Saying that Ted Cruz is the voice of reason is hard to do. But when he’s right, he’s right.
Meanwhile, Lindsay Graham kind of put his foot in his mouth (or thumb up his keyboard?) with saying out loud what, I would not be surprised to find out, many people are thinking. I have had the same thought, but have not shared it with anyone. (Oops.)
The ramifications would be too great for a state sponsored assassination of another country’s leader. It would be easier if Putin were on the battlefield like his Ukrainian counterpart. But still bad to say out loud.
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
That’s what comes of making heroes of one side and villains of the other, when what is really happening is a turf war between competing cartels of oligarchs.
People get emotionally involved and say stupid things.
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RE: “That’s what comes of making heroes of one side and villains of the other…”
Well put. Lindsay Graham (and Sean Hannity) contribute to the irresponsible fog of war when they call for assassinating Putin. But the same is true of anyone who demonizes Russia at the expense of offering or finding a solution to the current mess.
Western hysteria over the invasion threatens to escalate the conflict. I’m fearful in particular that arming the Ukranian resistance, providing logistics and intelligence support, will only prolong the conflict and thereby increase the risks of full-scale war.
The U.S. and NATO should be demanding peace talks instead of encouraging hysteria to rage.
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Peace has been demanded. Yet the Russians have already broken a cease fire agreement for humanitarian aid to be able to move freely.
I guess it isn’t hysterical when thousands of Russian troops are firing randomly into civilian areas (a war crime) or tanks and APC’s rolling towards the capital city and bearing down on other major cities. Nothing to see here. Move along. No reasin to be hysterical.
Let it happen here and see how hysteria reigns supreme.
Hysteria is “Stop the Steal” and attacking the Capitol based on a series of lies.
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RE: “Peace has been demanded.”
Did WE demand peace talks? Has Stumble Joe even mentioned them?
RE: “I guess it isn’t hysterical when thousands of Russian troops are firing randomly into civilian areas…”
I’ve seen reports of that. I’ve also seen reports debunking some of them. Because of fog-of-war problems I’ll wait for better information.
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You really believe the debunking of the truth, don’t you?
Watch the news. See the destroyed apartment buildings. See the people fleeing in droves to safety or hiding under bridges.
The fog of war is not thick this time as there are too many reporters with cameras on the ground, reporting LIVE, in several instances.
AS far as peace talks go, they have produced nothing. A cease fire to allow aid and refugees to move freely was broken by the RUssians less than three hours after implementation.
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I don’t think too many oligarchs are on the battlefield. Putin invaded another sovereign nation. Two things to keep in mind.
Putin is doing it for ego so he can go down as the man who made Russia into an empire again.
He was not treated as the liberator he tried to sell to the rest of the world. What he did to Chechnya should be a heads up as to his ultimate battle plan: destroy everything.
With that in mind, any sovereign nation would be supporting the Ukrainians regardless of how corrupt or not corrupt the government may have been. If not, it will give the green light to Putin to move in on Finland and other states he considers either too close or to aligned with the West.
You seem to side with Putin because a few Russians live in a small corner of Ukraine. If that truly was the issue, then a sit down negotiation for either secession of just those territories or repatriation with some financial assistance. Never offered or happened.
Unfortunately, he has crossed the proverbial Rubicon, lots of innocents will die, building destroyed unless Putin is defeated. And that will happen, later if not sooner. Insurgents almost always extract a win of some kind, but the prize is mauled.
That being said, Graham is a sorry excuse for a man and politician. Shame, because he was a decent fellow about 5 years ago.
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RE: “Putin is doing it for ego so he can go down as the man who made Russia into an empire again.”
Let me suggest that talk like that is irresponsible because you don’t actually know Putin’s mind.
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He told us why he invaded Ukraine in his rambling, threatening rant.
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You should have quoted him, then.
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The oligarchs are never on the battlefield. They have staff for that.
But our support for Ukraine will result in a lot more Ukrainians getting killed.
Absent NATO sending in the troops, Russia is going to win. The harder we make it for them by providing intel and advanced weapons just makes them try harder. Further, the false hope we give the Ukrainians makes them delay the eventual surrender.
Russia initially went it trying to keep casualties down on both sides. They took out the Ukrainian air defense system with a loss of less than 150 lives.
But now, with our weapons killing Russian soldiers, they’re taking the gloves off.
If we aren’t going to get in to these conflicts to win, fewer people die if we give no help at all.
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You think the Ukrainians would just lie down? Putin is facing a years long insurgency at best, even if he took Kyiv in two days. Insurgents are motivated, Russian conscripts are not.
Think Vietnam. The most powerful military in the world couldn’t defeat an army that used old tires to make shoes and live in tunnels. And we slaughtered a lot more Vietnamese, Cambodian and other civilians than Russia ever will kill Ukrainians.
Remember that Putin has been hacking, extorting and creating mayhem in out cyber world for years. He parked in our State Department for almost a year during the last administration. Putin is not just someone else’s problem. He is our enemy, and if Ukraine is a way to take him out, so be it.
