The same people in American politics who spent more than four years pretending to believe Donald Trump was an “asset” of Russian President Vladimir Putin have been spending the past few days trying to convince the country that the world is better off with Joe Biden in the White House.
Social media has been awash in anti-Trump tweets. A CNN political analyst Monday night touted Biden’s “leadership.” Hours earlier, a Washington Post columnist speculated on how Putin is missing Trump in the White House.
Fortunately, conservative commentators such as the invaluable Ben Shapiro are around to set the record straight — with the cold reality of facts that liberals try to avoid.
While there was no shortage of material attacking Trump in the Twitterverse, Shapiro was initially responding to a post by overrated historian Francis Fukuyama (the “The End of History” guy), who ludicrously claimed that Trump would “side with Russia” as it invades a neighbor.
The Daily Wire’s founding editor-in-chief pointed out that Russia under Putin has invaded Ukraine twice in recent years – and neither invasion took place while Trump was in the White House.
In fact, Biden was in the executive branch both times — as vice president under President Barack Obama, and now, God help us, as commander in chief himself.
“The ‘Biden is sucking at this, but Trump!’ stuff is laughable when it comes to Russia invading a country both before and after Trump,” Shapiro said on Tuesday. “This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s just reality.”
The "Biden is sucking at this, but Trump!" stuff is laughable when it comes to Russia invading a country both before and after Trump. This isn't a hypothetical. It's just reality. https://t.co/DZufODWA3K
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 22, 2022
Then he got to the brass tacks of why the world is in a position where Russia is invading an independent country as the West looks impotently on.
How to incentivize a Russian invasion of Ukraine:
– Pull out of Afghanistan for no reason and hand it to the Taliban;
– Kill Keystone XL;
– Shift European energy production toward completely inefficient sources;
– Greenlight Nord Stream 2 and keep rejecting attempts to stop it.— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 22, 2022
Citing Biden’s militarily disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, economically disastrous decision to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline (on his first day in office) and strategically feckless decision to waive sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will help enrich Russia with natural gas sales, Shapiro made the truth clear:
It was the Biden administration and Europeans who set the stage for Putin’s belligerence. And any intellectually honest American who’s been following the news lately knows it.
That description — particularly the “intellectually honest” part — leaves out a fairly large percentage of Twitter users, who replied to Shapiro’s post with outrage, or mocking, or attempts to pretend the Democrats’ first embarrassing attempt to impeach Trump over a phone call with the Ukraine president meant they gave a tinker’s damn about Ukraine sovereignty or security.
But there were some who got the drift.
Plus, this war was continuously encouraged when Biden was Vice president and now as president.
— Daniel K Hartness (@hartness_daniel) February 22, 2022
One of the most duplicitous aspects of the long-running Russia collusion hoax was the Democratic argument — abetted by the mainstream media — about which party was tougher when it came to Russia.
It was Biden’s Democratic predecessor, Obama, who used a 2012 presidential debate to mock then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney over Romney’s labeling of Russia as the country’s largest geopolitical foe. (CNN’s Chris Cillizza finally agreed — on Tuesday.)
It was the Obama-Biden administration that slapped Putin’s hand in 2014 when he invaded and annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea — imposing economic sanctions that did nothing to change the facts on the ground. (The eighth anniversary will be rolling around March 18 — less than a month from now. Putin knows what he can get away with when Joe Biden is in the Oval Office.)
And it was Biden’s decision to humiliate himself and his country by leaving Afghanistan in defeat that telegraphed to the Putins of the world that they had nothing to fear from the United States.
The president was also willing to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline – at the cost of thousands of jobs – to appease the radical wing of his already-radical party, effectively destroying the United States’ bid for energy independence, while approving the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that increases Western Europe’s reliance on Russian natural gas for energy.
And it was Biden’s party — those get-tough-on-the-Russkies Democrats — who, as Fox News reported, filibustered a bill in the Senate last month sponsored by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz that would have sanctioned European officials and business leaders involved in the project.
The hypocrisy is almost breathtaking sometimes.
The United States’ “allies” in Western Europe aren’t blameless either, as Shapiro noted. Dead-set on destroying their own energy sectors, they’re basically surrendering power over their economies to Putin’s revanchist Russia. (Ever-so-liberal Germany just closed three of its six remaining nuclear power plants in January, as ABC News reported.)
This isn’t a debate about a continued American military presence in Afghanistan or Trump’s agreement with the Taliban on a withdrawal — it’s about the humiliating sight of the world’s only remaining superpower allowing itself to be chased out of a country by a Third World criminal gang — and leaving behind billions in weaponry as a parting gift.
It’s about a president’s willingness to destroy his own country’s economy for the sake of leftist radicals who don’t like the country in the first place.
Above all, it’s about weakness — military, political and economic — that does nothing but encourage violent land grabs like the one taking place in Eastern Europe as this is being written — and the land grabs in Asia that Biden’s foreign policy fecklessness is all but begging for.
And it’s about the same mainstream media-Democrat complex – like CNN’s Joe Lockhart or The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson — that will keep trying to convince Americans that the senescent septuagenarian in the White House is strong enough for the job.
Americans are seeing through that – whether it’s watching disasters unfold abroad or Biden’s policies wreaking disaster at home with soaring inflation and an invasion of illegal immigration.
There are facts not even liberals can escape forever.
And conservatives need to remember them for the November elections.
