"Humankind cannot bear very much reality," T.S. Eliot once noted. Americans, especially, have what the historian Louis Hartz called a "vast and almost charming innocence of mind." But we can't afford any willed innocence about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin has reduced Russia to a failed state that runs on thuggery, cyber-piracy, gas and war, and all this has been getting cover from Putin's longtime sycophant Donald Trump and his Republicans, not least through the recently concluded Conservative Political Action Conference. Putin must be stopped by force, and his American apologists must be thoroughly discredited, much as Hitler and Mussolini and their American apologists and collaborators were, even if doing so requires pain and sacrifice from the rest of us.
