El Che 🇨🇺🇦🇷 🚩

🇵🇱 Speaking of the Applebaums... Back in February, Tusk posted this photo of himself reading "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World," with the caption: "In the time of strategic uncertainty, it's worth knowing who we're dealing with." The author is Anne Applebaum, a Jewish-American journalist at The Atlantic, Pulitzer winner, and wife of Tusk's Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski. So the Prime Minister promoted a book by his own Foreign Minister's wife, about the dangers of leaders who grab institutions by force. Nine months later, his government sent riot police to the Constitutional Court. Applebaum isn't just a journalist. She's a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins, where she runs a program on "disinformation," a former senior fellow at the Washington think tank CEPA, where she led a project on "countering Russian disinformation" in Eastern Europe, and has sat on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, the US government-funded body that bankrolls NGOs and media abroad. In "Autocracy, Inc." she lumps Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and others into one global network of "dictators," a worldview where anyone outside the Western camp is an enemy and every domestic critic is a potential foreign agent. Sound familiar? It's the same logic Tusk used last night to blame the Constitutional Court crisis on "Russian bots."

🇵🇱 HERE WE GO. Donald Tusk finally speaks on the Constitutional Court crisis, and yes, it's Russia. (We said he'll blame Russia on Monday. He didn't even wait that long.) After a full day of silence, Tusk finally spoke for five minutes. If you took a shot every time he said "rule of law," you'd be on your eighth before he got to the Russian bots. His main points: 🔸️The court built by PiS "is not a real court," and Nawrocki and PiS blocked every attempt to fix it. 🔸️His judges were "legally elected" and were "attacked," while the police were there to "protect the court from the attackers." 🔸️"In a state governed by the rule of law, a judge, even a petite woman, does not back down before an aggressive thug." That's a dig at Nawrocki. 🔸️"In a state governed by the rule of law, a politician cannot enter a court and give orders or intimidate judges, even if he is the president." Then he explained the whole crisis with a story: a thief snatches an old lady's handbag, and when he's caught, he screams that he's the victim. And then, right on schedule: "It is no accident that they find support around the world among pro-Russian forces. Today in this conflict they are benefiting from the support of an army of Russian bots on the internet. They have even received public compliments from the Kremlin's chief ideologue." In Tusk's version, the Supreme Court, the President and two of his own diplomats are a Russian influence operation. The riot police are the rule of law.