You might remember that thread I opened a while back about how "Republicans ❤ Putin". And over on my side of the aisle that chapter of American politics is still a source of amusement and begs an actual, serious question: For months, Republicans in the United States ran around singing Putin's praises, convinced that it was the Russian autocrat gaining power and prestige on the international stage, while President Obama "failed to lead" and American influence waned. It seems painfully obvious now that Republicans had it backwards. George Packer has a fascinating new piece on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which included a classic anecdote .... Putin's brand of macho elicits in Merkel a kind of scientific empathy. In 2007, during discussions about energy supplies at the Russian President's residence in Sochi, Putin summoned his black Lab, Koni, into the room where he and Merkel were seated. As the dog approached and sniffed her, Merkel froze, visibly frightened. She'd been bitten once, in 1995, and her fear of dogs couldn't have escaped Putin, who sat back and enjoyed the moment, legs spread wide. [...] The German press corps was furious on her behalf – "ready to hit Putin," according to a reporter who was present. Later, Merkel interpreted Putin's behavior. "I understand why he has to do this – to prove he's a man," she told a group of reporters. "He's afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this." I've long believed this is the detail that Putin's American admirers have never fully understood: some people act tough to hide their insecurities, while others actually are tough and see no need for pretenses. Putin belongs in the former camp, which seems to impress GOP politicians in the United States, but which doesn't actually produce positive results for Russia. So, while Republicans run to the Sunday shows to announce that Putin is playing chess to Obama's checkers, Obama is helping scuttle Russia's warship deal. All the while, Putin is increasingly isolated, leading a country with a collapsing economy and neighbors eager to strengthen alliances with the West. Now, it's true that Steve Benen↱ really enjoys hitting Republicans on this point; indeed, he was a bit more explicit in December↱: The confluence of economic events unfolding in Russia is amazing: cheap gas, banks in need of a bailout, crashing currency, high interest rates, and an inability to repay debts, all against the backdrop of additional sanctions. There's no reason conditions are going to improve in Russia anytime soon and Putin doesn't know what to do next. With these developments in mind, I'm curious: where did all the Republicans go who heralded Putin as a strategic mastermind? Where are the Fox News personalities who liked the idea of Putin leading the United States? They seem to have fallen quietly lately. Maybe someone should ask them whether they stand by their previous gushing over the Russian autocrat. It's a fair question. I mean, we knew it was goofy then, because it involved listening to a retired Army colonel going on about what a "he-man" Vladimir Putin is, and even a famous dragster, Rudy Giuliani, praising the foremost closet homosexual in the world as "what you call a leader". So to me the question of, "What's with Russia?" is an interesting one in multiple contexts. To the one, it is both fascinating and sickening to watch what is most likely symptomatic of a strongman in the throes of some manner of neurotic rupture―I hold with the closet case thesis for both its likelihood and morbid amusement. To the other, the real situation will play out in a real Russia, affecting real human beings both within that country and around the world. Still, though, it might be worth making a definitive list of all the Republicans who fell in love with Vladimir Putin because they wanted to support a tyrant in order to undermine the efficacy of their own government and declare, "Okay, you're all disqualified from being taken seriously." ____________________ Notes: Benen, Steve. "Against Putin, Obama gets the last laugh". msnbc. 28 January 2015. msnbc.com. 4 February 2015. http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/against-putin-obama-gets-the-last-laugh —————. "Putin's failures leave Russia reeling". msnbc. 2 December 2014. msnbc.com. 4 February 2015. http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/putins-failures-leave-russia-reeling
Sadly, it's not just rightist Republicans who've sought to curry favour with Putin, support him or emulate his methods. There's also plenty of leftists throughout the West who've argued on his behalf and continue to do so wherever his name comes up on the internet. Many of them I suspect are paid Russian propagandists posing as western Europeans and Americans, especially the ones that echo Pravda's ramblings line by line. The rest I believe to be a combination of anarchists, radical leftists and social outcasts who've basically taken it upon themselves to hate everything American and to cheer anyone who boasts of being able to bring it to its knees. Since the day Yeltsin resigned, Putin and his allies have actively sought to undermine America's diplomatic and military positions around the globe solely for the purpose of taking its place. In their eyes the problem isn't that America pushes its weight around and violates human rights in the places it occupies, it's merely that a rival street gang is operating on their turf. They fancy themselves as master manipulators of internal Western divisions, mixing fact intimately with fiction in their propaganda broadcasts to lend the illusion of credibility to the latter, while in truth they act duplicitly in the fight against global terror, spy on the US and its allies on behalf of their enemies, finance and equip the most brutal rogue regimes on the planet and sponsor known terrorists in Ukraine and throughout the middle east. Too many fools on both sides of the political spectrum allow themselves to be seduced by Putin's arguments in the same way an unemployed American labourer might have once found common ground with Hitler's radio rants.
It's not only with Putin. Republicans have short memories. Republican entertainment (e.g. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, et al) gave them Baby Bush who was an incompetent spendthrift and supported him for 8 years of profligacy. One would think these folks would become weary of Republican entertainment, but such is not the case. Republican entertainment explained away their blunders by blaming the mythical RINO and the Republican based bought it hook line and sinker.
