One can certainly tend towards the hyperbolic when dealing with the current state of our politics. The opponent in this election (as well as 2016 and 2020) could be described in multiple ways and none of them have any connection to actual reality. Some would describe him as a cartoon villain. Others might describe him as the real life adult Eric Cartman. In the past, I have described him as a Bond villain post-traumatic brain injury. These are all funny in their own way, but for some they don’t carry much weight.

So, let me describe something that is concrete and potentially disastrous for our country. The current iteration of the GOP has no platform and no real ideology. It basically has become “whatever that guy says it is.” Ideology has to govern your party. Right or wrong, your party has to have a common framework and conception of how the world works. The other side might and likely will poke holes in that framework, but it gives you a baseline for decision making and core values.

I am only 50 years old. Many in our audience here have me by a decade or two. So, this seems weird for me to say, but I remember a time when Russia was the enemy. I remember a time when the worst thing the GOP could hang on you was either the communist label or to be painted as a Russian sympathizer. Instead of holding any candidate to that standard, the party has shifted based on a cult of personality and the fact that their standard bearer has a weird dictator fetish.

That is assuming the very best of the situation. The alternative is that their standard bearer is either under control for financial/blackmail reasons or is unwittingly under their control. I’d like to believe that his followers are blindly following him over this cliff, but we can’t rule out the possibility that some or all are paid stooges as well. I could point to numerous examples within the right wing media, but doing so would be giving attention to people that desperately crave it.

One recent example saw Vladimir Putin apparently advertising for disaffected conservatives and mouth breathers to move to Russia to get away from western liberalism. Indeed. We know a few things. We know that Russia interfered with our election in at least 2016 if not 2020 as well. We know they have spied on us. We know that our last president sided with Putin when it came to all of this information over his intelligence agencies and we know he shared confidential and top secret information with their bureaucrats.

We also know that Russia invaded a sovereign country unprovoked. Yet. voices on the right in government and commenting outside of it that have openly asked what is wrong with that. They have questioned whether we should be involved at all with even a few suggesting we should support Russia. Maybe we need a replay of cold war era movies where Russia is cast as the enemy. Maybe millions of Americans need to be reminded that dictators are not our friends. Maybe it just doesn’t matter anymore and we just need this spell to be broken. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills and I know I’m not the only one.

Russian state media is laughing at the US, saying that the files in TFG’s basement contain information about new nuclear weapons, and that they’ve already seen them.  Let that sink in.

Meanwhile in Russia: Putin's mouthpieces on state TV are taunting America about "Top Secret" documents sought during the raid of Trump's estate, which they claim had to do with the newest nuclear weapons developed by the US and gleefully imply that Moscow already got to see them. pic.twitter.com/hmmphB4Utf

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) August 13, 2022

It hit me a little when I was sitting in mass. We do the usual things because I suppose the usual things give us some comfort. Of course, the faithful hopes it does more. We said rosaries for Ukraine and we ultimately hope it has some positive impact. So, it isn’t the prayer themselves but what we say before the prayer.

The priest told us we were praying for all of the world leaders to come up with a peaceful solution in Ukraine. He’s a really great guy (the priest). I know he means well and I imagine most churches are saying something similar. Yet, that sentiment hit me. We are operating in this situation as if a global community needs to come together to come up with a collective solution to a problem where multiple people are involved in the causes.

There is one man. Ukraine didn’t do this to themselves. Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t do anything to anger or provoke the Russians. The European community, international community, NATO, or the United States didn’t do anything specifically to invite Russia to invade Ukraine. This was a decision by one man, so any praying needs to be done for the victims, but also for that one man.

This is usually where conservatives point fingers at liberals and liberals point fingers at conservatives. If only you would have done this or said this then none of this would have happened. It’s a trap. Vladimir Putin is a bully. Like most bullies, you either stand up to him or you don’t. There is little rhyme or reason to their behavior, so it’s more about you reacting to him than him reacting to you.

This is one of those scenarios where the former guy’s behavior comes under question. He seemed way to eager to be Putin’s friend. He seemed way to eager to go along with him at all of their various summits (particularly at Helsinki). So, the obvious thought was that he was indebted to Russia in some way. There were some shady business deals that seemed to indicate that.

Yet, that line of thinking is probably trying too hard. The former guy’s pathology is easier to grasp than that. He likes all strong men because he wants to be a strong man. So, he may have gotten help putting him in office, but it might not be anything other than Putin feeling he was better for them than Hillary Clinton.

