Patterico's Pontifications

2/21/2025

Weekend Open Thread

Filed under: General — Dana @ 8:23 am



[guest post by Dana]

Let’s go!

First news item

May these sweet little ones rest in peace with the angels in the heavenly place:

Details:

“Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered by terrorists in cold blood. The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys. They killed them with their bare hands. Afterwards, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities. This assessment is based on both forensic findings and intelligence.”

I won’t link to it, but there is video of Palestinians basically having a party and cheering while the coffins are paraded before them.

Second news item

A few Senate Republicans pushing back on Trump about his comments about Zelensky and Ukraine:

Public comments from President Trump blaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for Russia’s invasion of his country are unnerving Senate Republicans, who have largely sought to avoid conflicts with the White House.

Trump’s escalating war of words with the Ukrainian leader comes as hawks in both parties plead with the president not to give Moscow a free pass in talks to end the bitter three-year conflict.

From Sen. Wicker:

“Any sort of peace talks that might get a fair result would definitely need to have the Ukrainians at the table and make sure that European interests are considered and carefully weighed,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), a leading Ukraine proponent, adding that the Russian leader should not be trusted in these talks.

“Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life — if not executed,” he added.

From Sen. Tillis:

“I’m concerned with anything that would ultimately allow there to be a moral equivalency between Zelensky and Putin,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who visited Ukraine alongside a pair of Senate Democrats over the weekend and toured parts of suburban Kyiv that have been ravaged by fighting.

He also pushed back on Trump’s criticism of Zelensky on Wednesday, when he took to Truth Social and called the Ukrainian president a “dictator without elections” who was doing a “terrible job.”

“Zelensky is frustrated, but he’s also been the right head of state for the time. He’s kept a nation together focused on Russian occupiers, and I think we should give them a fair amount of credit for that work,” Tillis said.

More at the link.

Third news item

America isn’t looking too good, thanks to Trump:

The U.S. is refusing to co-sponsor a draft U.N. resolution marking three years since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine that backs Ukraine’s territorial integrity and again demands Russia withdraw its troops, three diplomatic sources told Reuters, in a potential stark shift by Ukraine’s most powerful Western ally.

Washington has also objected to a phrase in a statement the Group of Seven nations was planning to issue next week that would condemn Russian aggression, two other sources told Reuters.

The U.S. refusal to agree to language that has been regularly used by the U.N. and G7 since February 2022 comes amid a widening rift between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and U.S. President Donald Trump.

You can read the latest polling data on how Americans feel about supporting Ukraine here.

Fourth news item

Buttigieg making more sense than most Democrats:

Former Biden administration official Pete Buttigieg said that the Democratic Party’s approach to promoting diversity was too heavy-handed and led to the election of President Donald Trump.

“What do we mean when we talk about diversity? Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one is mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for? Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of ‘Portlandia,’ which I have also experienced,” Buttigieg said.

“And it is how Trump Republicans are made,” Buttigieg added.

Mandatory unconscious bias trainings, and inclusivity and diversity trainings have been the rage at places of employment for a number of years. With DEI now on the outs, maybe the Democratic Party can actually start to focus on what voters of all stripes care about: the price of eggs and the economy.

More:

Buttigieg explained that the DNC event “was a caricature of everything” wrong with the Democratic Party’s “ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree” with them.

“I think — and this might sound counterintuitive — if we were more serious about the actual values and not caught up in vocabularies and trying to cater to everybody only in terms of their particular slice of combinations of identities versus the shared project.”

“It’s a problem, especially for men and White men,” Bibb said. “Both educated and non-educated college degree White men.”

Fifth news item

No one should be surprised if Trump refuses to vacate the office in four years. He has already refused to go peacefully once before. It would be foolish to think he wouldn’t do that again:

Sixth news item

Smart piece:

The American demand is of an extraordinary scale. In Kyiv and again in Munich, the Americans proposed that Ukraine concede half of the profits from its mineral rights in perpetuity and from other national resources and from its ports in perpetuity with a lien on everything important — in exchange for essentially nothing. This is not really a monetary proposition, let alone a “deal,” but rather the demand that Ukraine become a permanent American colony. It amounts to blackmail enabled by ongoing Russian invasion. In effect, the United States is telling Ukraine to concede its resources to the United States, under the threat that American aid will be otherwise withdrawn, and those resources will be taken by Russia.

Seventh news item

Yep:

Eighth news item

He will do anything in Ukraine’s best interest to save the country and its people. They are Priority 1. No wonder Trump hates him. Zelensky is not a petty wanna-be king. He is a serious leader who seeks to save his country and not bring needless ruin to it:

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Sunday that he was willing to step down if it meant peace in Ukraine. His remark came days after President Trump questioned his legitimacy and called him a “dictator without elections,” echoing a Kremlin talking point.

At the same time, he continued to push back against Mr. Trump’s insistence that he sign a minerals deal that Ukraine says is unpalatable. And he announced a meeting on Monday of over 30 countries in person or online as a kind of coalition of support for Ukraine’s war effort.

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Zelensky had seriously considered the option of stepping down or was merely responding to the latest jabs from Washington and Moscow. He added that he could trade his departure for Ukraine’s entry into NATO — a highly unlikely scenario given Mr. Trump’s opposition to allowing Ukraine into the military alliance.

“If it brings peace to Ukraine, and if you need me to step down — I am ready,” Mr. Zelensky said during a news conference on Sunday, on the eve of the third anniversary of the war. “Second, I can exchange this for NATO.”

Note, that while Trump blathered on at CPAC about the “deal” they were close to, it’s a non-starter for Ukraine because it would saddle many generations to come with an unrealistic and absurd financial burden to carry and with no security agreement.:

Under the proposed deal, those revenues would be directed to a fund in which the United States would hold 100 percent financial interest, and Ukraine should contribute to the fund until it reaches $500 billion. That sum is more than four times as much as the value of U.S. aid committed to Ukraine so far and more than twice the value of Ukraine’s economic output in 2021, before the war.

“It’s astronomical for us, and I don’t understand why would you impose such a burden” on an economy already reeling from the war, said Victoria Voytsitska, a former Ukrainian lawmaker and energy expert. “It sounds like the next couple of generations will have to pay reparations under such a scheme.”

The agreement does not commit the United States to security guarantees for Ukraine, or promise further military support for Kyiv. The word “security” was even deleted from a formulation contained in a previous version of the deal, dated Feb. 14 and reviewed by The Times, which stated that both countries aimed to achieve “lasting peace and security in Ukraine.”

Have a great weekend.

—Dana


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