WND Columnist Keeps Serving As A Putin Apologist

WorldNetDaily columnist Jim Darlington was an apologist for Russia shortly after that country’s invasion of Ukraine, and he has continued to be one. He wrote in his Oct. 7 column, justifying the invasion as a response to Ukraine considering joining NATO:

One, Russia wanted Ukraine to be permanently off-limits to membership in NATO … as a promise made and then denied through decades of Russia’s repeated, insistent assertions that keeping just such a promise was critical to their national security.

Two, the U.S., under the Obama-Biden rule, was complicit in the 2014 replacement of one president less hostile to Russia with another that was less hostile to paying off the approved parties, and willing to initiate a low-profile war against its own (mostly Russian) people in the provinces bordering Russia in eastern Ukraine.

Three, any willingness to negotiate on this one issue would have prevented this war. And further negotiations early on could have stopped the war, but agreements on the table were withdrawn by Zelensky at the behest of the then U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, on orders from Biden and Company that the war should continue, to punish and finally to remove Vlad Putin.

Darlington didn’t mention that it was Putin’s unwillingness to negotiate that directly led him to a completely unprovoked military invasion. Instead, he complained:

In the present production of anti-Russian agit-prop, playing everywhere, every night, we have Vlad Putin, aka Hitlerian Fiend, Destroyer of Democracy. His agents are everywhere clawing at our very foundations. OK, well, that would actually be the Chinese (if we weren’t paralyzed with the fear of being called names: racist, xenophobe, whitey, etc.). More reliably (maybe) are reports of bad things happening to Putin’s opponents. No doubt, a few here and there, might have wished they’d been better friends. The World News Oligarchs happily report any such suspicions, whether fact or anonymous fantasy, while ignoring China’s daily and massive human rights transgressions.

Let’s bottom line this. U.S. allies need not be nice, but their allegiance needs to be in line with American interests. Russia should be our friend and most appropriate fellow warrior, against Islamism and Communism. Promises to keep NATO from her doorstep should have been honored.

Darlington whined further in his Oct. 14 column:

Some of us Unpatriotic Putin Apologists have been found committing treasonous thought crimes and have been publicly condemned. (Well … you know, by a handful of avid commenters.) Never mind the notion of measured and reasonable discourse, or that wholly antiquated innocent-until-proven-guilty thing. Wherever the great finger of the 95% media is pointed, shame and cancellation must follow. Name-calling is so much more fun than critical thought.

All right, so we might be whining a tad, but let’s get serious. Some of us, in trying to come to a balanced conclusion, try to see ourselves, as though wearing the shoes of the Other. This was once known as part of the process of “understanding.” In the case of the Ukrainian “Special Military Operation,” otherwise known as the brutal Russian invasion of its faultless neighbor, we might even be inclined toward some small measure of sympathy for Putin’s predicament. There it is. The confession. How right and righteous the finger pointers are proven to be!

But whether Ukraine has been warring against its own enclaves of Russians, since the U.S made them part of the Obama-planned and supported Orange Revolutions, in 2014, or whether the areas Putin wants to annex are overwhelmingly populated by Russian-speaking people, or whether the Ukraine’s military point-of-the-spear is actually a cadre of rabid Hitlerian Nazis, waving swastikas and proudly wearing SS insignia, or whether agreement with Putin’s position would have averted, and could now immediately end, this atrocious war, rather simply and painlessly, is truly not the real concern of those opposing this war. We, who are apparently post-Soviet Russian assets, prove to be pretty fickle when it comes time to hug the Russian Bear. We love you, Comrade Vlad, sort of, kind of, once in a while, but, whatever sympathies we may be accused of harboring, the terminus of these “affections” is finalized in this: We don’t care what’s happening over there! We care about what’s happening right here in the USA.

He then strayed into well-worn (and discredited) conspiracy theory territory:

Every thinking American knows perfectly well that the 2020 election was a national travesty, corrupted in every available manner, and more than half of us have now stopped lying about that. It’s a tough one to look at squarely, especially for those of us who were deniers of the Big Steal, but we must. The usurpers of our democracy demonize any who speak out truthfully, and have made it plain that they are willing to use “any means necessary” to advance their globalist aims.

You, who are participants in the government-mandated boosterism of a war that drains us to the point of real and deadly vulnerability (as such Democrat-initiated involvements have in the past) may want to reconsider exactly who the useful idiots really are.

Darlington apparently really hates to have his Putin-loving side called out, because he started his Nov. 8 column this way:

It’s shocking! But it’s everywhere! So many people discovered to be “Russian Assets”!

One might hope, briefly, that for all of us called “racists” and “xenophobes” and “homophobes” and “fascists” and “evil white supremacists,” etc., that all the previously popular denominations of slander might now be simplified to fall under the single sobriquet of “Russian Assets,” but no such luck. The left can’t get tired of adding to their arsenal of verbal slings and arrows, any more than they can limit their ever-growing list of important newly discovered genders.

But for those of us who don’t hate everyone who’s different, and have no secret urge to be other than a good ol’ binary man or woman God made us to be, and who even care about the United States of America … well, becoming a Russian Asset may turn out to be a real temptation.

It got weirder from there:

No! Ukraine was not the world’s most corrupt government and breeding ground of corporate graft. No! Obama’s CIA had nothing to do with the 2014 overthrow of a government that was getting along with Vlad. No! There wasn’t a huge majority of Russian-speaking people in the Crimea. There had been no “quiet war” against the Russian provinces since 2014. The Ukrainian shelling of Donetsk and Luhansk did not increase exponentially, each day, in the week prior to the Russian aggression.

Strange, indeed, how many of us who were enlightened by Miss Information, and steadfastly viewed the torch she held high as one and the same as that held up by the Statue of Lady Liberty, have now been seduced by what’s maybe “the best trick yet” of the globalist warmongers.

All you patriots demanding an immediate negotiated end to the Ukrainian-Russian war have been taken down a notch. The left suddenly flips, and now you must join them in cheering for war. And, if not, you have taken the first steps in becoming a real, honest to goodness Russian Asset.

Blaming Ukraine for instigating military conflict against Russia is actual Russian propaganda. So it seems we should believe Darlington when he tells us who he says he is.