J.D. Vance's Apathy Toward Ukraine Is Backfiring

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Venture capitalist and Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance is one of a number of Republican candidates for high office (in his case a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio) who has stumbled in trying to keep up with the MAGA zeitgeist of his party. As a celebrity cultural conservative in 2016, Vance declared himself a “Never Trump guy” and mulled a vote for Hillary Clinton. As late as October of that year, he tweeted of his future lord and master: “My God what an idiot.” Now in the midst of a Trumpier-than-thou Senate race, Vance has had to eat his words, which he now “regrets.”

Reversed opinions aside, Vance’s compensation for his past heresy has mostly involved becoming the most serious “outsider populist” in the Senate field — sort of a Buckeye version of Josh Hawley. Or perhaps Vance can best be compared to his most avid media booster, Fox News commentator and own-the-libs provocateur Tucker Carlson. Like Carlson, Vance has praised Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, the self-styled defender of Western Christendom against migrants and immigrants. But in a recent interaction with an even more outspoken Orban ally who was the original MAGA architect, Steve Bannon, Vance made a crucial mistake while trying to sound like the 45th president. On Bannon’s War Room podcast on the brink of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Vance said “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” It wasn’t a gaffe, since his campaigned proudly tweeted out his remarks:

Link to tweet

This flippant isolationist comment did not go over well after Russia invaded, so Vance put out a long statement expressing sympathy for Ukraine but blaming the “globalists” of the “foreign policy establishment” for backing Putin into a corner and thus leading “the Ukrainians directly into the slaughterhouse.” Subsequently, though, he went on Carlson’s show once again and argued that any aid being offered to Ukraine should instead be appropriated and tripled to spend on America’s borders. Even now, Vance’s campaign website features an image of the candidate and Carlson under the legend: “Secure our Southern Border and NOT Ukraine’s border! Stand with Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance.”

At a time when most Republicans are attacking Joe Biden for insufficient aggressiveness towards Moscow and generosity towards Ukraine, the Vance-Carlson message is jarring. And it’s getting some bad reviews. Vance has been suddenly disinvited — or as The Bulwark’s Jim Swift put it, “canceled” — from a scheduled keynote speaking appearance at the Minnesota Republican Party’s annual Lincoln-Reagan fundraiser:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/j-d-vance-s-apathy-toward-ukraine-is-backfiring/ar-AAVfqXX

[FalloutShelter]

1. Good!

N/T

[blm]

2. Ohio has a large population of Ukrainians and descendants.

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

4. Y E S,

And apparently his people did not do their research.

Plus the fentanyl he alludes to is made in MASSIVE quantity in China. But is smuggled through the southern border as well.

If he wants to secure the border, then start with telling China to keep their poison out of our country and tie a nasty little sanction to it until they do.

I still think he's a jerk.

[dalton99a]

3. Dirty Putin whores

[heckles65]

5. Fentanyl is mostly smuggled in

as a part of legal commerce - not by illegal immigrants. It's not going to be walled out.