I now reserve a room at the library to write. What with teaching 4 courses with the cumulative number of 92 students (and no teaching assistants, you understand) and chairing the department, opportunities abound to weasel out of writing. If ever there were an excuse not to write, I’m in full possession of it. One of the courses I’m teaching, I didn’t know I was teaching it until a week before classes began. A content-heavy course (meaning, not language), and it’s not in my area at all. I’ve got to prepare. Plus, I need to grade. And the GAs don’t supervise themselves, do they? Budgets don’t miraculously materialize on my desktop. I got to do all of that. Ten languages that I’ve got to manage.
So I found a great way to defeat the opportunity to weasel out. I go to the library and sit in a room alone, three hours twice a week. I write in-between, too, but these writing-only sessions are great.
This is a regular reminder that no US politician was nicer to Putin than Obama. (George W Bush runs a close second). Obama worked for years to disarm Ukraine before the 2014 invasion, forcing Ukrainians to give up large stocks of weapons precisely in the areas that Putin would claim. (Yes, Ukrainians were mega stupid to agree. But cheating stupid people and getting them killed is still not OK. There’s no defense in law based on the “yes, I murdered him but he deserved it because he was too trusting and dumb.”)
As a Senator for Illinois, Obama personally supervised the disarming of the region that borders – guess whom? – Russia.
In Donetsk, I stood among piles of conventional weapons that were slowly being dismantled,” Barack Obama, then a newly elected United States senator from Illinois, said in 2005 after his first foreign trip.
The future president visited the eastern Ukrainian city, the future hotbed of pro-Russian separatism, and helped secure $48m to fund the further destruction of 400,000 small arms, 1,000 portable anti-aircraft missiles and 15,000 tonnes of ammunition.
Here is photographic evidence:
Donetsk, eh? Donetsk has been under Russian control since 2014 as a result. As a resident of Illinois, I find it hard to understand why the senator of our state – and then the president of our country – would be so dedicated to disarming Ukraine. He probably thought Illinois had no bigger problems than Ukraine’s capacity to defend Donetsk.
Obama actually helped invest US money, our taxpayer money into disarming Ukraine. This doesn’t seem to bother anybody besides me, so I keep bringing it up because I can’t get over the absolute insanity of the US politics where we pay first to disarm and then to arm Ukraine, and this all happens within the same short period of time.
No photograph of this kind exists featuring Trump, by the way. To the contrary, Trump was the first US politician to start re-arming Ukraine in 2016.
Obama made it clear recently that Harris is going to continue whatever he started. More photographic evidence from Obama himself:
Now, attention, an important question: why would Putin not want Harris as president? Again, we have incontrovertible proof brought us yesterday by the Biden DOJ that delivered evidence of Russia funding Lauren Chen’s anti-Trump rhetoric.
Why, in the face of all this, aren’t we discussing whether Obama was a Russian asset? Not a spy, obviously, but definitely an asset. How else can we possibly describe all this? Russia annexed the Crimea and invaded the Donbass during the Obama presidency. The massacre of Ilovaisk where Putin blatantly defied the agreements with the US happened in 2014. There were no consequences to Putin over that. There was no Crimea, Donetsk, Ilovaisk or Lugansk during the Trump administration. I’d be the first person to wail to the skies if there were. What did Trump ever do for Russia that’s remotely approaching all this?
I criticize Trump all the time. I think everybody is tired already of my litany of complaints about Trump but I can repeat it if necessary. But on this issue, which obviously matters to me enormously, I just can’t see how Trump was worse for Ukraine than Obama.
To conclude, here’s the story of the Ukrainian photographer who took the famous picture of Obama at the weapons depot in Donetsk:
A local photographer named Sergey Vaganov took pictures of Obama in the arms depots.
A decade later, Vaganov fled a Russian-backed separatist conflict in Donetsk and, in March, barely survived the Russian siege of Mariupol.
“I was waiting for the relief [of death]. I had these half-suicidal thoughts,” Vaganov told Al Jazeera, describing how he and his wife, Iryna, waited out Russian air raids in their ice-cold apartment with windows shattered by shelling.
The siege of Mariupol took place in 2022, during the Biden presidency. Please, tell me some more about how it’s Trump Ukrainians should fear.
Kamala Harris single-handedly disproved the entire theory of intellectual heritability.
Yes, yes, I know it’s more complicated than “smart parents invariably produce smart children.” A stupid great-great-grandma can rear her empty head at any point.
N is exactly like this. He has a lightning-quick sense of humor, always delivering the perfect comeback instantly. I always envied this because I’m a slow, plodding thinker, and the art of the funny comeback is not in my arsenal.
N talks to no people outside of our immediate family, and this wealth of ready wit is concealed from humanity.
I guess because I'm not a white whine mom but I find Vance's family to be much more relatable than I do Walz's despite the thousands of opeds telling me Walz is supposed to be my dad https://t.co/fD99g6VVRp
As God is my witness, I can’t comprehend who cares if a politician has “a relatable family.” I care what he’ll do for mine, not what his is like.
The need to see yourself reflected in everything and everybody reminds me of the people who can’t read a novel if they can’t see themselves in the characters. But this fixation on politicians’ families is even worse because it’s not even the politician himself who has to beam you back at yourself but his family, too.
This isn’t a minor point because people are beguiled by this utterly imaginary relatability and forget to demand that politicians actually do something for them.
This is Obama-level stuff where the will of the Congress is directly defied to aid Russia. We are the Dems’ new blacks. We are being loved and supported by them to the absolute death.
I understand that not everybody cares about Ukraine, and that’s fine. But, folks, the Dems are doing this exact thing to you on whatever issue you do care about. All they give is words and symbolic gestures of support and understanding while eviscerating you.
“Yes, but don’t you think Republicans would have been worse?” people invariably say when I talk about this. This is the hook we are being kept on. We fixate on a fantasy and forget about reality. Trump didn’t defy the Congress to quietly sabotage the Lend Lease. He didn’t let PDA expire amidst showy gestures of fake support. He didn’t do anything for Russia at all. Yet we hear that he’s a Russian spy while Biden / Harris are pro-Ukrainian from every outlet in existence because of the words each side said.
There is nothing happy about Biden’s failure to follow a clear and decisive course on Ukraine. Instead, he has condemned Ukraine to a long war of attrition and possibly a slow national death, by slow-walking U.S. weapons support and permission for its use.
If Trump did anything remotely similar to what Biden is doing, we’d hear endless howling that he’s a Russian spy, owned by Putin, and all that. But these actions aren’t evidence of being “a Russian asset” if a Democrat is doing it.
I can only repeat that political partisanship is a mental defect.
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