Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Conservatives in disarray here and abroad

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We begin today with an exclusive by George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Calvert of The Sunday Times in Londongrad writing that Ukraine began asking Great Britain for lethal military assistance right after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and through the terms of three Conservative prime ministers and were refused. Until recently.

In the years after the invasion of Crimea, there would be much rhetoric directed against the Kremlin from successive British prime ministers and foreign secretaries. However, the words were not matched by action and a series of clear opportunities were missed to challenge Putin and his London-based allies. […]

There were many calls for Britain to confront Putin in a way that would demonstrate the high cost he would have to pay for breaking international law. The pressure to take decisive action greatly increased after the Salisbury chemical weapon attack.

As a result, two parliamentary inquiries — by the foreign affairs committee in 2018 and the intelligence and security committee in 2020 — called for sanctions to be imposed on the oligarchs in London. The committees’ recommendations, however, were largely ignored by the May and Johnson governments. While he was foreign secretary, Johnson sidestepped implementing the findings of the foreign affairs committee and later, as prime minister, delayed the release of the intelligence committee’s report. Britain did not independently sanction any oligarch with known UK assets until Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.

There were a number of reasons for this inertia. A significant one, some claim, was the cosy relationship between the government and wealthy Russians who entertained ministers; gave money to the Conservative Party; brought wealth into London; and acquired important national assets such as a newspaper and Premier League football clubs.

What’s notable about this reporting by The Sunday Times is that a few of the former government ministers were willing to go on the record for this story. The Sunday Times also notes that even the Trump Administration summoned the will to at least sanction a few oligarchs whereas the Brits did not impose any sort of sanctions or restrictions until July 2020; a rather eye-popping bit of news for this liberal on this side of the pond.

Considering that Rupert Murdoch and News Corp owns The Sunday Times, I must say that conservatives are in disarray all over the place, it seems.

Dan Balz of The Washington Post writes that the only thing that animates House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is keeping his hopes of becoming Speaker of the House alive.

After offering critical remarks about Trump on the House floor in the days after the Capitol attack, McCarthy lost his nerve. He made a pilgrimage to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, the supplicant asking the monarch for forgiveness. They were photographed together, the public record of the visit Trump’s apparent punishment for the earlier criticism.

McCarthy has since been craven in bowing to Trump’s wishes, fearing that crossing the former president could compromise both his party’s hopes of capturing the majority in November’s midterm elections and his own desire to lead a Republican-controlled House next year as speaker. He also has been weak in the face of calls to discipline the most extreme members of the House GOP conference — those who have been the most loyal to Trump and his conspiracy theories, including the false claim that he won the 2020 election.

[…]

This is what the Republican Party in the House of Representatives now stands for — the abandonment of a principled conservative leader and the possible elevation of a politician whose abiding principle is the pursuit of power, one who has bent and bowed before a former president whose actions he denounced and knew were wrong.

Heather Cox Richardson writes for her Letters From an American blog naming the names of some the Congresspersons who plotted to overthrow American democracy.

Let’s be clear: the people working to keep Trump in office by overturning the will of the people were trying to destroy our democracy. Not one of them, or any of those who plotted with them, called out the illegal attempt to destroy our government.

To what end did they seek to overthrow our democracy?

The current Republican Party has two wings: one eager to get rid of any regulation of business, and one that wants to get rid of the civil rights protections that the Supreme Court and Congress began to put into place in the 1950s. Business regulation is actually quite popular in the U.S., so to build a political following, in the 1980s, leaders of the anti-regulation wing of the Republican Party promised racists and the religious right that they would stomp out the civil rights legislation that since the 1950s has tried to make all Americans equal before the law.

But even this marriage has not been enough to win elections, since most Americans like business regulation and the protection of things like the right to use birth control. So, to put its vision into place, the Republican Party has now abandoned democracy. Its leaders have concluded that any Democratic victory is illegitimate, even if voters have clearly chosen a Democrat, as they did with Biden in 2020, by more than 7 million votes.

Renée Graham of the Boston Globe notes that Russian President Vladimir Putin has a new pupil: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Like Donald Trump, his political mentor turned detractor, DeSantis appears to be taking his budding dictator cues straight from the Kremlin. Last month, when he signed into law the execrable Parental Rights in Education bill, which bars teachers from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity with children in kindergarten through third grade, DeSantis said that teaching young kids that “they can be whatever they want to be” is “inappropriate.” Those who’ve dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law are promoting “woke gender ideology,” he said.[…]

Putin is an autocrat who has ruled Russia since 1999. In a ruthless move, DeSantis is consolidating power with his GOP-centric reconfiguring of Florida’s congressional districts that — and stop me if you’ve heard this one before — would have a disproportionate impact on Black voters. The change will likely cut the number of Black Democratic representatives in Congress while boosting Republican chances to pick up House seats in November. Even a sit-in on the Florida House floor Thursday led by Black Democrats could only delay but not prevent its passage.

And in an act of pure retaliation, DeSantis went after Mickey Mouse. After pressure from LGBTQ employees, Walt Disney Company officials denounced and pledged to help repeal the “Don’t Say Gay” law. On Thursday the Florida legislature revoked Disney World’s special tax district status that has allowed the 25,000-acre theme park complex near Orlando to operate as a separate municipality since 1967. There’s no doubt DeSantis will sign it into law to send a pointed warning to other companies that might consider publicly bucking him or his policies.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes that a recession may— or may not— happen.

