If there's one person who shouldn't pontificate about dealing with Putin and Russia, it's Hillary Clinton. As Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary staged that pathetic, supposed, "reset" of relations with Putin's Russia, capped by laughingly pushing her [mistranslated] reset button with Putin's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Subsequently during Obama's tenure, Putin invaded and annexed the Crimea region of Ukraine, as Obama meekly responded with some feckless sanctions. So much for your reset, Hillary.
But there was Hillary on Friday's Morning Joe, opining at great length about how America should respond to the invasion. She proclaimed Biden's Russia policy has been "well-executed."
Predictably, Joe Scarborough rolled out the red carpet for Hillary to point all her fingers of blame at Trump:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I do wonder, Madam Secretary, if all the chaos of the last five years hasn't just encouraged Vladimir Putin and other enemies to move forward?
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, I think the answer to that is absolutely yes. And it's tragic, because President Biden had to rebuild trust and confidence in NATO, in the United States.
None of this that he has now engineered to respond would have been possible in the prior administration. In fact, I'm not even sure that the prior administration would have cared enough to ask.
And so, this is a rebuilding of our credibility, of our leverage.
May we point out, Madam Secretary, that you can only speculate about what would have happened if Putin had invaded Ukraine during the Trump administration because . . . Putin DIDN'T invade Ukraine during the Trump administration! He waited until Joe Biden got into office.
So Biden's supposed attempt to rebuild our "credibility and leverage" obviously failed to stop Putin.
Rather than Trump's actions in office, it's fair to surmise that it was Biden's weakness in general, and catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in particular, that, to quote Scarborough, "encouraged Vladimir Putin and other enemies to move forward."
Before attempting to somehow shift the blame from Biden to Trump over Ukraine, Hillary began her spiel by attacking Trump [without deigning to mention him by name] for praising Putin's "genius" and "smart move." That led Scarborough to denounce the Trump right as "useful idiots." Hillary upped that ante, accusing them of giving "aid and comfort" to the enemy. That is the very definition, under US law, of treason, and is punishable by death. Is that what Hillary has in mind for her political opponents?
Hillary then called on "what is left of the Republican party" to denounce such people. "What's left" of the GOP? You mean, the party that is poised to sweep Democrats out of control of the House and Senate?
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
2/25/22
6:09 am ETHILLARY CLINTON: We have to also make sure that within our own country, we are calling out those people who are giving aid and comfort to Vladimir Putin, who are talking about what a genius he is, what a smart move it is, who are unfortunately being broadcast by Russian media, not only inside Russia, but in Europe, to demonstrate the division within our own country.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You know, Madam Secretary, I'm so glad you brought up, as we former Republicans used to call -- call people that were sympathetic to the old Soviet Union, these useful idiots on the Trump right that we now have.
And the former Republican in me remembered the stories of the dissidents who would say they remembered hearing of what Ronald Reagan would say during the Cold War and it would spread around the jailcells, it would spread around the gulags. And this morning as I was thinking about that, I was so saddened because they're replaying this propaganda from Trumpists in Moscow, and that has to be getting to the Ukrainian people. How distressing, Madam Secretary. How distressing.
CLINTON: Well, Joe, as you know so well, we had a bipartisan agreement, a commitment, starting after World War II with Harry Truman, all the way until the Soviet Union collapsed, that we would stand with people who loved freedom like we do, that we would stand with the dissidents who were speaking out about human rights, and against oppression and death at the hands of regimes, that, you know, the Soviet Union, both executed themselves and supported elsewhere. So this is heartbreaking, but it's also dangerous. And I think it's time for what's left of the Republican party that has any common sense not just to say, okay, go help defend Ukraine against Putin, but to stand against those people in politics and government, in the media and elsewhere in our own country, who are literally giving aid and comfort to an enemy of freedom and democracy.
. . .
SCARBOROUGH: I do wonder, Madam Secretary, if all the chaos of the last five years hasn't just encouraged Vladimir Putin and other enemies to move forward?
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, I think the answer to that is absolutely yes. And it's tragic, because President Biden had to rebuild trust and confidence in NAtO, in the United States.
None of this that he has now engineered to respond would have been possible in the prior administration. In fact, I'm not even sure that the prior administration would have cared enough to ask.
And so, this is a rebuilding of our credibility, of our leverage.
Hillary Clinton "absolutely" agreeing with Joe Scarborough that the "chaos" of the Trump years encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine was sponsored in part by Pfizer, maker of Nexium, and LifeLock.
