If you don’t want Putin to do ‘whatever the hell he wants,’ call Congress about Ukraine | Opinion

Fellow citizens, I rise today — OK, strike that; I’ve clearly spent too much time listening to three of our four Missouri and Kansas U.S. senators rise only to then fall into speaking nonsense about aid to Ukraine.

I am writing to ask those of you citizens who are still pro-democracy to call your U.S. representatives and urge them to support the urgently needed $95 billion foreign aid package that just passed the Senate with a these-days-miraculous 70 votes. Trump-run House Speaker Mike Johnson does not even want to bring it to the floor, where if he did it might just pass.

Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, I should say right away, deserves our thanks for voting for the package, which also includes money for Israel, Taiwan and humanitarian aid to Gaza. And on a closely related front, Moran also did the right thing in repudiating Donald Trump’s truly end-times talking point inviting Russian aggression in Europe.

Trump, as you’ve probably heard, said he would “encourage” Russian President Vladimir Putin to do “whatever the hell” he wants to any NATO members who don’t, as he put it, pay their bills.

(To appreciate how deeply ironic as well as dangerous this is, coming from a man best known in his hometown, pre-politics, for exaggerating his net worth and stiffing his contractors, I refer you to the USA Today investigation headlined, “Hundreds allege Trump doesn’t pay his bills,” about his failure to pay “carpenters, dishwashers, painters” and lawyers. Or the Wall Street Journal report headlined, “Donald Trump’s Business Plan Left a Trail of Unpaid Bills.”)

In response to Trump’s green light to more Putin war crimes, Moran said NATO is “an important ally and we need to be united as we combat many of the world’s challenges together.”

Report: Hawley laughed at Trump’s NATO threat

Missouri’s Josh Hawley, though, seemed to find Trump’s unlawful threats amusing: He reportedly laughed as he said of Trump’s latest and lowest Valentine to Vlad that “the NATO countries definitely need to pay.” Then he added, “if they invaded a NATO country, we’d have to defend them, so we don’t want that.”

The best way to keep them from invading a NATO country, Senator, is to help our ally, Ukraine, which Hawley has falsely said is not our ally at all.

In his remarks opposing aid, Hawley claimed at length that we can’t afford to do anything to help Americans because our available dollars have “all gone to Ukraine.”

Foreign aid only 1% of federal budget

Ukraine funding, in his fantasy, is why Congress has done nothing to improve railroad safety or compensate St. Louis victims of nuclear radiation poisoning. Both of those things can and should happen, but neither has anything to do with foreign aid, which never accounts for more than 1% of our budget.

In 2022, we spent .032% of our gross domestic product on Ukraine.

According to an extensive recent Washington Post report, the Congress has done zero to respond to the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, because railroad lobbyists have successfully blocked reform: “Some of the chief beneficiaries of industry cash were Republicans who initially attacked the Biden administration over its handling of the East Palestine derailment before opposing or slowing down safety legislation.

“In doing so, rail industry lobbyists also fought the Biden administration on even the most basic upgrades, from efforts to ensure that engineers have special breathing equipment onboard to new rules that would require miles-long trains to be staffed with more than one person. The staunch opposition has bogged down some federal action while leaving Congress unable to hold a single vote on rail safety legislation in the House or Senate.”

Blaming this failure on Ukraine is vintage Josh Hawley.

Like some others in their party, Missouri Republican Eric Schmitt and Kansas Republican Roger Marshall went back to arguing that until our border with Mexico is secure, we shouldn’t even think of helping Ukraine: “There’s no border security in this bill,” Marshall said, “none.”

Could that be because Republicans torpedoed their own very conservative border bill just days ago?

Putin’s scary talk about Poland with Tucker Carlson

In his mostly mind-numbing recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin said he isn’t attacking Poland, where Russia has “no interests.” You know, just like he said even after invading Ukraine that he wouldn’t and wasn’t doing that.

But in the interview, Putin also spoke about Poland in many of the same false and scary ways he has always spoken about Ukraine.

“I can’t get one passage out of my mind,” Masha Gessen wrote in the New Yorker. “In the history-lecture portion of the interview, when Putin got to 1939, he said, ‘Poland coöperated with Germany, but then it refused to comply with Hitler’s demands. … By not ceding the Danzig Corridor to Hitler, Poles forced him, they overplayed their hand and they forced Hitler to start the Second World War by attacking Poland.’ … The idea that the victim of the attack serves as its instigator by forcing the hand of the aggressor is central to all of Putin’s explanations for Russia’s war in Ukraine. To my knowledge, though, this was the first time he described Hitler’s aggression in the same terms.”

“Putin has reproduced Hitler’s rhetoric before,” Gessen said, yet it wasn’t clear then if he’d come up with that himself, or if his speechwriters had. “But the way Putin described the beginning of the Second World War in his interview with Carlson suggests that, although he keeps accusing Ukraine of fostering Nazism, in his mind he might see himself as Hitler, but perhaps a wilier one, one who can make inroads into the United States and create an alliance with its presumed future President.”

“It’s telling, too,” he wrote, “that Putin took the time to accuse Poland of both allying with Nazi Germany and inciting Hitler’s aggression. As he has done with Ukraine in the past, he is positioning Poland as an heir to Nazism. He mentioned Poland more than thirty times in his conversation with Tucker. If I were Poland, I’d be scared.”

They wouldn’t have to be, and we wouldn’t have to be, either, if we’d stand by our allies in Ukraine now, when it matters. It would also be helpful to elect a president who knows how important our NATO alliance really is.

There aren’t any “bills,” paid or unpaid, to NATO, but every member is supposed to spend at least 2% of its GDP on its own defense. You know which NATO member spends the highest percentage of its GDP on defense? Poland.

Article 5 of NATO’s charter states that an attack against any ally “is considered as an attack against all.” The only time it has ever been invoked was by the United States after 9/11, and every NATO ally joined our fight then.

“History settles every account,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in support of the aid package. It does, but we can’t wait for that. Right now, we can still choose how this important chapter ends.