Thursday, May 6, 2021

Jen Psaki's Brilliant Blow to Bothsiderism

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has once again made his intentions clear. 

As some in the media pointed out, that was reminiscent of what McConnell said in 2010. 

None of this should come as any surprise because, as I wrote more than a year ago, McConnell had already promised a return to total obstruction if a Democrat was elected president. 

During her press conference on Wednesday, Jen Psaki was asked about McConnell's most recent remark and demonstrated why she is such an effective spokesperson for this administration. 

First of all, she drew the contrast. If Republicans are 100 percent committed to stopping anything this administration tries to do, Democrats are 100 percent committed to delivering relief to the American people. Boom! The message: while Republicans play political power games, Democrats are delivering for the people.

But then Psaki did something that tends to drive liberals crazy. She talked about how the Biden administration was continuing to reach out to Republicans and said that the door is always open to work together on providing relief to the American people. Why would she add that? 

The first thing to note in answering that question is something former Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren wrote back in 2011.

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

Lofgren went on to point out that this Republican strategy works with low information voters who respond to the dysfunction in Washington with "a pox on both your houses." Even more importantly, it works with a media that is committed to bothsiderism. 

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable “hard news” segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias.

During Obama's presidency, I wrote a lot about his strategy of using conciliatory rhetoric as a ruthless strategy. Here's how Mark Schmitt described Obama's "theory of change" in 2007.

The reason the conservative power structure has been so dangerous, and is especially dangerous in opposition, is that it can operate almost entirely on bad faith. It thrives on protest, complaint, fear: higher taxes, you won't be able to choose your doctor, liberals coddle terrorists, etc. One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that's not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists -- it's a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict.

That strategy wasn't very successful - primarily due to the fact that the media's commitment to bothsiderism kept them from exposing the fact that Republicans had nothing. Instead, when we weren't being subjected to stories about how the two sides failed to reach an agreement, we were told that Obama was aloof and didn't reach out to Republicans enough. 

While the undertone of bothsiderism is still prevalent in the media, the direction the Republican Party has taken over the last few years made it much more difficult to maintain. What Psaki did during the press conference on Wednesday was to first of all point out the difference in focus between McConnell and Biden. But in reaffirming that the door is always open, she also drew a contrast with McConnell's obstruction. In doing so, she made it much more difficult to blame both sides for digging in their heels and refusing to cooperate. Well done, Madam Press Secretary! 

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Wednesday, May 5, 2021

What We Can Learn About Systemic Racism in Jury Selection from the Chauvin Trial

By the time he was 32 years old, Philando Castile had been stopped by police 52 times. It was the 53rd time, when former officer Jeronimo Yanez pulled him over because he "looked like" someone involved in a robbery, that resulted in his death. 

But let's imagine for a moment that the 53rd incident hadn't happened. If Castile was alive when former police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd and, having that kind of direct experience with racial profiling, attended a protest, he would have likely been barred from serving on the jury that found Chauvin guilty.

That is what I thought about when I read the story of Brandon Mitchell, a 31-year-old high school basketball coach in Minneapolis, who served on the jury in Chauvin's case. This photo from prior to the trial recently surfaced on social media (Mitchell is the one on the right).


Mitchell says that the photo was taken last August at an an event commemorating Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream Speech." But according to the Washington Post, experts are saying that it calls into question whether Mitchell could have served as an impartial juror. In other words, Black men who speak out against systemic racism in policing are disqualified from serving on a jury in a case of police brutality. 

Here is what potential jurors in the Chauvin trial were required to disclose:
As part of the jury selection, the candidates were required to fill out a 14-page questionnaire asking about a wide range of topics including race and policing, as well as education levels, professional experience, and hobbies, in order to gather in-depth knowledge about the candidates.

It also asked prospective jurors about information they had on Floyd, their opinions on the Black Lives Matter movement, and, more specifically, if they had attended protests or demonstrations against police brutality.

If Mitchell lied on that questionnaire, it could be grounds for an appeal. But the whole incident brings up a much deeper question. Black people can be excluded from serving on a jury simply for acknowledging that systemic racism exists and that their own lives matter. In other words, the law basically says that, when it comes to being an impartial juror, the experience of Black people is disqualifying. Jurors must view the world through the eyes of a white person. That is precisely what systemic racism looks like. It isn't simply embedded in policing, but permeates the entire justice system, including jury selection. 

Of course, this country has a long history of racism in jury selection. It was the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that was supposed to guarantee that Black people could serve on juries. It stated:

Sec 4. That no citizen possessing all other qualification which are or may be prescribed by law shall be disqualified for service as grand or petit juror in any court of the United States, or of any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude; and any officer or other person charged with any duty in the selection or summoning of jurors who shall exclude or fail to summon any citizen for the cause aforesaid shall, on conviction thereof, be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and be fined not more than five thousand dollars.

