President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Gibbet?

 

Who is more Canadian, Suzanne Craig or the McKenzie Brothers?

 

https://x.com/Acyn/status/1717013355775545630?s=20

 

Of course that crazy a** Virginia Foxx is front and center yelling "shut up." She is such an embarrassment.

 

Just a few things.

The "vote" by parliament came 1) after protesters demanded Yanukovych's immediate resignation, 2) after hundreds of police officers abandoned their posts, 3) after protesters took over several government buildings and 4) after Yanukovych fled the country. It was a done deal by then. Kind of like Iraq "impeaching" Saddam after his hanging.

My issue in what happened is that instead of urging the nation's citizens to follow through on its Democratic institutions, you had U.S. politicians on the ground in Ukraine instead urging the protests --- basically doing what Trump is accused of doing and could be jailed for.

Just imagine foreign politicians coming to America in December 2020-January 2021 and helping urge U.S. citizens to protest the "rigged and stolen" election of Joe Biden. It's mind-boggling to contemplate such an action as perfectly normal . . . yet we engage in it elsewhere.

A couple of other notes: For all the hullabaloo about Yanukovych being a "Putin puppet," he was walking a fine line and actually went against Putin several times:
1. He took a noncommittal stance on joining a Russian-led customs union of former Soviet republics.
2. He outright rejected Putin’s proposal to merge the countries' respective state-owned gas companies, which would have given Moscow control of the Ukrainian pipelines it used to transport its gas exports to Europe. That caused Moscow to refuse to renegotiate the hated 2009 gas contract between the two that had been struck by the previous Ukrainian government.

And about that deal the EU offered: It had many strings attached, such as the elimination of tariffs (no more trade with Russia, a crippling blow), wage and pension freezes, spending cuts and the end of gas subsidies to Ukrainian households. To counter the EU's offer, Putin offered a no-strings-attached deal of the same value as the EU's. When the EU didn't offer anything else, Yanukovych grudgingly reneged on the deal and went with Moscow's offer. I hope you can appreciate the difficult position he was in and that this deal was probably a lot more nuanced than what most people in the West were told.

I suspect the EU deal might have been better in the long run but would have been crippling in the short term. And like most cowardly politicians, Yanukovych picked what he thought was the best short-term option for his citizens, even though it meant Russia continuing to stick its nose in the country's business.

 

This morning’s horrible take comes The Washington Post’s editorial board.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/24/tom-emmer-republicans-house-speaker-democrats/

No. Republicans should help Democrats elect a Republican house speaker. Democrats will vote for someone who’s not batshit crazy or will immediately prostrate himself in front of Trump. It’s not their responsibility to bail out Republicans without Republicans helping.

 

I understand that the Russia deal had attractive features, like a lot of up-front cash. Though I don't think any deal with Putin can be described as no-strings and there were concerns that the deal would lead to Ukraine becoming a Russian puppet state like Belorussia.

But it seems that Yanukovchy, when he reneged on the EU deal, badly misread the political sentiments of his country, even the "pr=Russian" speakers who wanted an EU treaty ant a Russian one. One reason for these sentiments is that countries in the EU have a substantially higher standard of living than countries like Russia and Serbia who are not in the EU.

 

Very true. But remember, at that time much of Europe was under the grip of an austerity movement, and Ukraine wasn't in a very good position to be able to handle those measures without a lot of pain. Just shitty timing in a lot of ways.

 

I know it's AOC and all that, but she posted a few weeks ago as this Speaker debacle was happening that essentially distilled to, "You've literally demonized Dems for the last six years, and now you ask for help? Why should Dems bail you out?"

And I'd add that Beschloss' tweet this morning is another major point in all of this that speaks to the same thing.

Why in the fucking world would any Dem trust a GOP member right now?

https://x.com/BeschlossDC/status/1717179348300509604?s=20

(If the tweet doesn't load here, it's: "So imagine that Mike Johnson becomes House Speaker, Trump loses the 2024 Presidential election and he claims he won, there's an insurrection and then there are demands to certify Trump's "victory" anyway. What would Mike Johnson do?")

 

I was going to ask where everyone is getting their news. Maybe even start a thread.

The reason? I’ve been watching the Al-Jazeera feed through YouTube. Seems mostly factual and not editorializing much (at least compared to the USA).

And then, my google feed suggested this today:

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/25/tony-blinken-qatar-israel-hamas

I swear - what country has the USA become?