It pains me to say it in the case of John Kennedy, of whom I’m a fan, but when both of Louisiana’s senators come up for re-election – in Bill Cassidy’s case in 2026 and in Kennedy’s case in 2028 – a changing of the guard is in order.
Why? Because of that awful $95 billion monstrosity both Kennedy and Cassidy voted for that the corrupt Washington establishment is doing everything it can to force through the House over the objections of the two senators’ fellow Louisianan, Speaker Mike Johnson.
Kennedy and Cassidy were two of the 22 Republicans voting in favor of this foreign-aid bacchanal, more than $60 billion of which would be appropriated to prolong the war in Ukraine.
Here at the Hayride, we are not opposed to supporting the Ukrainians. We would like to see the end of the suffering of the Ukrainian people. But it’s very obvious that the interests of the Ukrainians and the interests of their kleptocratic government – and more to the point, the interests of the corrupt Washington elite who are openly telling us that “aid” to Ukraine is really more about funding for the U.S. defense industry, while behind the scenes that “aid” is little more than a money laundry for D.C.-connected nonprofits – are not the same.
We’re supposed to support $60 billion for Ukraine, a figure larger than the entire budget for the United States Marine Corps, because otherwise the Ukrainians are going to be overrun by Russia, and if they are then it’s a matter of time before American troops are fighting in Eastern Europe because Poland will be next. Or Hungary.
Of course, Poland and Hungary are NATO members and Ukraine is not.
I wasn’t overly impressed with the lengthy historical case made in that Tucker Carlson interview by Vladimir Putin for why Ukraine, or at least the eastern part of it known as the Donbas – not to mention the Crimea – that he now occupies most of, is rightly part of Russia. Putin strategically left out the fact that the Ukrainians have very little interest in being ruled by the Russians after having suffered through the Holodomor, the man-made famine by which Stalin starved some eight million of them to death by stealing all the grain from their fields for several years running.
Ukraine should be an independent country.
But it isn’t worth American troops on the ground, or bankrupting the U.S. treasury with endless supplies of highly-inefficient military and humanitarian aid packages, to protect Ukraine when there might be a deal had to end this war.
Putin took the Crimea in 2014, and the Obama administration did nothing about it. Neither did the Trump administration, and neither did Joe Biden before Putin launched this war. Russia has held the Crimea for a decade. The Crimea is part of Russia now and whether we like it or not, America is not going to pay the cost to physically dislodge the Russians from that peninsula.
And beyond Crimea, this war is about where the borders should be between Ukraine and Russia.
If you listened to Putin in that Carlson interview, he essentially said that he’s fulfilled his territorial aims, and spent a lot of time demanding the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. “De-Nazification” is a red herring; it’s something he’s throwing out there as a pre-negotiation tactic, because he’s talking about demanding that the Ukrainians cancel aspects of their culture (hero worship in some sectors of their World War II figures who threw in with the Germans against the USSR, which might seem distasteful outside of the context of the Holodomor that Putin doesn’t want to talk about) and he knows that’s an unreasonable and impossible demand.
You can get Putin to drop that.
The problem is, nobody is even negotiating with him. There are no peace talks. The war is a stalemate, and we’re being told by the “experts” who are wrong about virtually every one of their warnings and prognostications that without this $60 billion the Ukrainians will be overrun.
Shouldn’t it be a prerequisite to dropping $60 billion more on Ukraine that this administration be made to go to the peace table and at least try to find an end to this thing? Is the demand really that we would engage in an open-ended commitment to manage a stalemate of a war which could escalate at any time?
And when Sen. Ron Johnson suggested that the $60 billion be tied to performance by the Biden administration in stopping the border invasion – doling it out $5 billion per month based on hitting certain metrics of deportations and blocking illegals from crossing, for example – he was rebuffed not just by Biden but by Mitch McConnell, the utterly corrupt, decrepit and completely out of touch GOP Senate caucus leader.
Ron Johnson and several other Republicans attempted to filibuster this bill on the Senate floor. It passed with 67 votes, including Kennedy and Cassidy and the 20 other GOP practitioners of the usual Washington way.
Then Mike Johnson said it was dead on arrival in the House, because – as he’s been consistent in saying all along – there will be no Ukrainian foreign aid boondoggles under consideration until the border is meaningfully addressed either by the Senate or by Biden. Nine months ago the House passed a border bill that would satisfy those concerns and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer won’t even take it up.
So they’re attempting to discharge this $95 billion mess onto the House floor over Johnson’s objection, and the question is whether enough House Republicans are willing to destroy Johnson’s speakership over Ukraine in order to pass it.
Then we find out that the bill includes a provision which makes it impossible for a future president to block further Ukraine aid…
Republicans need to be aware that this bill, supported by Mitch McConnell and almost all of Senate GOP leadership, sets in motion the next hyper-partisan Trump impeachment (before he’s even elected!) https://t.co/PHu9PunArn
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) February 12, 2024
Oh, and no sooner does this thing hit the House but we were told yesterday that there is a “serious national security threat” which must be dealt with…
NSA Jake Sullivan says he's "not in a position to say" if the public should be "alarmed" by news of a classified briefing in Congress over "an urgent matter with regard to a destabilizing foreign military capability" pic.twitter.com/pOtUJ7KEUZ
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 14, 2024
And what was it? The Russians are exploring putting nukes in space. Just as the Russians have been exploring doing since the 1970’s.
The fraud and deception goes on and on. We’re treated worse by our own government than by any of our enemies. One questions whether anything these people do is truthful.
And both of Louisiana’s senators are in on the scam. I’ve wanted to believe Kennedy isn’t, but I can’t make that case anymore after the vote on that $95 billion boondoggle.
You’d like to think that because the bill was going to pass the Senate anyway that Kennedy and Cassidy were simply hopping on the winning side and therefore shielding Louisiana from potential retaliation where it comes to hurricane recovery money, or Medicaid waivers, or whatever.
But this is too awful. Blasting tens of billions of dollars we don’t have into the void – the bill actually funds both sides of the Israel-Hamas war, which makes zero sense to anyone outside of D.C. – with no attempt to address the very serious domestic issues we confront in any serious way isn’t defensible.
Cassidy is up for re-election in two years, and it sounds like he’s running. I’m calling for at least one conservative to announce a challenge to him now, and to start actively running against him. And in 2028, when Kennedy comes up, we need to have a real conversation about whether we shouldn’t have somebody younger who has the stones to take on the Powers That Be in the government-inflation complex, much less the military-industrial complex, and demand some accountability for the fiscal incontinence that both of our current senators lack the stomach to fight.