The Meaning of Speaker McCarthy’s Ouster

The Meaning of Speaker McCarthy’s Ouster

A lot of reasons have been given for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster from the speaker’s post. Correctly, some are saying part of it has to do with Ukraine War funding. Writing in the influential Financial Times, Edward Luce brands it “The return of American isolationism.” I could cite many more.

But the situation has little to do with World War II and defeating the Nazis. Except this time the Nazi Azov Battalion, Right Sector and other groups are actual Nazis, and play a major role in Ukraine’s government. That was dramatized recently when Canada’s parliament honored 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, maybe the last surviving veteran of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, the psychotic mass murderers and Hitler’s personal bodyguard. 

The Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote, “Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center (FSWC) is deeply disturbed by the Canadian Parliament’s recognition of a Ukrainian veteran who served in a Nazi military unit during the Second World War implicated in the mass murder of Jews and others. FSWC is further outraged that parliamentarians in the House of Commons gave a standing ovation to the former soldier on Friday.”

The Canadians apologized. Although Justin Trudeau, the ephebic Mussolini of the Great White North, bizarrely blamed the scandal on Russia. Whose people, along with Poles and Jews, were massacred by Hunka. Current estimates are 27 million Russians died in the Nazi invasion.

Back to Speaker McCarthy. The fact is, far from being “isolationist,” Americans have gone along with all these wars foisted on them by their incompetent political class. But there’s a limit. After the Korean War had lasted more than two years, Gen. Eisenhower, who defeated Hitler, promised in his 1952 presidential campaign, “I will go to Korea.” He was elected, and ended the war in the summer of 1953.

President Johnson “escalated” the Vietnam War starting in early 1965, sending in 150,000 combat troops. That rose to 550,000 by March 31, 1968, when he announced he would not seek re-election. Nixon was elected to end the war, but took four years to “Vietnamize” it and wind down U.S. troop levels. But that took too long and ended with Watergate, his resignation in 1974 and the helicopters taking off from the U.S. embassy in Saigon as the North Vietnamese communists took over.

G.W. Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003. He won re-election easily in 2004, on the apparent success of the war and on the residue of national outrage from the 9/11/2001 attacks. But by 2006, three years after the war started, Americans wanted new leadership and turned Congress over to the Democrats, making lovely Nancy Pelosi House speaker.

And Biden was riding high in the polls until his disastrous departure from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. His popularity never has recovered.

For the Ukraine war, now 20 months old, there’s also something not present in those other wars: the threat of nuclear annihilation. This is part of how Americans think. Many people have seen such movies as “Dr. Strangelove” and “Fail Safe” from the early days of the Cold War. But maybe the most visceral was the highly popular “Terminator 2” from 1992, when Schwarzenegger was at the height of his popularity and malicious animal magnetism. It showed this nuclear apocalypse scene. 

At the back of our minds, we know the world actually can be be blown up. If not by a fictional Skynet, the certainly by our fool incumbent politicians.

Which brings us to the real reason for this war. Just a month ago, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted: “At the NATO Summit, the main message was of course to support Ukraine. 

“We were also able to make progress on Ukraine’s path towards NATO membership.

We recognize what the European Union has done, in granting them candidate status. In NATO, at the Vilnius summit we made important decisions to help to move Ukraine closer to membership.”

As I’ve said for 20 months, that’s one thing Russia never will allow. It would mean putting U.S. nukes 200 miles from Moscow. Three minutes.

We’ve seen this before with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Kennedy wouldn’t allow Khrushchev to put nukes 90 miles off our shores, and able to obliterate cities in the South and East of our country. Fortunately, they were able to work it out. It wasn’t known until later, but part of the deal was the U.S. pulling Jupiter nuke missiles out of Turkey. That was kept secret so the Democrats could keep Congress in the election a few days later.

But whereas Kennedy was a rational actor at age 45, can Biden, age 81 next month, even reason at this point of his increasing senescence? 

Let’s hope the next House speaker realizes his main job is to cut off aid to this war to force peace talks before the whole planet goes up in irradiated smoke.

John Seiler blogs at: johnseiler.substack.com