Well, probably not, but it does look like he’s got a nice three-carom billiard shot at home, bouncing Vladimir Putin off of both Tucker Carlson and Mitch McConnell as a way of exacerbating the friction between the True-Trumpers like Tucker and the “Why Won’t He JUST FUCKING DIE ALREADY!” crowd headed by Mitch himself.
If Joe had gone all soft on Vladimir, Mitch and the entire right-wing interventionist crowd would have pounded him, and the Never Trump interventionists as well, not to mention all the old-style, AIPAC-lovin’ (AIPAC-lovin’ an’ AIPAC-fearin’) Democrats like Robert Menendez, meaning that Old Joe could just about kiss whatever is left of his domestic program goodbye.
But Joe didn’t go soft. Joe stood tall, which I think he pretty much had to do, with King Vlad looking very much like he started something bad ass pretty much because otherwise the Russian people might forget he was there, a something that, it turns out, probably wasn’t a very good idea in the first place. But getting on an onery bronc is a lot easier than getting off.
Meanwhile, Tucker et al. are wetting their pants in honor of a guy who likes to ride bare-chested—though presumably not bare back—leaving poor Donald Trump wishing the guys liked to look at him when he took his shirt off, and Mitch McConnell wishing we could go back to the days when everyone kept their shirts on.
So Uncle Joe has (slightly) mollified the Military Intellectual Complex, furious with Joe after he told them flatly that their 20-year mission in Iraq was an utter failure, instead of spending another $1,000,000,000,000 and several thousand lives to cover up that fact, the way a president should. He has firmed up his support among the remaining few centrist Democrats and remaining few centrist Republicans, and pushed the Trumpist right a step or two past “Crazy” to “Crazy Crazy”. I don’t think that many Republicans are going to get all choked up over the restoration of the Moscow Patriarchate. But Tucker and his pals seem to have other ideas.
Afterwords
I have gone on recornd, many times, but perhaps most loudly here, that the expansion of NATO, and particularly the attempt to bring Ukraine peermanently into the orbit of the West, was a disastrous undertaking. But Putin has deliberately chosen a seriously disruptive path for no good reason.
UPDATE
How are things in Ukraine itself? Well, as Fred Kaplan explains, not great.
