Republicans Now Defending Putin’s ‘Strong Leadership’ Thanks To Trump. …

Source: Daily Wire | September 9, 2016 | Ben Shapiro

Republicans Now Defending Putin’s ‘Strong Leadership’ Thanks To Trump. Yes, That’s A Problem.

On Wednesday night, Donald Trump replayed some of his greatest foreign policy hits: take the oil, we wasted American lives in Iraq, he knows more than the generals. But his most widely-covered statements came with regard to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin:

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This is not the first time Trump has defended Putin as stronk like bool! before. Back in December, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked Trump about Putin killing journalists and invading countries. Trump’s answer: “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader. Unlike what we have in this country.” Scarborough then reiterated: “He kills journalists that disagree with him.” And Trump again: “I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, so, you know.”

This is pretty disreputable stuff. Putin is strong in the same way that Kim Jung Un, who just banned sarcasm in North Korea, is strong. He’s strong the way Stalin was strong. He’s a dictator. Dictators have the capacity to dictate. By definition, they’re strong. Have you ever heard of a weak dictator? For the love of God, they’re called strongmen in common parlance.

Now, if Trump had said that Putin is destroying America’s credibility internationally, and outplaying President Obama in doing so, that wouldn’t just be decent, that would be true. But he didn’t. He admires Putin’s savagery, which is why he defends Putin hacking American institutions (“nobody knows that for a fact”) and killing his opponents (“I think our country does plenty of killing also”). He thinks Putin is popular – which, it turns out, is easy to assure when you’re murdering your opponents. There’s a reason the Castros routinely win 100% of the vote in their “re-elections.”

But many Trump defenders no longer call this game honestly. Instead, they attempt to rewrite Trump’s own verbiage to mean that he’s critiquing Obama’s weakness instead of praising Putin’s “strength.” Take, for example, Trump’s vice presidential water carrier, Mike Pence. Pence called Trump the new iteration of Ronald Reagan yesterday, stating that Trump will bring “truth and toughness” to the White House. Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980, who was busily losing to the Soviets. At no point did Reagan suggest that Brezhnev was a “strong leader” who hadn’t committed sins in order to ding the incompetent and nasty Carter. But Pence went even further: “I think it’s inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country.” He then added, lamely, “Trump said last night he doesn’t particularly like the system.”

Hugh Hewitt takes the same tack: “Putin’s an evil man. POTUS a good but incompetent man. Putin has served his country’s national interests better.” Making the analogy, Hewitt went on to defend Mao as “the greatest murderer of post-WW2 era, but most historians rank him effective leader.” That’s arguable on its own – Russians living in abject poverty while watching their country devolve into an authoritarian petro-oligarchy might think otherwise, and the 45 million Chinese who died in a four-year period during the Great Leap Forward might have some quibbles.

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This is the problem. It is possible to say what Pence says. It possible to say what Hewitt says. But Trump is not saying those things. Pence and Hewitt aren’t raising Trump’s rhetoric to their own level – they’re not saving him. He’s dragging them down to his level, because it now appears that both Pence and Hewitt, in order to defend Trump, are defending Putin even if they don’t mean to do so.

When the media smack Republicans for admiring a foreign dictator, they’re certainly hypocrites – Obama has emboldened evil dictators around the world, including Putin, and the media have cheered him on. But they’re not wrong about Trump and Putin. Pretending they are only destroys the credibility of Trump defenders and the Republican Party for which Trump now, pathetically, carries the banner.

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  • Consistent #9870

    Consistent #9871

    EVERYDAY #9874

    The GOP could have prevented Trump’s nomination, but it didn’t. Now the party is stuck with him and will sink with him. At this point, I really don’t care what happens to the party. It deserves whatever fate befalls it

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