What's In It For Putin? Josh Hawley Offers World’s Most Offensive Idea For How to Help Israel

Mod: The Missouri misery Josh Hawley is a Cruz level collaborator.

Josh Hawley Offers World’s Most Offensive Idea for How to Help Israel (The New Republic link): Republican Senator Josh Hawley is offering the world’s most harebrained pitch on how to help Israel: simply redirect funds from Ukraine to Israel.

Hawley posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday saying, “Israel is facing an existential threat,” using the tragedy there to further his own political agenda of defunding U.S. aid to Ukraine.

Fighting broke out on Saturday when Hamas launched a deadly surprise attack on Israel, killing over 900 Israelis. The Israeli government has responded by declaring a total siege of Gaza, home to two million Palestinians and what has been described as the world’s largest open-air prison. About 770 Palestinians have already been killed in retribution, and the death toll is expected to keep rising.

On Monday, Senator Mitch McConnell was among several bipartisan lawmakers who pushed for a spending package that would link aid for Israel with support for Ukraine and Taiwan.

The hope is to convince Ukraine aid skeptics, like Hawley, to continue supporting the country as support diminishes in the GOP-controlled House. On both sides of the aisle, the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis have already become a political tool.

Meanwhile, some are saying that it’s not clear that Israel requires immediate U.S. funding. Congressional aides have said that Israel already has the resources to wage a weeks-long campaign of violence in Gaza and use its Iron Dome system to defend itself, and can then tap into more than $5 billion made available by Pentagon drawdown authority.

What Ukrainian Soldiers Really Think of Trump and the GOP (The New Republic link): “Donald Trump is a fucking asshole,” said Anatolii, a soldier in the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces. The leaves are changing, and it’s a chilly fall day in Bilopillya, a village in the Sumy region where you can see Russia a few kilometers away. “That’s what I think of him.”

“The problem is, they never give us enough weapons,” he told me in an almost exasperated tone about U.S. and NATO arms transfers. “If he comes back and what? Give us none again?” Many in the Ukrainian military and government already feel that they are not receiving enough military aid. The stakes of the nascent Republican primary, which has been defined by isolationist rhetoric, are potentially dire.