Putin has again threatened to use the nukes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian military to put its nuclear forces on “special alert” – the highest level of alert for Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces.

Speaking to top military officials, including Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, he said Western nations had taken “unfriendly actions” towards Russia and imposed “illegitimate sanctions”.

And what does he think he’s doing? Other than taking “unfriendly actions” toward Ukraine? And imposing “illegitimate” bombing and shooting and destroying?

But don’t worry, he’s just threatening to use them, not actually saying he’s going to.

The very public shift to high alert status is a way for Moscow to send a warning. Moving to alert status is likely to make it easier to launch weapons more quickly. But it does not mean there is a current intent to use them.

And? It also does not mean there is not a current intent to use them, let alone a future intent to use them.

It doesn’t help that he’s gone insane.

More on the “what is a woman?” non-question:

The Tate Modern has become engulfed in a transgender rights row after promoting a short film about the definition of “woman”.

Isn’t it interesting that it’s about the definition of woman? Not man? Not woman and man? Just woman? I think it’s very interesting. I think it’s fascinating that it’s only women who are up for debate in this intrusive, patronizing way. I just can’t take my eyes off the fact that men are allowed to go right on being men, but women are constantly interrogated and rebuked and hounded for continuing to know what women are and refusing to be told that we’re suddenly something else.

Some women protested, as well they might.

A spokesman for the group said: “We are here to say loudly and proudly to Tate Modern that women are adult human females. Many of us work with galleries and in the arts, and we know that stating this simple fact can lead to loss of work and harassment.

…

The Tate rejected the activists’ criticisms, telling The Telegraph: “We have chosen to screen a work that does not propose one perspective on the question of womanhood, but instead considers multiple perspectives.”

We don’t want multiple perspectives on “the question of womanhood,” we want womanhood to stop being a question. Never mind multiple perspectives on what we are, what about asking what men are? If you’re not asking about men, then why are you asking about women? Why is it only women who are suddenly so puzzling and question-worthy? Why do men get to skate past all of this whistling a cheerful tune?

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on 14 million people.

The war in the East was terrible, likely the worst three years of human conduct that ever has or ever will be enacted; the horrors that the Germans and Soviets committed upon one another and the millions of civilians across the battlespace are unimaginable even to historians who’ve documented them.

The Red Army was particularly brutal to women in the territories it clawed piece by piece from the Wehrmacht, during the three years it took to reconquer the territories lost to Operations Barbarossa and Blue. The German authorities estimate that at least two million East German women were raped, not a few of them to death, and eyewitnesses in the siege of East Prussia claim that no woman between eight and eighty was spared. Estimates for the reconquered Eastern European countries are harder to come by, but there are also plenty of anecdotal accounts that tell us the Red Army’s conduct in Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland was at best a difference of degree, and not of kind. Given the much larger populations of Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian women, it is likely that the German share of such brutality was at most half of the whole, if not less.

Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall 1945 goes into this aspect of the Red Army’s conduct during their victorious encirclement of Berlin. He has also written a forward to the English translation of A Woman in Berlin, which was published out of the diary of an anonymous woman who experienced the conquest first-hand. I am currently picking my way through the original version, and I have not yet gotten to the truly harrowing parts yet, but I will steel myself for them.

This brutality is in some sense understandable, though by no means excusable. The Germans launched a genocidal war in order to enslave and work to death every non-German between the Vistula and Volga rivers, and they prosecuted this war in contravention of every law of warfare ever established on the theory that their victims were at once subhumans barely capable of cultivating their lands and a dire ideological threat to the German way of life. The only real reason Germans did not employ chemical weapons on the battlefield, aside from the bitter experience they had gained in the First World War over the stalemate quality of such tactics, is because much of their capacity for producing such chemicals was dedicated to the Holocaust.

And make no mistake, if the Germans had defeated the Soviet Union and finished murdering the Jews and Roma and Soviet POWs, they would have kept the camps humming along for the Slavs in their conquered lands, in an attempt to replace the entire population with ethnic Germans (at least those themselves not deemed worthy of extermination). I personally believe that the enterprise would have collapsed in on itself even in this worst-case scenario, that the literal and social people-eating machines the Nazis developed would wind up eating the Nazis and millions of Germans besides before the society fell to civil war and anarchy, but I am grateful that these musings of mine were not tested by history.