On the flip side you have the other side wondering if Biden is too old. Maybe he isn’t tough enough to show the resolve necessary to steer the world through this situation. Maybe a strong man would be the best thing to help combat a strong man. Except, we aren’t exactly sure whether the former guy is anything other than a paper tiger. He acts tough though and I guess that’s enough for some.

Again, this is simple. This isn’t about the world developing a complex strategy to deal with all of the players so they can come to an equitable solution. This is about one man flying off the handle. It is about the world simply putting that man back into a box or six feet under in a box. Everything else is simply a distraction.

“Where have all the good men gone And where are all the gods? Where’s the streetwise Hercules To fight the rising odds?”– Bonnie Tyler

No one could call Ukraine a fake country. It is the largest country in Europe and would be much more well-known if it were in Western Europe. The perception of Ukraine was probably that it was a de facto part of Russia trying to make a go of independence. We were supposed to feel sorry for them.

Looking pathetic would have created a similar effect as to what we have seen. Millions of Americans and citizens of other NATO countries would feel sorry for the Ukrainians and want to intervene. In essence, the Ukrainians haven’t played their part in that morality play.

The leader in Ukraine is a legitimate badass. Volodymyr Zelenskyy got his start as a comedian and satirist. His rise to prominence would be most similar to Al Franken in our own country if you remove the sex scandal and instead make Franken the president of the United States. Zelenskyy has a presence and charisma that few American politicians can muster. He’s needed every bit of that over the past few weeks and more.

Something special has happened in Ukraine. Great sports teams often take on the personality of their coach. I suppose bad teams do as well. The Ukrainian people have embodied the spirit of their leader and are winning over the citizens of the world. They are fighting all the way down to the last adult, often making weapons through Google searches and whatever supplies they can find on hand.

Meanwhile, they are getting support from some of the unlikeliest of places. No one could scarcely say that the entire world is behind them. Even the most cockeyed of optimists wouldn’t go that far. However, it is pretty safe to say the majority of the world is behind Ukraine and that support has caused some Russia backers here in the U.S. to change their tune. They know who they are, so there is no need to belabor the point.

Meanwhile, the Russian army has embodied the spirit of their leader. They came in with a big, imposing force hoping to bully the Ukrainians into submission. Yet, their effort was largely disorganized and many of the soldiers don’t seem to have the will to continue. They may eventually overwhelm Ukraine, but they certainly haven’t looked good doing it.

Since the Cold War days you could credibly say that the U.S. and Russia were mirror images of each other. That might be more true than we thought. One wonders if we would even be capable of mounting the same kind of defense that Ukraine is mustering. All people are capable of acts of courage and bravery collectively and we are no different. Yet, you have to wonder if we have any leaders capable of doing what Zelenskyy is doing. Even if we did you’d openly wonder how many people would actually follow them.

Lord knows why these things happen. There are certainly no shortage of working theories here. Many think our former president was either an unwitting or witting Russian agent. Others just think he saw himself as an autocrat and therefore gravitated towards those kinds of guys. Maybe that explains guys like Tucker Carlson too. I’ve never been much to buy into conspiracies, so I’m not about to start now. What I do know is that we could use own Zelenskyy right now.

Yesterday was an interesting day in the World Geography class I support. See, the district made a huge deal about the teaching of controversial topics. It isn’t even so much that we aren’t supposed to do it, but we have to be so careful as to not interject our own opinion into these things. Then, the teacher found a worksheet that described health care costs in the United States and nine other industrialized nations.

The teacher gave me the worksheet and asked me to look at the first question. It looked a little loaded and so we pivoted a little and hedged our bets. We looked more carefully at the whole sheet (including the graph) and there was no way to spin it. All of the questions were loaded. It presented facts that could not be disputed and yet framed the discussion in such a negative way that you wanted to call the policy fight before one side got killed.

See, according to the graph, the United States spends more than 15 percent of its GDP on health care. Naturally, you’d have to read the fine print to know exactly what that all entails. We could naturally assume they are talking both health insurance premiums and out of pocket expenses. The other nine industrialized nations all hovered around ten percent. Sweden was the lowest at 9.3 percent.

We include the usual caveats in a conversation like this. Why did those that make the graph pick those specific countries? Wouldn’t we need to also see what people are getting for that care? The worksheet even asked a question of what we would expect to see in terms of quality of care.

We avoid teaching these things because we are under the impression that we have to show both sides. We are under the impression that both sides actually have equal merit. This is where we’ve landed in terms of political correctness and bending over backwards not to appear to have a liberal agenda. A worksheet clearly shows we are spending too much on health care and we have to somehow tiptoe around that.

