Senator Mike Rounds has said he views Vladimir Putin as the enemy and stands with the people of Ukraine. South Dakota’s junior Senator told Fox News Sunday that the United States must do whatever it can to help Ukraine:
“It’s been great that we’ve been able to get as many of those weapons in as already — as we have,” Rounds said. “But we’ve got — we’ve got more on the way and, uh, we clearly support them. We want them to be successful in this and we’d love to have them retain their country. Clearly, they’re brave. They are fighting and there’s a whole lot of us that are doing everything we can to assist them” [Sarah K. Burris, “Republican Senator Celebrates Ukraine Aid and Weapons Delivery—After He Voted Against It,” Raw Story, 2022.03.13].
But last week he voted against sending Ukraine $13.6 billion in humanitarian and military aid to help the people of Ukraine stand against our common enemy:
The Senate passed a $1.5 trillion appropriations package on Thursday that included $13.6 billion in emergency humanitarian and military aid for Ukraine amid the ongoing Russian invasion.
The legislation won bipartisan support but 31 Republican senators voted against the measure, with Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) saying he supported helping Ukraine but arguing the process was rushed. Other Republicans voiced similar concerns.
…About half of the $13.6 billion will be spent on military aid for Ukraine as well as the cost of sending U.S. troops to NATO countries in Europe amid the crisis. The rest will be used for humanitarian aid and economic assistance. That aid is just one aspect of the much larger bill, which will fund the U.S. government and avoid a shutdown [Darragh Roche, “Full List of 31 Republicans Who Voted Against Military Aid for Ukraine,” Newsweek, 2022.03.11].
Ukraine needs help, but Rounds votes against helping Ukraine and votes to shut down our own government. Tell us again, Senator Rounds: who is the enemy?
Only the US Senate could sit on their hands, doing nothing for a year, then refer to the results as being “rushed.” For the GOP, the two options are “rushed” or full obstruction.
South Dakota’s good old junior senator is probably hoping Putin would just come to Charles Mix County to hunt or steal from Native children’s educational funds, then takes care of self-inflicted business like his other cronies.
In the 1940s, some in the U.S. Congress waited for the killing to get worst before letting others push them into action to stop it. Strangely, the 31 republican senators are in favor of stopping a woman for any purpose from aborting a fetus but don’t mind if a nut case running a country uses bullets or bombs to murder the born and yet to be born. To those 31 republican senators, it seems, it’s about the tools and methods of stopping births or killing newly born babies that make a difference.
It is learned the moral compasses of the SD Republicans in Washington get bent. Look at how Senator Rounds fell in line with other hypocritical Senators; like Cotton of Arkansas, Cruz of Texas, Hawley of Missouri, the list goes on to all 30 Senators who jumped on the help Putin train along with Senator Rounds. RINO Thune is on the down-low as he is in campaign mode, cannot show his true self until after November 2022.
A sad thoughtless, heartless bunch who are following 45’s praising Putin with inaction and attempting to block or stall aid to the innocent babies born and yet to be born. Yep, heard those historical stories growing up on the reservation and have gone to see the mass buried evidence on the Pine Ridge reservation of men, women, and children killed by the military then dumped into a large dug-out without ceremony or care. I guess the tools and methods make it right, as there were 20 Medals of Honor given to the perpetrators of that massacre. Lucky, those types of honors cannot be given outside the U.S. or the 31 Senators will be lining up to give one to Putin via 45. Harsh! Listen to Ukrainian families talk about their relatives killed, especially the killing stories of babies or the moms carrying babies in the maternity hospital destroyed.
Time to send a new representative and senator to Washington in November 2022. SD is stuck with Rounds for several more years unless he takes to driving SD highways; South Dakotans know riding a motorcycle or walking public highways could be a death sentence when inept inbred Republicans are at the wheel of a car.
Don’t get me started on Drill Here, Drill Now, who might have just gotten On It.
After 2014, Putin’s regime began to evolve into something entirely different.