Nevertheless, African Americans were regularly excluded from serving on juries because they were deemed to lack the education and intelligence that white people required. That is part of the system that unleashed the post-Civil War terror campaign against Black people.

“It really made lynching and the Ku Klux Klan possible,” said Christopher Waldrep, a historian at San Francisco State University and the author of a forthcoming book about a lawyer who was able, in a rare case, to prove jury discrimination in Mississippi in 1906. “If you’d had a lot of black grand jurors investigating crimes, it would have made lynching impossible.”

But a study by the Equal Justice Initiative completed in 2010 demonstrated that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's didn't eliminate the practice of excluding Black jurors in the southern states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Here's what they found:

Racially biased use of peremptory strikes and illegal racial discrimination in jury selection remains widespread, particularly in serious criminal cases and capital cases. Hundreds of people of color called for jury service have been illegally excluded from juries after prosecutors asserted pretextual reasons to justify their removal.

Prosecutors have struck African Americans from jury service because they appeared to have “low intelligence,” wore eyeglasses, walked in a certain way, dyed their hair, and countless other reasons that the courts have rubber-stamped as “race-neutral.”

Some district attorney’s offices explicitly train prosecutors to exclude racial minorities from jury service and teach them how to mask racial bias to avoid a finding that anti-discrimination laws have been violated.
We could now be moving into an era when it is the very experience of African Americans with systemically biased law enforcement that is used as an excuse to disqualify them from serving on juries. As Mangy Jay noted on Twitter, that sets up "an endless loop of oppression."  
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Tuesday, May 4, 2021

Biden's Ingenious Plan for Exposing Republican Obstruction

During the 2020 campaign, Donald Trump struggled to come up with a derogatory nickname for Joe Biden. For example, during a staged event in New Jersey, he asked the crowd "What’s better, Sleepy Joe or Slow Joe? I go back and forth.” On other occasions, he tried "Basement Biden," "Crazy Joe Biden," and "Slow Joe." Of course there were others. But a theme that emerged was an attempt to paint Biden as mentally incompetent due to his advanced age. 

Even as the president came out of the gate running, some of Trump's enablers still haven't completely let go of that one. They insist that Biden is merely a mouthpiece (a kind of Manchurian candidate), and someone else is behind the scenes pulling the strings. At various times that has been Vice President Kamala Harris, dark money interests, or "the Squad." There have even been attempts to name Chief of Staff Ron Klain as the "real president."

But just as Trump failed to land a blow with "Sleepy Joe," these attempts to paint him as incapable of doing the job are at odds with the need for Republicans to cast him as some kind of radical who is pushing through an agenda that is out of step with the American mainstream. And so, according to J. Peder Zane at the right wing site RealClearPolitics, "'Sleepy Joe' Was Just a Facade."

The candidate who promised a return to “normalcy” is advancing the most radical agenda since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The candidate who pledged to unify the nation is rejecting all compromise. He is deploying deception and stoking racial tension to divide and conquer America for the left.

In order to paint Biden as a radical, Zane has to suggest that his proposals aren't popular with voters. So he adopts the Republican line about the president's infrastructure proposal.

Only about 15% of the spending would fund roads, bridges and other projects commonly understood as infrastructure and generally supported by the American people. The bulk of the money would go to a liberal wish list of more controversial social programs, making the bill a Trojan horse.

Here's what a CBS/YouGov poll found when it comes to public support for those "controversial social programs" in Biden's infrastructure bill.


A CNBC poll found almost identical results. If Biden is such a radical, so are about 80 percent of Americans. 

This demonstrates Biden's ingenious plan for dealing with Republican obstruction. He was part of the Obama administration that came into office promising to unify the country, only to see Republicans adopt a plan of total obstruction as a way to take a sledge hammer to that promise. So Biden's first step was to re-define bipartisan as support from American voters across party lines. Then he flooded the zone with liberal proposals with broad bipartisan support from the public. 

That has put Republicans on defense, claiming that things like universal access to pre-K and affordable child care are attempts to "take away the freedoms of parents to make decisions for their children."

In another media appearance, Sen. Blackburn said that Biden's proposal for universal pre-K would be mandatory — a complete and utter lie. 

But perhaps even more importantly, that nonsense completely ignores the facts about women's lives.

