UKRAINE PRESIDENT TED CRUZ MEME TV

The phrase “ Put some seeds in your pockets” barely requires explanation any more. In other words, they achieved unsurpassable meme superiority. Mere hours into the war, it was blindingly obvious that, while the Russians might overpower Ukraine militarily, the Ukrainians had grabbed firm control over something no army could wrest away: the narrative.

Suddenly, the right gestures were not just welcome but essential. As late as February 21, 2022, the chief editor of the Kyiv Independent was calling Zelensky “dispiritingly mediocre” in an angry op-ed: “Gestures, for him,” she wrote, “are more important than consequences.” As the Russian forces massed at the borders, he played a murky game of managing expectations that seemed to frustrate everyone involved.

UKRAINE PRESIDENT TED CRUZ MEME TV

Promising to fight corruption, he had instead, in the judgment of the Wilson Center at the two-year mark of his presidency, “constructed an informal vertical that is far from any good governance or rule of law principles.” He skirted the limits of presidential power in a democracy by straight-up banning three unfriendly TV networks. Several of his Quarter 95 colleagues followed him into government, which raised eyebrows. The fear was-ironically-that he would get too cozy with Russia.Īs president, Zelensky’s peacetime domestic record was so-so. Vakarchuk was not just a plausible candidate but the first choice for a large swath of progressive youth, who viewed Zelensky’s feel-good centrism as a barely acceptable Plan B.

In fact, things could have been crazier still: Running alongside him in the same election was one of Ukraine’s best rock singers, Slava Vakarchuk of the band Okean Elzy, who unlike Zelensky never performed in Russian. Zelensky’s landslide 2019 victory against the incumbent Petro Poroshenko seemed like the wildest plot twist imaginable. He divested from Quarter 95 to run for office, but named his party “Servant of the People” after the series, providing a remarkably smooth continuity from KVN to politics that’s also when he finally switched languages. Interestingly, Zelensky still played his part in Russian. It was a well-filmed and heartfelt satire of Ukrainian politics, daring to imagine a fundamentally decent man in the halls of power (think Mr. Servant of the People, the 2015 sitcom that made Zelensky a true public figure, was a huge improvement over his other work. It’s Woody Allen in Bananas, it’s Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar, it’s Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder. The idea of one of those (of us, I should say), becoming a wartime icon is in itself a perfect Jewish joke. a sham investigation into the Bidens, and got impeached for his troubles-and is now staring down Putin on the streets of his besieged capital.Ī huge part of Zelensky’s global resonance is that he seems to fit a type everyone knows the world over, because, thanks to millennia of persecution, the type exists the world over: a Jewish wiseacre. The erstwhile Ukrainian voice of Paddington Bear, the star of a dozen shitty comedies and one decent one, he first stared down Trump over their “perfect” phone call-if you recall, 45 tried making aid to Ukraine conditional on a “small favor,” i.e. By now everyone knows his life story’s surreal outline: a comedian who rose to fame with a portrayal of a president becomes the real thing, then transcends it. As I write this, Volodymyr Zelensky, the most improbable national leader in the world, just might be the world’s most popular.

Ukraine president ted cruz meme