In their October 22, 2012 debate, Obama mocked GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney for expressing concern about Russia and Vladimir Putin:
“Gov. Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that al Qaeda is a threat because a few months ago when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War's been over for 20 years.”
As was Romney’s wont on all matters non-Trump, he became tongue-tied and impotent the moment he was challenged. Obama won on points. Putin for the knockout.
When Donald Trump sought the presidency, however, Democrats suddenly decided that Russia and Putin actually could be useful to have as a “world’s-worst problem” on some level. At least enough so that, if handled masterfully, Russia and Putin could be converted into electoral allies to help Hillary Clinton at the polls. Suddenly, Democrats said Russia was America’s most fearsome antagonist, with Trump treasonably in cahoots with Putin.
We all know the sordid tale: Clinton cash, the Perkins-Coie law firm, Fusion GPS, the Steele Dossier, Strzok and his lover Page, Comey and FBI corruption, leaks to the New York Times via a Columbia law professor, John Brennan, McCabe — the whole fetid, putrid lot of them. All bit players in a Clinton-Media Academy Award entry “The Russia Hoax.” At its core, Trump was supposedly in bed with Moscow, from political corruption to other disgustingly defamatory rumors, and Putin now supposedly had the goods, compromising him forever.
The Great Russia Hoax instead had been a Clinton hoax on the American people, perhaps the most egregious political crime in American history. That chapter remains open, exposed now to John Durham’s special investigation and later to historians.
America experienced two years, 448 pages, and $32 million of Mueller. In short order, Mueller found nothing, depleting chunks of his reputation and cognition along the way. There had been no Trump-Russian collusion. The Great Russia Hoax instead had been a Clinton hoax on the American people, perhaps the most egregious political crime in American history. That chapter remains open, exposed now to John Durham’s special investigation and later to historians. Clinton corruption will be remembered in American political-corruption history alongside Harding, Buchanan, LBJ, and as some prefer regarding Watergate.
Time moved on, as it does for all except Joe Biden. The Soviet Union had fallen in 1991. We had seen and learned more about Boris Yeltsin — alternately standing on a tank . . . or being too tanked to stand. There had been Gorbachev and “Perestroika” and “Glasnost.” But always there was Vladimir Putin. To his credit, he is the first leader of Russia since Noah and the Ark who does not employ state-sponsored antisemitism for political gain. Regardless of how we Jews feel about him, let us give him that.
And he is the master player. He has outlasted them all — Bushes, Clintons, Obama, Trump, Merkel, all the EU leaders, his opponents back home who seem to sustain unusually severe exotic illnesses that make COVID-19 and its origins seem as unremarkable as an Excedrin headache and who die from outlier causes like umbrella-point pricks and defenestrations (window tumbles). If Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund would always have Paris, the rest of us will always have Putin.
With Communism’s fall, Ukraine became free as did so many other of the U.S.S.R. imprisoned republics: Georgia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and such. Israel’s amazing rise as a world-leading “start- up nation” owes much to the anti-Semitism in Russia and Ukraine that drove away hundreds of thousands of highly trained high-tech experts. That same emigration wave also ended Marxist-socialist dominance and Left-wing influence in Israel. Left-wing political science professors at Tel Aviv University and at Ben Gurion U. in Beersheva may love Karl Marx, but no one hates socialism and Marxism more than those who actually have lived under it.. The only reason that the 72 right-wing seats in today’s Knesset do not prevail by landslide — from judicial appointments to building even more in Area C and throughout Judea-Samaria is that myopic politicians heading Yamina, New Hope, and Yisrael Beyteinu allow personal egos to obstruct voters’ wills and their own professed beliefs.
Ukraine is a tough pill for Jews. Bogdan Chmielnitzki started there in the 1640s. The Ukrainian pogroms of 1903-1906 often were worst and bloodiest there. Hitler’s einsatzgruppen never could have perpetrated as much murder as they did without the eager assistance of Ukrainian locals. Babi Yar is there. Even the fictional musical Anatevka pogrom was there.
Yet today’s Ukraine did freely elect a Jew to be president. They ally with Israel and the free west. They allow fools to abandon their Israeli families for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to worship at the Uman gravesite. Although Ukraine could turn against Jews tomorrow, they deserve their place among nations as a free country. In a world where the anti-Semitic want to replace Israel with a phoney-baloney country (“Palestine”) that would be populated by a phoney-baloney non-people who were fabricated only in 1964 (“Palestinians”), Ukrainians are a worthy nationality, have a land, a legitimate country among nations.
