Dick Hubert’s Worldview: Fears for Ukraine as NATO wonders about U.S.; plus Latimer-Bowman
February 28, 2024 at 11:53 p.m.
Will the U.S. government come to a crashing halt because Republicans in the House refuse to vote on the budget?
Will the Russians continue their advance into Ukraine, and in the process threaten NATO’s defenses, because the Republicans in the House refuse to vote for aid to Ukraine which funds çritical purchases (in the U.S.) of artillery shells and air defense systems?
These are some of the alarm bells going off in my head as the start of the third year of the full scale Russian assault on Ukraine continues.
I love our country, and I fear for our country, which is why I keep coming back to these concerns as the Trumpist Republicans seem determined to tear our country down, and in the process degrade our alliances, put at risk the fighters for democracy in Ukraine, and boost the ambitions and confidence of anti-democracy dictators everywhere.
I’m not alone with this alarming thought.
The astute journalists at The Economist devoted their cover and lead editorial last week to the threat the GOP under Trumpists creates for our national security and longtime international friends.
Here’s how Economist Editor in Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes put it in a letter to subscribers:
“When you combine the relentless hostility of Vladimir Putin with growing doubts about whether America should come to Europe’s defense—at least among Donald Trump and his followers—you soon reach the conclusion that Europe’s eastern borders now rival Taiwan as the most likely theatre for the first ever war between enemies armed with nuclear weapons.
That gloomy prospect was at the back of our minds this week as we took on the challenges facing European defense. Wreathed in acronyms like SACEUR, SHAPE, and NATO, it is a theme that all too easily seems institutional and remote. What’s more, Europeans take Pax Americana so much for granted that they overlook how immense a task it will be to rebuild the structures that have kept them safe since the second world war.
The job for our designers (of The Economist’s cover) was to shake them out of their post-Soviet complacency.”
So the cover shows Trump from the back looking inward into the U.S. while Putin has his binoculars on Western Europe for starters.
Concludes Beddoes: “Russia is much poorer and less populous than Europe. Mr. Putin’s depredations make it a declining power. But the bear can still spread destruction and misery. The best place to stop Mr. Putin is in Ukraine. Europe will have to think very differently about defense. It needs to start now.”
I don’t believe Europe’s military manpower training as well as its defense industry will be up to replacing the U.S. as a deterrent to Russian aggression in the short term. Experts I trust say it will take five years at best.
There’s no other country that can fill the gap except the U.S.
For all of my lifetime America has been the indispensable world power, and my firm conviction throughout that lifetime is that we as a nation cannot walk away from that responsibility on short notice, or even in the long term.
But will we walk away and abandon our friends and allies by electing both Trumpists into majorities in the House and Senate and Trump himself into the Presidency in November?
Thomas Friedman in the New York Times has articulated my fears so well that a brief quotation from his Feb. 20 column is in order:
“...Trump’s “America First” strategy would almost certainly wind up an “America alone” strategy. If you think helping Ukraine is expensive today, try defending America against Russia, China, and Iran—all by ourselves.
I am afraid for what this future holds, my fellow Americans, because Trump is a fake, Lindsay Graham is a fake and the GOP has become a cult with no coherent platform other than what side of the bed Trump woke up on, meaning it’s a fake. None of them will fight for anything any longer—other than staying in Trump’s good graces by saying whatever he tells them to say.
They are all trapped in a performative doom loop that has nothing to do with acting on our real interests. It’s only about performing for Trump and for his base to get more clicks. Rinse and repeat—the actual world be damned.
It’s all fake. Only our enemies are not fake.”
There are a frightening number of Americans who have been lulled into complacency and even hostility to our worldwide obligations by not just Trump and his followers but by Fox News and other far right propaganda outlets.
How this will all turn out will be determined at the ballot box. Who will be on the ballot, and who will turn out to vote…that is the question.
The 16th Congressional District
Democratic primary drama continues
I’m on the e-mail list of Congressman Jamaal Bowman where I receive frequent appeals for campaign donations plus bitter denunciations of his primary opponent, Westchester County Executive George Latimer.
I also receive on a less frequent basis all the campaign e-mails and announcements from Latimer. Those proclamations are calm in tone, don’t mention Bowman, and in recent weeks have included a steady series of announcements of support by local Democratic organizations in just about every community in the 16th District north of the Bronx border.