The annexation of Crimea was the first significant foreign policy initiative undertaken without regard for Western reaction. This new approach soon manifested in the Donbass and Syria conflicts, as well as in Russia’s information and cyber policy toward Western countries. ***
Crimea rallied Russians behind Putin — but Putin no longer listened to them.
With his continuing focus on foreign policy, the president moved away from his own political elite, resulting not just in an increasingly detached president, but also a power vacuum within the vertical.
This has resulted in fierce infighting among the elite, as the high-profile arrests of former Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev and senator Rauf Arashukov demonstrated. Here too, we see signs of Putin’s weakness as a political leader.
For Russia, the main consequence of annexing Crimea has been the gradual shriveling of Putin as the country’s domestic leader.
A tightly coiled political vacuum has formed, and it is closely guarded against alternative elements. Vladislav Surkov’s notorious open letter sums it up well: never before has anyone described the lack of ideas and cynicism of Putin’s new Russia with such candor.
The annexation of Crimea allowed the president to cast Russian society as a silent, helpless, impotent mass, forever in debt to the president for bringing the peninsula “home.” Russian society, however, is starting to show that it never signed up for these terms.
Opinion, The Moscow Times 3/15/19
***
Sen Ron Johnson (WI) was appearing on right-wing talk broadcasts to peddle Trump’s conspiracy theories about Ukraine and Russia.
The senator’s record has been so shameful that last week, when Johnson was attacking Biden — and failing to call out Trump — Daniel Goldman, the former general counsel for the House Intelligence Committee who helped lead the impeachment inquiry against Trump, challenged the senator directly. “You knowingly promoted Russian disinformation from known Russian assets in Ukraine to help Trump’s reelection in 2020, even though you knew it was all bogus,” declared the former assistant U.S. attorney in Southern District of New York. “You spent the Fourth of July in Russia. You can try to whitewash your actions, but we remember.”
So did Sen Thune. Sen Rounds just voted against Ukraine military funding.
“It is important to remember. Johnson has repeatedly lied in order to retain the favor of Donald Trump. Those lies came back to haunt the world last week as Trump celebrated Putin’s murderous strategies for invading and occupying Ukraine.” John Nichols, Capitol Times 3/7/22
Every war is a banker’s war.
Former Governor Rounds was elected to the US Senate with cash from the Kochs’ National Federation of Independent Business. The so-called “Americans for Prosperity” is a Koch-soaked dark money group with an agent in Sioux Falls. South Dakota’s GOP legislators and candidates enjoy millions in lobbyist benefits from the Kochs and their American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC.
South Dakota has joined with other mostly red states to resist the Biden initiative in what they say is federal interference because with guidance from the Koch Machine Republican Governor Kristi Noem has learned how to raise money from the extreme white wing of the Republican Party so she’s a pro now.
Today Koch is one of four corporations that control the production and sale of nitrogen-based fertilizer in the US. The others are Yara-USA, CF Industries and Nutrien so the Family Farm Action Alliance, a 501c3 non-profit group has asked the Department of Justice to investigate the reasons behind the avaricious rises in fertilizer prices.
The United States gets much of its nitrogen fertilizer from Belarus through the Persian Gulf but a Trump era tariff and Hurricane Ida in the Gulf of Mexico slowed the movement of product to markets up and down the Mississippi River. Nitrogen fertilizer is normally applied to subsidized corn then ends right back up in the Gulf of Mexico where it kills whole ecosystems.
Republicans are evil.
31 butt wipes …
For much of the GOP, Putin is not the enemy, Biden is. They would much rather use Putin to hurt Biden than the other way around.
Rounds must enjoy death. Not for himself, but when it happens to other people. Children’s bodies are being crushed under tank treads. Homes and apartments are the targets of bombs and artillery. Hospitals are being crushed. Poison gases are awaiting dispersal for immediate use. Newborns are being jerked out of hospitals to wait until the soldiers kill them. Cities are burning. The Russians keep coming to gun down civilians, rape and pillage. All of this death because one person, Vlad Putin, demands it.
What about Senator Mike Rounds? Well, thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers. No more money and weapons to help Ukrainians defend their lives. Just thoughts and prayers.
