Richard Vigilante:

Chiang Kai-Shek was corrupt. Unworthy of our support. The commies got China.

Battista was corrupt. Unworthy of our support. The commies got Cuba.

Ngo Diem and then a succession of South Vietnamese leaders were corrupt. Unworthy of our support. The commies got Vietnam.

The Shah was corrupt. Unworthy of our support. The Mullahs got Iran.

If I worked my memory, or Google, hard enough I’m sure I could come up with more.

Or I could just go with the big one, subsuming all others:

The United States was conceived in corruption. Time to go.

This stuff used to come from the left. These days the “national” right is right along with them:

“Ukraine is corrupt, it deserves what it gets.”

No, they would never say it that way. That would be like saying the Chinese deserved Mao.  No one would buy that. And no one will buy that any nation deserves to be conquered by what Russia has (again) become, the global champion of state brutality and disregard for human life.

To mention Mao or Putin would be to invite into the argument the three most important words in the English language: “compared to what?”

No competent propagandist does that.

Instead, they always say ‘because [NAME of PRO-AMERICAN GOVERNMENT] is corrupt, we can’t support them. We must remain morally pristine.’ Or, more crudely, ‘we don’t like our taxpayer dollars being stolen.’

The corruption charge is perfect as propaganda, because it is always true.

Without any specific evidence, I can confidently tell you right now [NAME OF ANY GOVERNMENT ON EARTH, EVER] is corrupt. This will always be true.

“Corrupt” as used in propaganda is rarely specified, even more rarely quantified and never, ever compared. A guilty verdict is conveniently inevitable. To be innocent one must be a virgin, a status difficult to retain and impossible to regain.

But no, they’ll say, that’s not what we mean!  We’re talking like really corrupt, like sleazeball corrupt. So corrupt that our alleged allies will blow the support we give them and lose anyway.

And that’s all she wrote. ‘They’ll lose anyway’ was lights out for Chiang, Battista, Diem, the Shah, and now Zelenskyy. ‘They would have lost anyway’ makes them no loss at all.

Note though that now the propagandists have put themselves at (slight) risk by allowing the argument to shift to quantities.

Because governments free of corruption have never existed and will never exist, if the propagandists advocate corruption as grounds to withhold our support, the burden should be on the accusers to demonstrate its relevance. Logic, justice, and due regard for our own national interest demand quantification and comparison, an answer to “compared to what?”

That never happens, probably the defense realizes that debating degrees of corruption is a loser for the defense.  Not a virgin? Must be a slut. Let’s avoid the argument.

Understood. But not responding to the corruption charge has never worked either.

The real problem may be that the defense does imagine its response in terms of a debate. That’s a mistake. The corruption charge is not a debate case, but propaganda. What is needed is counterpropaganda.

In response the defenders of Ukraine should be shouting at the top of their lungs: how dare you use this crude libel, for which you offer no proof, to justify selling out the Ukrainian people to the Russians when you know very well the Russians will kill even more Ukrainians in the aftermath of victory than in the achievement of it.

Show us the crime that is worth such a punishment. Shame on you for a blood libel!

This is a shouting match, not a courtroom. In a shouting match the only defense is to shout the louder.  The GOP lost in 2022, largely on abortion, because some response is always better than no response. It does no good to say “better off not bringing it up” when you are not in charge of what comes up.

The corruption charge is a vile distraction from what the bugout boys are really advocating. Having first assured Ukraine of our full support, opposed negotiations, armed them, cheered them on and armed them some more, they now propose to abandon them to an enraged and desperate enemy.

Yes, we should never have enabled and encouraged a war we were unwilling to fight. We should never have done most of what has passed for U.S. foreign policy since 1989. Three and a half decades of culpable incompetence have perilously undermined our power while leaving perhaps a million corpses behind.

What’s done is done. We will live with it. As blood cannot wash away blood the corruption canard will not wash the blood from our hands. It will only increase the flow.

Forget all the talk of breakthroughs on the battlefield. They will be reversed with U.S. government’s next inadequate, penny-pinching response to desperate war. Ukraine is on the cusp of defeat, conquest, and genocide. The corruption canard merely hastens the day.

This reads like the 1991 Louisiana governor election between Democrat Edwin Edwards, who was well known for his corruption, and Republican David Duke, grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Republicans and two of Edwards’ former GOP opponents for governor went into Louisiana and campaigned for Edwards, and a popular bumper sticker read “Vote for the crook. It’s important.”