In any case, in the face of such barbarism — not really seen since before the Bronze Age — the Soviets made great and terrible sacrifices simply to survive. Essentially every man between the ages of fourteen and sixty who could walk and hold a gun was pressed into military service, while almost all the women were set to work in military industries. And, of all those called, between a third and 40 percent would not survive to see the end of the fighting. Indeed, Germans took between two and three Soviet lives for each German life lost, but the Soviets did not stop until they had pushed the Germans from Moscow and Stalingrad all the way back to the Elbe. In order to do this, the Soviets had to endure privations, brutalities, and terrors that are quite simply unimaginable to any of us.

Americans often like to boast that they “won” WWII, that they “beat” the Nazis…and they aren’t exactly wrong, but they are usually misidentifying America’s role in winning the war in Europe. It is true that America invaded North Africa and Italy and France, and engaged in fierce combat at many points of the war on their own path to the Elbe, but for all that, less than two hundred thousand American lives were sacrificed in Europe, essentially every one of them a soldier. By comparison, the Soviet Union (including the countries it had occupied which became a part of the so-called Bloodlands) sacrificed approximately 27 million people, civilians and soldiers, in order to beat back and defeat the Germans.

But the Soviets were only able to accomplish this titanic loss of life, and the victory in the face of it, because the Americans supplied them with a vast amount of food and civilian supplies; indeed, Operation Lend-Lease sent more materiel to the Soviet Union than to the rest of the Allies combined, though this fact has been all but forgotten. The Soviets even made sure to stamp-over the American livery with Soviet emblems, so that their own troops wouldn’t realise that so much of their food had come from the United States. As it happens, a great deal of these supplies came up through the Volga, which had the benefit of never freezing over and not being threatened by German U-boats, unlike the Arctic port of Arkhangelsk; it is likely that Hitler set his sights on Stalingrad at least in part to cut this supply line, which might well have forced the Soviets to capitulate.

So imagine life as a young Soviet grunt. You’ve been indoctrinated your entire life into a cult of personality and into an ideology that places the existence of the state above your own, and gives you all the positive and negative incentives in the world to at least pretend to trust the word of those speaking on behalf of the leader of your country. Your country has been invaded by millions of maniacs that are actually intent on killing you and everyone you love, and geopolitical forces far beyond your understanding have turned your entire army into what is essentially the vanguard of the powers allied against your enemy — regardless of your position, you and everyone you know is in principle a front-line soldier. Half of the men you have fought with have died, and the only way that you have survived is to let almost everything human within you die, to become more pitiless and ruthless than your enemy and your comrades both.

Now imagine that the personality whose cult you’ve been pulled into has decreed that every civilian in occupied territory who is not a partisan or has not died fighting the enemy is a collaborator and a traitor, someone responsible for all of the suffering and death you have had to endure and inflict just to keep breathing. It becomes not simply a right, but something like a duty to punish them, to take your pleasures where you can before you, too, meet your end. Imagine that your superiors look the other way, or slap you and your fellow soldiers on the wrist — or, if you cross too many lines, they shoot you cleanly in the head and hand your rifle to the next man in line behind you, just as you were handed the rifle of the man who fell in front of you.

…as I said, this does not excuse such brutal conduct, but in the war in the East, there were no excuses. There was only horror, and blood.

One reason “surrogacy” is not the sweet touching altruistic fairy tale some would like us to think:

Nine-day-old baby Luke Moynihan woke up on Thursday morning safely at home in Co Kerry with his parents Dermot and Dorothy, after a frantic mission to bring him home succeeded just ahead of the Russian invasion. 

“At home” is stretching it, since his life up to that point was spent in Ukraine. He wasn’t kidnapped and taken to Ukraine by criminals, he was born there.

Just two days before, the Moynihans were in Lviv, scrambling for emergency travel documents to bring their baby home before the military invasion began.

Charming – “their baby”…that some random Ukrainian woman had carried and pushed out for them, and never mind what happened to her, the important thing is the baby-shoppers got out.

Mr Moynihan said it had been a surreal journey of “intense emotions” from when Luke was born in Lviv last week to touching down on Irish soil with their precious cargo on Tuesday.

It’s ugly stuff. They didn’t plan it that way, but it’s the nature of “surrogacy.”

There are many many more words, about their joy at getting home, and about the baby, and about how difficult it was getting out, and even about “the people of Ukraine,” but there’s not one fucking word about the woman who gestated and gave birth to the baby. Not a single mention.

White supremacist and pro-Putin – what’s not to like?

