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**FEBRUARY 13, 2024**
On the Prospect website
AIPAC's Surprising Salvo in Orange County
A swing seat in California is seeing a flurry of attack ads from
pro-Israel forces. Why? BY DAVID DAYEN
Reversing Private Equity's Looting of Hospitals
The right remedy is to claw back the billion-dollar payday Cerberus
Capital and other insiders took out of Steward Health Care and give the
money back to the hospitals. BY ROBERT KUTTNER
The Stakes of Rafah
Over a million Palestinians, pushed to the brink of Gaza at the border
crossing with Egypt, now face aerial bombardment by the Israeli
military. BY JONATHAN GUYER
Valentine's Cards
Tom Tomorrow brings you This Modern World BY TOM TOMORROW
Meyerson on TAP
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**** The GOP Putin Cult
House Republicans won't consider aid to Ukraine because, as a
homophobic thug, Putin personifies their values.
By a substantial bipartisan vote (70 to 29), the Senate has now passed
and sent to the House the long-touted bill to provide military funding
to both Ukraine and Israel. The House, says Speaker Mike Johnson,
won't consider it.
Initially, of course, House Republicans said such a bill had to be
linked to more funding for our border with Mexico and to policy changes
that would reduce the flow of immigrants and asylum seekers into the
U.S. With Democratic mayors and governors loudly noting their own
inability to handle the sizable influx of immigrants on their doorsteps,
President Biden and most congressional Democrats agreed to compromise
border legislation drafted chiefly by Oklahoma Republican Sen. James
Lankford. Confronted with the horror of, by their standards, a
successful deal with Biden and the Democrats, the House Republicans,
egged on by right-wing media, reflexively recoiled, soon to be joined by
all but a handful of their Senate counterparts. That leaves them free to
oppose the aid to Ukraine per se, which constitutes the lion's share
of the funding that the Senate just authorized.
The main argument Republicans have advanced for opposing the Ukraine aid
is that the money would be better spent at the border, though, of
course, it's the selfsame Republicans who have kept that from
happening. The more general argument they've advanced is that, as the
redoubtable Marjorie Taylor Greene has put it
, aid to Ukraine
"puts America last," which means "we're ignoring our own people's
problems."
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But with the exception of more funding for a bigger, better border wall,
it's nearly impossible to find anything domestic that Republicans
actually want to spend money on. The 920-page Heritage Foundation policy
blueprint for a second Trump administration, which I reviewed
in our December print issue, advocates spending boosts for the border
and the Pentagon, but cutting back on nearly everything else (their
favorite remedy, which pops up in their discussions of dozens of federal
policies, is to privatize government programs, beginning with Medicare).
Greene may want to spend your tax dollars on anti-missiles targeted to
shoot down Jewish space lasers, but it's hard to find Republican
support for other specific policies to which money that could otherwise
go to Ukraine can be redirected.
That leaves only the possibility that the Trumpified Republican Party,
like Trump himself, actually supports Putin and Putin's war, either
because Putin is a hard-right homophobe (the source of his appeal to Pat
Buchanan more than 20 years ago, and to Christian nationalists today) or
simply the kind of thug whom Trump wants to emulate (and thus appealing
to the GOP's legions of thug-o-crats). Those appear to be the two
dominant schools of thought in Trumpland, though it's possible, of
course, to adhere to both.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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