Seven Types of Dumbass Ukraine Takes
From "antiwar" tankies to "liberal" xenophobes to MAGA machismo fetishists, some people should just log off.
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The ongoing Russian war of aggression on Ukraine is, itself, a war crime. It’s also arguably the greatest disruption of the post-World War II international order. The fog of war and the incredible fluidity of the situation are hindrances to intelligent commentary—but never underestimate the overconfidence of American political commentators.
These are the cable TV bobbleheads, columnists, shitposters, members of Congress, and contrarian brain genius tweeters who run interference for inexcusable actions, using tortured reasoning and bad-faith whataboutism.
There are far too many variants of the “Dumbass Ukraine Take” to categorize in a single blog post. There are subsets of subsets. For the purposes of brevity, I’ve broken them into seven groups.
Full disclosure: I acknowledge it’s a bit of a copout to roast other people who’ve stuck their chins out with their Ukraine takes, while at the same time not laying out my own thoughts on Putin, post-Soviet NATO expansionism, the questionable state of Ukrainian democracy, the consequences of Biden’s energy policies, Western Europe’s feckless defenses, the vagaries of the international banking system, et al.
I simply don’t have a tremendous amount to offer in the way of prescriptions or even diagnoses at the moment. Other than committing to the position that Vladimir Putin is unequivocally a war criminal who should remain a global pariah for the rest of his life—to the extent possible, I’m staying in my lane.
But media criticism is a part of that lane! And the myriad trans-partisan bad Ukraine takes are each low-hanging apples, all deserving of being mercilessly whacked with a rhetorical baseball bat.
So without further ado, and in no particular order, here is a non-comprehensive collection of the Seven Types of Dumbass Ukraine Takes.
The MAGA masculinity groupies
Take: Biden isn’t tough/crazy/scary like Trump and that’s why Putin felt he could invade Ukraine.
Daniella Greenbaum Davis is a former producer for The View, and like myself, a former Business Insider columnist. She notes that she didn’t vote for Trump, and was in fact, a critic of his. So while she can make the case that she’s not personally MAGA, her “No one is scared of Biden but they were scared of Trump” argument absolutely is.
The Trumpist view of masculinity and strength holds that respect is only earned when you act like a “tough guy.” And the argument is essentially that Trump was such a bad motherfucker that, at the very least, he made the U.S. look “strong” in the eyes of the world—as opposed to Biden, who projects aged weakness.
Biden’s fiasco of an Afghanistan withdrawal certainly didn’t project “strength,” but neither did America’s failed 20 years of war and occupation in that country. (And Trump had already committed to a total U.S. withdrawal from the country had he been reelected, so there’s that.)
Absolutely nothing in the past quarter-century has made the U.S. “weaker” in foreign policy terms than the disastrous war of choice in Iraq—launched under false pretenses by a Republican president, which gave al Qaeda (unlike Saddam, the actual perpetrators of 9/11) a base where it previously had none, and gave Iran an oil-rich Shiite-majority ally on its border (with which it had previously been at war for decades) and over which it could impose its considerable influence.
We also don’t have to imagine “What Would Trump Do?” He was president for four years! We already saw him do everything possible to marginalize NATO, alienate our European allies, and all but declare the post-WWII international order a scam that ripped off Americans.
And let’s not forget, Trump’s fake tough guy bravado didn’t much impress the world’s authoritarians even on the rare occasion when he attempted to stand up to them.
Yes, Trump was a dangerous loose cannon. At no point did it make us (or any potential targets of Putin’s aggression) safer.
On topic, the beanie man has a take:
The “Antiwar populist” tankies
Take: Nothing is more important than being antiwar, even if it means telling people to surrender their homes and self-determination to a madman.
Kim Iversen, co-host of The Hill’s The Rising, essentially argues that nothing is worth fighting a war over, not even one’s home or family.
Iversen says that since Ukraine can’t possibly defeat Russia militarily, the better move would be to simply subjugate themselves to a brutal authoritarian, and then “use democracy in the future.”
Hard to top that one, but credit to Iversen for her commitment to the bit.
