Paul Waldman: Rick Scott reveals the GOP’s election strategy: All culture war, all the time

When you’re in the opposition and your party lacks a clear leader (other than your mad exiled king), there are plenty of opportunities for political entrepreneurship. If you come up with a new way to threaten trans kids or a bold new agenda for Republicans to follow should they take over Congress, you can get a bunch of attention and perhaps boost your profile and ambitions.

So it is that Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, a potential future presidential candidate and chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which tries to elect Republicans to the Senate, has released an 11-point blueprint that he hopes all Republicans will rally around as the midterms approach.

It’s as good a summary as you’ll find of what passes for an “agenda” for today’s Republican Party, in all its vulgar, paranoid, resentful glory.

The document’s first words are “Dear Fellow Americans, the militant left now controls the entire federal government, the news media, academia, Hollywood, and most corporate boardrooms," and it only gets worse from there.

The 11 points resemble policy proposals, but every one is wrapped in culture-war provocation. Is the critical race theory panic No. 1? Of course it is: “Our kids will say the pledge of allegiance, salute the Flag, learn that America is a great country, and choose the school that best fits them,” reads the first item.

From there, we get a string of meaningless chest-thumping (“We will protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs”), culture-war grunts (“Men are men, women are women, and unborn babies are babies”), and the requisite nod to Trump (“We will secure our border, finish building the wall, and name it after President Donald Trump”).

What it adds up to is not so much an “agenda” as a rotating list of things to be mad about. One thing’s for sure: Republicans are feeling as confident as they ever have, and they won’t be bothered with complicated problems that demand difficult policy solutions. It’s going to be nothing but culture war from here on out. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/22/rick-scott-culture-war/

Max Boot: Ukraine’s fight is our fight, too. We are all Ukrainians now.

President Biden has done an excellent job of calling out, even preempting, Russian propaganda about Ukraine. The U.S. willingness and ability to respond to Russia’s “war of words” have helped build an impressive facade of Western unity — as seen in Germany’s decision Tuesday to suspend the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia. But even such countermeasures are unlikely to prevent Russian strongman Vladimir Putin from proceeding with an actual, rather than simply an oratorical, war.

Dictators are not dissuaded by having their lies called out; at least this one isn’t. On Monday, Putin went through an elaborate charade of deliberation. then proceeded to give an hour-long, scripted harangue denying, yet again, that Ukraine is an actual country whose borders should be respected. He also claimed, once again, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, that Ukraine somehow poses a military threat to Russia. The entirely predictable conclusion was Russia’s recognition of two breakaway regions of Ukraine — the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk.

This was followed by the announcement that Russian “peacekeeping” forces would enter the “republics” to protect them from imaginary threats. The Russian troops are “peacekeepers,” of course, in the same sense that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was an expression of “legitimate political discourse.” This is another Orwellian use of language by those bent on destroying truth as a means of destroying democracy.

Monday’s absurd spectacle in the Kremlin was an exercise in industrial-strength gaslighting. Biden and others have called out Putin’s lies, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. Dictators and demagogues revel in making their subjects believe the nonsensical: It is a sign of their strength. The same phenomenon is evident in the United States, where former president Donald Trump — Putin’s No. 1 fan — has convinced most of his followers that he actually won the 2020 election.

The only thing holding back a lawless new phase of world history is the willingness of Ukrainians to defend their country from Russian aggression. With his military superiority, Putin can invade Ukraine and maul its armed forces. He can even install a puppet regime in Kyiv. But he cannot make Ukrainians accept the Russian yoke. He cannot prevent Ukrainians from fighting back, whether with massive “people power” demonstrations (like the ones that toppled a previous pro-Russian ruler in 2014) or with guerrilla attacks (like the ones carried out by Ukrainian fighters against Soviet rule in the 1940s and 1950s).

The West must do whatever it can to support Ukrainian patriots. Ukraine’s fight is our fight, too. As Sen. John McCain said in 2014, during the last Russian invasion of Ukraine, “We are all Ukrainians.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/22/we-are-all-ukrainians-now-putin-russia-invasion/

Max Boot: J.D. Vance’s attack on Gen. Barry McCaffrey is obscene. It’s also not unusual for today’s GOP.

If you want to see the calamitous impact of Trumpism on the GOP, look no further than the party’s primary to succeed Portman, who is retiring. The two loudest voices in the contest belong to J.D. Vance and Josh Mandel. Both are onetime moderate conservatives doing their best imitation of Trump — or is it Marjorie Taylor Greene? These faux populists, who are, in fact, exemplars of elitist striving, are locked in a race to the bottom to see who can say the dumbest, vilest things to rouse the MAGA hordes.