Years ago, in the wee hours of night, PBS was showing a documentary that shook me to my marrow. I had hoped they would show it at least once more but never found it. It was the winner of several independent film awards. As I sat bawling like an infant, I realized what it was all about. The children who grow up with the sound of gunfire and artilleries volleying “feel like a giant hand comes down and grips their heart and squeezes it tighter and tighter.” Described by the six year old the documentary follows. That amazing young man, robbed of a childhood, taking care of his beloved babusya, is probably dead. And he knew all along. Just a little boy.
THE DISTANT BARKING OF DOGS
Maybe he wants to see if the Ukranians can hang on another month on their own. Just be cautious, after all, he’s doing everything he can. He prays for them. What else can he do? Its so easy for Russian agent’s in South Dakota, he has to watch out for himself. He is a Republican you know and his statue has the gun.
I guess Mikey wants to slow things down a bit, like Romney. Guess they will get to Ukrainian aid right after “infrastructure week,” Mexico wall funding and Obamacare replacement. Please slow down, senators!! /s
The general characteristic of an American way of war is: avoiding peak evil, then show up for the rebuilding contracts.
It’s a general pattern the US began in 1917 and repeated many times.
The big lessons from the Ukraine war are: 1) never give up your nukes; 2) never believe a security guarantee from the US/UK; and 3) if you don’t have them – get nukes. Biden set back nuclear non-proliferation 70 years.
The newly elected president of South Korea caught the lesson and wants nukes. He’s not about to succumb to a ‘US security guarantee’.
John, I would say that the US was and is peak evil in many of its conflicts. Certainly the centuries-long genocide of Indian tribes was something Hitler admired and tried to copy. Our war against the Spanish/Mexicans in what is now SE USA was a more complex evil. Then we went on a binge of overseas imperialism in various places. We tended not to get involved much if white people were involved, but if people were black, brown or red the US was more than ready to join the killing, and not really participate in re-building, unless military bases were handed over. Let’s just say Vietnam was the not the last of those endeavors and they continued until Biden got us out of Afghanistan, except that the US is currently engaged in “counter-terrorism” wars in Africa, mainly to protect uranium mining and other sorts of resource extraction. War is the price we pay for being an imperialist power. Same with Russia.
I’m not putting us in the same boat as Russia, though. Sometimes we need to get involved, even against white people. Hitler was a menace to everyone. So was Stalin, but he had nukes. And so does Putin. I’d like to see Putin crushed like an ant, but, you know, we ain’t going to war and risk them lobbing a few nukes our way. Like Russia, we sometimes try to live up to our agreements, lopsided as they are, though we violated many in our short history, too. We tend to violate the ones that are with lesser powers, like the many tribes or Mexico. You might say Russia is just following our example. But, I’m not putting us in the same boat as Russia in this situation. Russia is wrong. Ukraine is right
I’m not arguing with your “big lesson,” however. It was the right decision when they gave up the nukes, but it turned into Russian aggression. I think the world will learn the lesson of 2022, rather than that after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Curtis LeMay
OK John, when somebody uses a nuke, then what?
Republicans would have voted for it had Trump been in office.
Rounds is like a fish, flip-flopping back and forth so only one blind eye can see what’s in it for him.
None of these guys know what they stand for anymore. It certainly has nothing to do with unifying behind a common cause against a specific enemy. No, they target Democrats, those who aren’t Republicans, our values etc. instead of the red elephant in the room.
Who told Short Round we are doing all we can? Also didn’t the Koch’s Dad get his big start with Russian oil?
To Rounds and those who offer their thoughts and prayers to those folks being slaughtered, I say–think of the Ukrainian soldier being immortalized with his gesture and thoughts to the invaders.
Rounds pimps for Putin.
John, Russia also guaranteed NOT to invade Ukraine as part of the very same deal to get rid of Ukraine nukes. Meanwhile, the US and the UK ARE sending aid (just not combatants) to Ukraine. Not sure why you’re only criticizing the US/UK/Biden – OH, that’s right, you’re a “useful” Putin parrot.