There used to be a day when we could all agree on the facts before us. If information presented itself that we spent more on health care per capita then any country in the world then we could all agree we are spending too much on health care. We could all agree that you don’t pal around with white supremacists or sing Vladimir Putin’s praises.

Politics used to be about accepting reality and then suggesting ways to make it better. If we want to stop a Russian mad man do we simply clamp down on him with more sanctions or do we actually physically intervene? We acknowledge that racism exists. We acknowledge that there are cases of racial bias in the judicial system and other systems. We endeavor to find ways to remove those biases.

In terms of health care, we acknowledge we are spending too much and too many families are financially ruined because someone got sick. Of course, acknowledging that also forces us to acknowledge our own greed. We would acknowledge that we are the only industrialized nation without universal coverage. We would have to acknowledge that drug prices are higher here and insurance companies make a bigger profit here.

We used to acknowledge that mad men shouldn’t have access to automatic weapons that can kill people by the dozens. We used to acknowledge that consumers deserved basic protections from predatory lenders or those that would swindle them. The debate came in how we protect people. It came in how we best serve their interests. It came in just how involved the government needed to be in providing these solutions. No one ever argued that these were good things. At least they didn’t until now.

I don’t have to recount the thousands of times that all but a tiny handful of GOP politicians have praised, looked the other way, made excuses for or lied about the despicable and illegal conduct of TFG.  Goofballs, weirdos and Fox News talking heads called sensible public health policy “tyranny”, comparing wearing masks and getting vaccines to the Nazi run gas chambers during the holocaust.  Said goofballs also did the bidding of TFG  and attacked the US Capitol to stop the lawful certification of the presidential election.  Since the attack, every conservative talking head and politician have twisted themselves into pretzels downplaying the insurrection or trying to justify it because of the tyranny of a free and fair election that their guy lost.

Then comes the guy TFG loves, Vlad Putin.  Doing what TFG only dreams of, Putin completely controls the levers of power in Russia and its zone of influence, having destroyed the constitution that Boris Yeltsin pushed through to make Russia a democracy.  He decided that Ukraine, which has been an independent democracy since 1991 when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, was actually his in his fever dream of rebuilding the Soviet Union.  Violating a whole book full of international laws, Putin launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine last week, expecting the same tepid response of 2014 when he annexed Crimea and succeeded while Europe looked the other way and the US responded with limited sanctions (that Trump undid as one of his first acts in office).  TFG stayed in character this last week lavishing praise on Putin, followed by sycophants at Fox Noise, and the TFG wing of the GOP.

And then, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stood up, took off his suit, donned olive drab, declared he was not surrendering, and started rallying his people. When offered an evacuation by the US, he declined, saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”  Following his lead, thousands of Ukrainians have volunteered to defend their homeland, and even expat Ukrainians are returning to fight.  They’ve built barricades, made Molotov cocktails, taken up arms, and have steadfastly resisted the onslaught.

After witnessing Zelensky’s courage and the response of his people, the international community has responded in a way unseen since 911.  The EU banned Russian aircraft in their airspace; the US, with cooperation of allies, implemented sanctions on Putin and his henchmen, even including denying some Russian banks access to the SWIFT international payments system, which I believe hasn’t been done before and threatens to cripple the Russian economy.  Hundreds of thousands of Russians in large cities around the country, risking arrest and detention, publicly protested against Putin.  The EU offered to finance weapons into Ukraine, and then Fedex and UPS announced that they were halting all shipments into and out of Russia. Shortly after, BP announced that it was exiting its 20%, $14 billion position in Rosneft, the Russian national oil company.  Boom. In less than a week, Putin was isolated and now a pariah in global political and industry circles with few exceptions.  Even Putin ass-kisser Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has announced that he is “neutral” about the attack on Ukraine.

The pressure on Putin is now so great that, after putting his nuclear assets on alert, he asked for talks with Ukraine through the president of Belarus.  So far the talks are said to be arranged on the border between Ukraine and Belarus, a Russian satellite state.  There are no real hopes for progress, but with Putin raising the specter of nuclear war, he is clearly on his heels.

This is how you deal with a despot.  When they threaten unlawful actions, you don’t appease.  You kick them in the groin and poke them in the eye.  This is not only how you deal with Putin, you do the same thing with shitbags like TFG, Bolsanaro, Kim Jong Un, and other despots around the world.  They rule with fear; they’re bullies.  When overpowered, they run.

There is a lesson being taught the world by the people of Ukraine.  I’m just hoping that many people, including TFG appeasers, are learning it.