders’ personal interests.”

Biden’s priority was trying to head off bloodshed in Ukraine. He was, of course, also weighing his words and actions with a domestic audience in mind. The president’s team is understandably loath to talk U.S. politics in the middle of an unpredictable international crisis. Yet the two components are necessarily intertwined: Confronting Russian aggression is somewhat easier if Biden’s moves have solid American public support behind them. “Definitely,” the senior adviser says. “It’s important for the American people to understand exactly the actions the administration is taking and the challenges we face.” And the president is well aware he is not operating in a vacuum, with the likes of Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio and Fox News claiming Biden’s “weakness” has somehow invited Putin to seize Ukraine. 

Just how much the broader American public cares about what’s happening in Ukraine is subject to more debate within Biden’s camp. One view—parallel to how Biden approached his 2020 campaign—is that while the war is inarguably an enormous human tragedy, the attention Ukraine is drawing in Beltway and media circles is considerably higher than it is across the rest of the country. A second perspective is that Americans care plenty—but those concerns don’t merely take conventional shapes. “People certainly get that this important. They care,” a Biden adviser says. “But the reporting isn’t just about where missiles are landing. There’s a connection being made about what this means for global inflation and the stock market going down. And after what everyone has been through the past two years, it just adds to the pain everyone is dealing with, the mental fatigue. This contributes to a feeling of being stuck in the mud, regardless of whether people agree or disagree with the president’s actions.”

With the military option for Ukraine’s defense off the table, the president has been left with rhetorical and financial plays. On Thursday afternoon, Biden reinforced the themes he’s been laying out for weeks. “Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences,” the president said at the White House while announcing new freezes of Russian economic assets. “America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom. This is who we are.”

The situation in Ukraine is too volatile, and the stakes too high, to focus very much on whether Biden eventually receives any deserved political credit for how he handled the run-up to Russia’s invasion. Yet the two elements will combine in a high-profile way next Tuesday, when the president delivers his second State of the Union speech. Biden was expected to focus on how the number of COVID cases is finally waning, on the bright spots in the economy, and how his administration is tackling lingering supply chain dysfunction and worker shortages. Those issues will likely still take up significant space in his address to Congress. But the context for Biden’s remarks has shifted a great deal in the past week, and new paragraphs about Ukraine may need to be written as the president is on his way to Capitol Hill

 

Hitting Putin Where It Hurts

 

Hitting Putin Where It Hurts

The Fed and the European Central Bank move hard, fast, and together.

By David Frum

FEBRUARY 27, 2022, 12:04 AM ET

About the author: David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

 

The EU Commission announced this afternoon that the European Central Bank will deploy its most powerful financial weapon against Russian aggression. Several hours later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the Federal Reserve will impose sanctions of its own upon the Russian central bank.

Central-bank sanctions are a weapon so devastating, in fact, that the only question is whether they might do more damage than Western governments might wish. They could potentially bankrupt the entire Russian banking system and push the ruble into worthlessness.

Russia is also being hit by a partial cut-off from the SWIFT system. SWIFT is a messaging technology based in Belgium that allows banks to talk to one another in secure ways, enabling the safe and sure electronic transmission of funds. SWIFT is not a bank, nor is it exactly a payments system. It is instead a way to guarantee that money moves where it is supposed to go. Countries cut off from SWIFT, as Iran was in 2012, are effectively cast back into the precomputer era—forced to rely on primitive barter transactions, or Breaking Bad–style pallets of physical cash, to fund their governments and their economies.

Details are still pending about the Western central-bank sanctions. To better understand the possibilities, I spoke with Michael Bernstam, an economist and Soviet-born analyst at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Bernstam has studied the potentially decisive impact of such sanctions since the prior Russian invasion of Ukraine, in 2014.

Bear with me as I walk you through some banking and currency technicalities. I promise the destination will be worth the trouble.

Suppose you are a Russian company that buys things from the outside world and sells them to Russians. You earn your income in rubles. You spend in euros, U.S. dollars, British pounds, Japanese yen, South Korean won, or possibly Chinese renminbi. How does that work, exactly?

