America's Co-Conspirators in Putin's Crimes

MAGA, QAnon, Fox News and other members of the GOP are complicit in murder

There was a time they would be called useful idiots. But we can no longer dismiss the cheerleading by much of the GOP for Vladimir Putin’s war crimes as the consequence of stupidity. Rather, for reasons almost beyond comprehension. they have become Russia’s useful co-conspirators.

From the time of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, a huge number of Americans who identify themselves as Republicans have been throwing love bombs Putin’s way, no matter that magnitude of his slaughter. They lie that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a Nazi, or out to destroy Christianity, or is committing war crimes within his own country to make the Russians look bad. They are led in their effusive slobbering over Putin by their American taskmaster and white supremacist Tucker Carlson, the Fox News commentator who insults, degrades, and lies about Zelenskyy, Ukraine, and Russia almost every weekday on his nightly flow of sludge. Fearful that this evil, disgusting propagandist might turn his spew of hate in their direction, some of the GOP mimic him in a hallelujah chorus.

Look at what happened on Thursday night. Zelenskyy bravely flew on a secret mission to the United States to meet with President Biden, to thank the American government for its military support, and to reinforce to Congress his country’s need for continued aid. But the pro-Russia segment of the Republican Party treated this brave man like so much dog feces on their shoes. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) did not attend the speech, an insult and dereliction of duty that may be unprecedented in America’s dealings with an ally. Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and others did not stand up to applaud. 

Then the GOP commentators flooded Twitter, television, and radio, competing to see who could compose the best insult of a brave man leading an allied country. America’s most prominent drug fan, Donald Trump Jr., slapped Zelenskyy (in a tweet that misspelled the president’s name) as “an ungrateful international welfare queen.” Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire wrote, “Get this grifting leech out of our country please.” Charlie Kirk, a useless meat sack who has accomplished nothing in his life other than spew hate as the head of Turning Point USA, dismissed Zelenskyy as an “actor” and criticized him for “wearing an army fatigue colored sweater and cargo pants” - as if a man in the midst of a war has the time to drop by Brooks Brothers after risking his life to fly here. Melissa Makenzie of the American Spectator went full QAnon, repeating one of the cult’s top conspiracy theories when she tweeted “Zelensky can disgrace Biden because he has crap on every single establishment politician. He knows what they've done and what they want to hide.”

And then there’s Carlson, Putin’s leading lapdog, who insulted Zelenskyy as a “Ukrainian strip club manager” and that “it may be impossible to imagine a more humiliating scenario for the greatest country on Earth.”

The vehemence, the hatred of a man defending his fledgling democracy against an unprovoked invasion by one of the world’s most brutal and evil dictators would have been incomprehensible as little as eight years ago. Back then, when Putin first attacked Ukraine by annexing Crimea in 2014, Republicans ranted, blaming President Obama for failing to prevent the invasion, often by claiming that he hadn’t taken actions that he had already taken. Lying to deceive the gullible and uninformed Republican base seems to just come so easily to these politicians.

Senator Ted Cruz, (R-Texas) jumped with this “blame America first” position. “In Ukraine, we’re seeing the direct consequences of a failure of American leadership,” he said. Putin, Cruz said, “has taken the measure of President Obama and has determined that he has nothing to fear from the United States, and that is why he is proceeding with impunity.”

He wasn’t alone. Then House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said Obama “plays marbles while Putin plays chess.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) oozed that the lack of a strong response by Obama to the Benghazi attack of 2012 - the GOP’s endless go-to for political points - was enough to “invite this type of aggression.” 

What happened that led so many Republicans to flip from supporting Ukraine in 2014 to the widespread contempt in conservative circles for the same country now that it has become an emerging democracy, a development that no doubt contributed to Putin’s decision to invade. How did they go from “Why won’t you do something about Russia invading Ukraine?” to “Why are you doing something about Russia invading Ukraine?”

Part of it is, no doubt, just a consequence of the GOP’s knee-jerk opposition to everything Democrats do, even if they contradict their previous positions. When Obama said he would consider meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un under proper conditions, the GOP went berserk. When Trump actually did it, the GOP all but threw a ticker tape parade. The reality is, when a political party cares only about “owning the libs” and keeping their cushy jobs, America always comes last.

But the impact of Donald Trump’s bootlicking of Putin cannot be overstated. From 2018 when President Trump sided with Putin over American intelligence services at the Helsinki Summit, the depth of his obsequiousness toward the Russian dictator was laid out for all to see. And rather than reacting with outrage, the Republicans lined up behind him, cheering on our enemy because ignorant members of MAGA believe everything Trump says.

Make no mistake, Putin’s co-conspirators in America are supporting crimes against humanity. A brutal article and video in the New York Times today laid out in excruciating and painful detail how Russia’s 234th Air Assault Regiment led by Lt. Col. Artyom Gorodilov slaughtered dozens of unarmed civilians in Bucha, leaving their bodies lying in the street. When photographs of those corpses strewn across a single neighborhood first emerged in April, Putin denied that Russia had anything to do with the murders. And like the good little lapdogs they are, Putin’s American co-conspirators accepted the words of this known liar and laid the blame for the massacre on Zelenskyy as some sort of bizarre killing of his own people for propaganda purposes. 

Regardless of these Republicans’ reason for ignoring the slaughter of innocents by Putin, this invasion is about more than Ukraine. Russia’s invasion was not debated in the United Nations before it occurred. It was not something where there was an international agreement that Ukraine posed a threat that had to be confronted by the world. It was simply one country disregarding the independence of another in violation of the UN Charter, which, according to Article 2, “is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members” and that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

We have faced this situation before. In speeches during November 1975, UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, delivered a consistent message - that the world was corrupting the language of human rights, which would soon threaten national rights as well. The invasions of Goa by India and of East Timor by Indonesia - and the coinciding dismissal of atrocities committed by the occupier - served to prove Moynihan’s warning as true. 

“It would be gratifying to report that there were those who made some connection between what we said would happen and the invasions of Goa and East Timor, but there were none,” Moynihan wrote in his memoirs. “This perhaps only confirmed are charge that the (UN) Charter was being drained of meaning.”

The Republican co-conspirators are once again corrupting the language of human rights, dismissing the atrocities committed in Ukraine by Russia, endangering the global commitment to national sovereignty, and choosing instead to giggle and insult a brave national leader who is fighting to save his country. It is an abomination.

In the 1930s and early 1940s, there were Americans who sided with the Nazis, who felt a kinship with the hatreds and brutal dictatorship of Hitler and his thugs. They dismissed the evidence of Nazi crimes - from the Sterilization Law to the Nuremberg Laws to Kristallnacht - with the result that history looks upon these Americans as the worst of the worst citizens this country has produced. There is little doubt that, when the story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is retold in history books, the GOP’s co-conspirators in Putin’s crimes will be depicted with the same disgust that all decent people now feel.