Republican leaders are facing fresh demands to expel the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, after she spoke at a conference of white nationalists and sympathisers with Vladimir Putin.

The event in Orlando, Florida, on Friday night was organised by the far-right extremist Nick Fuentes, who told attendees: “Now they’re going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler – they say that’s not a good thing.”

Fuentes, eh – is he aware that most white supremacists probably consider him non-white?

Liz Cheney, a member of the House select committee investigating the January 6 riot, tweeted: “As Rep[resentative] Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep[resentative] Paul Gosar speak at this white supremacist, antisemitic, pro-Putin event, silence by Republican party leaders is deafening and enabling.”

Trump loves Putin. What more do we need to know?

Edward Lucas suggests some background reading:

The first book on anyone’s reading list should be Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. This revisionist history, which explores the overlap between Nazi and Soviet atrocities in the “bloodlands” of Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, shows that between 1930 and 1945 14 million people were shot, gassed or starved. The book is the best rebuttal to Putin’s Soviet-centred, cod-imperialist approach to the past displayed in his rambling essay last summer and his even more incoherent speech on Monday. It is also a corrective to the simplistic western-focused approach to history, which involves neat starting and finishing dates to the Second World War, and frames it as a simple contest between good and evil.

Also a corrective to the, how shall I say, the unconscious habit of just not really noticing that part of Europe all that much. I know it was a habit of mine, and I doubt I’m the only one. The point Snyder made that really jumped out and punched me in the face is that the vast majority of the WW2 deaths in Europe were in the Bloodlands.

Complementing this is Anne Applebaum’s gruelling Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, an account of Stalin’s mass-starvation programme in Ukraine. Only by understanding Ukraine’s historical trauma at Russian hands can western readers begin to appreciate the depth of the country’s desire for peace and sovereignty.

And the depth of the insult of Putin’s claims that Ukraine is and always has been part of Russia, as if it were a much-loved errant offspring.

Yes we need to have an endless dialogue about “what is a woman” because we still after all these thousands of years just can’t seem to figure it out.

Tate Modern has become engulfed in a transgender rights row after promoting a short film about the definition of “woman”.

The gallery screened What is a Woman? by Norwegian director Marin Håskjold on Friday evening as part of an evening focused on female artists.

In it, a trans woman is drawn into an argument in a women’s changing room over whether she should be there.

Over whether he should be there. These “arguments” and “discussions” and “debates” are always distorted from the outset by the fact that the trans “woman” is referred to as a she.

The Tate rejected the activists’ criticisms, telling The Telegraph: “We have chosen to screen a work that does not propose one perspective on the question of womanhood, but instead considers multiple perspectives.”

How fascinating. When will the Tate screen a work that proposes multiple perspectives on the question of manhood? Why is it only women who have to keep being subjected to “discussion” of what a woman is while what a man is continues to be taken for granted?

Surprising.

What? Why single out “LGBT+”? Why them and not women, immigrants, refugees, disabled people, workers, unemployed people, people with no money?

Oh that’s why.

We’re not the conspiracy theorists, you’re the conspiracy theorists! Aaron Rabinowitz in (ironically) The Skeptic:

As conspiracy communities continue to interconnect and produce complex conspiracism ecosystems, it’s worth keeping track of the common themes that facilitate the slide from one conspiracy to another. This month, I want to look at conspiracies centered around creeping transhumanism, a theme with a rich history that unsurprisingly involves accusations of malevolent Jewish influence, and seems to be gaining market share in conspiracism communities.

You’ll never guess whose conspiracism is in his sights. Never. It’s all been covered up too carefully.

This month though I want to focus on the way that anti-transhumanism conspiracies with clear antisemitic roots have been laundered and mainstreamed in Gender Critical and Radical Feminist communities.

There it is! It’s the filthy feminists! It’s the malign scary women who refuse to agree that men are women if they say they are.

First, I want to reiterate that being a member of these communities does not immediately make someone either antisemitic or a conspiracy theorist.

It takes at least half an hour to make members of these “communities” antisemitic conspiracy theorists.

And having brought out the scare quotes let me expand on that a little: I do not see myself as a “member” of “these communities”; I do not see gender critical feminism as a “community” at all; it’s a political stance and a form of activism and a set of ideas, just as feminism is. “Community” is the wrong word for that. The political and intellectual are just that, and calling them “communities” is sentimental and infantilizing. I reject the label.