Well, a Russian business or individual might convert the rubles earned inside Russia into foreign currency at a Russian bank. Or—because the ruble has a strong tendency to lose value against foreign currency—that Russian business or individual might set up an account at a Russian bank denominated in euros or dollars. Both of those are legal to do in postcommunist Russia.

Most of these conversions from rubles into foreign currency take the form of computer clicks that credit or debit the electronic ledgers of financial institutions. The deposit of rubles into a bank is a click. The sale of rubles for euros or dollars is another click. The arrival of the foreign currency into the Russian customer’s account is only one click more. Very seldom does any actual paper money change hands. There’s only about $12 billion of cash dollars and euros inside Russia, according to Bernstam’s research. Against that, the Russian private sector has foreign-currency claims on Russian banks equal to $65 billion, Bernstam told me. Russia’s state-owned companies have accumulated even larger claims on Russia’s foreign reserves.

Despite the relative scarcity of physical foreign currency inside Russia, all of these clicks can happen because Russians generally have confidence that their banks could pay foreign cash if they had to. If every Russian depositor—individual, corporate, state-owned—showed up at the same time to claim their dollars and euros, you’d have a classic bank run. But Russians don’t run on their banks, because they believe that in a real crunch, the Russian central bank would provide the needed cash. After all, the Russian central bank holds enormous quantities of reserves: $630 billion at the last tally before the start of the current war on Ukraine. In an emergency, the central bank would draw upon its reserves, provide cash to the commercial banks, and every depositor could be paid in full in the currency promised. With $630 billion in reserves, there is no way Russia would ever run out of foreign currency. You’ve probably read that assertion many times in the past few days. I actually wrote such an assertion myself in an article published last week.

Not so fast, argues Berstam. What does it mean that Russia “has” X or Y in foreign reserves? Where do these reserves exist? The dollars, euros, and pounds owned by the Russian central bank—Russia may own them, but Russia does not control them. Almost all those hundreds of billions of Russian-owned assets are controlled by foreign central banks. Russia’s reserves exist as notations in the records of central banks in the West, especially the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve. Most of Russia’s reserves are literally IOUs to the Russian central bank from Western governments.

Remember the saying “If you owe the bank $10,000, you have a problem—but if you owe the bank $10 billion, the bank has a problem?” We, the people of the Western world collectively owe the Russian state hundreds of billions of dollars. That’s not our problem. That’s Russia’s problem, an enormous one. Because one thing any debtor can do is … not pay when asked.

To finance its war on Ukraine, Russia might have hoped to draw down its foreign-currency reserves with Western central banks. The Russian central bank would tell the Fed or the ECB to credit X billion dollars or euros from the Russian central bank to this or that private Russian bank. That bank would then credit the accounts of Russian businesses or individuals. Those businesses or individuals would then pay Western companies to whom they owe money.

All of this requires the cooperation of the Fed or ECB in the first place. The Fed or ECB could say: “Nope. Sorry. The Russian central bank’s money is frozen. No transfers of dollars or euros from the Russian central bank to commercial banks. No transfers from commercial banks to businesses or individuals. For all practical purposes, you’re broke.” It would be a startling action, but not unprecedented. The United States did it to Iran after the revolutionary regime seized U.S. diplomats as hostages in 1979.

Iran did not feel that freeze, however, because it was earning massive amounts of new foreign currency from oil sales. But if Russia’s foreign income slows at the same time as it is waging a hugely costly war against Ukraine, it will need its reserves badly. And suddenly, it will be as if the money disappeared. Every Russian person, individual, or state entity with any kind of obligation denominated in foreign currency would be shoved toward default.

Of course, long before any of that happened, everybody involved in the transactions would have panicked. Depositors would race to cash out their dollar and euro holdings from Russian banks, the Russian banks would bang on the doors of the Russian central bank, the Russian central bank would freeze its depositors’ foreign-currency accounts. The ruble would cease to be a convertible currency. It would revert to being the pseudo-currency of Soviet times: something used for record-keeping purposes inside Russia, but without the ability to buy goods or services on international markets. The Russian economy would close upon itself, collapsing into as much self-sufficiency as possible for a country that produces only basic commodities.

