[T]here was something missing in [the two House Intelligence Committee witnesses’] description of “alarm” at the withholding of US military aid to Ukraine.
For all their concern about Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia, they were remarkably sanguine about the Obama administration’s inaction after Russia annexed Crimea and began aggressing into eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko went to Washington and begged for military assistance but the Obama-Biden administration refused, out of deference to Moscow.
Poroshenko complained at the time: “one cannot win a war with blankets.”
This was surely the low point of Ukrainian-US relations, not Trump’s phone call in July.
Despite the witnesses’ dissatisfaction with President Trump’s Ukraine policy, it was President Trump who approved the supply of weapons to Ukraine.
So if concern for Ukraine is not the real motivation behind the diplomatic community’s alarm about Trump, all that’s left is protecting the Bidens.
Without a real whistleblower we can only think the worst.It's conceivable that the quid pro quo Biden bragged about on video had to do with concern over corruption that a Ukrainian prosecutor was failing to investigate, not corruption that he was threatening to investigate. It's even possible that Biden didn't think any of the un-investigated corruption involved his family, though the second part at the very least paints him as oblivious. If that's the case, though, what I'm seeing is Trump jumping to a fairly natural conclusion after seeing Biden's videotaped statement, and wishing someone would look into it long enough to give us a clue what was going on.
Vindman gave the game away with his prepared testimony. He believes the permanent bureaucracy should reign supreme, and if some elected politician gets crosswise with the solons of the state, then they must act. So he did, as he detailed in his prepared statement and testimony to Congress. From the statement: “In the Spring of 2019, I became aware of outside influencers promoting a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency. This narrative was harmful to U.S. government policy.”How they'll howl if he gets prosecuted by a court martial.
There is a lot of wrong in those two sentences, which profoundly illustrate the fundamental flaw Vindman and his fellow Deep Staters operate under. The interagency he mentions is a collection of staff from the major agencies like the State Department, Department of Defense, and intelligence agencies, who meet to coordinate and plan implementation of policy. They most certainly are not supposed to decide what policy the United States will follow.... [despite] his belief that they are the ones whose opinions matter and anyone acting outside of that is acting against U.S. interests. Even if that conflicted with the policy of his superiors all the way up to the president, Vindman and the Deep State would decide what “advanced U.S. policy interests.”
Vindman also took action warning Ukrainian officials he spoke to: “I would tell them to not interfere — not get involved in U.S. domestic politics.”
This was after Vindman says he had determined the calls for an investigation into election interference and anything related to Burisma corruption and the Bidens equaled President Trump trying to get Ukraine to interfere in U.S. politics. He was actively undermining what he believes is the president’s chosen policy—not because it is illegal, but because he disagrees with it and doesn’t think it is important.
That is far beyond Vindman’s duties or authority, and in applying his opinion and actions to counter the president’s goals, Vindman may be violating Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which covers insubordination to the president and other named officials.
This is insubordination and malfeasance, and likely punishable under several sections of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).
"The stakes in this battle on the right are much higher than the next election. If Republican voters can’t be convinced that democratic elections will continue to offer them a viable path to victory, that they can thrive within a diversifying nation, and that even in defeat their basic rights will be protected, then Trumpism will extend long after Trump leaves office—and our democracy will suffer for it."It would be easier for people on the right to believe that their basic rights will be protected in defeat if the folks on the left would quit running on, inter alia, the following things:
However, the Cuban and Venezuelan leaders - who had previously voiced their support for Mr Morales - condemned the events as a "coup".I guess they'd know one when they see it. It wasn't a coup earlier, though, when Morales got a friendly court to throw out term limits.
Shouldn’t we have understood the hollowness of the Soviet system from the moment the wall went up in 1961? If the Soviet Empire had been founded on an ideology, a belief, a hope for a better society, it would not have been necessary to build a wall, surrounded by barbed wire and explosive mines, to prevent East Germans from leaving. The wall had no other significance than to evoke and reinforce fear in the subjects of the empire and among Communist leaders themselves; if they had once believed their Marxist vulgate, the wall proved, starting in 1961, that they no longer believed it. Neither did Stalin in the 1930s, since his essential contribution to the Soviet system (and later, by contagion, the Chinese and the Cuban experiments in inhumanity) was to institutionalize fear, with prison camps, phony trials, arbitrary arrests, and the denunciation of everyone by everyone.
* * *
Communism has been an actual belief primarily in free countries.... Communism only works, it seems, where it is not applied.
Thirty years after the wall came down, some believe that the event has not lived up to its promise. Well—explain that to the Poles, the Baltic peoples, and the Ukrainians! Another quarrel also divides historians: did the wall fall, or was it destroyed—and if destroyed, by whom? By heroes seeking freedom, by brave people seeking bananas, by the preaching of Pope John Paul II, by the prescient 1987 speech of Ronald Reagan in Berlin—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”? As often happens in history, major events grow out of multiple influences. But of all these factors, the most improbable was Gorbachev’s instructing his troops, “Don’t shoot.” He thought that he was reinventing socialism with a human face. The Soviet Empire was destroyed by the only one of its leaders who believed that real socialism could exist without fear—a fatal, fortunate error.
