May 2024 Newsletter

GOOD NEWS: Democrats Support Ukraine, NATO defense, American Manufacturing & American Defense!

Conservative columnist George F. Will laid it all out in his Washington Post opinion piece on April 24, 2024. Here are some direct quotes to clear up any confusion about who to support if we want democracies to continue throughout the world.

"The Republican Party was founded as a noble rejection of the most consequential bad thing Congress has ever done: the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which authorized territories to vote slavery up or down, thereby valuing popular sovereignty more than liberty. On Saturday, the House voted 311-112 for $61 billion for Ukraine, with 112 ignoble House Republicans voting to condemn Ukraine to death, starved of such military basics as artillery shells. How many of the 112 know or care that more than half the $61 billion will fund restocking U.S. munitions inventories, as well as Ukraine’s purchases of U.S. weapons?" ...

"Congress’s support for Ukraine ranks with two other nation-defining congressional acts.

In March 1941, Congress approved Lend-Lease aid to Britain and others (235 Democrats and 24 Republicans yea, 25 Democrats and 135 Republicans nay). This 'most unsordid act in the history of nations' (Winston Churchill) ended the facade of U.S. neutrality. By approving aid for Greece and Turkey in May 1947, Congress affirmed (161 Democrats and 126 Republicans yea, 13 Democrats and 93 Republicans nay) the Truman Doctrine: The United States would assist democratic nations threatened by authoritarians. World War II’s end would not revive isolationism.

In today’s Republican Party, dominated by someone who repudiates the internationalism to which Eisenhower committed the party seven decades ago, the cabal of grotesques might yet predominate.

It includes Missouri’s Sen. Josh Hawley, who thinks we have given “blank checks” to Ukraine (actually, 5 percent of defense spending, and less than half the monetary value of European support). Yet Hawley says we cannot defend both Ukraine and Taiwan, so this would be an excellent time to reduce the U.S. forces in Europe that are deterring Russia from aggressions against NATO allies. Another grotesque, Ohio’s Sen. J.D. Vance, an itinerant Neville Chamberlain visiting green rooms, would welcome Ukraine’s death on the installment plan (see Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939). Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (she who wonders whether Jewish space lasers cause forest fires) expresses her loathing of Ukraine with lunatic accusations that confirm the judgment of Texas’s Rep. Michael McCaul (Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee) that Russian propaganda has 'infected a good chunk of my party’s base.'

We have defined heroism so far down that it encompasses Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) allowing a House vote on assisting Ukrainians’ resistance to indiscriminate bombardments of population centers, ethnic cleansing, rape, torture and the abduction of children. Oleksandra Matviichuk, the Ukrainian winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, adds: 'One woman I interviewed had her eye extracted with a spoon.'

Heroism is not required of Ukraine’s NATO and other allies, whose combined GDPs are 20 times that of Russia. The cost of losing, by ill-conceived parsimony, this proxy war with a barbarian power possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenal would be steep."

schoharie county democratic committee