Russia imports almost everything its citizens eat, wear, and use. And in the modern digitized world, that money cannot be used without the agreement of somebody’s central bank. You could call it Berstam’s law: “Do not fight with countries whose currencies you use as a reserve currency to maintain your own.”

There is one exception to the rule about reserves as notations: About $132 billion of Russia’s reserves takes the form of physical gold in vaults inside Russia. Russia could pledge that gold or sell it. But to whom? Most potential customers for Russian gold can be threatened with sanctions. Those who might defy the threat couldn’t afford to take very much: The entire GDP of Venezuela, for example, is only about $480 billion.

Only one customer is rich enough to take significant gold from a sanctioned nation like Russia: China.

Would China agree to take it? And if China did agree, would it not demand a big and painful discount for helping out a distressed seller like a sanctioned Russia? How exactly would the transaction occur? Would China be content merely to take legal ownership of the gold and leave the metal inside in a Russian vault? Doubtful. One ton of gold is worth about $61 million, so $139 billion would weigh about 2,290 metric tons. It’s certainly conceivable for a locomotive to pull a train of that weight from Moscow to Beijing. But it would constitute a considerable logistical and security undertaking to load, move, unload, and secure the gold for a train trip across Siberia.

What would be accomplished by such a move? Russia already has $84 billion of assets denominated in Chinese renminbi. If Chinese-denominated assets were of any real use to Russia, Russia would not need to sell the gold to China in the first place. Russia’s renminbi reserves can certainly be used to buy things from China. But that does not solve the real problem, which is not to buy specific items from specific places, but to sustain the ruble as a currency that commands confidence from Russia’s own people. China cannot do that for Russians. Only the Western central banks can.

And here we bump into the limits of central-bank sanctions as a financial weapon: A weapon that altogether crushes an adversary’s banking system may be just a little too powerful. The West wants to administer penalties that cause Russia to alter its aggressive behavior, not to crush the Russian economy. The central-bank weapon is so strong that it might indeed provoke Putin into fiercer aggression as a desperate last gamble. So the next question is: Is there any way to use the central-bank-sanctions weapon more incrementally?

Perhaps there is. Western banks do not need to freeze the Russian central bank’s accounts altogether. They could put the Russian central bank on an allowance, so many billions a month. That would keep Russia limping along, but under severe restraint—asphyxiation rather than sudden strangulation. The West could not prevent Putin from spending foreign currency on his war or favoring cronies in the distribution of foreign currency. But the restraint would rapidly make the terrible cost of Putin’s decisions much more rapidly visible to every power sector in Russian society. It’s not the full blow, but it might hurt enough—and of course, the full blow could be applied later.

The central-bank-sanctions tool will also deliver a humbling but indispensable lesson to Putin. Putin launched his war against Ukraine in part to assert Russia’s great-power status—a war to make Russia great again. Putin seemingly did not understand that violence is only one form of power, and not ultimately the most decisive. Even energy production takes a country only so far. The power Putin is about to feel is the power of producers against gangsters, of governments that inspire trust against governments that rule by fear. Russia depends on the dollar, the euro, the pound, and other currencies in ways that few around Putin could comprehend. The liberal democracies that created those trusted currencies are about to make Putin’s cronies feel what they never troubled to learn. Squeeze them.

CAN THE PROGRESSIVES BE ANY MORE STUPID - DOING TRUMP'S WORK FOR HIM. TLAIB CLEARLY HATES THIS COUNTRY.

 

'It's Like Sacking Your Own Quarterback': Bill Maher Rips Rashida Tlaib Over Rebuttal to Biden's SOTU

"Real Time" host Bill Maher slammed progressive Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for her scheduled response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address, arguing that a member of the president's party giving a rebuttal does more harm than good.

Tlaib announced earlier this week that she would be delivering the Working Families Party response to Biden's March 1 speech. Traditionally, the party that controls the White House does not give a rebuttal. 

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) will give the Republicans' rebuttal to Biden's address.

"Now, I've always seen the opposition party give a rebuttal," Maher said Friday during a panel discussion. "This is from the same party. This is like sacking your own quarterback. I don't know, maybe she's gonna say some nice things about Joe, but basically, it's to present- … bad idea for the Democrats?"

