The GOP Takes Ukraine Aid Hostage
Plus: 'Richard Bachman’ and Angry Horror
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WILLIAM SALETAN: The Republicans Who Are Treating Ukraine as Their Hostage.
IN THE YEAR AND A HALF since Russia invaded Ukraine, many Republicans have turned against arming Ukraine. Now the party has crossed a tipping point. Most rank-and-file Republicans want to end or reduce aid to Ukraine. For the first time, most House Republicans have voted against a proposal to send more assistance. And even Republican leaders who support Kyiv are threatening to withhold aid unless Democrats offer concessions on other issues. They’re treating Ukraine as a hostage—not a Russian hostage, but a Republican hostage.
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BILL RYAN: Richard Bachman’s Angry Horror.
WHEN THE CULT WRITER RICHARD BACHMAN died of cancer in 1985, he left behind four strange and angry novels about 1970s America (a couple of which were filtered through a mesh of soft science fiction), and one best-selling horror novel. The tumor was discovered in 1982, the year his penultimate novel The Running Man came out. The illness lends his next novel, Thinner (1984) an extra, unhappy jolt. But of course, dead though he was, Bachman, the writer, wasn’t done. Two more novels would be published posthumously: The Regulators (1996) and Blaze (2007). Both of these did better commercially than anything he’d published in his lifetime.
CATHY YOUNG: What Russian War Hawks Are Saying to Themselves About Ukraine.
THERE’S NO SHORTAGE of rationales offered for opposing American aid to Ukraine in its resistance to Russia’s war of aggression—everything from claims that Ukraine is a “corrupt regime” that persecutes dissidents and churches to the isolationist notion that we shouldn’t spend taxpayer dollars on (to borrow Neville Chamberlain’s phrase) “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” Another such argument is that the war has turned into a deadly stalemate, with the Ukrainian offensive reduced to a pointless meat grinder with little if any chance of pushing back Russian occupying forces…
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