Ukraine Takes Its First Scalp--McCarthy's

Matt Gaetz was pretty clear about this. Gaetz first began considering the motion to vacate after Speaker Kev flipped off 90 GOP members to do a deal with the Dems on the budget. That was bad—very bad. But Gaetz didn’t file his motion until he first spent a little more time investigating whether Speaker Kev had done—or thought he had done—a backroom deal with Zhou and McConnell to flush more money down the Ukraine drain. Gaetz made Ukraine the hill for Speaker Kev to die on.

But there’s more to this. Turtle McConnell has, since the start of America’s war on Russia, consistently stated and restated that money for Ukraine was America’s top priority—meaning, his top priority. Over the weekend, virtually every single GOP senator (Susan Collins was the exception) sent Turtle the message that, no, Ukraine is not America’s top priority. I urge you to read this article:

How Conservatives Quietly Outmaneuvered Weakened McConnell On Ukraine

McConnell quietly acknowledged to his colleagues that the Senate bill including the Ukraine funding was not a winning issue for the party.

The move may have been spearheaded by conservatives, but it had the support of essentially the full Senate GOP. That amounts to a vote of no-confidence in Turtle, and it surely didn’t go unnoticed in the House. Here’s the gist of what happened—but there’s lots more, so do follow the link above:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suffered a stunning blow this weekend when Republicans in the upper chamber disregarded his repeated calls for prioritizing Ukraine funding by passing the House GOP’s short-term spending bill, which included no provisions for the Volodymyr Zelensky regime.

Publicly, McConnell pretended his move to finance the proxy war in Ukraine was temporarily tabled for the convenience of avoiding an imminent government shutdown. Behind closed doors, the Senate minority leader’s plan to indefinitely send U.S. tax dollars to Eastern Europe was shunned by nearly every member of his party who expressed discomfort with hinging the fate of the government shutdown on Ukraine.

One source familiar with the situation told The Federalist that even McConnell quietly acknowledged to his colleagues that any spending bill that included Ukraine funding was not a winning issue for the party. Yet, he was so committed to putting another country’s financial well-being ahead of his own that he fought his own conference on it.

The Senate GOP’s defiance of McConnell was confirmed when they, at the urging of Senate GOP steering committee members like Sens. Mike Lee and Rick Scott, passed House Republicans’ continuing resolution (CR) instead of the Senate bill.

“When I came in on Saturday morning, I was convinced we were not going to win. The headwinds were totally opposed to us. And then by 1 o’clock, we had decisively defeated McConnell,” a Senate staffer told The Federalist.

“Ukraine”—a convenient title to cover the most monumental screwup in US history, in which the Neocons running our Deep State went to war, military and financial, with most of the world—is emerging as a major issue for the 2024 election. US senators need to be attuned to the views of the entire state that they’re elected from, not just a small, possibly gerrymandered, district. Those GOP senators must know something about how “Ukraine” is playing with their voters, and so they refused to follow the aged Turtle over the cliff.

The thing about “Ukraine” as an issue is that it’s much simpler for people to grasp the perversity of spending vast amounts of money on a foreign country that most people could never locate on a map, rather than addressing our multifarious domestic problems. Obviously, “Ukraine” is really just the tip of the fiscal iceberg our adrift ship of state is headed for, but it works very well as a symbol. It’s an easy way to segue into the fiscal responsibility issue

In addition, senators who follow the polling—and what senator doesn’t?—will be well aware that the single biggest negative for Zhou is the ignominious Afghan bugout. For all the other things pointing America in the wrong direction, that’s the one that still sticks in people’s minds—and craws. Senators like Josh Hawley who attend classified briefings know we’re headed for another ignominious defeat, this time at the hands of Russia. Hawley came out of the latest such briefing stunned, so he claimed, that we have no bugout strategy and no path to victory. Senators and Reps who have done a minimal amount of thinking about these issues will be aware that “Ukraine” has greased the slide that the dollar as world reserve currency is on. They will know that, one way or another, difficult times lie ahead—no matter what America’s long term prospects are. Why would they risk a scalping for the sake of a bunch of Nazi wannabes? Leave that to the Dems. It’s time to reposition.

So for those Republicans out there clutching their pearls over Gaetz’s move, I say: Get a grip. The scalping of Speaker Kev represents, in the big picture, the Republican party coming to a realization of where the Deep State has led America. It tells us that their instinct for self preservation is still in working order. They don’t intend to go down with that ship—they want to position themselves to be demanding answers to tough questions.

For these reasons, I don’t expect the battle for the Speaker’s gavel to be particularly rancorous—as leadership struggles go. I expect the debates and speeches to be more about how to assure comity within the Republican conference, rather than specific policies. From that standpoint Gaetz did his colleagues a favor by using pretty much the minimum number of GOPers necessary to scalp Kev. That will reduce the finger pointing to a minimum and allow the party to move on. Doing the deal with the Dems over the heads of his own conference meant that Kev had to go. Putting Turtle in his place has had a similar effect in the Senate. The potential is now in place for Republicans to prepare for 2024. I’m sure Lindsey! will find a way to live with the new lay of the land. Overall, it seems healthy—for the GOP and for the country. Let the great debate on America’s future begin.

Now, on a mostly unrelated note, I want to recommend very highly this article about the situation in the Caucasus, which details the way the Neocons—with no concern for American credibility—have screwed another tiny country:

Armenia’s Bleak Future Thanks to US Neocons