Greg Gutfeld Just Asking How We Can Make Putin Feel Better, So He'll Stop The Murders

Just a little consolation reacharound so he can say he's won?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been begging NATO to "close the skies" over his country, or at the very least send him war planes. As if to bolster his request, the piece of shit from Moscow bombed a children's hospital on Wednesday.

Against this backdrop, here's Greg Gutfeld, the Fox News personality who's supposed to be the "funny one," saying that poor Vladimir Putin needs to win some sort of "small victory" from the West, so we can convince him to stop indiscriminately murdering Ukrainian babies. Poor thing needs to save face! We've got to give that to the guy!

GREG GUTFELD: What do we do? We're presented with a choice. And the obvious Ukrainian desire is the no-fly zone, but if you do that, you shoot down a Russian jet, then we're at a war with Russia. We might already be in a war with Russia. But if we don't do that, then this goes on indefinitely.

And then that raises the question from two weeks ago, do we want this as badly as Putin does? 'Cause, if so, then we have to go all in. Because we're going to be looking at these — it's as you say about stealing — we're going to have to look at these photos, these horrible images every day, every day, because as long as we sit here on the sidelines, the massacre will be prolonged. Right? But there is a solution and it's something I was going to ask you about before the show, but I figured I wanted to ask you here.

Greg Gutfeld has a solution because Greg Gutfeld is a knower of such things.

We don't hear anything about a serious attempt at mediation. [...] Where — something where world leaders urgently meet with Putin and Zelenskyy and they figure out a way — a face-saving, small victory for Putin because he can't afford to lose. He's already a war criminal, which means if he loses, he's dead. So they have to give him some kind of — as Avril Haines said, she's the Director of National Intelligence — you've got to give this guy proper deference. Because he feels that he never got that from the West or from Europe.

So we have to, like, somehow pick a nice, little, small victory, a face-saving off-ramp. We need to have some kind of mediation, because, to echo what Jesse said, what else can you — what else can you do except world war? Right?

Right? We've got to give Putin the respect he feels he deserves! "Proper deference" he says. Give him some little victory and a pat on the head, so he thinks he's won something. What kind of little victory? One of the demands on his "give me these four things and I'll stop blowing up babies" list? That'll stop him, for sure. (For the record, there's an article out there today saying some officials see a "subtle shift" in Putin's rhetoric the past few days. The article also acknowledges it "might be a head-fake.")

You might think based on Gutfeld's quote that DNI Haines also said we should give Putin "proper deference" and give him a little participation trophy victory. She did use the words "proper deference," but she was describing Putin's perspective, not discussing a plan to give him a consolation reacharound. She does say that what Putin "might be willing to accept as a victory might change over time, given the costs he is incurring."

Here is Haines testifying in Congress this week. It's quite an assessment she delivers:  

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines tells House that U.S. officials believe that Russian Pres. Putin “feels aggrieved the West does not give him proper deference and perceives this as a war he cannot afford to lose.” https: //abcn.ws/3HTG9LN pic.twitter.com/4OlB9WG5sT

— ABC News Politics (@ABC News Politics) 1646756608 

We kid Greg Gutfeld (because he's a moron) but he's close to accidentally making a point, which is that Putin literally has no good options in this war he created for himself, which isn't going quite as he imagined it would. Another person who usually drives us nuts is Tom Friedman, but Friedman has a halfway decent column in the Times explaining how scary it is that Putin has no good options. Essentially he's saying there are no face-saving offramps for Putin at this point.

After writing out a litany of things Putin got wrong about how this war would go, Friedman says:

When you get that many things wrong as a leader, your best option is to lose early and small. In Putin’s case that would mean withdrawing his forces from Ukraine immediately; offering a face-saving lie to justify his “special military operation,” like claiming it successfully protected Russians living in Ukraine; and promising to help Russians’ brethren rebuild. But the inescapable humiliation would surely be intolerable for this man obsessed with restoring the dignity and unity of what he sees as the Russian motherland.

And that's the thing right there. He's beyond that.

What does one give as a consolation prize when the aggressor's goal is to undo the fall of the Soviet Union and restore it as one of the world's most superpowerful superpowers?

If there's an answer to that question, Greg Gutfeld ain't got it.

[ New York Times ]

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