Washington Post And Politico Have 'Blame Zelenskyy' Contest, Everyone At Both Publications Should Resign
Democracy dies because Washington Post and Politico touched it.
If Jeff Bezos is really retooling the opinion section of his personal blog The Washington Post, we have a suggestion: fire wingnut lunatic Marc Thiessen and replace his column with something more significant and thoughtful, such as a rotating slate of smart guest writers or a bag of dogshit.
What could Bezos possibly have to lose, anyway? If he bleeds any more subscribers, the paper will be down, reader-wise, to whatever rats still use it to line their nests.
Thiessen watched the Oval Office meltdown last Friday between convicted felon Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Unsurprisingly, he seems to have seen a different press conference than we did. Or much of the rest of the media. Or the country. Or most of Europe, for that matter.
The headline and subheadline set the tone for the entire piece of garbage:
Headline: “Zelensky just mend the breach with Trump — or resign.” Oh, must he, Marc Thiessen? Is that what he must do? Or should everybody left in the Washington Post building resign, because this is what rock bottom looks like?
Subhed: “Zelensky’s stubbornness has badly hurt Ukraine.”
You know we’re in trouble here early on, when Thiessen sneers that “[Zelenskyy] refused a White House request to wear a suit.” We were unaware that the White House could dictate to foreign leaders what they are allowed to wear when visiting. Zelenskyy has worn the same fatigues to every meeting with world leaders for three years, in solidarity with the Ukrainian soldiers who are doing much of the dying in this war, and now the Trump people are going to let their nards get tweaked over a heretofore-nonexistent dress code?
But that’s far from Thiessen’s most egregious sin. His most egregious sin is being Marc Thiessen. Second-most egregious? That would be cherry-picking certain comments while leaving out context for his surely very detail-oriented and astute MAGA readers:
Trump extolled the minerals deal they had reached and said, “We look forward to getting in and digging, digging, digging.”
Trump was responding to a reporter’s question about security guarantees for Ukraine. Trump responded that he did “not want to talk about security yet because I want to get the [mineral] deal done.” The signing of that deal was the main reason for Zelenskyy’s visit, in fact.
The convicted felon then bragged about how much of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals the United States was going to dig up and bring back to America to “create a lot of great product in this country.” Then he started yammering about how the mineral deal is so good for everyone, Russia won’t even want to go back to Ukraine. Why, Ukraine won’t even need much security at all!
Now imagine you are the president of Ukraine. Large swaths of your country have been turned into rubble and thousands of your citizens are dead. And here is Donald Trump rubbing it in your face, on camera, that he’s much less concerned with the security of your partially occupied nation than he is with taking a shitload of mineral wealth you could use to rebuild after the war is over, and he’s going to try and create wealth for a nation that is already the wealthiest on the planet. Might that seem a little ungenerous to you? It does to us! But not to Marc Thiessen, who probably is still shocked the Iraqis didn’t fall to their knees in gratitude to America back in 2003.
Thiessen then dinged Zelenskyy for his response to Trump’s treating him and his nation like a colony to be exploited for its natural resources:
He summarily dismissed Trump’s idea of an immediate ceasefire — something that is extremely important to Trump, who is committed to stopping the killing — because he said Putin had already broken ceasefires 25 times.
We’re guessing Zelenskyy would also like to stop the killing, which is why the security guarantees are so fucking important to him, as they would be to anyone else in his situation. Russia, after all, did not invade Ukraine for its mineral wealth. Russia invaded Ukraine because Vladimir Putin has convinced himself that it is a phony nation that historically belonged to Russia, and that its independence is a massive geopolitical mistake that needs to be rectified so Putin can rebuild the Russian empire.
In other words, the stakes here are much more existential than who is going to get all the lithium to make batteries for electric cars. Of course Zelenskyy wanted to make sure that fact didn’t get lost when the press wrote up the meeting. His audience is not just Donald Trump. His audience is also his own people.
And we haven't even gotten into Zelenskyy having to sit there while Trump trash-talked Joe Biden, assert as he always does that the war never would have happened if he had been president, claim incorrectly that Europe hasn’t helped much, and then let the Twitter shitposter he installed as vice president rip into the Ukrainian leader for not being grateful enough. It was pretty appalling.
