On the impeachment

Turns out I have something in common with Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the former NSC expert on Ukraine, and Maria Yovanovich, the ex-ambassador to that country, both of whom have been testifying in the Trump impeachment hearings.

We are all children of parents who fled the vicious dictatorship that was the Soviet Union. And if their parents were like mine, these honorable public servants grew up steeped in the knowledge of what it means to be deprived of life, liberty and basic human rights by a tyrannical regime. We were also schooled in seeing through Soviet disinformation tactics and the constant redefining of reality endemic to that system. So when we see a president of the United States spouting conspiracy theories invented by the FSB (or GRU, KGB, MVD, GPU, NKVD, Cheka—different names for the same rotten thing), and cozying up to the likes of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping, we naturally bristle up. And when cozying up to dictators leads to sacrificing America’s natural allies abroad and endangering her national security in exchange for dirt on political opponents or a hotel in Moscow, we see Red. The Cold War isn’t over, you know. It’s just entering a new phase.

If Vindman’s and Yovanovich’s parents were like mine, they didn’t come to the United States to evade military service or to make a buck. They came because America was a nation committed to “liberty and justice for all,” where the rule of law mattered and where their children could grow up breathing freely.

Well, America under Trump’s leadership and with Republican collaboration has really dropped that torch. Instead of serving as a beacon to the rest of the world—Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill”—it appears she’s become a Trumpian dumpster fire of betrayal, corruption and lies, serving only his personal interests and those of the neo-Soviet dictators he so admires. ALEX MIRONOFF

Fayetteville