The Griner conundrum

These things never go clean. Perhaps that's where we start today.

Brittney Griner stepped off a plane in San Antonio at zero dark thirty this morning, and a good chunk of America seems to wish she was still on Devil's Island or whatever the Russians call the penal colony where she was imprisoned. This might be unfair, but so is what that chunk of America is saying.

They say she "hates America" (she doesn't; she just hates the way it treats some of its citizens). They say she broke Russian law, and therefore all but deserved to be held for 294 days as a bargaining chip in the ongoing Russia-U.S. cold war over Vladimir Putin's bloody aggression. 

Siding with a murderous dictatorship over an American citizen it's holding hostage. Let that one marinate for a minute.

And while you're at that, consider a nation so riven with bitter divides it can't just celebrate getting an American back home, the way America did when the POWs came home from Vietnam or Iran released the embassy hostages. No one picked at the strands of those deals. No one obsessed over who won and who lost, or what if anything the U.S. gave up.

But Griner is a black gay professional basketball player, and one of those annoying kneelers, and a retired Marine named Paul Whelan is still imprisoned in Russia. And for Griner, the U.S. exchanged a notorious former arms dealer named Viktor Bout, who was once known as the Merchant of Death and thus provided a convenient headline for publications/websites of a certain bent.

U.S. RELEASES MERCHANT OF DEATH FOR BASKETBALL PLAYER WHO HATES AMERICA! 

BASKETBALL PLAYER WHO HATES AMERICA FREED SO MERCHANT OF DEATH CAN KILL MORE AMERICANS!

And of course: BIDEN LEAVES MARINE BEHIND!

The Blob's take is there sure are a whole lot of experts in international hostage negotiations out there all of a sudden.

It also reiterates: These things never go clean.

Which is to say, this isn't a basketball game, where there's a scoreboard and a game clock and at the end of it there is one winner and one loser. Winners can be losers in this game, and losers can be winners. And so Brittney Griner is free, but Paul Whelan still isn't; Brittney Griner is free, but so is the one-time Merchant of Death.

I don't like this muddiness, this conundrum, any better than you do. In fact I wondered, when the news broke, why the hell the Biden Administration didn't get Whelan out, too, if it was going to give up a Viktor Bout.

Time lends perspective (though not to everyone, clearly). And 24 hours later, I have a little.

I understand now that Viktor Bout was a mostly retired Merchant of Death when he was nabbed in a sting operation in 2008, and he has been in U.S custody since. And he's served almost two-thirds of what was a minimum sentence to begin with; convicted in 2011, he was scheduled for release in 2029.

So it's not as as if he hasn't paid at least some price for his dark deeds.  And after 15 years in stir, whatever arms network he had is presumably long gone. It's not even the same world anymore.

So to suggest he's going to take up where he left off and get more Americans killed probably isn't realistic.

And Paul Whelan?

Part of the reason Griner was in the Russians' hands for so long is because the U.S. was trying for the twofer: Griner and Whelan both, or no deal. At one point, according to U.S. officials, Bout was offered straight up for Whelan. The Russians said nyet. They put Whelan's case in a different category, since he was convicted of espionage. 

So it was Griner or nothing. And the U.S. continues to push for Whelan's release, as an administration official maintains it's been doing since "the earliest days of this administration." 

The degree to which it's done that, of course, is open to interpretation. But it sure doesn't sound as if anyone's "leaving a Marine behind," as the overheated rhetoric maintains.

In the meantime, I'm wondering if all the caterwauling about trading the Merchant of Death for an American imprisoned by a hostile regime might have sounded different had the Russians had gone for the Bout-for-Whelan deal. I have a feeling we would have heard scarcely a peep from the precincts screeching about it now.

This is because Whelan is, yes, a retired Marine, and Brittney Griner is just an athlete. 

This is because, not only that, she isn't properly appreciative (in their eyes) of all the blessings America has bestowed upon her in her lucrative-but-frivolous occupation.

Blessings like, I don't know, the obvious contempt of some of her countrymen, perhaps? And their inability to just say "welcome home" without adding "but, you know, we shoulda got Whelan out first"?

What a world. What. A. World.