by Thaddeus G. McCotter
Criticizing Putin for decades apparently isn’t enough to make his blacklist—while others land on it with ease.
During a bygone era of Detroit Lions football misery, a losing coach who was trying to end his suffering cried out in anguish: “What’s a guy have to do to get fired around here?”
He soon found out.
Recently, one of my in-laws who lives in the United Kingdom (UK) informed me that he had received a singular distinction: he’d been placed on “Putin’s blacklist.”
While he is a private individual, it was not beyond the realm of possibility. Following the dictum to trust but verify, I checked. He had, indeed, been banned from entering the Russian Federation. I felt a tinge of envy and the brutal ache of unfairness.
After all, I have been assailing the former KGB spook for over two decades. My rightful antipathy toward Mr. Putin preceded Presidents George W. Bush seeing a soul in Vlad’s eyes; Barack Obama attempting a “Russian reset”; Donald Trump trying his own reset (and, unlike Mr. Obama, being slandered by the Democrats’ Russia-gate lie); and Joe Biden continuing his family’s long-running “fleece through strength” grift in Ukraine until Putin’s latest criminal invasion of a neighboring nation.
Speaking of trust but verify, Vlad, I have receipts. For example, per the Estonian World Review archives for 2006:
Congressman McCotter was one of the first American leaders to sound the alarm about Vladimir Putin’s creeping authoritarian tendencies and called for Western resolve in the face of Putin’s implicit threats to neighboring countries. At last year’s [2005] Joint Baltic American National Committee (JBANC) conference, McCotter coined the term “Re-Stalinization” to describe internal and external features of current Russian political thought.
How could Vlad resist blacklisting me after that and much, much more? I remained publicly and implacably opposed to the wannabe vozhd and his revanchist Russia’s international criminality on global display in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.
I even trekked across the Atlantic to England to denounce your shirtless, Billy Squier-like visage:
Recently, Congressman McCotter traveled to London, where he delivered a speech and debated a leader of Russia’s Motherland (Rodina) Party before the House of Lords. McCotter called for a renewed sense of shared purpose for the West, and for a transcendent moral order to revitalize the European-American transatlantic alliance. [Italics mine.]
Welcome to the party, J.D. Vance. I felt your pain.
But, no, you blacklisted my brother-in-law. Really, Vlad? Here in the blessed land of liberty, you only had to be MAGA to be cancelled, doxed, and blacklisted.
Or, now, you only need to recognize the futility of the continuing carnage in Ukraine and seek peace.
Both the progressive left and the neo-con Right have branded as a Putin stooge anyone who will not join them to “stand with Ukraine” until—when, exactly? The last Ukrainian killed? The first American soldier killed after being sent to Ukraine as a “security guarantee?” Or World War III?
One can explain why Russia invaded Ukraine without excusing this crime. Indeed, if one does not understand what led to this bloodbath, one cannot craft a just, enduring peace to put an end to it. No, it will not be perfect justice. That would entail not only restoring Ukraine’s boundaries, including Donbas and the Crimea. But that is not possible under current— or any realistically foreseeable—conditions on the ground.
To pretend otherwise is detrimental to peace and abets further deaths. Still, to make such cruel calculations in the abstract is the forte of the neocons. But one might have expected otherwise from the progressive Left, who had no qualms arguing that they could “support the troops but not the war” when their own nation’s men and women in uniform were confronting the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan. If they could argue that opposing the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars did not mean they also supported Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, then it is the height of hypocrisy for them to claim that supporting peace in Ukraine makes someone a minion of Putin—like, say, Mr. Obama?
Via a 2016 post by Brookings that touched upon Mr. Obama’s response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine:
In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, President Obama laid out key elements of his approach to foreign policy… As regards the two-year-old conflict between Ukraine and Russia, the president said Ukraine is a core interest for Moscow, in a way that it is not for the United States. He noted that, since Ukraine does not belong to NATO, it is vulnerable to Russian military domination, and that “we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.”
It would seem progressives who supported Mr. Obama’s position then need to explain the reason for their newfound support for open-ended escalation in Ukraine now—other than “orange man bad.” Not holding my breath….
Vlad, do not make their mistake. I support a negotiated peace in Ukraine, and I want to see you deposed for your war crimes by the very Russians whose progeny and prospects you have squandered in the killing fields of your “near abroad” during your criminal pursuit of your solipsistic delusions that have made Russia not an emerging empire but an international pariah.
True, the crystalline morality of the present quagmire requires an alacritous end to the slaughter. Likely, then, the world and I must wait until you are stuffed in history’s dumpster and buried beneath the ignominy you so richly deserve. But my animus towards autocrats like you, Vlad, remains implacable, while I patiently await the opportunity to disrespectfully defecate upon your grave.
That said, Vlad, what’s a guy have to do to get blacklisted by you?
***
An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012, He served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee and as a member of the Financial Services, Joint Economic, Budget, Small Business, and International Relations Committees. Not a lobbyist, he is also a contributor to Chronicles; a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a co-host of “John Batchelor: Eye on the World” on CBS radio, among sundry media appearances.
Thaddeus G. McCotter
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/08/vlad-whats-a-guy-have-to-do-to-get-blacklisted-by-you/
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