Chloé Vandary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, came to Tlaib's defense, saying, "I don't know if it's a bad idea." 

She explained that, while Democrats would like to exhibit a "unified front," it's still a good idea to "hold their party's feet to the fire." But she did also warn that such a move could "backfire."

Maher then responded, noting that he remembers Tlaib as "very us versus them."

"I remember because she's one of the Squad members," he said. "And I remember we talked about on this show one night BDS, which is the boycott that some people want to do against Israel, because Israel somehow got to be the Nazis. … And I said no- that BDS is a bunch of bulls---."

"And then Rashida Tlaib called for me to be boycotted, so was saying we shouldn't boycott and then her answer was, 'We're gonna boycott you.' … So when people say, 'You know, why are you so hard on the left these days?' Bulls--- like that is why. We have a different opinion about this issue called BDS and you want to just boycott me," Maher continued, referring to a time in 2019 when he and the congresswoman were at odds. 

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens chimed in, saying, "That's the difference between the Democratic and the Republican Party, which is the Democrats are hostage to their crazy minority, and the Republicans are hostage to their crazy majority."

STOP PUTIN AND SHUT DOWN THE MAIN TRAITOR TRUMP, HIS MAGA MORONS, AND HIS DRUG-FUELED KIDS

 

PUTIN'S MISCALCULATION

 

Will Russians suffer for Putin and his cronies? Will they suffer for a man who lives in a golden palace, and who hasn’t been seen for days?

How long will Russians continue buying into this war — a war they know Putin started, despite what their TVs might be telling them? How long will they watch videos of Ukrainian soldiers telling Russian warships to go fuck themselves in their common tongue?

Ukrainians, in the meantime, are suffering for freedom. They are suffering for Zelenskiy, the man who stayed in Kyiv to fight alongside them. A man who rejected a U.S. evacuation offer, reportedly saying: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

Putin’s miscalculation

The president has misread not only Ukrainians, but also Russians.

BY ZOYA SHEFTALOVICH

February 26, 2022 11:46 am

Watching Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine play out, it seems the Russian president has vastly underestimated and misunderstood Ukrainians and their president.

Putin, a one-time KGB operative who in 2004 said “there is no such thing as a former KGB man,” has made clear that he lives in a world of the past. The world that existed before the end of the Cold War, a world in which the territories of the former Soviet Union, potentially even the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, are run out of Moscow. A world he is trying to rebuild today.

But the USSR is not Russia, and when you live in the past, you lose touch with the present.p

Putin has lost touch with ordinary Russians, despite exercising immense control over what they watch, listen to and read. But to an even greater degree, Putin has lost touch with what Ukrainians think.

It’s the classic mistake of every tyrant: Surround yourself only with sycophants, suck-ups and yes-men, and you never get a reality check in your echo chamber. Eliminate dissenting politicians, and you assume that means you’ve eliminated dissent.

The decisive moment that sealed Ukraine’s fate may well have been the U.S.-led withdrawal from Afghanistan — a country closely watched by the Kremlin, given its key role in the downfall of the USSR, after the Soviets attempted to invade in 1979, and spent almost a decade fighting a losing battle.

When the West left Afghanistan last year, the speed and success of the Taliban takeover of the country would have delighted Putin. The capitulation of the U.S., the impotence of Europe, and the relative ease with which the militants took control of the Afghan capital within days of the Western retreat made Ukraine seem a tantalizing prospect.

Perhaps Putin thought he’d roll into Kyiv the way the Taliban rolled into Kabul, meeting scant resistance from Ukrainians. He seems to have expected to be welcomed in by Russian-speaking Ukrainians as nostalgic for the Soviet heydays as he is. It seems Putin expected Ukrainians to lay down their arms, and for their pro-Western and NATO President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to flee, making space for one of Moscow’s allies. The Kremlin could roll its tanks back to Russia, taking a sizeable chunk of Ukraine with them, and Putin could declare his bogus “peacekeeping” mission over after a few days. He would take some limited casualties, some painful but not devastating sanctions, and then it would be back to business as usual.

