Author: Andrew Sullivan

What Can We Do About Ukraine?

Jamila Trindle considers sanctions:

Future sanctions against Ukraine would almost certainly be far more limited than what has been in place against Iran, out of concern that the sanctions could hurt ordinary Ukrainians and push public opinion toward embracing an alliance with Russia.  Sanctions would likely focus solely on Ukrainian officials and their supporters.  They would also be less effective because Russia would likely not join in on measures targeting one of its closest allies. The current crisis began late last year when Ukrainians took to the streets after Yanukovych rejected an EU trade deal in favor of a bailout from Russia.

Sam Cutler, a policy advisor for sanctions law firm Ferrari & Associates, says sanctions alone are unlikely to force the government to ease its crackdown or negotiate with protesters. “It’s a way for politicians in the EU and the U.S. to say, ‘Look how much we’re doing,’ and to take a moral stand, but it has to be a complement to a broader policy,” Cutler said.

Hayes Brown looks at the actions that have been taken already:

The European Union on Thursday approved targeted sanctions on Ukrainian government officials, as well as an arms embargo on the country. The U.S. also announced on Wednesday evening that it was imposing a visa ban on 20 Ukrainian officials as part of their initial response to recent escalations. Experts, however, say that the announced embargos are unlikely to do much to change Yanukovych’s calculations. This is particularly true of the arms ban, since as Ukraine was a primary hub for manufacturing weapons during the Soviet Era they are awash in weapons.

Larison’s view:

I don’t see what constructive difference imposing targeted sanctions would have, but since imposing sanctions is almost always done just to express disapproval rather than achieve anything I suppose that is what the U.S. and EU will end up doing. All in all, there doesn’t seem to be very much that the U.S. can do that would be constructive, and it shouldn’t seek to have a larger role in trying to resolve the crisis.

Quote For The Day

“He said, ‘I will pray with you,’ but that’s all he’d do. That was it. I just saw red. I cursed at a priest. I called him a hypocrite. As he was leaving — I can’t repeat what I said, but it was bad … I’m thinking I’m going to rot in hell now. But after that, I became scared — fear settled in. I don’t have the rites, I didn’t get Communion. I believed in the sacraments; this is something we’re taught we need before we die… I’ve tried to be a decent person all my life. I’m not perfect, believe me. And I wouldn’t wish [being gay] on anyone. But you can’t be somebody you’re not. Otherwise you’ll end up 63 and alone,” – Ronald Plishka, denied last rites after a heart attack by a Catholic priest in a Washington hospital.

What The Hell Is Happening In Venezuela? Ctd

A reader updates us on the crisis:

The timing – coinciding with the once-in-a-generation freakout in Ukraine – is unfortunate, but you really need to have a second look at what happened last night in Venezuela. Basij-style pro-government paramilitaries on motorbikes shooting directly into protesters, the National Guard firing tear gas cannisters directly into residential buildings … there just aren’t any precedents for what we saw last night. Some of the videos and photos are … well, just staggering. It was very much what we’ve all been fearing would happen since Chávez first came to power 15 years ago. Worse still is the way the Western media is asleep at the switch. It’s as though we only have attention for one crisis like this at a time, and all the camera crews are already in Kyev.

Another reader is also frustrated that “none of the major media organs utter a word about Venezuela”:

Ukraine is not a NATO ally or a part of the EU, and Venezuela is a major source of oil of the United States. And in our hemisphere to boot. Another reminder that unless we’re talking about illegal immigration or drug cartels, the American MSM doesn’t give two shits about Latin America.

Update from another:

Although the sentiment of the last sentence may be true, it’s worth pointing out that Ukraine borders four NATO members, has been part of NATO’s Partnership for Peace since the early 1990s and has sent troops to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and BiH. There has been extensive cooperation between NATO and Ukraine both to build Ukrainian military cooperation and also to place this under effective civilian control. And of course Ukraine is not part of the EU but it was the cynical decision of Yanukovych regime to walk away from a landmark trade agreement with the EU that sparked the recent protests. The bottom line is that Ukraine matters to European security.

Without wishing to fisk your correspondent, one might also point out that Venezuelan oil exports to the US have plummeted with the growth of US shale oil and that the disturbances in Caracas are a fraction of the THREE-month stand off in Kyiv which saw many, many deaths today.

Another:

One of the reasons we’re seeing a lot more coverage of Ukraine than Venezuela is that the latter’s thugs have done a very thorough job of cutting off nonofficial communication with the outside world, better than their counterparts did in Syria or Iran at a similar stage of their recent upheavals. Kiev, in contrast, is practically smoking up my office and laying out its dead on my desk. It’s easier to empathize with the suffering you can see than with the suffering you can only imagine.