Vance may have just won the offensiveness Olympics — and lost his soul — by trashing one of America’s most distinguished soldiers. It all began when Vance said during an appearance on a right-wing podcast: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” That led to a withering riposte from retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey: “JD Vance is a shameful person unsuitable for public office. His comments are those of a stooge for Russian aggression.”

Rather than slink off in shame, Vance shot back: “Your entire time in military leadership we won zero wars. You drank fine wine at bull---- security conferences while thousands of working class kids died on the battlefield. Oh, by the way, how much do you stand to gain financially from a war with Russia, Barry?”

Vance may think his brief stint in the Marine Corps (where he did public affairs work) gives him the standing to insult one of America’s greatest war heroes. He is wrong. While Vance was spending his time in the military writing news releases about aircraft maintenance, McCaffrey was earning four stars on his epaulets and receiving three Purple Hearts, two Distinguished Service Crosses (the Army’s second-highest award for valor) and two Silver Stars. He served in both the Vietnam and Gulf wars. In the latter conflict, he commanded the 24th Infantry Division as it executed the “left hook” that pulverized Iraqi forces in Kuwait. That was, in fact, a war that we won — in no small part because of McCaffrey’s inspired leadership. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/21/jd-vance-attack-on-barry-mcaffrey-shows-decline-of-gop-ohio/

Bess Levin: You’ll Never Believe It But Hillary Clinton Did Not, In Fact, Spy On Trump’s White House

In less breaking news, Donald Trump remains a moron.

Imagine, if you will, that a special counsel appointed by the federal government declared in a court filing that he had evidence that a major political figure—let’s call her Hillary Clinton—had paid spies to infiltrate the White House and run surveillance on Donald Trump in order to frame him as a foreign asset. The whole thing would be a big flipping deal! One for which there would be major, major consequences and far-reaching fallout. The country, nay, the world would be gripped by the story, and for good reason—a former candidate for office spying on the president? In the White House? That would be crazy! And you’re right—it would be crazy if something like that had actually happened. Which it didn’t, though unfortunately for reason, logic, and the concept of the truth, Donald Trump, Fox News, and various other deranged conservatives cannot be convinced of that.

Yes, as you’ve probably heard, on Saturday the former president released a statement claiming “Special Counsel Robert Durham”—he meant to say “John Durham” but was apparently too angry to keep his Johns and his Roberts straight—had uncovered “indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia,” a “scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate” for which Trump suggested those involved should be executed but would settle for criminal prosecution. The problem? Neither Robert Durham nor John Durham nor anyone else for that matter had actually provided evidence of any such crime, let alone even suggested it.

According to the filing, Sussmann had gotten his information from technology executive Rodney Joffe, whose company, Neustar, had performed server-related work for the White House. In Durham’s estimation, Joffe and his colleagues had “exploited this arrangement by mining [certain records] for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.” Fox News took this line from Durham’s filing and ran with it, claiming Durham had said he had found that the Clinton campaign had paid the technology company to “infiltrate” White House servers. The lack of similarly baseless claims from the mainstream media led Trump to declare “The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place. This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”

Strangely, there wasn’t a lot of fact-checking going on down at Mar-a-Lago, but the actual reason that the “LameStream” media hadn’t covered the story was likely because, as the Times notes: (1) Sussmann’s conversation with the CIA had already been reported last October (2) Durham never once said anything about the White House being “infiltrate[d]” (3) the special counsel also never claimed the Clinton campaign had paid Joffe’s company and (4) perhaps most importantly, “the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era.” In fact, lawyers for the data scientist who helped develop the data analysis in question, say this happened during— wait for it—Barack Obama’s presidency.

“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” attorneys Jody Westby and Mark Rasch told the Times. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”

In other words, Trump and company got the whole thing hilariously, mortifyingly incorrect. But fear not: We’re sure they’ll issue a lengthy correction and heartfelt apology to the people whose reputations they impugned—and the ones Trump suggested should be put to death—in no time. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/02/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-white-house-spying

George T. Conway III: Trump’s new reality: Ex-president, private citizen and, perhaps, criminal defendant

So Trump would face a heap of problems even if the New York attorney general (and the Manhattan district attorney she’s working with) closed up shop tomorrow. No wonder Trump’s son Eric was all but crying when he mentioned the prosecutors this week on Fox News.

But as Thursday’s ruling makes clear, the prosecutors aren’t going away anytime soon. And in 21 days, absent some relief from a higher court, Trump will face a profound conundrum at his deposition.

Will he testify and (assuming he’s even capable of it) tell the truth, and possibly implicate himself in crimes? Or will he provably lie under oath, and virtually guarantee himself an indictment for perjury?

