Give war a chance.
Blaska has offered the Wisconsin State Journal, our favorite Madison morning daily newspaper (except for Mondays), his unique and under-appreciated talents to write an opinion column. Awaiting a response from whoever is its current editor. (They come and they go more frequently than Peruvian presidents.) If our price ($500 a pop) is too rich for your blood, make a counter-offer. As Jerry Lundegaard said in Fargo, “I’m working with ya on this thing here.”
It could be our prose is too (how shall we say) “vivid” for the timorous. Blaska admits a stylistic debt to the likes of P.J. O’Rourke, Patrick Buchanan, and National Lampoon’s Doug Kenney (one of the authors of Animal House — which we regard as a political parable akin to All the Presidents Men). We like to keep the PTSD counselors busy.
So, welcome to the party Boris Johnson — our favorite recent British prime minister! Pecksniffs in his own conservative party hounded the mop-headed PM out of office for partying hardy during Covid, which, in retrospect, was the only sane response — London gin being more efficacious than Trump’s hydroxychloroquine.
Trump, J.D. Vance, and Marc O’Rubio are putting a much-needed boot to Europe’s socialist somnambulance. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Boris Johnson supplies the steel toe. A little Harry Truman plain talk, possibly fortified by a tumbler of Tanqueray.
Socialism’s bill, coming due: Zohran Mamdani wants to raise property taxes 9.5% in New York City.
Great balls of fire!
Johnson challenges his “economically stagnant, welfare-addicted continent” to “do something brave and perhaps very expensive to make good their rhetoric” over Ukraine, which is more existentially a European problem. (We’ve still got that ocean.) Boris writes:
If Europeans want the chance to seize leadership from the U.S. and do things differently, then this is it. There is a real war on our continent — as opposed to a nonexistent U.S. “threat to Greenland.” It is a cruel and hideous war in which Vladimir Putin is increasingly torturing the Ukrainian population.
Johnson proposes seizing Russian petroleum tankers, cashing out the $140 billion in seized Russian assets as the first installment of Ukrainian reparations, and putting European boots on the ground just outside the combat zone.
Why didn’t we Europeans have the balls to show independence from the U.S., and to go the extra mile for Ukraine? Because we were afraid of being sued? By Mr. Putin? In what court? In what world? The whole thing is beyond pathetic. European statesmen say they want strategic autonomy. Liberal Europeans clap their perfumed hankies to their noses and proclaim their revulsion at the boorishness of the Trump administration.
May we suggest going a step further? Take the podium at Munich and address Vlad the Putin in English and Russian translation: Mr. Putin, you have 48 hours to cease fire, 96 hours to withdraw all troops, six months to ship heavy loads of gold to Kiev. Meet those conditions or we allow you to live — in exile in North Korea. Boris Johnson closes:
Unless Europe is willing to do “something big, risky and strategically autonomous to help Ukraine … they need to put a sock in it.“
Blaska’s Bottom Line: This is Ronald Reagan “Tear Down That Wall” rhetoric, worthy of Maggie, Winston, and the various Pitts. More effective than casting one’s adversaries as apes and put to better purpose in frank and (yes) vivid language. Here in Wisconsin, if Tom Tiffany dares some tough, big and risky talk of his own — beholden to no sacred cows (Trump included) — he wins.
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