COVID-19 is hard on women because the U.S. economy is hard on women, and this virus excels at taking existing tensions and ratcheting them up. Millions of women were already supporting themselves and their families on meager wages before coronavirus-mitigation lockdowns sent unemployment rates skyrocketing and millions of jobs disappeared. And working mothers were already shouldering the majority of family caregiving responsibilities in the face of a childcare system that is wholly inadequate for a society in which most parents work outside the home... 
COVID-19 has also increased the pressure on working mothers, low-wage and otherwise. In a survey from May and June, one out of four women who became unemployed during the pandemic reported the job loss was due to a lack of childcare, twice the rate of men surveyed. A more recent survey shows the losses have not slowed down: between February and August mothers of children 12 years old and younger lost 2.2 million jobs compared to 870,000 jobs lost among fathers.

Biden is forcing Republicans to go on record to justify their obstruction of a whole myriad of proposals that would support working families and tackle the roots of income inequality. That is an argument he can win, demonstrating that "Sleepy Joe" knows exactly what he's doing. 

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Monday, May 3, 2021

The Divisive GOP Arguments Against D.C. Statehood Just Took a Turn for the Worse

On April 22, the House passed a bill to grant statehood to Washington, D.C. On two separate occasions, Steve Benen has documented the nonsense arguments offered by Republicans against such a proposal. As an example, Sen. Tom Cotton said this during a speech on the Senate floor.

Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working class state. A new state of Washington would not be.

There's a whole lot we could say about that argument, but perhaps Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY) summed it up best. 

What all of these arguments have in common is that they are dog whistles meant to raise objections to granting statehood to a population that is over 57 percent people of color, predominantly African American. 

But those dog whistles turn into bull horns in an article by Kylee Zempel at The Federalist titled, "Let's Not Give Statehood to the Third World Country of Washington DC." The tag line goes to the place you might expect: "To repurpose a poetic line from former president and wordsmith Donald Trump, the District of Columbia is a 'sh-thole country.'" 

Let's start by recognizing that Trump's enablers now admit that he referred to Haiti and other African nations as "shithole countries." We could talk about why they would go from denying a statement like that to embracing it. But suffice it to say that they just continue to travel deeper down the rabbit hole of blatant white supremacy. 

Now we're hearing that the Americans who live in Washington, D.C. hail from a "shithole country." What is astounding to me is that so many people on both the right and the left continue to promote the narrative that it is Democrats who are elitist in their messaging. The fact is that it is Republicans who constantly say things like this, or take it upon themselves to define who qualifies as a "real American."

So how does Zempel go about defining D.C. as a shithole country? 

We don’t need to cross any borders to witness a failed state — or at least a dysfunctional wannabe state. The 68 square miles of Washington D.C. have it all: a pathetic education system, federal security that is a “shocking failure,” law enforcement that stands by while mobs set fire to their squad cars, and lots of povertyand illiteracy — one in four adults in the District struggles to do basic reading, and one in three can’t do simple math. This is to say nothing of the city government, which is known to be fraught with corruption...This brings us to the out-of-control crime.

That "shocking failure" of federal security is a reference to Capitol Police, who are accountable to Congress. What happened on January 6 is actually an argument in favor of D.C. statehood.

Twenty years after Congress dissolved a federal control board that had seized authority over the nearly bankrupt city’s affairs from a troubled mayor, it was D.C. leaders rushing to the aid of national lawmakers amid a threat posed by a failing president.

To local officials, the outcome provided a vivid illustration of the burdens imposed on the city by the lack of full home rule. The District has no voting rights in Congress, which still oversees its budget, and, unlike the nation’s governors, Bowser does not have authority over the local National Guard, which reports to the secretary of the Army.

If Zempel really wants to make an argument against statehood based on a failing education system, poverty and crime, perhaps we should re-think whether states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi should be part of the union. U.S. News and World Report recently published their rankings of states based on factors including education, health care, the economy, opportunities, quality of life, infrastructure, and public safety. The three states I mentioned are at the bottom of the list.

Let's be clear. The reason Republicans oppose D.C. statehood is that they can be fairly certain that its constituents will elect two Democratic senators. But even if they were to be honest about that, they'd still have to grapple with the fact that it was Republicans who gerrymandered the senate - bequeathing to us a system in which 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats. Anyone who doubts that part of our history should have to answer the question: how did we wind up with two Dakotas?

Given that the Republican goal is to maintain that imbalance, it comes as no surprise that they are resorting to their favorite playbook - racism - to make their argument. Whether or not it's accurate, they believe that playing up racial divisions, whether it's via dog whistles or bull horns, is their best strategy. 

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Sunday, May 2, 2021

"Is America a Racist Country" Is the Wrong Question

During his rebuttal to President Biden's speech before a joint session of congress, Senator Tim Scott made a declarative statement: "America is not a racist country." That prompted journalists to ask other elected officials whether they think America is a racist country.

