Broken compass

 (Your standard disclaimer: This is not a Sportsball post. It is not about the Cubs, or the Lakers, or the Indianapolis 500, or why the designated hitter is an abomination to all right-thinking humans everywhere. Thus, the usual instructions apply. If you don't want to stick around, grab a hall pass and go sit in the library until we're done here.)

We used to know who the bad guys were, here in America.

We looked at Hitler, with his lank hair and his shitty little 'stache and his martial strut, and we knew he was up to no good. Ditto Mussolini, with his arrogance and the bully's itch he scratched by beating up on poor Ethiopia. Ditto, too, Josef Stalin, who occasionally starved and murdered his own people in droves just for the hell of it.

You looked into that guy's eyes, and you knew what you were dealing with. Cruiser-class psychopath, oh, you bet.

Now?

Well, let's consider how our spectacularly unqualified Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, answered a reporter's question the other day.

Reporter: "Fair to say Russia attacked unprovoked into Ukraine three years ago tomorrow?"

Hegseth: "Fair to say, it's a very complicated situation."

Only if you're a Russian toady, Petey old boy.

For those of us with functional brain cells, see, it's not complicated at all. Three years ago, Russia launched a surprise attack on another sovereign nation and decimated a goodly chunk of it before the Ukrainians gained their footing and started to fight back. It was as stark an example of naked aggression as North Korean tanks rolling across the 38th parallel in the predawn hours of June 25, 1950, or Hitler's blitzkrieg crashing into Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. 

Of course, had the current regime been running America then, they'd likely have blamed the South Koreans and Poles. Or said, "It's a very complicated situation."

We used to know who the bad guys were. But now?

Now we side with 'em.

Now the President of the United States and his handpicked confederacy of dunces spout Russian propaganda with a startling lack of self-awareness or shame, and treat it like revealed wisdom. One of the President's flunkies, Elon Musk, even tweeted the other day that if Russia "went too far" at the beginning of the war, Ukraine was going "too far now."

Which I guess means if Poland had been able to put up a longer fight against Hitler, it, too, would have been going too far. That's how twisted is Apartheid Clyde's logic, and those of his ilk.

We used to know who the bad guys were.

Now we try to make the bad guys into the good guys, or at least the not-really-bad-guys. We blame, not the violators, but the violated, against all common sense and decency. And rather than take up for the violated, the way the United States at least tried to do occasionally when it still had a working moral compass, we go behind their backs to strike a deal that doesn't include their input. 

Think for a second about what a massive betrayal that is. Then think about the President of the United States getting up in, say, 1950, and announcing that, in addition to negotiating with the North Koreans without the South Koreans, the U.S. was also going to extort half the South's mineral deposits as payback for American aid.

That's the idea the Felon in Chief floated the other day, vis-a-vis Ukraine. You can look it up.

I don't know if betrayal is a strong enough word for something that breathtakingly vile. I don't know if a strong enough word exists for it.

We used to know who the bad guys were.

And the corollary to that?

Our allies used to know we wouldn't turn our backs on them.

Now all of that is gone. Now the moral compass lies broken on the floor, and the heel that ground it to shards is the same heel that's busily crushing whatever honor we once had as a nation.

If that doesn't make you weep, I don't even know what to say to you. 

Nor do I wish to say it.