With each endorsement that Latimer rolls out, there seems to be a corresponding denunciatory e-mail from Bowman or his team. He has called Latimer “Genocide George” for failing to call upon Israel to immediately announce a cease fire in its war with Hamas; he has denounced Latimer for “being in league with right-wing outside groups” who are spending “millions to attack Jamaal and buy our election”; and he accused Latimer of claiming “I take money from Hamas.”
That latter charge, Bowman explained: “Translated from racism, that means I’m receiving money from folks in the Muslim community who see me fighting for a ceasefire. It’s dangerous and disgusting for my opponent to imply that all Muslims are members of Hamas.”
These e-mails are, in my view, explosive. So I arranged a phone call with Latimer to ask for a response.
To quote him:
“I’ve had the opportunity to run for office as an incumbent over 10 times. Every time, I was running for election as an incumbent, I never mentioned the name of my challenger, because I could run on my record.
I have to assume that if you’re spending this much time attacking a challenger, and in such over the top ridiculous ways,…is really a sign of desperation....It’s a sign that your record isn’t sufficient enough for you to garner support.
I think you can see that in the fundraising results that we had, where we outraised him 2 to 1, and I got 73% of my funds from people in the district; he got about 9% of his funds from people in the District. He’s had to go nationwide in his fundraising. He criticizes me for the AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) connection; yet he makes a connection with Representative Tlaib in a joint findraising effort (Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, from Michigan’s 12th District, is the first Palestinian woman to serve in Congress and one of only two Muslims in Congress).
Calling me a racist is absurd. I’ve been in public office a long, long time. That charge has never been directed at me. His desire is to make this a race about race.
I’m focused on what I can do if elected to Congress.”
Latimer’s record, well known in this area after his years as a County Legislator, State Assemblyman, State Senator, and County Executive, is confined primarily to local, county, and state issues.
Bowman, in touting his legislative efforts, sent out an e-mail announcing his involvement in a “Congressional Hip Hop Task Force” which will “give voice to the shared values of Hip Hop including peace, love, and justice.”
While the vast majority of Latimer’s centrist constituents may roll their eyes at Bowman’s announcement, it does highlight the centrist segment of the Democratic Party’s problems: maintaining support among young Black voters, many of whom say they’ll vote Republican in 2024. Bowman wants to remind Black voters in the 16th to stay with him and his segment of the party.
The Tlaib connection also shows the delicacy of the Democratic situation in Michigan, where loss of Palestinian support over Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Hamas in Gaza could lose the state for President Biden in November.
So voters in this district on June 25 (the date of the Democratic primary) may find themselves on the receiving end of national media sçrutiny, with analysts pouring over the results to analyze the question: where is the Democratic Party going and what does the outcome of the Bowman/Latimer contest portend for the Presidential race?
There will clearly be more to say about this on June 26.
A postscript to
my Jan. 11, 2024 column
Back on Jan. 11 in these pages, in what seems like light years ago in political terms, I urged independent (nons), Republican and Conservative registered readers who wanted to have a say as to who our Congressperson would be in the 16th District to change their registration to Democrat by Feb. 14 so they could vote in the Democratic primary June 25.
You’ll remember I bemoaned the collapse of the Republican Party in this district and its failure to contribute a dime to their designated candidate for the 2022 Congressional elections, virtually assuring the re-election of Jamaal Bowman without so much as a whimper.
I even wrote a follow-up column the next week, in response to a reader request, giving the step by step process for how to change registration.
Well, the prospect of voting for County Executive George Latimer in that primary seems to have galvanized 2,312 voters to switch their registration to Democrat, according to County Board of Elections data as reported in The Journal News Feb. 26.
I can’t take credit for that.
The Journal News reports that 1,660 of those new Democrats are claimed to have been persuaded to sign up by an outfit called Teach Action Fund, which the JN says is affiliated with a group “that advocates for public funding to support Jewish schools in New York and six other states.”
I am firmly opposed to taxpayer support for religious schools and don’t in any way want to be associated with Teach Action.
But politics makes for strange bedfellows, and hoping for a calmer, less argumentative Congressperson than Bowman has put us both in the Latimer camp.
We’ll have to wait until late in the evening of June 25 to see if in a race that’s tight, those new voters make a difference.
Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.
Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.
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