More revisionist history from the Putin apologists. Sen. Ted Cruz serves up a big heaping helping of just that while helping Fox's Laura Ingraham attack Zelensky.
As I've already discussed here, Fox has been more than ready and willing to help Trump advance his Kremlin talking points when it comes to his demands of Ukraine.
On this Wednesday's The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham went on the attack against Zelensky, accusing him of squandering US tax dollars with this disgusting graphic displaying for her viewers before inviting Cruz on to help lie about who was to blame for Putin invading Ukraine.
INGRAHAM: Every program is gonna be scrutinized. And Ukraine, it's no different. It's been what, $200 billion, $250 billion, who, who knows?
Zelensky can't even say for sure how much money they've gotten or where the money went. But I understand the old neocon crowd and some folks even at the Wall Street Journal are angry at Trump for hitting Zelensky.
But they should really be angry at the Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and Biden for squandering our immense wealth and our immense power over decades.
It was all predictable. They destroyed our industrial base. They opened our borders to millions of illegals. They expanded the welfare state. They accused us of systemic racism.
And then after all that, they expect the voters to agree to propping up the rest of the world, I guess on a permanent basis.
Now just as we felt terrible for the Vietnamese that were left behind after the war and for the Afghan people, when we pulled out of there, we all feel horrible about the tragedy that has unfolded in Ukraine.
But this wasn't Trump's doing. Blaming him is like blaming the bank when you can't pay your bills.
[...]
INGRAHAM: Why weren't we able to track the billions and billions of dollars that we sent to Ukraine, which ended up obviously being in a stalemate?
CRUZ: Well, look, because the Biden administration didn't want to, they didn't care about tracking it. They were just shoveling cash out the door.
And the irony is Joe Biden caused this war in the first place. If Donald Trump had been in the Oval Office, there would be no war in Ukraine, and I'll tell you what the precipitating cause of this war was, is Biden waived the sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the pipeline from Russia to Germany that I authored into law. I wrote those sanctions into law.
Putin was building that pipeline and Putin stopped building that pipeline literally the day President Trump signed my sanctions legislation into law.
That had prevented the war and when Biden came in, he waived those sanctions and that led directly to the war in Ukraine. Biden's Weakness got Ukraine and got America into this mess.
Yeah, sorry Ted, but that's not what happened.
They both proceeded to defend Trump against the accusations that he's "a poodle of Putin" and attacked Zelensky for daring to speak to the European press and anger Orange Jesus -- which was followed by this pathetic attempt by Cruz to put some lipstick on this pig.
CRUZ: Well, listen, President Trump campaigned very clearly last year, and it was clear he was going to end this war, and he's going to end this war, I think in the first half of this year.
Now I hope he ends it in a way that is a clear and obvious loss for Putin.
I think that's good for America, but Trump has no interest in just pouring billions and billions of dollars into this war forever, and I got to say.
The only thing Trump is interested in is handing Ukraine over to Putin and putting our European allies at risk in the process.
Colin Cleary wrote an op-ed in 2024 which explained why everything Cruz just said here about the pipeline is bullshit.
Trump’s Nord Stream 2 disaster:
In his rambling May 31 monologue following his felony convictions, Donald Trump somehow found time to reference the ill-fated Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Trump declared: “I ended the Russian pipeline. It was dead. He [Biden] comes in and approves it.” Trump went on to allege that Biden did so because money from the former mayor of Moscow’s wife was paid to the Biden family.
Similarly, in a speech at CPAC last year, Trump noted that he “got along very well with Putin even though I’m the one that ended his pipeline. … I ended it. It was dead.” Trump added that “nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along.”
In fact, Trump did not stop Nord Stream 2 — he enabled it. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline went from zero to 90 percent completed during Trump’s presidency. Rather than stop it “dead,” the Trump administration rejected years of bipartisan congressional calls for imposition of sanctions to stop the project. Only when Congress, in frustration, passed mandatory sanctions did the administration finally take concrete action. But by then it was too late.
Go read the rest of the article for the details on why it was too late and that anything the Biden administration could have tried to do at that point was going to be a waste of time.
I'm quite sure Cruz knows that everything that was laid out in that article is true, but that won't stop him from lying about it on Fox as he did here.
