Hat’s Off to Matt Gaetz

By Paul Craig Roberts

PaulCraigRoberts.org

Hat’s off to Matt Gaetz.  He has held the Republican Establishment accountable and removed their man from his position as Speaker of the House.  Whatever the downside of Gaetz’s achievement, Gaetz’s victory is a victory for us.

Forever it seems, the Republicans have talked the talk but haven’t walked the walk.  They align their talk with our concerns about what our children are taught and not taught, about the safety of our streets, about “affirmative action,” about the offshoring of our manufacturing jobs, about living standards, about government’s fiscal irresponsibility, about aggressive foreign policy, but they lack the courage to do anything.  Instead, they align their walk with the teachers’ unions, with the offshoring corporations, with the military/security complex on gratuitous wars that serve only armaments profits, and with aggressive neoconservative foreign policy that threatens nuclear war.

Gaetz said “enough,” and for the first time in history a Speaker has been removed from office.

Whatever the cost, this is an important gain.  

Gilbert Doctorow sees it as a life-saving gain. Doctorow thinks, as Jeffrey Sachs, Col McGreggor and I do, that US/NATO involvement in Ukraine is leading to nuclear war with Russia.  With the House now in disarray, the real possibility is created that “there will be no stratagem, no dirty trick that Biden and his fellow war criminals in power can turn to continue assistance to Ukraine.”  In other words, more war funding for Ukraine is possibly dead in the tracks, at least for awhile

Doctorow thinks that the silver lining might even be brighter.  The US Imperial System might collapse from “the scandalous judicial persecution of Donald Trump to remove him from the electoral race in 2024” and from “the treasonous behavior of the sitting president when he served as vice president under Barack Obama.”  Perhaps, Doctorow says, divine intervention will save us from nuclear war.

With Congress in disarray, now is the time for Putin to bring the Ukraine conflict to a quick end before it can escalate further and result in nuclear war, as Putin himself admits is a possibility.  Zelensky cannot stop Russia from seizing Odessa, Kharkov, and Kiev, and installing a Russian friendly government, something Putin should have done in 2014. Now is the opportunity and time for Putin to act and to save the world from nuclear war.