The argument is always the same: “if we don’t do this now, it will harm American security in the future.” If only people realized that what we are doing now is already harming American security! From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Trudy Rubin, from her Twitter biography.

If they win, MAGA Republicans will push to abandon Ukraine and harm U.S. security.

GOP candidates, along with Musk and Trump, echo Kremlin talking points in pushing to end Ukraine aid and force Kyiv to negotiate with genocidal Putin

by Trudy Rubin | Sunday, November 6, 2022

The ad during the first World Series game between the Phillies and the Houston Astros was terrifying — and totally misleading.

It denounced Joe Biden for sending billions in aid and weapons to Ukraine while U.S. cities were awash in crime and undocumented immigrants. “Joe Biden says his fight in Ukraine could lead to nuclear Armageddon. World War III,” the ad’s narrator intoned. “I say no mas.”

Trudy Rubin is a long-time columnist for the Inquirer, and a member of the newspaper’s Editorial Board. Someone so intimately familiar with the City of Brotherly Love cannot be unaware that her home city actually is “awash in crime and undocumented immigrants”. As her own newspaper reported, there was another mass shooting in the Kensington neighborhood, which the Inky recently described as “a section of Philadelphia beset by an open-air drug market and higher concentrations of poverty and addiction” and saying “no neighborhood has been as burdened by shootings.” With 445 homicides and a total of 2004 shooting victims as of Monday, October 31^st, it would certainly seem to me that Philly is “awash in crime”.

Does Miss Rubin dispute that President Biden and the Democratic majority in Congress have sent billions of dollars in aid and equipment to Ukraine? Does she deny that President Biden and his Administration have talked about “World War III” and nuclear war? One wouldn’t think she would, considering that she linked the Washington Post article documenting it!

More than 1.1 million viewers “liked” the ad when it surfaced on Twitter.

Well, Heaven forfend! 1.1 million people are opposed to increasing the probability of nuclear war? A scandal, I say, a scandal!

The ad’s sponsor was a virulently anti-immigrant, dark money group called Citizens for Sanity, which is linked to Steven Miller, former President Donald Trump’s close White House aide and anti-immigration tsar. Yet the attack on U.S. aid to Ukraine — in language that could have been taken from the Kremlin’s own playbook — was especially disturbing.

While there’s a lot more in Miss Rubin’s column, this is the money line: being opposed to American aid to one side in a conflict where the other side has a strategic nuclear arsenal capable of incinerating every large American city is “especially disturbing.”

This has, of course, been much of the Democrats’ and the neoconservatives’ playbook: if you are opposed to a policy which increases the probability of nuclear war, why you must be pro-Russia and Vladimir Putin’s stooge! Apparently, the seemingly unusual notion that some people might not like the idea of increasing the probability of nuclear war without supporting or being sympathetic to Russia just never enters their minds, or at least will not until after the election!

The advertisement is a preview of what to expect if Tuesday’s elections return a MAGA-heavy GOP majority to the House of Representatives, let alone the Senate. And it is a gift to Vladimir Putin, who hopes his battlefield losses in Ukraine will be offset by MAGA victories in the U.S.A.

The Inquirer is, as you might have guessed, wholly in the bag for the Democrats, and the Editorial Board absotively, posilutely hate Donald Trump and “Make America Great Again” Republicans. Much of the idea behind Miss Rubin’s column is an appeal to vote, if not for Democrats, against Republicans.

I do not know if the columnist has any control over where related article blurbs appear on the newspaper’s website, but the one pictured at the left showed up immediately below her last quoted paragraph, and it leads to another of Miss Rubin’s columns:

Putin’s nuclear threats and strikes on civilians rule out negotiations or an off-ramp

Biden should expedite arrival of air defenses for Ukraine and make clear to Putin that nuclear use would be catastrophic for Russia.

by Trudy Rubin | Thursday, October 13, 2022

On Tuesday morning, as news broke of Russia’s vicious missile strikes on civilian targets all across Ukraine, I texted a friend in the badly hit city of Kharkiv.