Personally, I wouldn't touch that question with a ten-foot pole because it is the wrong one to ask. That is the point Jay Smooth made so powerfully years ago in this video where he distinguished between the "what they did" conversation and "what they are" conversation. 


As Smooth pointed out, the "what they are" question is a way to derail the whole conversation because it relies on a person's (or country's) motives and intentions, which you can't ever prove. 

A few years later, Smooth expounded on that by talking about how we respond to someone telling us that we said or did something racist. 


The first thing Smooth does is point out how we tend to approach this issue with the all-or-nothing "good person/bad person" binary that someone is either racist or not racist. That is the crux of the question, "Is America a racist country." It is framed as a "yes" or "no" query. As Smooth says, if you're not batting a thousand then you're striking out every time. That makes it harder to work on our imperfections because, in order to not be racist, we must be perfect. In that context, it is worth noting that the concept of "perfecting our union" was the theme of Barack Obama's 2008 speech about racism.

It is critical to recognize, as Smooth suggests, that when we're dealing with racism, we're dealing with a social construct that did not emerge out of science or logic. It was born out of a need to justify indefensible acts (ie, slavery and genocide).  In other words, it wasn't designed to make sense. In my own experience and observation, one of the most difficult things for white people to grapple with is that oftentimes during conversations about racism, there is no such thing as the "right answer." We must simply listen and absorb the complexities.

Smooth compares the binary "racist vs non racist" construct to our tonsils. Either we've had them removed or we haven't. Demonstrating his comedic talent, Smooth proposes that "we move away from the tonsil paradigm of race discourse to the dental hygiene paradigm of racial discourse." 

That would mean moving away from the premise that being a good person is a fixed, immutable characteristic and begin to see that being a good person is a practice we carry out by engaging with our imperfections. Let's pause for a moment and acknowledge the wisdom of that advice in all areas of our lives. 

So, how would a dental hygiene paradigm of racial discourse handle the question of whether or not America is a racist country? The answer can be found is something Barack Obama said during his speech to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Selma march.
What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than [Selma]? What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?... 
It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America.

American is — and has always been — a work in progress. The real question is: "What have you done lately to perfect our union?

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Saturday, May 1, 2021

No, Biden Is Not Reigniting the Cold War With Russia

On April 15th, President Biden announced actions he was taking against Russia, including new sanctions and the expulsion of diplomats. Here is how he explained that:

I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, find that specified harmful foreign activities of the Government of the Russian Federation — in particular, efforts to undermine the conduct of free and fair democratic elections and democratic institutions in the United States and its allies and partners; to engage in and facilitate malicious cyber-enabled activities against the United States and its allies and partners; to foster and use transnational corruption to influence foreign governments; to pursue extraterritorial activities targeting dissidents or journalists; to undermine security in countries and regions important to United States national security; and to violate well-established principles of international law, including respect for the territorial integrity of states — constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.

During a public address, Biden made it clear that what the U.S. wants is a "stable, predictable relationship" with Russia. 

Nevertheless, almost two weeks later, Tucker Carlson took a break from his white supremacist lies to host Glenn Greenwald on the topic of Russia. Lately I haven't even bothered to expose Greenwald's lies because he's gone so far over the edge as to actually become a caricature of his former self. But during this particular conversation with Carlson, he employed a couple of arguments that could sound reasonable to someone who doesn't know the facts and history. So let's take a look.

 

While it is always important to point out the ways that foreign policy in this country has gone off the rails, one of the consistent themes from people like Greenwald is that they want you to assume that other countries have no agency when it comes to conflicts with the U.S. In this case, Greenwald blames the rising tensions with Russia on (1) propaganda about "Russiagate" during Trump's presidency, and (2) the need in the U.S. for an enemy to justify military spending. 

To this day, Greenwald denies that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 election. Even when he opens that door a crack, he writes it off to the kind of thing the U.S. has done in other countries. So that explains why he would blame this country for the current state of affairs. On his second reason, there is no denying that we spend too much money on war-making. But you'll notice that the actions Biden took were diplomatic and designed to hold Russia accountable - not a call to war.

Even more importantly, Greenwald doesn't take into account how Russia has changed over the last decade. In his book, "From Cold War to Hot Peace," Michael McFaul outlined a dramatic turn in 2012. During Obama's first term, McFaul served on the National Security Council as senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs. Then in 2012, he became the U.S. Ambassador to Russia. Here's how he described what happened from 2009-2012.
Several months before Obama’s inauguration, Dmitry Medvedev took over in the Kremlin — a change we believed might help us “reset” relations with Moscow. By June 2010, when Medvedev made his first visit to Washington, we were succeeding beyond our expectations: We’d signed a treaty to shrink our nuclear arsenals, jointly imposed tougher sanctions on Iran and added a supply route to Afghanistan through Russia, reducing our reliance on Pakistan. Soon we would help secure Russia’s membership in the World Trade Organization.