And perhaps if Putin had tried this maneuver during the Ukrainian presidencies of his ally Viktor Yanukovych, or of “chocolate king” billionaire Petro Poroshenko, he might have been able to roll into Kyiv the way the Taliban took Kabul last year.

But Putin underestimated Ukraine. The country’s troops have resisted hard and have largely held their cities against a Russian attempt at blitzkrieg. Kyiv claims that its experienced, motivated soldiers have killed thousands of Russians, downed enemy planes and destroyed hundreds of armored vehicles and tanks.

Putin also underestimated Zelenskiy.

A former comedian and actor with humble roots, Zelenskiy entered politics in 2019 on an anti-corruption campaign, after playing a history teacher elected as president on an anti-corruption platform in the sitcom “Servant of the People.”

Zelenskiy certainly isn’t perfect, but he’s also not cut from the same fabric of oligarchs who made billions in shady business enterprises. His ascent to the presidency seems to have genuinely been driven by a desire to make things better.

Ukraine now has a leader it can believe in, who is vowing to fight on against a military superpower. He’s a democratically elected president who wasn’t a cynical appointee of some other country, who wasn’t someone seeking the presidency to enrich themselves.

Unlike Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani and his government, Zelenskiy didn’t get on the first plane out of Kyiv, despite the clear danger to his life. When Putin talks about decapitating Ukraine’s government, he is not speaking metaphorically. As Zelenskiy himself said in a video posted to social media, the president is Putin’s No. 1 target, and his family the No. 2.

Zelenskiy has stayed in Kyiv, rebuffing reported offers of safety in France and in the U.S. He has donned a khaki T-shirt and jacket.

“We are here. We are in Kyiv. We are defending Ukraine,” Zelenskiy said in a video published on Telegram Friday night and shot in Kyiv. In the clip, he is surrounded by his Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, along with Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to the president’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, the head of the office of the president, and the head of the ruling party’s parliamentary faction, David Arakhamia.

With that video, Zelenskiy told Ukrainians: We aren’t running, we’re fighting. Ukrainians are fighting.

So, Putin expected Afghanistan in 2021. But he got Afghanistan in 1979. Ukrainians aren’t rolling over or welcoming back an old friend. They, and their president, are digging in for war. Their army is fighting hard. Harsh Western sanctions are targeting Putin and all his oligarch buddies, who were content to keep him in power while it filled their coffers, but who now stand to lose billions.

The Kremlin isn’t orchestrating a relatively bloodless coup in Ukraine any more. It is instead attempting to become an occupying force. And that is a much more difficult proposition for a country, even a large and wealthy one — you don’t need to look much further than Afghanistan to see the problem with external forces (who will, eventually, have to go home), trying to impose ideologies or governments on a people who don’t want them. Add to that those crippling sanctions, and you’re staring down the barrel of a protracted battle that isn’t easily won.

Or, to put it another way: How do you control a country of 44 million Ukrainians who suddenly have something to believe in? And how do you keep your own people on board?

As far as Ukraine goes, it’s clear the Ukrainians will be more resistant than ever to any Kremlin stooge, and would fight back as they did in the Maidan revolution of 2014. Ukrainians don’t have any misty-eyed Soviet nostalgia about what Putin is really offering. They know the model for his reforged USSR is based on oppression, murder and gangsterism.

Russians, doped up as they are on RT and TASS and Rossiya 24, are also suddenly seeing their favorite singers, tennis players and actors speak up about what is now a hot war. They’re seeing photos of bombed apartment blocks, kindergartens, dead children. They’re seeing this isn’t going to be a walkover.

There’s a genuine danger to Putin that he has greatly underestimated the breadth of opposition he could now face with a war against a people whom most Russians don’t see as an enemy. He’s not just facing metropolitan protesters. He’s also humiliated his spy chief in public, lost his oligarchs billions of dollars and could well have to deal with thousands of traumatized mothers. For a paranoid former spy, always alive to risks, he now appears extraordinarily confident that no one from this growing base of foes can threaten him.

A Communist Party member of Russia’s State Duma, Mikhail Matveyev, broke ranks on Saturday. “I believe the war should be stopped immediately,” he tweeted in Russian. “Voting for the recognition of the [breakaway Luhansk and Donetsk republics], I voted for peace, not for war. For Russia to become a shield, so that Donbass is not bombed, not in favor of Kyiv being bombed.”