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RE: “If we aren’t going to get in to these conflicts to win, fewer people die if we give no help at all.”
That’s the puzzle in a nutshell. Our foreign policy should be something like Starfleet’s Prime Directive.
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My Dad hated John Kennedy. With a burning passion so intense that when Kennedy was shot, he took a gift of a pair of ducks to a judge he knew, just so he would have an unshakable alibi.
The reason? Kennedy gave Cuban counterrevolutionaries false hope of US air and logistic support at the Bay of Pigs. One of his key moral principles was that you don’t abandon soldiers in the field. Ever. For any reason.
Had we not given Zelensky false hopes of defeating Russia, all he had to do was to cede the disputed areas, which he can’t govern anyway, to Russia and sign a treaty to not join NATO, and no one would have died.
But false hopes and advanced weapons will make this hard enough for Russia to bring the full force of the Russian military down on the Ukrainians, who are not fighting a guerilla war in the jungle of Vietnam or the Mountains of Afghanistan but are left to fight a set piece open field war that the Russian Army was built for.
And the weapons we are providing will force Russia to use its full force. Our saber-rattling cheerleaders will have a lot of blood on their hands,
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“. . . what is really happening is a turf war between competing cartels of oligarchs.”
Uh, pure nonsense. You have no evidence of that. You just made it up.
In my apparently better informed opinion, what is happening is a lifelong KGB operative doing his best to re-constitute the USSR out of almost pure ego. The Russian oligarch’s have no reason to want that.
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“That’s what comes of making heroes of one side and villains of the other,”…
So in your view, Putin is NOT a villain for an unprovoked, possibly illegal, invasion of a sovereign country, and Zelensky is NOT a hero for not only standing up for his nation and its peoples, but also right in the middle of it all.
The people of Ukraine voted out a corrupt Kremlin stooge and Putin wants a puppet back in leadership. His plan to reconstitute the old USSR. I guess that is no big deal to you, but to the free world it is a crime against humanity. Putin says, without justification, that he is “de-Nazifying” Ukraine, when it is he himself who is acting very much the Nazi.
Your definitions of villian and hero are quite out of the mainstream. And I don’t mean the media.
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Didn’t say Putin is not a villain, I’m saying the region is full of villains.
Zelensky is ‘standing up’ based on false expectations of the calvary coming to the rescue. Our misleading Ukraine is going to get a lot of people killed.
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There is only one true villain in that region and he is DJT’s master. The only misleading that is occurring is by Putin and those who just “pish posh” his unjustified attack and invasion of a sovereign country that he wants back under his egomaniacal control.
Zelensky is defending his country to whatever end and you question it. Would he welcome assistance more than what is already occurring. Absolutely. No leader wouldn’t. But he’s is going to stand and defend his country whether that assistance comes or not.
People who love freedom should stand in support of freedom. Unless of course it is inconvenient to you to do so.
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Zelensky chose this war as much as Putin.
The ethnic Russian regions in Ukraine were already held by separatists. Zelensky had no reason to fight over them unless he had the intent to crush the resistance there, killing thousands of ethnic Russians. He knew that Putin would not tolerate that unless Ukraine could enlist the support of NATO.
All Zelensky needed to do was let the ethnic Russian regions he couldn’t govern anyway go and agree to stay out of NATO, and there would have been no war.
So, other than the interests of Ukraine’s oligarchs, what reason was there to roll the dice on the US getting into the war on their behalf?
You must know we weren’t going to risk WW3 on Ukraine’s behalf. So, why give them the impression that if they went to war we would?
It’s not a value judgment, it’s reality.
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Big Yellow BS Flag!
Blaming Zelensky for the actions of Putin is a crock. There was no “genocide” of separatists, there was defense of the country from insurgents. Insurgents armed and motivated by Putin.
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Putting down insurgents and geocide are pretty much a matter of point of view.
Is it pretense to some extent? Probably, But there is no functional difference.
Nearly all wars are matters of miscalculation. No one goes to war knowing they will lose if there is a diplomatic option, which there was.
Asserting that Zelensky thought he could call on more outside help than he really could does not make him a bad person, it just makes him wrong.
Certainly, Putin helped stir up the insurgents, What does that change now?
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Defending against insurgents is NOT genocide; it is defense of a country from inside provocateurs. All backed by Putin.
And if there were truly a diplomatic solution, where was the proposal from Putin, short of saying “Let me have control of YOUR country.”
Putin did not want a diplomatic solution. If he truly did, he would not have massed over 150,000 troops and weapons of war on the border of Ukraine.
You still have not been truthful about any of this. Your snippets of this and that are just that. You have put ALL of the blame on Zelinsky and Ukraine. I didn’t see Ukrainian troops on the border of Russia, threatening the entire population because there were some ethnic Ukrainians wanting to be part of Ukraine.
