I read Douthat so you don't have to

Get ready for it: The right wing is going to come out against support for Ukraine in time for the midterms

Here’s what Ross Douthat’s main job is on the op-ed page of the New York Times:  he’s there to gently remove the MAGA hat from truly disgusting and out-there right-wing nonsense, give it an “intellectual” shoe-shine, and turn it out on the street to earn its keep.

The job the Koch empire or whoever he’s shilling for these days gave him for his Times op-ed today was to prepare the ground to turn the Ukraine war into a wedge issue for the fall.  All the usual signifiers are there – he wasn’t a Ukraine hawk at first…he thought the U.S. was pushing too hard and too fast for NATO membership in eastern Europe…Ukraine ran the risk of turning into another Afghanistan-style “collapse” that would end up embarrassing us on the world stage.

Finally he saw the light:  the hawks were right about Ukraine’s willingness to fight, our military support has worked, it’s been good for democracy in general and European unity specifically.

Then comes the yes-but kicker:  with all that Ukraine hawkishness has accomplished, he has suddenly awoken to find himself “baffled” by the “confidence and absolutism” of the hawks.

Aha!  Good old absolutism, along with wokeness, the bete noir of the gentlemanly rep-tie near edge of the MAGA far right.  Of course we’re against racism and for civil rights…just as long as that nasty Critical Race Theory (CRT) isn’t used to push it!  Of course we’re for women’s rights…just as long as they don’t mind carrying a baby to term just because we tell them it’s the right thing to do.  Of course we’re for gay rights…just as long as they keep their drag queens on a tight leash.

Douthat is clever enough not to get any of his pal Tucker’s stench of authoritarian fan-boy on him, and getting down in the weeds of the tactics and strategy of the war in Ukraine isn’t going to sell in the hinterlands in the midterms.  What to do?  Of course!  The issue with Ukraine isn’t morality or even geopolitics and all that yawn-inducing NATO stuff.  It’s money!

Let’s tick it off, shall we?  We’ve already spent “far more than we spent in foreign aid to Afghanistan in any recent year, for instance, and our support roughly trebles the support offered by the European Union.”

That’s the ticket, Ross!  Play that old saw Trump pushed to great effect out there in MAGA-land when he took on nasty NATO countries and all the tax dollars we were wasting over there!  Ukraine is in their back yard, and they’re not paying their fair share!

Listen to this zinger: “Our plan cannot be to keep writing countless checks while tip-toeing modestly around the Ukrainians and letting them dictate the ends to which our guns and weaponry are used.”  As if there’s any difference between “guns” and “weaponry,” but let’s not even go there.  It’s the “countless checks” Douthat knows will ring bells out there among the MAGA faithful.  Why, it’s almost like we’ve turned Ukraine into a great big old welfare queen ridin’ around in her Cadillac while the good folks out there in MAGA land can’t even afford to fill up their Chevy Tahoes and GMC Yukons!

No mention by Douthat of the countless lives saved by our countless checks sent to Ukraine.  If we hadn’t written countless checks and sent countless “weaponry” like Javelin anti-tank missiles at the beginning of the war, Kyiv would now be a smoking ruin, and Ukraine wouldn’t be fighting to retake the 1/5th of its territory now controlled by Russia, it would be fighting to hang on to the last piece they would still have.

Douthat finally gets around to showing a little ankle near the end when he notes, “We are also an internally divided country led by an unpopular president whose majorities may be poised for political collapse.”

See?  Douthat is the good little columnist who eschews anything radical and extreme and just wants what’s reasonable and sustainable and doesn’t “squander our still-provisional success” while cutting down on those countless checks the anti-internationalist MAGA crowd never wants to spend anyway.

Watch ‘em jump on board, now that Douthat has cleaned up Tucker’s pro-Putinism and given it a haircut.  Watch those Republican Senate and House candidates start pounding the drum for “realistic” Ukraine spending and a “strategy…that needs to assume difficulty, challenge, limits.”  I can smell Ukraine as a wedge issue from here already.