The other type of nuclear weapons are tactical, or nonstrategic, which the U.S. is more worried about today. They are shorter-range—they travel up to three hundred miles—and often have lower-yield warheads. (Some, though, carry more kilotons than the Hiroshima bomb.) They are designed to take out tank or troop formations on a battlefield—not wipe out a city. In the history of nuclear weapons, there has never been a treaty—bilateral or international—that limits developing or deploying tactical nukes anywhere. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union produced thousands each, with Moscow controlling up to twenty-five thousand. Afterward, the U.S. dismantled most of its tactical arsenal and withdrew most of those weapons from Europe. Russia kept more of its stockpile. There is now a vast disparity in tactical arsenals. Last month, the Congressional Research Service reported that Russia has up to two thousand tactical nukes, while the U.S. has around two hundred.

Today, Russia also has many more delivery systems for tactical nuclear weapons—submarine torpedoes, ballistic missiles on land or sea, artillery shells, and aircraft—while the U.S. has only gravity bombs that can be dropped from warplanes. “They have more diverse capabilities than we do,” McKenzie concluded. More than a hundred U.S. tactical nukes are again situated in Europe, at bases in five nato countries: Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey. Most of Russia’s are on its western front, near the borders of NATO members.

Four scenarios may lead Russia to use a nuclear weapon, according to Kimball of the Arms Control Association. To coerce Kyiv or its NATO allies to back down, Putin could carry out a “demonstration” bombing in the atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean or the Baltic Sea—not for killing, but “to remind everyone that Russia has nuclear weapons.” Russia could also use tactical weapons to change the military balance on the ground with Ukraine. If the war expands, and NATO gets drawn into the fight, Russia could further escalate the conflict with the use of short-range nuclear weapons. “Both U.S. and Russian policy leave open the possibility of using nuclear weapons in response to an extreme non-nuclear threat,” Kimball said. Finally, if Putin believes that the Russian state (or leadership) is at risk, he might use a tactical nuclear weapon to “save Russia from a major military defeat.” Russia has lost some twenty-five per cent of its combat power in the last two months, a Pentagon official estimated this week. Moscow’s military doctrine reserves the right to use nuclear weapons “in response to the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction” against Russia or its allies, and also in response to aggression via conventional weapons “when the very existence of the state is threatened.” In military jargon, the country’s policy is “to escalate to de-escalate,” Richard Burt, the lead negotiator on the original start accord, which was signed by Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush in 1991, told me. “The idea is to so shock the adversary that a nuclear weapon has been used, to demonstrate your resolve that you’re willing to use a nuclear weapon, that you paralyze your adversary.”

Steffan Klusmann of Der Spiegel writes that it is time for German Chancellor to stand up to Russian aggression.

According to a recent survey, many Germans now doubt their chancellor’s abilities. Just under two-thirds don’t consider him to be a strong leader. Is Olaf Scholz, who likes to attest to his own leadership, ultimately the wrong chancellor for these challenging times?

What is certain is this: He’s stuck in a dilemma that is difficult to resolve. His goal is to avert harm to the German people, and he has taken an oath of office to that end. Germany must not be dragged into the war under any circumstances, because Putin is capable of anything. Yet this is precisely the crux of the matter, and Scholz probably doesn’t want to talk about it publicly because it could be interpreted as a betrayal of Ukraine: What if Putin doesn’t get anywhere in the Donbas either? What if the arms supplies from the West actually enable Zelenskyy’s troops to withstand the Russians’ superior force?

For Putin, that would be tantamount to disgrace. In Scholz’s Chancellery, officials now assume that the Kremlin boss could then use nuclear weapons as a last resort. But what if those bombs fall not on Ukrainian soil but instead on Warsaw or Berlin? That Putin isn’t solely concerned with Ukraine, but with a reordering of the balance of power in Europe – they have understood that much in the Chancellery. This means, conversely, that they are no longer ruling out any possibility any longer.

Hans von de Burchard of POLITICO Europe points out that the German Green Party has become uncharacteristically hawkish because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Green Party is also gaining in popularity in Germany.

Habeck, the economy and climate minister, and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock — the Cabinet’s leading Greens — helped overturn a long-standing policy, of both Germany and their own party, to send defensive weapons to Ukraine. And they have since gone significantly further — pushing Social Democrat Scholz publicly and privately to send heavy weapons to aid Kyiv.

The shift is the latest chapter in the relatively short history of a party that grew out of environmental, pacifist and anti-nuclear movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has now begun its second spell in national government. […]

The Greens’ stance is striking a chord across Germany, too. Habeck, who is also at the forefront of efforts to wean Germany off its dependency on Russian energy, has become the country’s most popular politician, according to an Insa poll last week. Baerbock came second in that ranking — ahead of Scholz, who topped the chart not so long ago.

Finally, the second round of the French presidential election is being held today, with incumbent President Emmanuel Macron expected to win a second term and defeat the far right’s Marine Le Pen.

I was intrigued by this article at France 24 about how French pollsters project their election winners without using “exit polls.”

Unlike in most other democracies, where those projections are based on exit polls, French pollsters base their estimates on ballots that have actually been counted. Those estimates are updated throughout the evening as the vote count progresses.

“The main difference with an exit poll is that instead of asking people outside the polling station how they voted, we look straight at their ballots,” says Mathieu Doiret of the Ipsos polling institute, FRANCE 24’s partner for the presidential election. “This means we have to wait for the first polling stations to close at 7pm, whereas exit polls can be worked on throughout the day.”

Like other pollsters, Ipsos relies on feedback from hundreds of polling stations scattered across France. The sample is chosen to ensure it is representative of the diversity of French constituencies while also matching the overall result of the last presidential election, which is used as a benchmark.

There are turnout numbers available for the French overseas departments.

Here are the final polls and the approximate time that we should know the winner of the French presidential election.

Everyone have a great day!