Soon, ordinary Russians will start to feel the chilling effect of those Western sanctions.

Russians know how to suffer, of course. They are used to it. Famine, war, death — these are not hypothetical, far-away, historical things. Even those born as recently as in the ’80s remember being cold and hungry, remember empty shelves and petrol pumps. But during those Soviet years, Russians were suffering for what many saw as the great good.

Will Russians suffer for Putin and his cronies? Will they suffer for a man who lives in a golden palace, and who hasn’t been seen for days?

How long will Russians continue buying into this war — a war they know Putin started, despite what their TVs might be telling them? How long will they watch videos of Ukrainian soldiers telling Russian warships to go fuck themselves in their common tongue?

Ukrainians, in the meantime, are suffering for freedom. They are suffering for Zelenskiy, the man who stayed in Kyiv to fight alongside them. A man who rejected a U.S. evacuation offer, reportedly saying: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

Zoya Sheftalovich is a contributing editor at POLITICO Europe. She was born in Soviet Ukraine, before moving to Australia after the fall of the USSR.

TOM FRIEDMAN

 

We Have Never Been Here Before

Feb. 25, 2022

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Bottom of Form

 

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

The seven most dangerous words in journalism are: “The world will never be the same.” In over four decades of reporting, I have rarely dared use that phrase. But I’m going there now in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalized world. This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones, so acts of brutality will be documented and broadcast worldwide without any editors or filters. On the first day of the war, we saw invading Russian tank units unexpectedly being exposed by Google maps, because Google wanted to alert drivers that the Russian armor was causing traffic jams.

You have never seen this play before.

Yes, the Russian attempt to seize Ukraine is a throwback to earlier centuries — before the democracy revolutions in America and France — when a European monarch or Russian czar could simply decide that he wanted more territory, that the time was ripe to grab it, and so he did. And everyone in the region knew he would devour as much as he could and there was no global community to stop him.

In acting this way today, though, Putin is not only aiming to unilaterally rewrite the rules of the international system that have been in place since World War II — that no nation can just devour the nation next door — he is also out to alter that balance of power that he feels was imposed on Russia after the Cold War.

That balance — or imbalance in Putin’s view — was the humiliating equivalent of the Versailles Treaty’s impositions on Germany after World War I. In Russia’s case, it meant Moscow having to swallow NATO’s expansion not only to include the old Eastern European countries that had been part of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, like Poland, but even, in principle, states that were part of the Soviet Union itself, like Ukraine.

I see many people citing Robert Kagan’s fine book “The Jungle Grows Back” as a kind of shorthand for the return of this nasty and brutish style of geopolitics that Putin’s invasion manifests. But that picture is incomplete. Because this is not 1945 or 1989. We may be back in the jungle — but today the jungle is wired. It is wired together more intimately than ever before by telecommunications; satellites; trade; the internet; road, rail and air networks; financial markets; and supply chains. So while the drama of war is playing out within the borders of Ukraine, the risks and repercussions of Putin’s invasion are being felt across the globe — even in China, which has good cause to worry about its friend in the Kremlin.

Welcome to World War Wired — the first war in a totally interconnected world. This will be the Cossacks meet the World Wide Web. Like I said, you haven’t been here before.

“It’s been less than 24 hours since Russia invaded Ukraine, yet we already have more information about what’s going on there than we would have in a week during the Iraq war,” wrote Daniel Johnson, who served as an infantry officer and journalist with the U.S. Army in Iraq, in Slate on Thursday afternoon. “What is coming out of Ukraine is simply impossible to produce on such a scale without citizens and soldiers throughout the country having easy access to cellphones, the internet and, by extension, social media apps. A large-scale modern war will be livestreamed, minute by minute, battle by battle, death by death, to the world. What is occurring is already horrific, based on the information released just on the first day.”

The outcome of this war will depend in large part on the will of the rest of the world to deter and roll back Putin’s blitzkrieg by primarily using economic sanctions and by arming the Ukrainians with antiaircraft and anti-tank weaponry to try to slow his advance. Putin may also be forced to consider the death toll of his own comrades.

