Editors’ Blog

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss Russia-Ukraine and President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

Yesterday, as you no doubt saw, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 141 countries voted for the resolution. The 5 who voted against it were an unsurprising list: Russia, two countries Russia essentially owns (Belarus and Syria), another country opposed to any sanctions against bad regimes (North Korea) and Eritrea. The really interesting list though was the 35 abstainers. That list looks like a view into the future, in part because the bulk of the countries abstaining looked less like they were seeking to avoid criticism of Russia than they were following the diplomatic lead of China — the most prominent abstainer on the list.

A quick followup on the news from last night that the Jan. 6 committee claims it has a good faith basis for believing President Trump broke the law when he pressured Mike Pence to reject the electoral vote count.

As I explained in the Morning Memo, this arose in the context of the committee trying to overcome an attorney-client privilege argument being raised by John Eastman, the Trump adviser who is fighting a committee subpoena for his emails.

“She was just annoyed at having to see her ex-lover’s face on billboards as she drove around Plano.”

According to the Dallas Morning News, that was Plano, Texas resident Tania Joya’s justification for spilling the beans about an affair she had with incumbent Rep. Van Taylor (R-TX) to one of his opponents ahead of Tuesday’s primary.

Look, we’ve all been there.

But there’s a lot of other stuff going on here — far more, in fact, than Joya’s very valid logic. Let’s unpack.

I’ve mentioned this a few times already. But I remain stunned at the number of people I’m generally used to seeing decrying “forever wars” and the military industrial complex insisting the time has come for us to intervene militarily in Ukraine. The favored demand seems to be a “no fly zone” either over Kyiv or the entirety of Ukraine — which in case you haven’t reviewed the maps is a very large country. The preference for “no fly zones” is itself a reminder that the U.S. public has virtually no living memory of war with a peer military force or even one that can put up any kind of fight. The word gets tossed around as though it described a kind of high tech forcefield the U.S. deploys when we’ve gotten fed up with the pictures we’re seeing on TV. I’ve even seen people questioning whether a “no fly zone” actually constitutes an act of war.

Over the years, Pat Robertson and other fringe evangelicals and non-serious Christian scholars have become known for exegesis-ing any and all current news events into some sort of Biblical End Time prophesy. For some, COVID vaccines are the “Mark of the Beast.” For others, President Obama was the anti-Christ. (Trump got that distinction, too). The legalization of gay marriage in the U.S. was believed to be a signal that some hybrid Sodom and Gomorrah/rapture-induction event was imminent.

There’s one point I want to re-emphasize though it may sound a discordant note. In wartime communications even the good guys lie. Indeed, there’s at least some argument that wartime deception is a component of warfare itself. But the point is, governments and armies lie — especially when their backs are against the wall. The chaos and confusion of war also create erroneous reports. Sometimes the two intertwine. So while most of the claims we see coming out of the Russian side are downright Orwellian, we shouldn’t assume that all the claims we’re hearing from the Ukrainian side will bear out.

Twitter is chock full of hyperbole, ignorance and deception. But one of its special qualities is that if you take some care and follow some basic rules you can find people who you can actually learn quite a lot from. They’re out there. And during chaotic and fast-moving news events you can learn a lot from them. One of those people is Michael Kofman, who is one of the people on my list of people to follow to keep track of developments in the Ukraine Crisis. Among other things he’s the Director of the Russia Studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses, the main Navy/Marines think tank in Washington, DC. His opinions may be right or wrong. But given the Navy’s/Marine Corps’ interest in keeping tabs on the Russian military we can be confident he’s highly knowledgable about that topic specifically. I’ve been following his commentary over the last week or so and yesterday he posted a lengthy Twitter thread about what we’ve seen over the last three days.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis tweeted triumphantly this afternoon that he rejected the Biden administration’s request for states to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. ahead of Tuesday’s State of the Union speech.

I wanted to address a few points that have come up in discussions about the Ukraine Crisis in recent days and which John mentions below. I’ll start with the question of U.S. intelligence estimates about an imminent Russian invasion which appear to have been very accurate both in the overall prediction and the specifics of how one would take place.

I’ve seen a number of people say this was a surprise or at least not a given because of the intelligence failure that preceded the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

But I view this very differently.