J. Scott Applewhite / AP, file
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., chair of the House Progressive Caucus, attends an event at the Capitol in Washington, July 28, 2022. A group of progressive Democrats in Congress said Tuesday it had retracted a letter to the White House urging President Joe Biden to engage in direct diplomatic talks with Russia after it triggered an uproar among Democrats and raised questions about the strength of the party’s support for Ukraine.
Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Often, the far-left wing of the Democrats operates with the best intentions in mind. Other times, they come off like teenagers with irresponsible and misleading terms like “defund the police,” which are the political equivalent of tossing lit matches into wastepaper baskets.
On Monday, 30 members of the Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party in the U.S. House sent a letter to President Joe Biden calling on him to open negotiations with Russia about ending the war in Ukraine.
Unsurprisingly, the other 190 Democrats, including all of the members of our own Nevada delegation, were ready with a firehose in hand to put out the fire of this idiocy.
By Tuesday, the blowback from within the party was so loud that Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the chair of the progressive caucus, retracted the letter. She claimed the letter was from another time earlier in the summer and that the situation has changed.
“The letter was drafted several months ago, but unfortunately was released by staff without vetting,” she said.
We find it highly unlikely that congressional staff were dumb enough or bold enough to send a months-old letter from 30 members of Congress to the president of the United States without first checking that it was OK.
That’s sheer prevarication. Besides, the representatives signed on to the letter in June when the situation in Ukraine was materially the same as it is now, and Putin’s barbarism was on full display. They were disgracefully wrong when they signed it, wrong this week when they sent it, and their retraction has all the weight of a Lindsay Graham position that shifts with the wind.
Setting aside Jayapal’s unwillingness to lead by example and admit that she and the other progressives had miscalculated the response to their request, the fact remains that drafting the letter was a horrifying lapse in judgment.
The circumstances of how we got to this juncture in history continue to amaze us. On one hand you have powerful members of the GOP and leading Fox News hosts actively supporting Vladimir Putin and other tyrants. A huge chunk of MAGA-land thinks Putin is a hero, after all. And now we have the sick spectacle of some far-left leaders demanding what appears to be nothing short of appeasement of a monster.
Thank heavens Nevada’s moderate and sensible Senate and House members reject this madness and are willing to provide the brave Ukrainians the support they need.
Jayapal and other signatories should do more than try to shift blame. They should acknowledge they made a foolish decision that could extend this war — just as GOP promises to pull back on Ukraine aid put lives at risk.
Putin has been losing the war in Ukraine since the earliest days, when he envisioned sweeping into the country and capturing it within a week. And he has definitely been losing since late August, when full-scale counteroffensives began recapturing what is now more than 3,000 square miles of territory from Russian forces. He underestimated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he underestimated the resolve of the West, and most importantly he underestimated the will of the Ukrainian people to defend their homeland.
Putin uses propaganda and fear to rule what could be a strong and prosperous country were it not for the inept farce of a strongman at the helm.
His increasingly direct threats of nuclear war — he’s bluffing, of course — reveal a weak leader grasping for any appearance of strength to prop himself up. His lies about Nazis in Ukraine and a secret plot by Zelenskyy to use a dirty bomb within his own territory reveal a Russian government desperate for a justification for, or at the very least a distraction from, its evil and unprovoked invasion of a sovereign neighbor.
Here in the United States, Republicans have been advocating to withdraw financial support from Ukraine — sacrificing the freedom, autonomy, and lives of Ukrainian people — not to mention the national security of America and the rest of the Western world — to save a dollar at the gas pump. The GOP wants to do more than appease Putin, it wants to run away from the threat he poses.
Putin cannot be allowed to negotiate a resolution for this war that ends in anything less than a full withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory. As we wrote just five days ago in our editorial, “In reality, GOP’s ‘America First’ rhetoric puts America’s security last”: “If Vladimir Putin wins in Ukraine, he isn’t stopping. And an unleashed Putin is a profound danger to Americans ...” The GOP’s growing worship of tyrants is not a strategy that places America first in any sense. It will lead to disaster for our country.
We lambasted the GOP for its morally, ethically and strategically bankrupt policy of putting short-term comfort and profit over long-term safety. And now, we offer that same critique of those 30 Democrats who played into Putin’s hands and the hands of the Republican Party.
This is not a time for anyone who loves freedom to suggest negotiating with Russia for anything other than complete withdrawal. Putin is looking for cracks in America’s resolve that he can exploit, which means our resolve must be strong.
The GOP has given Putin plenty of reasons to believe that if Republicans return to power, Russia will have a free hand in the world and the Western Alliance that has kept the world safe will crumble. Now, Jayapal and her caucus have done the same, no matter how they try to claw this back.
Nevada is fortunate to be represented by a delegation with the wisdom to reject such unsound advice, and we would be wise to send that delegation back to Washington this November. As for the 30 members of Congress who signed this ill-conceived request, they should start by apologizing to the staff member they threw under the bus for their mistake and stop undermining important progressive ideas by lighting waste basket fires; then we’ll talk.
