Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was raked over the coals in a blistering column at the Bulwark for running to Fox News on Monday and undercutting President Joe Biden's show of support for Ukraine.
Disregarding a long-standing congressional agreement that "politics stops at the water's edge" proposed by Sen. Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI) in 1948 as NATO was being formed, DeSantis chose to instead attack Biden for his visit to the war-torn country, while waffling on Russia's invasion. It drew the ire of Amanda Carpenter, a former speech writer for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
According to Carpenter, DeSantis should know better than to play to the anti-Ukraine, pro-Putin crowd in an effort to boost his profile with far-right extremists, but his opportunism is overriding his decency.
Appearing on Fox, the presumptive heir to Donald Trump's mantle tried to make the case that Biden is somehow responsible for Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine while saying nothing about the atrocities being committed by Putin's military.
According to Carpenter, what DeSantis did was "far more cold-blooded and detached" than Donald Trump's "coddling" of Putin during his four years in office.
Carpenter wrote: "The crimes against humanity that Russia has committed in Ukraine are heinous. Putin has indiscriminately attacked civilian targets and summarily executed Ukrainians, piling them into mass graves. His troops have abducted and deported thousands of Ukrainian children. Accounts of rape and torture are numerous and well documented."
Carpenter added, "DeSantis disregards this reality so that he can then pretend he is unaware of the 'objective' of the U.S.-Ukrainian alliance — and then declines to say what such an objective should be. Maybe the objective should be Russian defeat; maybe it should be a settlement negotiated by the Ukrainians. That could be debated. But stopping the slaughter of innocent Ukrainians would seem to be an absolute baseline requirement. Ron DeSantis could not be bothered to say even that much."
Then she laid into the Florida governor for playing to what could be called the "attack Biden no matter what" crowd.
"Ron DeSantis isn’t really this dense — Yale, Harvard, QED. He’s just acting dumb because he thinks it’s politically smart. And in doing so, he has revealed quite a lot about what he might be like as a president. DeSantis has positioned himself on the wrong side of Ukraine because he thinks that opposing Biden, no matter what Biden does, is the only way to stay on the good side of MAGA voters. Even if that means turning a blind eye to the plight of the Ukrainians," she wrote before concluding,"As the lady said: When people show you who they are, believe them."
You can read Carpenter's whole piece here.
