Putin Rhymes Weakly with Purim

From ayatollahs wishing to destroy the Jewish state, good Lord give us deliverance.
According to my sober judgment, there’s between them not an adlayada of a difference.

To Putin I don’t think that I’m a meanie
by comparing him to Mussolini.
He should not be compared to Adolph Hitler,
because he’s than this horrid monster littler.
Unfavorably comparing, too, to Tito,
he should be banned as they did not Benito,
a faux savant who was not savvier
than was the president of Yugoslavia,
whose house of calling cards collapsed soon after
he died, just like supporters of the dafter
elected president electors dumped,
the Don who by democracy was trumped.

To the Jew Zelensky, I say: “Please
dump Putin, make no efforts to appease
the man like those that Biden may well make,
appeasing ayatollahs who give fake
assurances which he should be disputin’,
as dangerous, incredible as Putin,
by Biden trusted just as Trump once trusted
the man for whom he like fair lasses lusted.

It’s wrong of good men to rely on MAD
while giving nuclear power to the bad,

who are more dangerous than mothers against drivers who love drinking,
on whom we also can’t rely, because they’re MADD, I’m—adlaya-dad!— thinking.

David Suissa writes in the Jewish Journal, 3/13/22:
.
As the Biden administration rallies the free world to sanction and isolate Russia in the wake of its horrific invasion of Ukraine, it is rushing headlong to revive a nuclear deal with Iran, the world’s #1 sponsor of terror.
How eager is President Biden to make a deal with the mullahs? Let us count the ways.
A year ago, Biden and his team assured us they’d settle for nothing less than a deal that was “longer and stronger” than the flawed original. Now, with an overeager Rob Malley heading the U.S. delegation in Vienna, it looks like they’ll be settling for something even worse than the original.
As Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council, writes in The Wall Street Journal, the likeliest outcome is “a compromise pact far less comprehensive and robust than the original. Experts have warned against the dangers of such a ‘less for more’ deal, which would impose fewer restrictions on Iran’s stubborn nuclear effort while providing Tehran with more-lavish concessions and sanctions relief than before.”
This caving in by the world’s most powerful country is a dark development for the future of the Middle East, and will bring the opposite of peace and stability.
In “How to Deal With the Unappeasable Putin,” WSJ, 3/10/22, Walter Russell Mead writes:
Like Mussolini, Mr. Putin was fortunate to face an ungifted generation of Western leaders. Nobody will be expanding Mount Rushmore with sculptures memorializing any of America’s post-Cold War presidents, and the generation of European leaders that included figures like Gerhard Schröder and François Hollande will not long be remembered. Playing a weak hand aggressively, Mr. Putin managed to divide and confuse this motley crew long enough to threaten the Western order in Europe and reassert Russia’s place among the great powers.
Mussolini was unable to build an Italian economy that could support his ambitions or a military capable of rivaling the great powers like Germany and Britain. This is where the  limits of Mr. Putin’s achievements also seem to lie. After 20 years in power, he has failed to equip Russia with either the economy or the military that a great power needs. And because his power rests on such narrow and unsatisfactory foundations, his foreign policy remains one of brinkmanship and adventurism that is always vulnerable should his adversaries call his bluff—or if he miscalculates and bites off more than he can chew….
There are two mistakes we can make about figures like Mr. Putin. One is to underestimate their talent for troublemaking if they don’t get what they want. The other is to believe that by giving in to their demands we can quiet them down. The West has made both mistakes with Mr. Putin in the past. We must try to do better now.
Adlayada is a word derived from the rabbinic saying in the Talmud that one should revel on Purim by drinking “until one no longer knows” (adeloyada in, Aramaic: עַד דְּלָא יָדַע) the difference between “blessed be Mordecai” and “cursed be Haman.”
Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender (see pre-emptive nuclear strike and second strike).

Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.