Or will he do the sensible thing — plead his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination hundreds of times, as Eric Trump and the company’s finance chief, Allen Weisselberg, already have done — and face the political embarrassment (and, in civil litigation, the negative inferences) that would entail? In court Thursday, Trump’s lawyer said that he was advising his client to do precisely that.

Stay tuned. Could this be, at long last, the beginning of the end for Trump?

As always, don’t bet on it — but this time, don’t be surprised if it is. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/18/george-conway-trump-mazars/

Robin Wright: Does the U.S.-Russia Crisis Over Ukraine Prove That the Cold War Never Ended?

From the vantage point of history, some experts now view the current tensions as merely a new phase in a Cold War that never ended. “We can trace current strains back to the Cold War,” Robert Daly, the director of the Kissinger Institute, at the Wilson Center, told me. “There are important continuities.” He said the crisis today was not preordained or inevitable. If American, Russian, and Chinese leaders had made “a whole slew” of different choices along the way, history could have taken a different and less troubled course. “But it now looks like the period between the Cold War and today was an interregnum,” he said. “We thought issues were resolved, but it’s now clear that they weren’t.” The new prism on the past will be hard for Americans to accept, he said, because the crisis today reflects a “collective failure” over decades.

From today’s vantage point, the root causes of the tensions between Washington and Moscow have not changed much since the Cold War, Sergey Radchenko, an international-relations expert at the School of Advanced International Studies, at Johns Hopkins University, told me. The assumption in Washington that the Cold War was over in 1989 was “unduly American-centric” and ignored Moscow’s historic desire to be seen and respected by the U.S. and Europe as a major power, regardless of ideology. “It was never about this conflict between capitalism and communism,” he said. “It was much more about challenging the hierarchy of global politics and climbing up the hierarchy at the expense of the United States.” Gaining acceptance as an equal power, with its own sphere of influence, has been Moscow’s goal—whether under Communist or post-Communist rule—dating to the summit in Yalta, in 1945, of the three Allied leaders in the Second World War, Radchenko said.

The one constant is Moscow’s ambition, Francis Fukuyama, the author of “The End of History and the Last Man,” told me. Putin has openly lamented the Soviet Union’s collapse as a “huge tragedy. His foreign policy has been really to try to reassemble as much of that entity as possible.” But otherwise, Fukuyama said, the stakes between 1947 and 1989 were higher, and the conflict “much more enveloping” globally. The Cold War was often considered a conflict between rival universalist ideologies. In 2022, Putin is instead seeking “to undermine the belief of Western democracies in their own systems, but he’s actually not trying to pretend that Russia has a superior system that would apply in other countries,” Fukuyama said. The ideological battles of the Cold War have been replaced by more traditional geopolitical competition. “Russia is simply trying to gain influence using the sort of limited military leverage that it has in different parts of the world. But that’s not the Cold War,” Fukuyama said. Russia today, he added, is far weaker than the Soviet empire was, especially as much of Eastern Europe is “pretty solidly aligned with the West.”

The Cold War lasted nearly a half century. Whether Russia actually invades Ukraine, the crisis has the potential to drag out and ripple across the other countries on Russia’s borders, as the Cold War did. “Moscow has made it clear that it is prepared to contest the fundamental principles that have underpinned our security for decades, and to do so by using force,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, on Wednesday. “I regret to say that this is the new normal in Europe.”

President Bush got one thing right in his final address to Congress, three decades ago. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, “the world is still a dangerous place,” he said. “Only the dead have seen the end of conflict. And though yesterday’s challenges are behind us, tomorrow’s are being born.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/does-the-us-russia-crisis-over-ukraine-prove-that-the-cold-war-never-ended

Charlie Sykes: Putin's Right-Wing Shills

The loudest defender of the Kremlin’s view is, of course, the loudest voice in right wing media, Tucker Carlson, whose anti-Ukraine commentary has become a running feature of Russian State television.

"Vladimir Putin does not want Belgium,” explains Tucker. “He just wants to keep his western borders secure. That's why he doesn't want Ukraine to join NATO, and that makes sense."

As for Ukraine? "It's run by a dictator who's friends with everyone in Washington," Carlson said.

The Russian are, of course, thrilled.

Tucker is not the only voice on Fox News arguing that the focus on Ukraine-Russia is all a big distraction.

The conspiracy maven formerly known as the “money honey,” Maria Bartiromo, insists that the whole Ukraine-Russia threat has been fabricated to distract from (checks notes) Hillary Clinton.

“Was this a ruse?” she continued. “Was this whole thing an effort to take everybody’s attention away from what Hillary Clinton did and what we know to be a complete hoax over this Russia investigation?” After all, she continued, Sullivan worked for Clinton, and he had been involved in “peddling this Russia collusion lie.”

