I’m writing today on two subjects that don’t have much in common: Democrats and Ukraine. I bring them together only to discuss the double standards they each, in their own way, are forced to deal with. The two situations are in no way equivalent — Ukraine being in far more peril — but they do have parallels.
We all know how Democrats are expected to maintain the moral high ground, to impeccably observe ethical norms that feel almost quaint in the age of Trump. This is also true of Ukraine and Putin, but we’ll get to that.
Republicans, of course, are expected to be omnivorously corrupt. The self-dealing and grand larceny barely raise eyebrows in the media these days. If it isn’t about the Communist takeover of the Democratic Party, it isn’t news.
Even so, Democrats largely live up to the higher standard, foolish as that sometimes seems, and are still quick to remove anyone who’s not squeaky clean from their ranks. Republicans, of course, have unlimited license to rape, pillage, and plunder with impunity.
This means that for every Eric Swalwell who gets drummed out of the Democratic Party, there are literally dozens of Republicans in the Ken Paxton mold, who lie as easily as they breathe, who understand, and indeed revel in, the most disgusting behaviors their warped minds can dream up. Which they then accuse Democrats of doing.
So double standards were on my mind last week, even before John Oliver featured some breathtaking clips, from a year ago, of Jeanine Pirro cheering on the arrest of the notorious “Sandwich Guy” in his Washington home. We got to relive what amounted to a SWAT team surrounding this poor guy’s house, marching him out in handcuffs. This was after he’d volunteered, through his lawyer, to turn himself in.
But there was Jeanine for the People, and you’d have thought she’d gotten a pony for her birthday. In language as outlandish as the outfits she was wearing — if you watch, you’ll see I’m not just being catty — she went on video to pronounce this guy guilty of assault with a deadly sandwich, and in the same breath sentenced him to eight years in prison, as if she were judge and jury, as well as the prosecutor.
But while all that performative bullshit was reprehensible on its face, for me the most outrageous part was that she was on camera in the first place. That a sitting U.S. Attorney would go public, in any way, about an active case is not just appalling, it somehow exemplifies the whole double standard I’m talking about.
Attorneys for the government speak only through their court filings, for fear of compromising their case. Through administrations of both parties, U.S. attorneys have always been expected to be like Jack Smith — tight-lipped and efficient — the polar opposite of everyone in the current regime. DOJ is now in the hands of incompetent hacks who don’t seem to care if their cases are compromised — they’re all weak cases anyway.
Once again, we see one standard for this regime, and another for the rest of the universe. They fancy themselves immune, even to the laws of physics.
Which brings me to Ukraine, which is fighting its own version of a similar double standard. Simply put, the Western world expects Ukraine to conduct itself more like Democrats than Russians, which is to say that one side gets to obliterate entire cities while the other side gets to object.
Even so, the moral line gets blurrier the longer the war drags on, as Ukraine brings new and novel asymmetric tactics to bear on the problem. The most obvious case in point is Ukraine’s recent pummeling of one particular Russian company: Wildberries.
If you haven’t seen this story, it’s quite amazing. Wildberries is Russia’s version of Amazon, an online marketplace that accounts for over half of Russia’s online retail sales, and almost 4 percent of its GDP. Tens of thousands of small businesses, many of them individual entrepreneurs, rely on Wildberries to store, process, and ship out their products to customers. This makes them especially vulnerable to things like, say, Ukrainian drone attacks.
Which is exactly what’s been happening over the last month, as Wildberries facilities all over Russia have been destroyed. The online merchants, many of whom have their life savings tied up in inventory, have seen that inventory go literally up in smoke. Russian law holds these merchants personally liable for any debts they’ve incurred, so if they bought that inventory on credit, they now face bankruptcy.
To make matters worse, Wildberries changed its terms and conditions a few weeks before the attacks, so the company is not liable for force majeure losses — a legal way of saying that if your merchandise is blown to bits by drones, don’t expect Wildberries to bail you out.
But here’s where the double standard kicks in. The victims here are civilians, and Ukraine is ethically forbidden — by its allies, by the global media, even by its own codes — from targeting civilians. Ukraine depends mightily on the good will of Western nations for continuing support, and they’re expected to play fair, whatever that means.
So never mind that Russia indiscriminately targets apartment blocks in Kyiv. Never mind that its missiles routinely blow up power grids, transportation facilities, and all manner of civilian infrastructure. Never mind the 16,000 Ukrainian civilians who’ve been killed, or the 46,000 injured, all from Russian attacks. Russia kills civilians, Ukraine puts civilians out of business. The proportions here are seriously out of whack.
Putin’s obedient press corps has its obedient hair on fire over the sheer gall of Ukrainians bringing the war to Russian soil, and there has been some tut-tutting in the Western media. But most observers see the attacks against Wildberries for what they are: a way of hitting Russians where they live. Because it’s not just the merchants who are suffering, it’s their customers as well. The whole retail sector has been disrupted, and ordinary Russians are not getting their merchandise. The consequences of that disruption range from inconvenient to life-threatening. But the larger point is that Putin has taken great pains to create an illusion of normalcy in the Russian populace, and his smoke-and-mirrors act is getting easier to see through every day.
Wildberries is known to sell a wide range of military equipment, including drones, drone components, and navigation gear. Soldiers and their families also use the platform to buy what they can’t get from the army — things like medical kits and bullet-proof vests — thereby circumventing the disastrous shortcomings of Russia’s military logistics. This gives Ukraine both an additional incentive for attacking Wildberries facilities, and an additional argument in the ethical debate: Wildberries is selling to the military, not just civilians.
So far, the world has given Ukraine a pass for its clever strategy of attacking the Russian economy. As they keep blowing up Russia’s largest oil refineries, they cause no end of havoc at the gas pumps and bottlenecks throughout the national supply chain. Combine that with the retail sector now in turmoil, and ordinary Russians are finally being made to feel the war they’ve largely ignored.
Yes, the attacks on Wildberries facilities have killed several civilians, and while this is regrettable, the figures aren’t even a rounding error on the number of Ukrainian civilians killed.
Double standards are always unreasonable, but never more so than when the proportionality is so stark. Which is perhaps what Ukraine has in common with Democrats. Whenever either is compared to its adversaries, the comparison is never apples-to-apples, or even apples-to-handguns. It’s more like apples-to-ballistic missiles.
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