We also haven’t mentioned Trump chastising Zelenskyy for having “tremendous hate” for Vladimir Putin, as if Putin has spent the last three years lobbing Nerf footballs at Ukrainian cities instead of cruise missiles and exploding drones. Gee, what could Zelenskyy possibly be mad about?
Christ, what nitwit keeps letting Marc Thiessen write columns for The Washington Post? Whoever it is should resign in shame. We can’t believe we’re saying this, but there are smarter right-wingers out there who are capable of being less disingenuous than some AEI hack who probably spent most of high school stuffed in a locker.
For God’s sake, Trump already has One America News and Right Side Broadcasting to kiss his ass and throw softballs like “Mr. President, what gave you the moral courage to step forward and lead [the peace effort]?” For that matter, he has Axios, which last week replaced HuffPost in the press pool, possibly because it is more willing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
For that matter, Trump has Politico, which broke the big scoop this weekend that Trump’s people blame Zelenskyy for Friday’s dustup.
“I just don’t know what … Zelenskyy can do to mend the fences,” one White House official told me late Friday night. “Shaking his head, rolling his eyes? He’s trying to help you and he’s getting snide remarks in his own house?”
Another official, who like the others was granted anonymity to candidly describe the reaction inside the administration, said “everyone in the building — from the president on down — felt completely disrespected.”
Giving Trump officials anonymity to completely toast Zelenskyy’s behavior, while not finding a single source anywhere who could point out how much Trump tried to humiliate Ukraine’s leader by treating him like an afterthought, or by focusing on his country’s mineral wealth to the exclusion of the safety of its people? Brave reporting.
That accusation is infuriating White House aides who worked on the arrangements for Friday’s meeting and scrambled to make sense of what had happened afterward.
“I don’t think anyone expected him to have the balls to show up and try to pick a fight with the toughest and biggest personality in world politics in public,” said a third White House official.
No Trump official has ever lied about anything before. Clearly we should take them at their word that they were innocent and eager naifs trying to do normal diplomacy the way it has long been done, only to have their efforts undermined by the churlish and ungrateful Zelenskyy and his strange concern for the security of his nation.
The point is, per Politico, this is all Zelenskyy’s fault, just as it was for Thiessen. Politico’s headline?
He should probably resign, for briefly forgetting to slob Trump’s knob!
Anyway, as for the Post, Marc Thiessen should be the first person gone when the paper gets around to refocusing the opinion page on the freedom and personal liberty that Bezos says should be its main subject. Maybe someone could write that America strong-arming vassal states is not compatible with freedom, and maybe Marc Thiessen could read that while eating his morning bowl of fiber and learn something!
Ha ha, we kid, he’ll never learn dick. But then, apparently neither will some of the other outlets that should know better.
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Let's just make something explicit:
They have to blame the victim here, because they, themselves are choosing to kiss the ass of a man destroying the country - and I don't just mean causing chaos and economic harm, or even setting a precedent for all-out assaults on immigrants in a country where immigration has always driven its growth and its economy, notable in a country with the world's biggest. Trump is ripping up the constitution and making rule of law impossible. What makes the US the US **is** that document, and the rules and norms we've erected to insulate it from those who would disregard the law.
They are kissing the anal ring of the man threatening their country and then Zelenskyy comes along and refuses to kiss that offal orifice even though his own country is at a risk just as extreme (or possibly more so).
This is the worst possible case for them, because the only defense for WaPo and Politico and the others bending the knee to Trump is that they had no choice. But if Zelenskyy, under just as much pressure, can exercise choice, that gives the lie to their only defense. Zelenskyy MUST be in the wrong, because the only alternative is that those who choose the opposite of Zelenskyy must be wrong, and that includes themselves.
The worst thing that could happen from the point of view of WaPo, Politico, et al is for the people to come to believe that opposing Trump is an option. Make no mistake: the rush to blame Volodymyr Zelenskyy is, more than anything, a desperate rush to exonerate themselves.
Hey, guess what newspaper subscriptions we declined to renew last week. I'd say the timing is pretty optimal.
Related, what daily newspaper are people reading these days? We've got extra bucks that we'd love to use to fund actual newsrooms, as opposed to oligarch-sucking simps.