Laura Ingraham also tells her viewers that the whole thing is a distraction from the real crisis.

"Anyone paying attention to Biden's presser last week heard the sounds of the war-drums beating [as] the media desperately wants to get off the raging crime, raging COVID, raging inflation story that's driven Biden to another new low in the polls today.”

But this sort of thing is by no means confined just to Fox News. Prominent voices in the MAGA-centric media have also taken up Putin’s cause. As Cathy Young wrote in the Bulwark over the weekend, right-wing commentators like Sohrab Ahmari are eagerly pushing smears of Ukrainians as anti-Semitic fascists (while ignoring Russian fascism and anti-Semitism).

Ben Shapiro’s Candace Owens has not only defended Putin’s position, she has also suggested that we should be be invading Canada instead.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has also deployed her deep knowledge of international affairs to lie about Ukraine, saying“Ukraine was the number one donor to Hillary Clinton when she was running for president.”

Then there is GOP Representative Paul Gosar:

“We have no dog in the Ukraine fight. Not one American soldier should die there. Not one American bullet should be fired there. We just lost Afghanistan to sandal-wearing goat herders. I assure you [the] Russian military is no joke either,” said Republican Congressman Paul Gosar.

Ukraine has no basis to be in NATO, and NATO itself — a Cold War relic — arguably has no current purpose or mission. Getting involved in a military situation with no U.S. interest is America Last, not America First,” he said. Note: No one — as in no one — is suggesting that any American troops be deployed in Ukraine.

What is Putin making of all of this? I think it’s reasonable to assume that he thinks these are the authentic echoes of the Once and Future MAGA king.

And Putin very much has the measure of Trump, who has lavished him with praise, tried to weaken NATO, sided with him over his own government’s intelligence agencies, and actually held up military aid as part of his pressure campaign to get Ukraine's president to dig up dirt on Biden https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/putins-right-wing-shills

Matthew Dallek: Prosecuting Trump would set a risky precedent. Not prosecuting would be worse.

When President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace, the odds of his standing trial for obstruction of justice seemed high: His actions undermining the Watergate investigation had been tape-recorded, and his part in the coverup led to pressure on the legal system to hold him accountable. In September 1974, however, one month after Nixon left office, his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him. Ford later told a congressional subcommittee that the pardon was designed to “shift our attentions from the pursuit of a fallen President to the pursuit of the urgent needs of a rising nation.”

It didn’t — not in the immediate aftermath and, in some ways, not ever. Although views later softened, many Americans at the time saw the pardon as a mistake. Some were livid. One powerful man had essentially condoned the criminality of another. The get-out-of-jail-free card exacerbated public cynicism and deepened the nation’s social fractures. The White House switchboard lit up with calls that ran 8 to 1 against Ford’s action. The New York Times captured some of the liberal rage when it described the pardon as an affront to “the American system of justice.” A president who thought he was doing the right thing had taken justice into his own hands, casting doubt on a bedrock idea: Justice is blind; no one is above the law.

Nearly five decades later, Joe Biden is president, and a pardon for Donald Trump isn’t happening. But whether Trump will eventually be prosecuted for his conduct in the White House is more of a conundrum: If the country crosses this inviolate threshold, all hell will break loose. If we don’t cross it, all hell will break loose. There will be no “shifting our attentions” by advocates of either course. And whichever path the nation follows will have lasting repercussions. One thing is increasingly clear — fear will play a greater role than facts in determining it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/02/18/trump-prosecute-risk-law/

William Saletan: Father Carlson: Tucker Carlson is on Russia’s side.

Eighty years ago, when a dictator rose to power in Europe and invaded his neighbors, he found an ally in the United States. The dictator was Adolf Hitler, and his ally was Charles Coughlin, a popular radio host. Coughlin belittled democracy, defended the Nazis, and opposed America’s entry into the war, arguing that the movement to enlist the United States was a conspiracy on behalf of a sinister minority: Jews.

Today, a new demagogue has taken up Coughlin’s mantle: Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Like Coughlin, Carlson has spewed venom for years. And, like Coughlin, he has gradually made his treachery, nihilism, and bigotry unmistakable. If anyone still thought there was an innocent explanation for his behavior, Carlson’s latest monologue, delivered on Tuesday night, rendered such generosity indefensible.

To begin with, Carlson mocked the idea that rolling tanks into another country was wrong. In the view of liberals, he joked, “Invading America is called ‘equity’”—apparently he was referring to illegal immigration—but “invading Ukraine is a war crime.” He delivered this line with scornful incredulity, ignoring the fact that Russia’s invasions of Ukraine—this is the second one in eight years—are indeed acts of war and violations of international law. https://www.thebulwark.com/father-carlson/