One more:

Please keep covering what is going in Venezuela. As a Cuban-born American, I’m inspired by the courage of Venezuelans in resisting the same oppression that turned Cuba into a virtual jail. #prayforvenezuela #sosvenezuela

Ted Cruz Is Right

I have to say that the Robespierre of the Tea Party has a point here, doesn’t he? He’s talking about the vote to raise the debt ceiling

What Republican leadership said is we want this to pass, but if every senator affirmatively consents to doing it on 51 votes, then we can all cast a vote no and we can go home to our constituents and say we opposed it. And listen, that sort of show vote, that sort of trickery to the – to the constituents is why Congress has a 13 percent approval rating. In my view, we need to be honest with our constituents. And last week, what it was all about was truth and transparency. I think all 45 Republicans should have stood together and said of course not.

A-fucking-men. The entire Washington dance of wanting things to pass but not wanting to actually vote for them is both an inevitable part of political maneuvering and also deeply corrosive, if allowed to become the norm, of representative democracy. There has come a point in Washington where what would appear to sane outsiders as an act of preposterous hypocrisy, weaseling and cowardice … has simply become routine. And the umbrage of two-faced Senators complaining that they actually had to take a stand on something is, once you allow the layers of world-weariness to peel off, an obvious affront to, well, all of us.

Ted Cruz is a world-class meshuggenah asshole. But at least he’s not as unremittingly Washington as John McCain and Mitch McConnell.

A Ukrainian Civil War?

Simon Shuster thinks things are moving in that direction:

As the sun rose, it became all too apparent that lethal weapons – not merely stun grenades, rocks and Molotov cocktails, but rifles and pistols – had entered the fray on both sides. The conflict appeared to be spiraling toward a civil war, as deadly clashes between armed protestors and police were also reported in at least three other cities. Both sides blamed each other for the escalation.

But Keating sees civil war as unlikely:

Ukrainians may be split almost down the middle on whether they support the protests, but few support the use of force against them. Also, despite the country’s clear split between the Catholic, Ukrainian-speaking west and Orthodox, Russian-speaking east, support for the country’s independence has actually increased over the years, even in the east. (Crimea, which is majority-ethnic-Russian, may be something of an outlier.) And while the general ideological sentiments of the two camps are clear, it also seems like actual enthusiasm for Yanukovych is fairly thin, even among government supporters, and the opposition’s leadership is divided between three men—Vitali Klitschko, Oleh Tyahnybok, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk—all of whom carry some fairly serious flaws as potential leaders of a long-term nationalist uprising.

Fisher weighs in on the prospect of civil war:

The government’s talk about “anti-terrorist” operations doesn’t bode well. And Yanukovych fired his army chief on Wednesday – an extremely bad sign. We don’t know why he did it, but speculation has immediately turned to the possibility that the army chief had refused orders to bring the military out into Kiev’s streets. If that’s the case, then this is worrying both because it implies that Yanukovych may have been pushing for military involvement and because it hints at possible splits within the military leadership. All very bad signs.

Masha Lipman warns that “Ukraine is balancing on the brink of a large-scale armed conflict”:

Yanukovych, from his perspective, has to stay in power at any cost. He had his most serious political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, jailed. If he loses power, he can expect that the same will happen to him, especially after he has brought his country to a bloody political crisis in which several dozen have already been killed and hundreds wounded. His circle of cronies, his son among them, many of whom have enriched themselves through corruption during his tenure, may face the same fate.

You’ll Never Be Ready For Marriage

Matt Walsh explains why:

We commonly view living together as a logical step before marriage, but it isn’t. It’s something some people do, but it isn’t a step to marriage. Your marriage is defined by the commitment you make to the other person — not by the bathroom or mortgage you share. Living with someone is not a “warm up” for marriage or a “try out” period, precisely because it lacks the essential, definitive characteristic of that permanent commitment. You can’t comfortably transition into an eternal vow. You make it, and then it’s made. Period.

Dreher nods along:

This sounds familiar, because it’s a lot like the path Julie and I followed.

We met one weekend in the autumn of 1996, when I was visiting Austin. We fell instantly, and hard. I was living in Fort Lauderdale, she was finishing college in Austin. Our courtship, such as it was, became mostly a matter of letters and phone calls. Owing to the expense of plane tickets, we saw each other maybe once a month, but usually less frequently. After four months, we became engaged, but waited most of that year for Julie to finish college before we married. Our honeymoon was the longest continuous period of time we had spent in each other’s company since we met.

But it worked, and worked brilliantly, because the answers we held in our hearts were the same as Matt Walsh and his wife held in their hearts. You cannot know in advance what will await you in the wild unknown country of marriage. All you can know — and it’s a matter of intuition as much as anything else — is that you want to have that adventure with the one you love.