My concern is, much like with #SaveTheChildren, gender critical portrayals of the trans agenda and its funding are making members of that community more susceptible to onboarding laundered far right conspiracies.

Crap writer, isn’t he. Anyway, you see how this works – it’s oddly conspiratorial-looking itself, in fact. It’s not that he’s saying we’re all conspirators, he’s just saying that “members” of that “community” are more “susceptible” to believing “laundered” conspiracies. That’s a lot of levels of distancing if you look at them carefully. What purpose does all that distancing serve? It lets him off the hook. It draws a frilly curtain over the fact that he has no evidence of any conspiracies and is just bullshitting. “The Skeptic” in a pig’s eye.

The rest of the article is Jennifer Bilek blah blah blah Jennifer Bilek. It’s embarrassing.

The ACLU obsessing over trans issues again/still/always:

Using people’s names and pronouns is a matter of respect.

We all want to be respected and seen for who we are. When a young person’s name and pronouns are respected, they do better in school, have more confidence, and have lower rates of suicide.

There’s no such thing as “a person’s pronouns.” The ACLU doesn’t give any source for the claim about doing better in school and having more confidence and lower rates of suicide.

“Cisgender women should be concerned whenever an alleged concern for ‘protecting’ our well-being is invoked to justify exclusion.”

There’s no such thing as “cisgender” women. There’s no need for a special word to distinguish women from men who claim to be women. It’s only women who are women; no additional adjective is necessary. It’s not cruel or unusual “exclusion” to understand that men are not women, it’s just reality.

Attempts to legislate who is or isn’t a woman are not new. Lawmakers have often tried to exclude poor women, unmarried women, Black women, and others from legal protections.

Very true, but poor women, unmarried women, and Black women are all women. Men, however, are not women.

There’s nothing wrong with saying “woman.” Just ask yourself if that’s the most specific and inclusive language you can use.

Oh gee thank you very much. What do you mean “most specific and inclusive”? Aren’t you pulling in two directions at once? “Inclusive” is less specific, and specific is less “inclusive.” Language needs to be specific and accurate before it needs to be “inclusive.” If we’re talking about tigers there’s no need to be more inclusive and add lions and cheetahs and leopards. Is “women” the most specific word for “women”? Yes, it is.

Policing what it means to be a woman hurts everyone. That’s why the ACLU fights against sexist dress code policies and practices that push women out of the workforce.

Is that right? So it hurts everyone to try to hire and promote more women at work, including at the ACLU? We can’t do that any more because it’s hurty, so if the ACLU becomes 100% male that’s just fine? To try to add women would be to “police” what it means to be a woman? If that’s true feminism can’t exist at all.

School sports are about participation and belonging. It’s wrong to deny students the chance to try out for a team.

Nonsense. School sports are also about competition, and winning. Nobody is trying to deny students the chance to try out for a team; people with a lick of sense are trying to deny male students access to the girls’ team. It’s wrong to let boys join girls’ teams and thus make it impossible for the girls to win anything.

And on it goes – the usual childish stale much-repeated rhetoric, full of distortions and disguises and fatuous baby talk. The ACLU is making itself a joke.

Erm……..what?

Shahrar Ali didn’t mention trans women, and what he said is not about trans women.

Imagine using violence against women to say “fuck feminism.”

How kind: Putin is “offering talks.”

A little earlier we told you the Kremlin had signalled Russia was willing to hold talks with Ukraine.

Blamblamblam ready to hold talks yet?

But as the Russian military pounds targets across Ukraine, it’s hardly an olive branch.

In fact, the Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, insisted the Ukrainian army would have to lay down its arms first and surrender. And his boss, Vladimir Putin, called on Ukrainian troops to overthrow their leader, President Zelensky.

Ya that’s not offering talks, it’s ordering surrender.

Meanwhile, also from BBC Live, Russia is unimpressed by UK “sanctions.”

The BBC understands that this will take the form of an asset freeze, but not a travel ban – which is what the EU has announced too.

Prof John Heathershaw, who leads research into international kleptocracy at the University of Exeter, warns Russia “will not take these sanctions seriously” due to the UK’s “kleptocracy problem”.

“There are professional ‘enablers’ that help Russian kleptocrats obscure their ownership and sources of wealth, gain UK residency and property, and launder their reputations,” he says.

Tackling this, he says, would involve regulation that is “opposed” by many big businesses.

So there you go. We’d love to help Ukraine…but not to the extent of annoying kleptocrats or big businesses. Priorities, people.

Who is labeling which what?