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And yet as late as last November the Biden administration was offering Ukraine membership in NATO
From the WSJ article
“The November agreement added heft to looser assurances Ukraine received at a NATO summit five months earlier that membership would be open to the country if it met the alliance’s criteria. Mr. Service characterizes these moves as “shambolic mismanagement” by the West, which offered Ukraine encouragement on the NATO question but gave no apparent thought to how such a tectonic move away from Moscow would go down with Mr. Putin.”
And Putin has been telling Ukraine to let the ethnic Russian separatists go and stay out of NATO for years. That was a diplomatic solution.
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ANd the criteria is DECADES away from being met. Giving Ukraine an incentive to move away from the corruption that was rampant under Putin’s puppet, knowing it would not be done overnight.
And NATO is NOT an offensive alliance; it is defensive. That alone shows Putin’s paranoia to be a driving force behind his unprovoked and unjustified INVASION of a neighboring country. Where has there ever been any kind of threat to Russia by NATO? Not there, except in the paranoid megalomaniac invading his neighbors.
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“Zelensky chose this war as much as Putin.”
By defending his country against Russian mercenaries, disguised soldiers and terrorists dispatched to take yet another bite out of yet another neighboring country?
Shameful little parrot. Really pathetic.
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@Tabor
“Putting down insurgents and geocide are pretty much a matter of point of view.”
No, it is not a matter of point of view. They are very different things. Look it up.
“No one goes to war knowing they will lose if there is a diplomatic option, which there was.”
Yes, Putin had no good reason to go to war. It was HIS choice.
For Ukraine, surrendering is not a “diplomatic option.” It is surrendering.
“Asserting that Zelensky thought he could call on more outside help than he really could does not make him a bad person, it just makes him wrong.”
No, it makes you a fabulist. Zelensky is getting MORE outside help than he could have expected.
“What does that change now?”
It simply shows that the pretext for invasion was a pretext and not the cause. Kind of important, don’t you think?
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“Zelensky is ‘standing up’ based on false expectations of the calvary coming to the rescue. ”
That is baloney. President Biden has made it crystal clear from the start that the United States military will NOT be riding to the rescue.
Zelensky and the Ukrainian people are “standing up” because they do not want to be subjugated by the fascist regime that you support. As in any war, the defenders of their country hope to make the attacker pay such a price that the attack will be abandoned.
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You can say I support Putin every time you post and it will still be a lie.
Insight into his motives is not support. A white hat/black hat view of people who have a very different history than us leads to dangerous miscalculations.
US troops are not the only way of riding to the rescue. I think Zelensky believed that he would be able to get NATO to enforce a no-fly zone. He probably expected economic sanctions would include NATO not buying oil or natural gas from Russia.
Now he’s out on a limb because of those miscalculations.
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We can’t say this was a surprise
WSJ
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“You can say I support Putin every time you post and it will still be a lie.”
Uh, justifying his illegal actions and laying most of the blame for the war HE started on others IS support. Period. If you are embarrassed to own that support, that is on you. But I have not lied about it. So, you can take that accusation and. . .
And now your SUPPORT includes the nonsense that Zelensky was misled and therefore WE are responsible for the bloodshed. Our government has been very clear from the start – there would be no military confrontation with Russia over the Ukraine.
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I have opined this before and I will repeat it. One way this could end is with Putin dead at the hands of the people around him. His aura of invincibility and competence has been shattered by this massive disaster. And there can be little doubt that he is profoundly hated by many people. And that will be doubly so as the fortunes of the gangsters that prop him up go down the drain.
The wisdom of United States Senator tweeting to that same effect is another question.
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RE: “His aura of invincibility and competence has been shattered by this massive disaster.”
That’s one narrative. Another is that the Ukrainian resistance will fail because the Russian military is a superior force.
So far, there are no reports of Russian defeats.
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Your focus is too narrow. The disaster I am referring to is not just the struggling, apparently incompetent and unwilling Russian military – the real “paper tiger” in this story. It is the cratering of the Russian economy, the collapse of the Ruble, the evaporation of the wealth of ordinary Russians, the re-energizing of NATO, the rearming of Germany, the closer connection of Sweden and Finland with the EU and NATO.
As for “reports of Russian defeats,” have you ever heard the expression they won the battles but lost the war? This was supposed to be a walk in the park – a quick and bloodless regime change and a Russian puppet in Kiev signing away the future of Ukraine. Every day that this does not happen is another defeat for Putin.
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More whistling past the graveyard.
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You do remember that the Afghans resisted to the point that Russia left. The Ukrainian resistance will be as strong, if not stronger than the Afghan.
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You do remember that the Afghans resisted to the point that WE left, too. The Ukrainian resistance is certain to fail unless outsiders provide support. I’m not in favor of going to war against Russia as a covert CIA operation, are you?
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I am in favor of defending an ally however possible.
And if you think the Ukrainians aren’t as capable of a long term insurrection against an invading force, you don’t know dick about Ukrainians.
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