“We will not be intimidated,” Oleksiy quickly texted back. (I am using only his first name because he is now serving with the Ukrainian army.) “Kharkiv is ready for this.” He told me he was cooking borscht on a makeshift outdoor grill as we spoke because a barrage of Russian missiles had knocked out electricity in the city. The Russians had also targeted a children’s playground, civilian apartment blocks, and a downtown crossroads at morning rush hour.

That reminded me of a part of Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, in which one of the characters in the novel mused how interesting it was that Nazi propaganda told people that Allied bombs missed military targets but fell unerringly on schools, churches, and hospitals.

A couple of paragraphs down, she continued:

Ukrainians believe they are in an existential struggle for the very survival of their homeland. They are willing to pay a very high price for victory. Now is not the time for cease-fires or negotiations, which would only give the Russians a breather to rally their flailing troops. . . . .

Ukrainians like Oleksiy say any peace talks are impossible until Russian forces are driven out of most or all of their country. What kind of negotiations can be held with a Russian leader who insists that the Ukrainian state has no right to exist because it is part of Russia? Putin insists that Russia will never return the roughly 20% of Ukraine that it has annexed via fake referendums — including the Black and Azov Sea coastal areas that are key to the Ukrainian economy.

What follows that is what the columnist wishes that President Biden would say, which is, in effect, unconditional surrender. No, she doesn’t use those two words, but the effect is the same. A face-saving way out for Russia or a negotiated cease-fire? Not in Miss Rubin’s world.

But the last time the words ‘unconditional surrender’ were used as national policy meant that the nations against which they were directed, Germany and Japan, had to be beaten into complete submission, bombed until Hell wouldn’t have any more, and thoroughly militarily defeated. Germany and Japan, however, did not have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them on their enemies’ home soil, and really, no way to attack the United States at all; Vladimir Putin has those things.

If there is to be no easy way out for Russia, and no negotiated cease-fire or settlement, that means the war in Ukraine must continue until one side or the other is militarily defeated. If that happens, there are only two options:

1. Russia wins, in which case Ukraine not only loses its freedom and independence, but sees hundreds of thousands more of its civilians killed and much of its infrastructure and economy destroyed; or
2. Ukraine wins, in which case a huge amount of Russia’s military equipment is lost, damaged, or destroyed, and many, many thousands of its soldiers killed, along with President Putin driven with his back against the wall, and little reason not to try to use tactical nuclear weapons against advancing Ukrainian troops and military bastions.

Even Miss Rubin noted that Mr Biden “warned recently that Putin’s nuclear threats raise ‘the prospect of Armageddon.'”

Such a casual remark, at a campaign fund-raiser, scares rather than educates, and conveys uncertainty to Putin.

Ma’am, it ought to scare people; the threat of nuclear war ought to scare everybody!

In Dr Strangelove, when Ambassador Alexei de Sadeskii reveals the existence of the ‘Doomsday Machine,’ President Merton Muffley asks him, “I’m afraid I don’t understand something, Alexei. Is the Premier threatening to explode this if our planes carry out this attack?”, at which point the Ambassador replies, “No, sir, it is not a thing a sane man would do.” It isn’t, but Miss Rubin, and President Biden, and the whole cavalcade of neocon warmongers are now somehow depending upon the sanity and Western logic that Mr Putin has yet to demonstrate that he has.

And if they’re wrong, if they manage to provide enough weapons and money and materiel for Ukraine to beat back the Russians, and Vladimir Vladimirovich does decide that ‘battlefield’ or ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons are the only way to reverse a military defeat, what happens then? Perhaps Miss Rubin isn’t worried about Citizens Bank Park and the Liberty Bell being incinerated in nuclear fire, but I am, and the escalation of the use of nuclear weapons, once that threshold is crossed, is something we can never know when it will stop.