Texas’ crackdown on gender affirming care for kids follows the chilling strategy the state used last year to limit abortion access, gay rights advocates warn.

Though Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) announcement that gender-affirming care for transgender children is abuse that must be reported and investigated may not survive legal scrutiny, it will likely prevent at-risk children from seeking necessary medical treatment, advocates said. Similar to Texas’s recent abortion law (SB 8), the goal is to scare medical providers from offering certain services.

Ok wait just a damn minute here. Remind us what “gender-affirming care” is? Oh right, it’s surgeries and/or puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones – i.e. permanent changes to the child’s body in response to a nebulous state of mind that has been labeled “gender dysphoria.” It’s a drastic intervention with no actual medical necessity, in response to a claimed psychological state. Is that really such an obvious benefit to the child that no state should enact laws mandating caution?

I don’t trust the current Texas legislature as far as I can throw it, that much is true, but reporting on this subject needs to be careful and precise. Tampering with children’s hormones or genitals isn’t just straightforwardly “gender-affirming care” or any other kind of care. It is at the very least risky, and in some cases it will be a disaster.

Abbott’s letter to his agency heads “is very directly saying ‘members of the public report these families, report these children to the state and the state will potentially prosecute them,’” said Dara Purvis, a professor of law at Penn State Law and scholar of family law and gender identity.

It’s definitely not a great plan but then it’s also not a great plan to have doctors stopping or surgically altering puberty on the basis of a belief in wrong-body puberties.

“This combines the vigilante technique of SB 8 with I would describe it as state violence against families and against children,” she said.

But what about the violence of switching puberties?

Medical guidelines don’t recommend children start puberty blockers until the first signs of puberty or start sex hormones until they have the mental capacity to give informed consent, which is typically 16. Sex reassignment surgeries aren’t recommended under the age of 18, under the guidelines from the Endocrine Society.

That still leaves a lot of room for children and adolescents to make drastic decisions they could regret a few years later.

Horrible.

As Russian forces advance on the Ukrainian capital, the authorities are calling on the population to do everything they can to resist the invading troops.

Both the Ministry of Defence and the Interior Ministry are appealing to Kyiv residents to “inform us of troop movements, to make Molotov cocktails and neutralise the enemy”.

A leaflet with step-by step instructions of how to make petrol bombs has been posted on the Ministry of the Interior’s social media.

Interior Ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko says 18,000 machine guns “have been handed out in Kyiv to all volunteers, all those who want to defend our capital with weapons in their arms”.

They’ll be massacred.

A BBC team encounters some of the home guard.

As we head out on to the streets of Kyiv we find Ukrainian civilians now bearing arms to protect their country.

Men in trainers and jeans with rifles slung across their backs man checkpoints, and hidden in the trees on the side of the road are other young volunteers lying on the ground behind anti-tank weapons.

As we push on further we find professional soldiers braced for a last stand. They are accompanied by Ukrainian artillery and tanks facing the Russian position, less than 30km from the heart of the capital.

And we soon find signs of the battle drawing even nearer with a truck ablaze in the middle of the road.

Around the corner, my colleague Abdujalil Abdurasulov and I find Olena’s family, a group of five.

They’ve got a flat tyre at the worst possible time. They frantically try to change it as they bundle a baby into the back seat.

“We’re really afraid”, Olena’s mother tells us, before another loud bang silences everyone.

Horrible.

Don’t even bother trying.

A former NHS chief executive has been told not to apply to work with a transgender clinic because she believes that a person cannot change sex.

Kate Grimes, who has a history of transforming troubled hospitals, was told not to waste her time applying for the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust as her belief in biological sex was “not a viewpoint” they want.

What next? People have to believe in god, or witchcraft, or reincarnation, or homeopathy to work for the NHS? Belief in obvious well-established facts shouldn’t be a disqualifier for a medical institution.

The Tavistock has now been accused of breaking equality law by discriminating against those with gender-critical beliefs, just months after the appeal court ruled it was protected under the Equality Act.

“Gender-critical” is kind of superfluous, really. We just believe that sex is what it is, and that it’s not magically changeable. We believe what everyone has always believed. Some beliefs of that kind are wrong, of course, and can be changed via evidence or argument or both. But “men are not women” isn’t that kind of belief. There hasn’t been a new discovery that shows men are women if they say so. We’re not wrong to go on believing (i.e. knowing) that men are not women.

