This Holiday Season, Putin Should Send Gift Baskets to J.D. Vance, Gym Jordan, and the Rest of the Anti-Freedom Caucus

Mr Putin said support for Ukraine from its allies was running out.

"Today Ukraine produces almost nothing," he said. "Excuse my vulgarity, but everything is being brought in as a freebie. But those freebies could run out at some point. And it seems that they are gradually running out."

And there you have the Russian strategy: Keep throwing Russian men into the meatgrinder until his allies in Congress (and his asset in Hungary) can cut off all aid to Ukraine.

It really is a puzzle, in a way. Here we have a smaller country with a democracy and a vibrant economy (prewar, at least) and a breadbasket for much of the world, that is fighting off an invader that targets civilians, murders and torture civilians, rapes woman and kidnaps children and the Republicans back the country that is doing the invading, murdering and raping.

Further, if we fail here, a few very bad things are almost certain to happen. China will invade Taiwan, because they will believe that we won't stand with the Taiwanese and even if we did, we'd get tired and give up. Venezuela may invade its nighbor soon Russia will absorb, by persuasion or by force, most of the former Soviet republics. Eventually, Russi will turn its attention to the FSRs that are now NATO members, because Russia will believe that they can grind down western Europe, that the French and Germans will not send their sons to defend the Baltics. All because the Republicans are not just telegraphing American weakness and failure of resolve, they're shouting it from the rooftops.

Does anyone, other than the Putinites in Congress, not understand that Russia is an adversarial nation and has been since time immemorial? Russia has lost a third of a million men in this war (dead, wounded, captured), not counting the million or more who fled the country. Their economy is under stress. The only friends they have in the world who can provide meaningful help, so far, are Iran and North Korea. (China is being more circumspect to avoid being sanctioned.) Their soldiers are badly led, badly equipped and sometimes are moving forward under the threat of summary execution for not doing so. Their armored forces have been decimated; the Russians have been dragging rusted fifty and sixty year old tanks out of storage and junkyards and hurriedly refurbishing them for use.

We have the chance to break Russia as a military threat to the point that it will take them a decade or more to rebuild their conventional ground forces. All we are called to do in order to make that happen is to send money and weapons. The weapons, incidentally, from ammunition large and small to artillery pieces and missile systems are all made here,so those costs go to support American factories and American jobs.

Which, by the way, is something that we have needed to do for a very long time. Those who pay attention to logisitics have been pointing out for a very long time that we do not have the industrial capability to support a conventional war of any duration (the Navy still can't build surface ships for shit). We can use this war as a rationale to fix that problem and rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy.

But, for some reason, the Republicans are back in their time-worn practice of supporting dictatorships over democracies, and closing their eyes to fascist aggression. Is it because they know, in their souls, that when it comes to a contest of free ideas, they tend to lose? So they really do want to burn down the American Experiment and bring about a dictatorship of the oligarchs? And if we don't help other democracies when they are in trouble, then who can we expect to come to our aid if we once again need help?

I don't know the answer. Do you?