Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sharply criticized President Biden's decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine.
The bombs blanket a target area with smaller explosives that may detonate years after the fact, harming and even killing civilians.
Biden has received some muted criticism from within his party, but the strongest words have come from the handful of anti-war leftists still remaining and isolationist Trump Republicans.
"Last year, WH Press Secretary Jen Psaki called the use of cluster bombs a 'war crime.' Now President Biden plans to send them to Ukraine. Stop the ceaseless escalation! It is time for peace," Kennedy tweeted.
"Biden was opposed to cluster bombs in 1982 as well, when he opposed their sale to Israel," Kennedy added. “What happened to his conscience?"
Kennedy's criticism hearkens back to a moribund anti-war movement on the left, which has been supplanted by a new generation of "progressives" who embrace the FBI, pharmaceutical giants, and what hippies used to call the "military industrial complex."
Kennedy, while deplored by today's status-conscious Democrats as an icky "conspiracy theorist," has established crossover approval on the populist right with his broad skepticism of institutions and unorthodox views on vaccines.
His isolationist position on Ukraine is another area where his views bring him in alignment with the Trump movement, which has moved away from the hawkish foreign policy that was once a staple of Republican politics - and to a certain extent still is.
But there has been a noticeable party switch. Beginning in the Trump era particularly - right around the time the "Russian collusion" story caused Dems to lose their minds in fact - Democrats were reinvented as defense hawks, albeit with a "woke" spin, as the right moved the other way under Trump.
The overlap between President Trump and Kennedy was clear when Trump accused Biden of laying deadly traps for civilians.
"These unexploded cluster munitions will be killing and maiming innocent Ukrainian men, women, and children for decades to come, long after the war—we pray—has ended,” Trump said.
Trump, who at this hour appears most likely to challenge Biden in 2024, accused his rival of dragging the world toward a global catastrophe.
"Joe Biden should not be dragging us further toward World War III by sending cluster munitions to Ukraine—he should be trying to END the war and stop the horrific death and destruction being caused by an incompetent administration," Trump said.
The vacuous idealism of the modern Democratic party is perfectly encapsulated in Biden - a man who can barely talk - deciding to maim children in order to save "democracy" in a European backwater thousands of miles from home.