The trust, which provides a national service for treatment of gender dysphoria including for children, is recruiting for a new chairman and non-executive directors after an external review found multiple corporate governance problems and “deep seated” cultural issues.

And why? Because of this absurd new belief that men are women if they say they are, the one that is apparently a prerequisite for working there.

Ms Grimes is now calling on Sajid Javid to intervene to ensure that an external body takes over the process and to launch a review into the processes. In a letter to the Health Secretary, Ms Grimes said that the trust was “exacerbating its governance failures – and breaking the law – by refusing to interview anyone who believes biological sex cannot be changed”. 

And guaranteeing that it will get only dogmatists applying.

Ms Grimes told the Telegraph that patient safety was at risk if “clinicians are working from a belief system rather than evidence-based care”.

Indeed. They might as well hire Charles Windsor for the job.

Well this is great. Putin is actually off his rocker, and he’s promising to use the nukes if we don’t do everything he says.

Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a catastrophic new European war, combined with the sheer weirdness of his recent public appearances, has raised questions in western capitals about the mental stability of the leader of a country with 6,000 nuclear warheads.

That is, has revealed that Putin is crazy as a bedbug, which is unfortunate since he has the capacity to destroy the planet.

Following Putin’s speech on Monday, an Elysée official made an unusually bold assessment that the speech was “paranoid”. Bernard Guetta, a member of the European parliament for Macron’s grouping, told France Inter radio on Thursday morning, after military invasion began: “I think this man is losing his sense of reality, to say it politely.” Asked by the interviewer if that meant he thought Putin had gone mad, he said “yes”.

Don’t look up.

Putin frequently refers to that huge arsenal, and made a thinly veiled reference to them when he launched the war on Ukraine.

He said: “Whoever would try to stop us and further create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and lead you to such consequences that you have never faced in your history. We are ready for any outcome.”

At least we won’t have to worry about climate change any more.

They’re in the northern suburbs.

Fighting has reached the northern suburbs of Kyiv after a night of missile attacks on the Ukrainian capital to prepare for a major Russian assault, as president Volodymyr Zelenskiy pleaded for more international help and tougher sanctions.

First ya gotta do us a little favor though.

Air raid sirens wailed over the city of 3 million people and heavy gunfire and explosions were heard in a residential district on Friday morning. Ukrainian officials warned that Russian military vehicles were approaching the city from the north-west.

…

“Horrific Russian rocket strikes on Kyiv,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, tweeted. “Last time our capital experienced anything like this was in 1941 when it was attacked by Nazi Germany. Ukraine defeated that evil and will defeat this one.”

Lavrov says Russia’s doing this to free Ukraine from oppression.

Republicans admire Putin.

Pompeo has a great deal of respect for the man who has ordered the invasion. Those are his words, not mine: “I have enormous respect for him.” Even though Pompeo says he saw the attack coming, he’s spent the lead-up lavishing praise on Vladimir Putin. In an interview last week, he called the Russian president “very savvy” and “very shrewd,” adding, “I consider him an elegantly sophisticated counterpart and one who is not reckless but has always done the math.” In January, he said, “He is a very talented statesman. He has lots of gifts … He knows how to use power. We should respect that.”

That’s held up well. Not reckless. Elegantly sophisticated. Very talented statesman. Lots of gifts.

Trump’s Ukraine policy was all over the place: He sent weapons to Ukraine, something that the Obama administration had refused to do. He also accepted Putin’s seizure of Crimea, and he infamously tried to withhold aid from the Ukrainian government in exchange for help in the presidential election, leading to his first impeachment.

And by “help in the presidential election” David A.Graham means “dirt on Biden.”

Yet at an event at Mar-A-Lago last night, Trump, like Pompeo, praised Putin’s strategic genius: “I mean, he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.”

And that’s definitely the right yardstick. Rights, sovereignty, borders, peace, truth, fairness, international law – none of that matters, it’s all about being smart and smashing the neighbors.

Tucker Carlson, another orthodox Trumpist and the dominant conservative pundit of the moment, is unreservedly pro-Putin. “Why do Democrats want you to hate Putin?” he asked Tuesday. “Has Putin shipped every middle class job in your town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked your business? Is he teaching your kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Does he eat dogs?”

No, no, no, no, and you know what else? He’s not even a communist! Not even slightly! He’s just a thug! Isn’t that glorious? Don’t you just love him?

Via a Facebook friend (a public post):

Tapestry. Ukrainian artist Olga Pilyuhina