There’s been a stir in political circles concerning Senator Graham’s (R-SC) remark last week concerning President Putin of Russia. Steve Benen explains:
Graham didn’t just make an oblique reference in an obscure forum. The sitting senator and failed presidential candidate first floated the idea of Russians assassinating Putin on Thursday night, during a national television appearance. When that caused a bit of a stir, Graham pushed the same message again, this time via Twitter. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” he wrote.
On Friday morning, the GOP lawmaker returned to Fox News and again said he hopes someone in Russia will “take this guy out by any means possible.”
The rhetoric did not go unnoticed. NBC News reported:
Russian officials pounced on Graham’s comments, with Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov telling reporters, “Unfortunately, in such an extremely tense atmosphere, there is a hysterical escalation of Russophobia. These days, not everyone manages to maintain sobriety, I would even say sanity, and many lose their mind.” The Russian ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, said on Facebook that Graham’s statement was “unacceptable and outrageous” and said the degree of Russophobia and hatred of Russia in the U.S. is “off the scale.”
I know my own comments can be interpreted easily as a call for an assassination, and to some extent this is polite company outrage, because it is considered poor form to call for the assassination of a politician, within or without your country. Moreso, this is an entirely justified social convention, because sometimes there are people around who will commit an assassination for flimsy, even personal reasons that are really unjustifiable. This leads to an unstable political environment, and, given the power of today’s weapons, that can lead to disaster.
All that said, I don’t see Putin surviving this war. He physically has no where to go, and while the Ukrainians, along with President Biden and the allied liberal democracies, continue to perform at a premier level, he runs a substantial risk of defeat. Defeat will almost certainly mean his death. If he stubbornly continues this war for weeks or months, the Russian military’s reputation will be ruined, and if he withdraws, ditto. Meanwhile, the economy is rapidly worsening and may be ruined for so long as he’s in power.
Finally, remember, Sun Tzu observed that for an aggressor to achieve success in war, they must vanquish their enemy; the defender, though, need only survive. Which is a bit simplistic; I think Ukraine should like to see Putin unhorsed, as it were, in order to avoid future threats.
In the end, though, Putin will have to be removed in order for this conflict to be resolved, and his government replaced. Graham, I think, simply said out loud what everyone else was thinking. It was just not something you say out loud if you’re a United States Senator.
