Welcome to Beg to Beg to Differ, The Bulwerks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring

civil conversation across the political spectrum.

We range from center left to center right.

I am Mona Charent, syndicated columnist, and policy editor at the Bullwork, and I'm joined

by our regulars Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution

in the Wall Street Journal, Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center, and Damon Linker,

who writes the Substack newsletter, Eyes on the Right.

Our special guest this week is USA Today columnist Jill Lawrence,

author of The Art of the Political Deal.

I want to thank you one and all. Thank you Jill for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

So we are going to begin with a tale of two speeches, with Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden giving dueling speeches.

We woke up on President's Day morning to the surprise news that President Biden was

in Keith, which was apparently quite the feet of

first of all secrecy, but second of all courage on his part because it were

you know it's a it's a war zone in an area where there is no American

military presence and Biden chose to do that he had to take a long train ride through Poland and then Ukraine to get there.

So kind of amazing and he gave a wonderful speech in Poland a couple days later. So I want to begin with you, Jill Lawrence. I guess

when people listen to this it will be the the one year anniversary of the Russian invasion.

But I'd like to hear your reflections on the interesting phenomenon that we have a hot war going on in Europe the worst since World War II,

but we also have Putin's attempt, as we saw again during his speech this week, to make it a culture war and you know he talked about this in terms

of not that he's fighting to obliterate the Ukrainian existence but to fight wokism in the United States and in the West.

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