(01-21-2022 12:19 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(01-20-2022 10:34 PM)georgewebb Wrote:  

(01-20-2022 02:17 PM)tanqtonic Wrote:  The Ukrainian leader felt obligated to tweet this: "We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations. "

Yikes. That sounds like exactly the kind of plea that a Slavic foreign minister would have felt compelled to make in the 1930s, not the 2020s.

Then again, when I first heard Biden's stumblebummery, I immediately thought of a certain prime minister's infamous plaint about "a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing." But comparing Joe Biden to Neville Chamberlain might be unfair to Chamberlain. "Old Neville" was naive, deluded, arrogant, and idealistic to a fault, but he was neither unprincipled nor clinically stupid. When he died in the dark days of November 1940, after a painful bout with stomach cancer, Churchill (of all people) paid him this tribute: "Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged."

The world does not now and will not ever have similar regard for Biden.

Perfect sincerity and Biden in the same sentence? Never has happened, never will happen.

Nor the quality of "considerable capacity and authority." Those rest, in broad terms, on the stature of both the statesman and the statesman's country. Biden's own stature is laughable, and he is doing his best to diminish his country's.