This is about a recent post by Code Pink:

There has been some confusion about an image that was taken w/ CODEPINK volunteers & Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green. MTG opportunistically approached our volunteers in a parking lot on the Hill and she requested they take a photo together (1/4)

— CODEPINK (@codepink) October 5, 2023

The responses to this Xing ("tweet") were about 80% "you're a Putin puppet" to about 20% "join forces with Marjorie Taylor Greene." Code Pink, on the other hand, wants to advocate peace without being Marjorie Taylor Greene, an understandable sentiment. I'm not going to go over the recent to-do in which Code Pink participants were arrested on orders of Bernie Sanders for doing a sit-in in the space near his Senate offices. I'm sure it was newsworthy.

So here is my advice to Code Pink.

Dear Code Pink,

What you're dealing with, with pro-war Democrats, is neoconservative liberals. Neoconservative liberals are liberals, a familiar category to be sure, but when it comes to discussing American foreign policy they're neoconservatives. They think Team Biden is "helping Ukraine," and that Ukraine is "defending itself" against Russia, whose leader Vladimir Putin is the Devil himself. (Here one thinks of Sean Penn). Mostly they are Democrats, the Republican Party having gone to the dogs sin their opinions some time ago.

Neoconservative liberals are all over America like Argentine ants on a picnic in southern California. The evidence of their omnipresence is in the continuing popularity of Joe Biden's re-election bid among a substantial minority of the population despite outcomes such as this:

One supports such a President's re-election bid out of ideological obligation, not sound judgment.

The neoconservative liberals have that "America is a moral beacon and so it's totally okay if it behaves like a bully" sentiment that one could see in the periods of Reagan's (and indeed George W. Bush's) greatest popularity. They combine that sentiment with a Progressive-era sentiment desiring earnestly to clean up the world while polishing their self-definitions of being nice people. I'm sure that many neoconservative liberals are of old pedigree -- here one looks at both the 1980 and 1984 Presidential elections and ponders how paltry the opposition to Reagan's regime was. A LOT of people supported Reagan, liberals included. In fact, it was only with the 1992 election that put Bill Clinton into the White House that the current distinction between "red" and "blue" states was cemented into Presidential election results.

Perhaps a good slogan to adopt in opposing the efforts of the neoconservative liberals would be "Peace Is Wise." There is little point in opposing the vision of the neoconservative liberals, because it's their idea of moral rectitude. What might bear fruit, however, is arguing that the neoconservative liberals' world-view is detached from the physical world. What comes out of this thought is a suggestion that a more effective strategy than war would involve peace, and peace right away, not peace conditional upon immediately getting everything they want.

Putin might or might not be Satan himself. The fact of his being or not being Satan is not the main concern. What's important is that Team Biden's current strategy of proxy war against Putin's regime, with sanctions, has only succeeded in making Putin stronger. Putin's popularity ratings are high among his people, his armed forces are full of volunteers, and his economy is expanding, which is something that can't be said of Germany, premier European member of the NATO alliance.

Ukraine may have gained some small amount of territory from its counter-offensives over the summer, and it may have forced Russia to retreat a bit. Neoconservative liberals love to crow over this phenomenon. Heather Cox Richardson's Substack argues in her most recent post that:

Today news broke that Ukrainian attacks have forced Russia to withdraw most of its Black Sea Fleet from occupied Crimea. This is a serious blow to Vladimir Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

But Russian retreats are actually of little consequence because they do not forfeit substantial amounts of territory and are typically accompanied by vast slaughters of Ukrainian forces, to the point where Ukraine has lost at least 200,000 and possibly 490,000 troops -- the point being that, from the perspective that the Special Military Operation is a war of attrition, Ukraine has already lost the war. That is the primary fact of consequence.

The initial problem from the Ukrainian perspective was that the Armed Forces of Ukraine were conducting counter-offensives without benefit of air cover. The war has devolved to a point where the ability to rectify that situation passed into history some time ago.

The fundamental problem with the neoconservative liberal definition of "helping Ukraine" is that the US is goading Ukraine into US-directed "counter-offensives" which result in too many Ukrainian casualties. What might actually help Ukraine would be peace. A first step toward peace would be if the collective West stopped demanding the return of those portions of what we might call Ukraine of 1991.

The neoconservative liberals can expound 24/ 7 / 365.256 about the righteousness of Ukraine's demands. Letting neoconservative liberals feel righteous may be wise. None of it is of any consequence, however, because none of those demands are going to be fulfilled as long as the war keeps going. The war is lost for the West; no magic event, no number of public relations initiatives, no number of infusions of money or weapons will transform the war into a win. The Russians have, simply put, out-competed, for all of the evil they are imagined to be.

So you tell the neoconservative liberals this: "So you want to weaken Putin. Peace is the best way to achieve that goal, peace while salvaging the biggest chunk of Ukraine that you can possibly get at the bargaining table with the Russians. You will get peace through negotiations, if you get it at all. The opportunity to get rid of Putin through war disappeared some time ago if it was ever there in the first place, so you will have to do it through peace."

Such a strategy might not work. Americans, as George Carlin once pointed out, like war.

At any rate, peace is wise. Let it be your slogan. Who knows? It might be more effective than conducting sit-ins at Bernie Sanders' office.