Cool Ad Watch

A surprisingly clever spot from Coca-Cola:

Tim Nudd adds:

The video is pretty goofy for Coke, which usually prefers more feel-good stunts that don’t liken its target market to animals that can’t stop licking their stitches. But there’s some honestly there, at least. Just don’t share this with your friends. Coke wouldn’t want that.

Update from a reader, who shows how unoriginal the ad is after all:

Do you think Coke has to pay royalties on that commercial to The New Yorker? This cartoon ran a while back:

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Ceasefires Are Deadly

According to John Stevenson:

My research on all 174 of the internationally recognized new states that have emerged since 1900 and scores of mass killings reveals that international involvement to temporarily address the symptoms of the violence—the mass death of civilians—increases the likelihood of greater violence and destruction. That is because cease-fires do nothing to eliminate the root causes of violence against civilians. Instead, both sides use the pause in killing to solicit diplomatic and military aid while planning and preparing their next wave of attacks.

The Two Thailands

THAILAND-POLITICS-PROTEST

Duncan McCargo explores some of the deeper currents motivating Thailand’s ongoing political crisis. Among them is “the growing political chasm that separates greater Bangkok and the country’s south from its less affluent but more populous regions in the north and northeast”:

Because of Thailand’s hidden “caste system” — which is linked to popular Buddhist notions that the poor deserve their lower status because of accumulated demerits from previous lives — Bangkokians typically have a profoundly paternalistic view of the masses. [Former PM] Thaksin [Shinawatra]’s populist, can-do message, the stuff of self-help books, resonated deeply with many voters in the north and northeast. The leaders of the current anti-government protests — many of whom come from Bangkok — constantly deride these voters as ignorant and susceptible to electoral manipulation and vote-buying. Worse still, these anti-government protesters accuse pro-Thaksin voters of disloyalty to the Thai nation and the monarchy. On Jan. 26, I heard one rally speaker declare that those who had taken part in advance voting did not really love Thailand, and were probably in fact Cambodians casting fake ballots.

Meanwhile, current PM Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s sister, is facing corruption charges and more violent protests, raising the odds that the crisis will come-8 to a head:

There’s still a possibility of a Yingluck ouster that doesn’t involve once again tearing up the Thai constitution. In a major step toward impeachment, the kingdom’s National Anti-Corruption Commission said on Tuesday it has enough evidence to charge Yingluck with graft associated with her ill-fated program to buy rice from farmers at above-market prices. Thailand has spent 689 billion baht ($21.2 billion) on the program, resulting in rice that the government cannot sell. The stockpile now weighs 14.7 million tons, compared with just 6.1 million tons in 2010.

The opposition has long denounced the rice program as an ill-disguised scheme to reward Yingluck voters in rural areas, and the anti-corruption commission now alleges that graft took place at all stages of the program. Yingluck did nothing to stop it, the commission claims, “which shows that she was negligent in her duty or corrupt and abused her power under the constitution, which may be a cause for impeachment.”

Previous Dish on Thailand here.

(Photo: A policeman observes a demonstration by anti-government protestors in Bangkok on February 14, 2014. Thousands of riot police were deployed in the Thai capital on February 14 to clear areas occupied for weeks by opposition protesters seeking to force Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra from office. By Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images)

The Black Republican Advantage

Jamelle Bouie argues that African-American pols running for statewide office are “much better off in the GOP,” at least strategically: 

I wrote about this at length a few years ago, but in short, if you are a black lawmaker in the House, or the black mayor of a city – the kinds of people who tend to run for statewide office, in other words –odds are overwhelming that you serve a “majority-minority” constituency in a heavily Democratic area. This leads to a few things: First – even if you live in a largely liberal state – you’re considerably to the left of the median voter in your state. Think John Lewis in Georgia, or Bobby Scott in Virginia for examples of this.

Second, you’re likely to lead or represent a low-income area, which makes it harder to raise money for a statewide bid, on account of a smaller fundraising base. And finally, most majority-minority districts, or cities, are located in larger states, where – by definition – there’s more competition for statewide office. Either one of these alone is surmountable for a skilled and ambitious politician. But together, they present a huge barrier to advancement for African American lawmakers who are looking to statewide office …

Insofar that they exist, black Republican lawmakers don’t have these problems. Most likely, they’re representing middle-class to affluent white constituencies, placing them closer to the median voter, statewide, and giving them a healthy base for fundraising. And, judging from Scott in South Carolina, Shannon in Oklahoma, and Mia Love in Utah – who is likely to win her bid for a House seat this year—they seem to emerge in small, highly partisan states where the pool of candidates isn’t as deep, and inter-party competition is less fierce.