Put politics on hold and focus on standing up to Putin

I’m writing this as Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to eat up Ukraine. He may try to swallow up the Baltics as well. Did we fall asleep and wake up in 1938 to hear that Nazi Germany had taken the Sudetenland? Who knew this could happen, in 2022?

Actually, Putin told us he was going to do it with every public statement that avoided a direct “no,” with every troop movement, with every invocation of the sovereignty of the pro-Russian separatist regions. We knew this would happen, and Ukraine’s president knew this was going to happen even though he put on a brave face, and President Joe Biden knew this was going to happen, and Donald Trump knew this was going to happen. There are no surprises when it comes to Putin’s desire to reconstruct the Soviet Union.

And as I watch this unfold, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are no longer the breed of American who parachuted onto the shores of Normandy, marched with the Fighting 69th to battle Germany a generation before them, went, some willingly with honor and some forced but still with dignity, to Vietnam, and who battled in the heat of deserts to avenge the murder of 3,000 fellow citizens.

We are now tribes, divided by loyalties and political expedience. It’s a devastating commentary on where we’re headed as a nation.

I spent a good part of the last few days creating my own cocoon, unfriending those who blamed Biden for weakness and those who blamed Trump for loving Putin. I have decided to block out the noise. For the moment, I’m done with dissent.

That’s because whatever you might think of the wisdom of putting boots on the ground in a country located thousands of miles away, you cannot simply throw up your hands, offer “thoughts and prayers,” and believe that you’ve done your duty as an American when a dictator swallows up a sovereign nation.

You are also derelict if you try and compare what’s happening in Ukraine to our southern border. That’s comparing apples and bloody bodies, or bananas and those standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square. And it’s not because I’m an immigration attorney, or a globalist. I’m about as conservative as they come on national security, and I came of age during President Ronald Reagan’s administration. We are exceptional. We are that shining city on a hill.

But that also means we are obligated to care about our legacy in the world, which has been battered and bruised by many different, flawed men and women. But those leaders are not “America.” We are, and when we start backing off, I despair of ever again being proud of this nation and its history. If that makes me sound like Michelle Obama, so be it.

How the hell can we justify being children of Reagan and then running away from Putin and the evil he injects into the global bloodstream? How, in God’s universe, are we able to stand ourselves for saying “not this time, this is not our battle?”

On the other hand, you have liberals who are so damn obsessed with what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, something that was regrettable but did not destroy our essential character, something whose aftermath reinforced that strength and durability, that they ignore the absolute failure of their own tribe and reach back to blame Trump. Yet if they are calling for engagement, they are making penance for the repellent anti-Americanism they have exhibited in vilifying conservatives for decades.

This may have made no sense, written as it has been from a heart filled with anger. But of one thing I am certain. Any American who takes more pleasure in attacking her political rival than in seeking comfort and protection for the threatened, or who excuses evil if it advances their own partisan goals, is someone I renounce.