During the Trump years, Democrats’ Resistance fixated over Ukraine and never-ending pipe dreams of ousting America’s duly elected chief executive. Hunter Biden, a crook and drug addict, was paid $50,000 monthly to sit on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. He knew nothing of fossil-based crude oil nor gas — and nothing of Ukraine. Hunter since has moved onto painting for dollars and seems destined for more greatness as various grand juries take countless hours of testimony from women with whom he has consorted. He has done well financially as a member of the Biden Crime Family. Strange that the boy he denied fathering — until he conceded — was not named Rico.
In time we learned about a guy named Zelenskyy. An actor like Ronald Reagan, and a comedian, he played the president of Ukraine on a successful comedic TV series. The show was like a cross between “West Wing” and “Yes, [Prime] Minister” — only, presumably, when Ukrainian TV politicians say they know where bodies are buried and skeletons are hidden, they mean it. He ended up getting elected real-life president, a sort-of ultimate Netflix / Bravo reality-TV show. Thus Ukraine.
We know three things about Putin and Ukraine, and whether Zelensky is going to end up killed or locked in the Gulag for the rest of his life, and whether more Ukrainians next will die at Putin’s initiative than have been slaughtered since Stalin mass-murdered as many as seven million during the Holodomor with the active and criminal assistance of New York Times Russia bureau chief Walter Duranty:
1. None of the present mess happened when Donald Trump was president.
2. Vladimir Putin played by the rules of international comity throughout the Trump years.
3. Biden came in, demonstrated his and Antony Blinken’s foreign affairs chops in Afghanistan, and the whole house of cards came crashing down.
This was predictable from an incompetent who, in but one year, has presided over a complete breakdown of the social order. America successfully was rehabilitating from four Obama years of rot and decay, and Biden has proven transformative, introducing chaos marked by America suffering a severe nationwide collapse in urban law and order, a parallel breakdown at the southern border, historic inflation and economic dysfunctioning, a racial-based social cacophony that has undone racial harmony that reigned only a few years before, a cultural collapse in public education that sees children brainwashed to worry about personal pronouns and whether they are in correctly gendered bodies while being taught lies in history and corrupted math.
None of this — no real Putin problems — existed from 2017-2020. Trump knew how to handle Putin, as he did the North Korean dough boy, the Arab Muslim countries that joined the Abraham Accords, the American economy and overcoming unemployment among Blacks, Hispanics, and women. Trump got the Mexican border stabilized, supported law enforcement, promoted historically Black universities and colleges, advanced energy independence, and promoted religious freedom. For all his occasional bluster and disquieting personal flaws, Trump led outstandingly with excellence. He did not push secret-code buttons starting nuclear war. He did not conduct a single chaotic evacuation overseas nor initiate a single war, even as he killed Qasem Soleimani, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Hamza bin Laden, and Abu Hasan al-Muhajir like dogs.
Leftist pundits all predicted he would set the Mideast aflame if he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moved America’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over Golan, deemed Jewish towns and villages throughout Judea and Samaria legal if Israel’s Supreme Court deemed so, withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council, withdrew all funding from UNRWA, and closed down the PLO office in Washington, D.C.. The experts said Trump’s twitter storms with Kim Jong-un would result in nuclear holocaust starting in Seoul. That his import tariffs would generate an international trade war causing world-wide recession. And, yet, as we look back on 2017-2020, history is judging Trump quite well. As for CNN’s favored presidential successors — Andrew Cuomo, Michael Avenatti, Biden — not as well.
It took Biden and Pelosi only one year to mess everything up. NATO now has the American president they wanted, who does not demand they pay their fair defense share and who let them build a Nord 2 pipeline with Russia. CNN, Clintons, Cuomos, Obama, Bidens all have what they wanted. Each looks copacetically in the mirror every morning. They have obtained power.
What exactly else did they want?
Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer is Senior Contributing Editor at The American Spectator, adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations including Zionist Organization of America and regional boards of the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and served six years on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America
Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.. To attend any or all of Rav Fischer’s weekly 90-minute live Zoom classes on the Weekly Torah Portion, the Biblical Prophets, the Mishnah, Rambam Mishneh Torah, or Advanced Judaic Texts, send an email to:shulstuff@yioc.org