The “Putin isn’t as bad as Justin Trudeau” whatabouters
Take: Invading a sovereign country and crushing all dissent within your borders is totally the same thing as breaking up a weeks-long occupation of the center of a G7 country’s capital city by a small group of commerce-blocking protesters that don’t even represent the vast majority of Canadian truckers.
A few more examples. They’re spectacular.
And since we’re in a “Blame Canada” kinda mood, let’s include Steve Bannon’s “Ukraine Isn’t A Real Country Anyway” take.
The “Left-wing US anti-imperialism” tankies
Take: Russian aggression against its neighbor is an understandable reaction to the U.S./NATO military industrial complex.
New York City Councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan basically tweeted a series of Putin talking points that can be best summarized as “Look what you made Russia do!”
While her macro take is very bad, I’m plenty sympathetic to Jordan’s critiques of American foreign policy mission creep and the undue influence of the U.S. military industrial complex.
But then there’s this tweet in the same thread:
Yes, you read that right. The breakup of Yugoslavia was not facilitated by centuries of ethnic and tribal hatreds (among many other factors, WWII included), it was simply the U.S. and NATO’s doing. You could say the councilwoman has lost the plot.
On a similar theme, and just as dumb:
The “Putin invading Ukraine is THE WOKE’S fault” right-wing snowflakes
Take: “The WOKENESS is calling from INSIDE THE HOUSE!”
Republican congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana dropped an absolute banger of right-wing incoherence this weekend. He even made “Woke Sky” trend on Twitter, and earned a rare rebuke from the goddamn dictionary.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of this is going around:
Dishonorable mention goes to Fox News’ authoritarian bootlicker Tucker Carlson, who before he realized he bet on the wrong horse, literally implored his audience to empathize with Putin, because at least Putin didn’t call them racist.
The “Kick the ordinary Russians out of the country…for Justice” brigade
Take: Collective punishment of ordinary Russians going to school in the U.S. is smart and righteous because wartime xenophobia is good this time.
This one’s personal (only because I made it personal). First, some quick context.
California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, an uber-Russiagate dead-ender, mused about actions the U.S. government can and should take against Russia.
Some were completely reasonable and directly targeted the Russian government and its affiliated oligarchs—the gangsters that control all Russian industry and cleverly launder the Kremlin’s blood money through investments all over the world. (Look at practically any newly-constructed and mostly empty skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan for such examples.)
But Swalwell didn’t stop there. He mused about “kicking every Russian student out of the United States."
Admittedly somewhat reductively, I commented that Swalwell hadn’t learned the lessons of FDR’s evil internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
While I was hardly ratio’d for that effort, there was enough pushback to compel me to clarify that I was not comparing the crimes committed against U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry with the potential deportation of Russian nationals on student visas. What I clearly said was Swalwell hadn’t “learned the lesson”—which is that collective punishment against a large group of people not associated with an enemy government is both stupid and wrong—to say nothing of setting a terrible precedent.
I wasn’t so much bothered by the bad-faith reading of my initial tweet, but I was genuinely disconcerted by the strident reaction from a whole lotta MSNBC center-left liberals, who’ve so quickly gone full-on war boner that they really believe it’s both tactically smart and morally correct to assume every one of the thousands of Russian students in the U.S. must be part of the ruling elites.
Sure, foreign-born students in U.S. colleges are typically on the well-off side of the financial scale, but there’s only (give or take) 120 Russian oligarchs. Is every one of the (give or take) 5,000 Russian college students in the U.S. directly related to those 120 billionaire thugs? (Probably not.)
So many bad takes in my mentions. But this one was my favorite:
(UPDATE: Your humble correspondent gets results.)
Tulsi Gabbard’s takes. All of them. Always.
Take: “You’ve made your point, Putin”
To wrap up this aggregation of incredibly stupid content, let’s make some time for former Democratic congresswoman and MAGA gadfly Tulsi Gabbard—who certainly deserves a thorough compilation of her trademark dictator simping, but since this must end somewhere I’ll allow this one to hold up on its own.
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