Will Putin be brought down by imperial overstretch? It is way too soon to say. But I am reminded these days of what a different warped leader who decided to devour his neighbors in Europe observed. His name was Adolf Hitler, and he said: “The beginning of every war is like opening the door into a dark room. One never knows what is hidden in the darkness.”

In Putin’s case, I find myself asking: Does he know what is hiding in plain sight and not just in the dark? Does he know not only Russia’s strengths in today’s new world but also its weaknesses? Let me enumerate them.

Russia is in the process of forcibly taking over a free country with a population of 44 million people, which is a little less than one-third the size of Russia’s population. And the majority of these Ukrainians have been struggling to be part of the democratic, free-market West for 30 years and have already forged myriad trade, cultural and internet ties to European Union companies, institutions and media.

We know that Putin has vastly improved Russia’s armed forces, adding everything from hypersonic missile capabilities to advanced cyberwarfare tools. He has the firepower to bring Ukraine to heel. But in this modern era we have never seen an unfree country, Russia, try to rewrite the rules of the international system and take over a free country that is as big as Ukraine — especially when the unfree country, Russia, has an economy that is smaller than that of Texas.

Then think about this: Thanks to rapid globalization, the E.U. is already Ukraine’s biggest trading partner — not Russia. In 2012, Russia was the destination for 25.7 percent of Ukrainian exports, compared with 24.9 percent going to the E.U. Just six years later, after Russia’s brutal seizure of Crimea and support of separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine and Ukraine’s forging of closer ties with the E.U. economically and politically, “Russia’s share of Ukrainian exports had fallen to only 7.7 percent, while the E.U.’s share shot up to 42.6 percent,” according to a recent analysis published by Bruegel.org.

If Putin doesn’t untangle those ties, Ukraine will continue drifting into the arms of the West — and if he does untangle them, he will strangle Ukraine’s economy. And if the E.U. boycotts a Russia-controlled Ukraine, Putin will have to use Russia’s money to keep Ukraine’s economy afloat.

Was that factored into his war plans? It doesn’t seem like it. Or as a retired Russian diplomat in Moscow emailed me: “Tell me how this war ends? Unfortunately, there is no one and nowhere to ask.”

But everyone in Russia will be able to watch. As this war unfolds on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, Putin cannot closet his Russian population — let alone the rest of the world — from the horrific images that will come out of this war as it enters its urban phase. On just the first day of the war, more than 1,300 protesters across Russia, many of them chanting “No to war,” were detained, The Times reported, quoting a rights group. That’s no small number in a country where Putin brooks little dissent.

And who knows how those images will affect Poland, particularly as it gets overrun by Ukrainian refugees. I particularly mention Poland because it is Russia’s key land bridge to Germany and the rest of Western Europe. As strategist Edward Luttwak pointed out on Twitter, if Poland just halts truck and rail traffic from Russia to Germany, “as it should,” it would create immediate havoc for Russia’s economy, because the alternative routes are complicated and need to go through a now very dangerous Ukraine.

Anyone up for an anti-Putin trucker strike to prevent Russian goods going to and through Western Europe by way of Poland? Watch that space. Some super-empowered Polish citizens with a few roadblocks, pickups and smartphones could choke Russia’s whole economy in this wired world.

This war with no historical parallel won’t be a stress test just for America and its European allies. It’ll also be one for China. Putin has basically thrown down the gauntlet to Beijing: “Are you going to stand with those who want to overturn the American-led order or join the U.S. sheriff’s posse?”

That should not be — but is — a wrenching question for Beijing. “The interests of China and Russia today are not identical,” Nader Mousavizadeh, founder and C.E.O. of the global consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners, told me. “China wants to compete with America in the Super Bowl of economics, innovation and technology — and thinks it can win. Putin is ready to burn down the stadium and kill everyone in it to satisfy his grievances.”

The dilemma for the Chinese, added Mousavizadeh, “is that their preference for the kind of order, stability and globalization that has enabled their economic miracle is in stark tension with their resurgent authoritarianism at home and their ambition to supplant America — either by China’s strength or America’s weakness — as the world’s dominant superpower and rules setter.”