Coinciding with McFaul's appointment as ambassador in 2012 was an election in Russia. Vladimir Putin was once again elected president (he had previously been president from 2000-2008). Just prior to that election, massive protests erupted in Russia over a falsified parliamentary election. Here's how Putin reacted:

To rally his supporters and undermine the protesters, Putin would need an enemy, and he turned to the most reliable one in Russia’s recent history: the United States and then, by extension, me. As soon as I became the new proxy for Washington, Moscow launched a full-scale disinformation campaign alleging that, under my direction, the United States was funding the opposition and attempting to overthrow Putin. State propagandists and their surrogates crudely photoshopped me into pictures, spliced my speeches to make me say things I never uttered and even accused me of pedophilia.

To understand more recent Russian history, it is important to know what happened after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

[I]n the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the state-owned assets and resources of the superpower were snapped up by a tiny group of smart, ruthless, ambitious and well-connected men, who abruptly joined the ranks of the very richest people in history...

The oligarchs, not content with buying companies, villas, yachts, planes and the most beautiful of Russia's beautiful women, also bought power. In 1996, they connived to engineer the re-election of the politically and physically ailing Boris Yeltsin. In 2000, they helped steer Yeltsin's successor into power - Vladimir Putin, a saturnine former spook with the KGB, and its descendant organisation, the FSB.

Putin was eventually able to establish a "grand bargain" with Russian oligarchs. It allowed them to maintain their powers, in exchange for their explicit support of – and alignment with – Putin's government. Those who resisted were prosecuted (usually of fraud and tax evasion) and consigned to prison camps. 

What followed was a bond between the oligarchs, organized crime, and nationalism. As Franklin Foer documented, this is the source of the money Trump's sons bragged about in the years prior to their father's campaign for the White House. 

Putin further consolidated his power with an attack on truth, as Peter Pomerantsev explained.

The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action…

In today’s Russia…the idea of truth is irrelevant. On Russian ‘news’ broadcasts, the borders between fact and fiction have become utterly blurred...insisting on the lie, the Kremlin intimidates others by showing that it is in control of defining ‘reality.’ This is why it’s so important for Moscow to do away with truth. If nothing is true, then anything is possible.

By 2013, that kind of information warfare became the Kremlin's weapon of choice.

The Arab Spring, according to General Gerasimov, had shown that “nonmilitary means” had overtaken the “force of weapons in their effectiveness.” Deception and disinformation, not tanks and planes, were the new tools of power. And they would be used not in formally declared conflicts but within a vast gray between peace and war. 
Those ideas would appear, the next year, in Russia’s formal military doctrine. It was the culmination of a years long strategic reorientation that has remade Russian power, in response to threats both real and imagined, into the sort of enterprise that could be plausibly accused of using cyberattacks to meddle in an American presidential election.

That is the Russia that not only interfered in the 2016 election, but is the one President Biden faces today. To ignore the threat posed by Putin is to live in a fantasy land where the only actions that matter are the ones taken by the United States. 

This isn't the Cold War redux for anyone but Vladimir Putin, who wants to return to the Nineteenth Century "Great Powers" politics that led to world wars. That is why, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, President Obama gave a speech in Belgium to garner Western European support for sanctions. It was a powerful defense of the liberal international order established following World War II.

So I come here today to insist that we must never take for granted the progress that has been won here in Europe and advanced around the world, because the contest of ideas continues for your generation. And that’s what’s at stake in Ukraine today. Russia’s leadership is challenging truths that only a few weeks ago seemed self-evident -- that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters, that people and nations can make their own decisions about their future...

[O]ur enduring strength is also reflected in our respect for an international system that protects the rights of both nations and people -- a United Nations and a Universal Declaration of Human Rights; international law and the means to enforce those laws. But we also know that those rules are not self-executing; they depend on people and nations of goodwill continually affirming them. And that’s why Russia’s violation of international law -- its assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity -- must be met with condemnation. Not because we’re trying to keep Russia down, but because the principles that have meant so much to Europe and the world must be lifted up.

Obama wasn't threatening war. But he was very clear that Russia needed to be held accountable for breaking international law that protects the rights of both nations and people.

That is precisely what President Biden is doing again.  

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Wall Streeters are delusional, with a serious case of amnesia

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