If Jon Meacham is not “The Face” of the failed establishment, he’s certainly the most punchable one. Meacham identifies as a historian, but like that bottle of hair dye with legs, Michael Beschloss, he’s the opposite of a historian. Meacham is a smarmy elitist who name-drops history to justify electing Democrats. That’s his trick. That’s his thing, and true historians don’t do that. But it seems that no matter what insanity Democrats come up with, Meacham will smug up his face and then reach into his bag of tricks to explain how history informs us Democrats are always right…
Democrats open the border to millions of unvetted illegal aliens…Well, Abraham Lincoln in 1857 said blah-blah-foo-foo and Founding Fathers and Trump is the KKK…
No matter what it is, Meacham will pretend to respect the Founding Fathers and Jesus and tell us Democrats are right and Republicans are wrong. He’s one of those people who sounds smart to dumb people, or those who don’t know that he destroyed Newsweek by turning it into an elitist newsletter for dumb people who think he’s smart.
Meacham is a tool.
Look at the smarm he shoved at the Morning Joe crowd about President Trump’s efforts to reach a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine…
“This is an interesting question, whether this is a pre-World War I era that has reasserted itself at the end of what we all took, the lessons we all took from World War II and the Cold War? Which was an implacability, an unconditional surrender,” he said.
He’s comparing the war in Ukraine to World War II and the Cold War. And because he uses words like “reasserted” and “implacability,” dumb people, unthoughtful people, and poorly informed people find this insightful, when it’s pure historical illiteracy.
Of Trump’s effort to secure peace in Ukraine without Putin surrendering unconditionally, Meacham turned to name-dropping: “We didn’t talk about doing this after FDR announced unconditional surrender in the Second World War…”, he said. “We didn’t talk about it so much during Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy because we had made a stand [in the Cold War]. It’s a long twilight struggle, and we represented the West. As Ronald Reagan said, his view of the Cold War was we win, you lose.
“This is not that, right? This is something in between. I think it’s uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable for me to think, okay, we’re going to, we’re going to award this aggression,” he said. “But yes, you get a collective security agreement. Okay, but you wouldn’t need it if the aggression had not happened. So what is all that? That’s the tragedy of history.”
The tragedy of that statement is incomprehensible. And it’s not the first time he’s expressed it.
First off, comparing World War II and the Cold War to the war in Ukraine is like comparing a machine gun to a puppy.
World War II and the Cold War represented a global, existential threat. The Nazis and the Imperial Japanese intended to dominate and enslave the entire globe. The Soviet Union made no secret of its desire to spread the butchery of the Bolshevik Revolution globally, which would have also resulted in worldwide enslavement.
Putin wants Ukraine. He might even be a threat to the region, but he is not a worldwide threat. He is not an existential threat.
And then there’s this tiny little fact our oh-so precious historian overlooks: It’s pretty easy to demand unconditional surrender when your enemy is not sitting on a pile of come-and-get-me nukes. This is one of the downsides of nukes: the guy sitting on them can’t get taken down (see: Korea, North). The upside is that nukes have likely ended the thirst for world conquest that defined humanity pre-Hiroshima.
Then there are the facts on the ground… A little thing called reality… Over three-and-a-half years, Putin has seized and successfully held territory in Ukraine. I’ve read that nearly a half-million young Ukrainian men have died in this war. The Russian casualties are even higher. But Putin is a gangster. He doesn’t care about human life. He wants what he wants. That’s the reality.
How do you get him out of Ukraine?
How do you convince him to start caring about human life?
What is his incentive to unconditionally surrender?
Unless Ukraine believes it can eventually push Putin back to Russia, which it can’t, why continue the fighting and dying?
I’ve been on Ukraine’s side since the beginning, and more than once I’ve expressed my admiration for Ukrainian President Zelensky. Other than that first Oval Office disaster with Trump, Zelensky has done an admirable job of fighting a war against a much larger power and influencing world opinion in his favor. Just the cult of personality he created for himself is something to behold, even though I find most of his fan-girl cultists (like Meacham) insufferable.
I would have loved to have seen the bully Putin pushed back to Russia with blood on his nose and tears of humiliation in his eyes… But reality is reality is reality, and this is not World War II or the Cold War… It’s more like — if I may be so bold as to pontificate about that part of the post-World War II world Mr. Newsweek Destroyer conveniently overlooked — Korea, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In all three cases, the aggressor, the bad guy, got a little something because reality is reality is reality.
Yes, even Meacham’s precious John F. Kennedy secretly awarded the Soviet Union’s aggressive placement of nukes in Cuba by (secretly) agreeing to remove all of our offensive weapons in Turkey.
I could spend thousands of words laying out how Franklin D. Roosevelt capitulated whole countries to Stalin after World War II to avoid another war.
Kennedy was a realist. Roosevelt was a realist. Trump is a realist. Meacham is a good dog for the TDS-afflicted regime media deeply in love with the sound of his own voice.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
