I’ve been opposed to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and from day one have supported Western efforts to arm, train and otherwise back the Ukrainians in the defence of their homeland, even as I have grave doubts about them getting their desired outcome of pushing the Russian Army back across the border.

And I’ll continue to do so even in the face of this stupidity,  Zelensky Visits Pennsylvania With Democrat Politicians:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy flew into a key U.S. swing state this week on a taxpayer-funded aircraft after publicly criticizing former President Donald Trump and Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.

Then he viisted a factory producing artillery shells.

Exactly, and there were no Republican politicians, certainly not national ones, present: so much for bi-partisanship. As to the gently worded “taxpayer-funded aircraft” it was a lot more meaningul than that.

Impeachment of Biden at this stage is pointless, as the GOP well knew when it published the massive report on the Biden family grifting a few weeks ago to silence from the MSM and TPTB. But Hemingway’s point is specifically about the Hatch Act which outlaws politicians using government resources for their election efforts.

You could argue that there’s a fine line here given that Zylenski is the President of another country, one the US has been supporting in its fight for survival, and who has been to the US many times now at the invitation of “President” Biden and Democrat and GOP politicians. He’s even addressed a joint session of Congress.

But to bring him to America in a military plane this close to the Presidential election and parade him around a swing state – perhaps the key swing state – with only Democrat politicians in attendence is about as blatant a breech of the Hatch Act as it gets, certainly in terms of the spirit of the law.

For a contrasting hypothetical, can you imagine Biden-Harris bringing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to the USA and touring arms factories at this time? Not. A. Chance.

As to Zylensky, what the hell was he thinking? He’s a smart and brave guy but there’s a long history of foreigners failing to understand the American political scene. Before this trip he criticised Trump and Vance’s approach to the war, expressing his fears as to what may happen if Trump wins, and I can understand that. Moreover his remarks were reasonable criticisms:

Trump makes political statements in his election campaign. He says he wants the war to stop. Well, we do, too…. My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how,…With this war, oftentimes, the deeper you look at it the less you understand. I’ve seen many leaders who were convinced they knew how to end it tomorrow, and as they waded deeper into it, they realized it’s not that simple.

He also went after the VP nominee Vance, who had recently proposed a peace deal where Russia retains the territory it has seized with a demilitarized zone along the current battle lines and with Ukraine never being allowed to join NATO:

“This would be an awful idea, if a person were actually going to carry it out…But there’s certainly no way this could ever happen… And it wouldn’t necessarily end the war, either. It’s just sloganeering… Whichever President or Vice-President raises this prospect -that ending the war hinges on cementing the status quo, with Ukraine simply giving up its land – should be held responsible for potentially starting a global war…..I don’t take Vance’s words seriously, because, if this were a plan, then America is headed for global conflict. It will involve Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Taiwan, China, as well as many African countries.

Ouch. That last actually doesn’t seem reasonable to me but over-the-top. There have been plenty of land-for-peace deals in recent decades – think Israel handing back Sinai to Egypt – that have not led to such a scenario: simmering tensions perhaps, but not war.

But reasonable or not, making such criticisms public – and in the Democrat loving mouthpiece that is the New Yorker magazine, a red rag to the Right-Wing bull – and then engaging in this partisan campaign charade, is a very Not Smart thing to have done.

I see that House Speaker Mike Johnson is already demanding to know how all this was arranged and why no Republicans were involved. This certainly reflected anger among GOP House members and probably his own anger, since it makes his job of passing bills allocating money to support Ukraine just that much harder to win with defecting GOP members. No Speaker wants to be reliant on the opposition to get stuff passed.

Within a few months Zylensky could very well be facing a combined GOP Presidency, Senate and House. He might have to eat a lot of humble pie to maintain support. Incidentally, as an example of how the winds can change, none other than the NYT reported back in 2019 that Zylensky had been on the verge of launching an investigation into the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine when the White House suddenly released military aid it had been withholding (actually a policy from the Obama years) and Zylensky felt free to drop it. The reason is amusing in light of this latest trip:

According to the Times, Zelensky wanted to avoid getting caught in the middle of American partisan politics, and thus had resisted pressure from the Trump administration — pressure that Gordon Sondland now concedes was applied — to investigate the Bidens. This reporting is consistent with both common sense and with documentary evidence that Zelensky made it known to the U.S. he didn’t want to be a “pawn” in our politics.

Yet now he is one!