Even the corrupt and cynical have sided with Ukraine against Putin. Guess who hasn’t

Starkly pitting belligerence against coexistence, autocracy against democracy and war against peace, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would seem to signal the end of all fence-sitting. Even the most ethically challenged entities abandoned attempts to both-sides Vladimir Putin’s all-out military assault on his neighbor, which has slaughtered children and created over a million refugees.

Switzerland, the famously neutral Nazi gold repository, froze Russian assets. FIFA, whose corruption stands out even among sports cartels, was shamed into disqualifying Russia from the World Cup. And Bay Area tech titans like Google and Facebook finally found some content they wouldn’t host.

And then there were the Republicans.

Now into the second week of watching Russia rain ammunition on Ukraine and what remains of the international order, Putin’s favorite political party appears to sense that its alliance with the neo-Soviet warlord has grown untenable. Nearly three-quarters of its own voters, being human after all, view Putin unfavorably, according to a recent poll — better than they rate Joe Biden, sure, but still not very good. The GOP, however, is struggling to demonstrate the moral clarity of such otherwise hopelessly compromised bodies as, say, the U.N. General Assembly, where a vote to condemn Russia’s invasion passed 141-5 — and one of the five was North Korea.

And yet Russia was hailed with a thunderous round of applause last weekend at a white supremacist rally that featured two Republican members of Congress, Arizona’s Paul Gosar and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy responded that he hoped to talk to the lawmakers. From the man engaged in excommunicating Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney for criticizing former President Donald Trump, a prospective and halfhearted talking-to is an underwhelming consequence indeed.

Even Trump, whose first presidential campaign was supported by Russia’s military intelligence officers and paid internet trolls, seemed to understand the need to distance himself from the man he once hoped would be his “best friend.” In recent days, the former president evolved from declaring Putin’s blitzkrieg “genius” to calling it “an atrocity that never should have been allowed to occur” — while reiterating that he remained wowed by the intellect of the atrocity’s author.

California’s own McCarthy, who is counting votes for the speakership with the care he once applied to collating candy for Trump, went a bit further, allowing that Putin is “evil” and “reckless.” But he joined Trump and much of his caucus in quickly pivoting to tortured attempts to tie the invasion to the alleged weakness of America’s president instead of the evil of Russia’s.

The impulse to blame America and its allies is so ingrained in the post-Trump GOP that much of the party couldn’t quit even in the teeth of the Russian monstrosity.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose grotesque mismanagement of the pandemic has helped make him Trump’s chief intraparty rival, attempted to belatedly weigh in on Ukraine this week only to digress into nonsensical disparagement of a key U.S. ally, France. The governor ultimately came off as far less outraged at Putin than he was at the children he publicly berated for wearing masks to his press conference.

Rep. Tom McClintock of Elk Grove, who shortly before the invasion suggested appeasing Putin by ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine, subsequently blamed Russia’s invasion on the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal and insufficient assistance to Kyiv.

San Diego area Rep. Darrell Issa attacked Biden for leaving Washington — for a family funeral in Delaware, as it happens — and said his sanctions were “too little too late and not intended to stop this terrible dictator.”

All of this is, of course, garbage. The Afghanistan withdrawal was executed disastrously, but it was overdue and, by the way, fiercely advocated and authorized by Trump. More to the point, Biden has joined democracies in Europe and beyond in an unprecedented economic assault on Russia that has battered its currency and stocks. His administration has provided over a billion dollars in security aid to Ukraine and asked Congress for more. And the White House recast the State of the Union address last week to condemn Putin’s “premeditated and unprovoked” attack and “send an unmistakable signal to Ukraine and to the world” that “Yes, we the United States of America stand with the Ukrainian people.”

It was a startlingly appropriate response after four years of a president who threatened to withdraw from NATO and had to be coerced by Congress into sanctioning Russia for waging information warfare on an American election. The Republicans taking a microscope to the Biden administration’s Ukraine assistance were putting on blindfolds when Trump illegally withheld military aid from the country while it was already in a shooting war with Russia.

Perhaps it’s too much to ask Republican lawmakers to reappraise their exoneration of that high crime now that the war has come to its full and awful fruition. But couldn’t they at least put the blame for the invasion where it obviously belongs?

Sen. Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, did just that in floor remarks that served to highlight his fellow partisans’ failure.

“Vladimir Putin is a thug and is solely responsible for the invasion of Ukraine,” he said. “I condemn him, and he’s even being condemned by his own people in Russia ... and a growing alliance around the world.

“There is nothing that justifies Russia invading Ukraine. This is the most significant intrusion from one country to another since ... World War II.”

As the senator’s blunt assessment demonstrated, it’s not that so many post-Trump Republicans can’t see the world clearly. It’s that they won’t.