Want to See $2.5 Billion Go Up in Smoke?

Lame duck Joe Biden is making arrangements to send Ukraine that much worth of weapons to keep Ukraine's army fighting Russia, despite the reality that US aid will end once Trump becomes president

Ukainian military video of fighting in Eastern Ukraine (video clip from Sky News)

President Biden, knowing that Donald Trump plans to cut off military aid to Ukraine on taking office, is rushing $2.5 billion in weapons and ammunition to support that doomed effort to defeat Russia.

Whatever one’s opinion on the rightness or wrongness of the Russia-Ukraine War (and I believe it is as insane as would be Russian provision of long-range missiles and advanced air defenses to Cuba or Venezuela), it is simply a waste of taxpayer money and human lives to continue funding that nearly three-year old conflict, knowing that Ukraine will be forced to agree to a deal to end it in a matter of weeks. Anyone dying in the fighting at this point, including civilians on both sides, is dying for nothing.

There should be an immediate cease fire to stop the senseless slaughter.

Biden doesn’t care though, any more than he cares about the continued US military support for Israel, which underwrites that religio-fascist nation’s continuing genocide in Gaza.

If Biden wants to save some threatened federal program by acting unilaterally with an executive order, why doesn’t he bump up the shriveled level of support for the federal Head Start program to help kids under five in underserved low-income urban, rural and suburban Americans. That program has helped some 35 million little kids in poor families get better prepared to succeed in school since it was established in 1965. That’s nearly 2 million kids in Head Start a year. But stingy Republicans who hate all programs that help low-income families have for years attacked the Head Start program and these days it manages to serves less than a million kids a year, though the need for such a proven successful early intervention has only increased along with poverty in America over the years.

That $2.5 billion that Biden is pissing away on more war in Ukraine would, if invested in Headstart, represent an almost 25% increase in the federal Head Start program, which would work out allowing it to reach another 200,000 little underprivileged kids.

Come on Biden! Rescue something meaningful! Don’t just kill more people to satisfy your petulant grudge over having presided over a foreign policy disaster in central Europe that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers all for nothing by just adding to the carnage as you walk out the door of the White House!

The voters of America have spoken. The majority of voters who cast their ballots forf Trump last November chose a candidate who consistently vowed to end that war, not to continue, much less expand it. Even many Democrats do not support further US-funding for Ukraine’s war against Russia , not least because it is risks prodding Moscow into resorting to nuclear weapons or to a dangerous retaliation such as threatened launching of even non-nuclear attacks on neighboring countries that are helping deliver the US military aid to Kiev.