I wrote for Politico today about the fiasco of the House progressive letter — released, walked back, then completely retracted — advocating talks with Russia:
House progressives made a terrible mistake — they used the D-word in public.
For this error, they were roundly denounced and had to swiftly backtrack, withdrawing the ill-fated missive entirely.
The D-word in question is “diplomacy,” which has long been a favored word of Democrats. Indeed, it’s their go-to proposal for solving any international problem, no matter how intractable or threatening. That it has now become a toxic notion in the context of the Ukraine war is a sign of how a justified feeling of moral righteousness among backers of Ukraine is swallowing rational thought about how the war might end.