I have little doubt that in his heart China’s president, Xi Jinping, is hoping that Putin gets away with abducting Ukraine and humiliating the U.S. — all the better to soften up the world for his desire to seize Taiwan and fuse it back to the Chinese motherland.

But Xi is nobody’s fool. Here are a couple of other interesting facts from the wired world: First, China’s economy is more dependent on Ukraine than Russia’s. According to Reuters, “China leapfrogged Russia to become Ukraine’s biggest single trading partner in 2019, with overall trade totaling $18.98 billion last year, a nearly 80 percent jump from 2013. … China became the largest importer of Ukrainian barley in the 2020-21 marketing year,” and about 30 percent of all of China’s corn imports last year came from farms in Ukraine.

Second, China overtook the United States as the European Union’s biggest trading partner in 2020, and Beijing cannot afford for the E.U. to be embroiled in conflict with an increasingly aggressive Russia and unstable Putin. China’s stability depends — and the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party rests — on Xi’s ability to sustain and grow his already massive middle class. And that depends on a stable and growing world economy.

I don’t expect China to impose sanctions on Russia, let alone arm the Ukrainians, like the U.S. and the E.U. All that Beijing has done so far is mumble that Putin’s invasion was “not what we would hope to see” — while quickly implying that Washington was a “culprit” for “fanning up flames” with NATO expansion and its recent warnings of an imminent Russian invasion.

So China is obviously torn, but of the three key superpowers with nuclear weapons — the U.S., China and Russia — China, by what it says or doesn’t say, holds a very big swing vote on whether Putin gets away with his rampage of Ukraine or not.

To lead is to choose, and if China has any pretense of supplanting the U.S. as the world leader, it will have to do more than mumble.

Finally, there is something else Putin will find hiding in plain sight. In today’s interconnected world, a leader’s “sphere of influence” is no longer some entitlement from history and geography, but rather it is something that has to be earned and re-earned every day by inspiring and not compelling others to follow you.

The musician and actress Selena Gomez has twice as many followers on Instagram — over 298 million — as Russia has citizens. Yes, Vladimir, I can hear you laughing from here and echoing Stalin’s quip about the pope: “How many divisions does Selena Gomez have?”

She has none. But she is an influencer with followers, and there are thousands and thousands of Selenas out there on the World Wide Web, including Russian celebrities who are posting on Instagram about their opposition to the war. And while they cannot roll back your tanks, they can make every leader in the West roll up the red carpet to you, so you, and your cronies, can never travel to their countries. You are now officially a global pariah. I hope you like Chinese and North Korean food.

For all these reasons, at this early stage, I will venture only one prediction about Putin: Vladimir, the first day of this war was the best day of the rest of your life. I have no doubt that in the near term, your military will prevail, but in the long run leaders who try to bury the future with the past don’t do well. In the long run, your name will live in infamy.

I know, I know, Vladimir, you don’t care — no more than you care that you started this war in the middle of a raging pandemic. And I have to admit that that is what is most scary about this World War Wired. The long run can be a long way away and the rest of us are not insulated from your madness. That is, I wish that I could blithely predict that Ukraine will be Putin’s Waterloo — and his alone. But I can’t, because in our wired world, what happens in Waterloo doesn’t stay in Waterloo.

Indeed, if you ask me what is the most dangerous aspect of today’s world, I’d say it is the fact that Putin has more unchecked power than any other Russian leader since Stalin. And Xi has more unchecked power than any other Chinese leader since Mao. But in Stalin’s day, his excesses were largely confined to Russia and the borderlands he controlled. And in Mao’s day, China was so isolated, his excesses touched only the Chinese people.

Not anymore — today’s world is resting on two simultaneous extremes: Never have the leaders of two of the three most powerful nuclear nations — Putin and Xi — had more unchecked power and never have more people from one end of the world to the other been wired together with fewer and fewer buffers. So, what those two leaders decide to do with their unchecked power will touch virtually all of us directly or indirectly.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is our first real taste of how crazy and unstable this kind of wired world can get. It will not be our last.