I admit I'm always suspicious when I see that kind of generalized equivocation; the question that arises is what story the detail will tell. Consider the idea of a strongman in a state not called Russia. So that strongman decides to run an unofficial pogrom against a specific group of people, and even justifies himself by saying that society will fall apart if these people are allowed to live without being kidnapped, tortured, and often murdered. Now consider that here in the States, the opposition party, hoping to discredit the White House and undermine the nation, argues the virtue of this strongman and praises his leadership. Now, then, what exactly is your equivalent that "penty of leftists" have undertaken? Do you understand? Russians are hunting their fellow human beings who happen to be homosexual. Putin responds by passing laws against homosexuals, encouraging further murderous hostilities. He explains himself on the grounds that if he discourages the society from discouraging homosexuality in this way, the nation's birth rate will plummet because Russian men will leave their wives for other men. There is, of course, the obvious point to be made: The only guy who worries about leaving his wife for another man is the bisexual or gay guy in the room, not the confidently heteroseuxal. But setting that aside, what about those actions are praiseworthy? What about them brings people like Giuliani to praise him as "what you call a leader"? What about those actions makes Putin into a "real he-man", as one retired Army colonel gushed? What is your equivalent? If you have "plenty" of examples, why stick with something so vague? Or is it more the need to be equivocating and pretend that all politicians are the same? Or perhaps you hope to buff Republican buttons? I don't get why people offer some vague equivocation and then chicken out on their own argument. Seriously, there is no American equivalent to what the GOP did and is doing. Remember that line about how Obama was playing checkers but Putin was playing chess? Murderlust in order to pander to bigoted voters at home? Are you certain about your equivocation?
Not in any way trying to detract from Republicans trying to use crises to score political points, was just noting what to me seems a genuine trend, and I wasn't referring exclusively to leftists on the political spectrum in America alone. Take for example the far-left Syriza party in Greece which has been threatening to break ranks on the issue of Russian sanctions and was partly responsible for the lack of new sanctions being applied in the wake of new Russian aggression last week, but there have been many other European voices calling for appeasement who need regular weekly cracks on the noggin from drunk Russian thugs to remind them who they're dealing with. The Chavistas in Venezuela and their global sympathizers frequently accuse the US of engineering a fascist coup in Ukraine (this as their economy crumbles to pieces and their only response is to do everything short of cutting shopkeepers' hands off). globalresearch.ca is a popular news blog for the radical left and their Ukraine articles are basically towing the Pravda line verbatim, while Pravda itself says America should lay off, accept the return of the Russian empire and just let them have itty bitty Czechoslovakia... or, well, you know. Wasn't Pravda itself a socialist working-class newspaper once upon a time? In response to virtually every mainstream online Western-published article on the subject of Ukraine, one can observe endless multitudes of radical viewpoints being expressed in the talkbacks about how America's meddling in Iraq and elsewhere in the middle east justifies Putin with his pants down showing up for sloppy seconds, or helping himself to a few extra rolls from the bread basket next door (granted, I suspect a large proportion of such posts might indeed originate directly from the Kremlin and its minions, as I insinuated in my previous post, rather than disgruntled leftist Americans). Oh believe me, I understand, and I understood it even before I watched any of the many documentaries showing just how Russians are hunting down those homosexuals. What I don't understand is why, for the last 15 years, Russia has been treated with kid gloves, like an obnoxious drunken friend whose antics are moderately annoying but not so much as to warrant an embarassing dismissal from the dinner party. Yeah, so they're run by a tyrannical KGB autocrat who potentially blows up his own apartment buildings to justify blasting even more of them in Chechnya (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings), but we can work with them. Yeah, so Putin's a little close with the Russian Mafia and occasionally sells advanced weapons to belligerent Sunni and Shia terrorists, but he probably doesn't always realize who he's dealing with, or it must all be about preserving global stability or something like that. Ok, Putin passed on some weapons and intel to Saddam just to get more people killed on both sides of the Iraq conflict and make America bleed a little more, and he's doing the same thing with North Korea, but we can still trust this guy, he's just a little butthurt about losing his favourite shooting practice partner. Yeah, so they're occupying chunks of Georgia and Moldova and talking about how they're going to replace America as the top dog on the world map, but all that boozer talk of violence and nuclear war is really just filler to pass the time until they come up with a realistic economic and diplomatic alternative. On and on the laundry list goes, and I'm sure I'm missing dozens of items there, and finally we get to the point where Putin realizes he can get away with pretty much anything up to and including murder on British soil, so he just says "ok f*ck it, time to go after the gays too." And still the world blinks and moves on with business as usual buying oil and gas from the Russian mafia, and selling them luxury automobiles, penthouses and putting their kids through Western educations meant for royalty. Here Putin, have some more computer chips to put in those rocket launchers you're selling to the next asshole who wants to fight us. Maybe Putin himself really is a closet homosexual as you hypothesize- he's certainly got some serious insecurities of one sort or another, but it's irrelevant; the guy can do whatever the f*ck he wants and come off smelling like roses in some circles because he's not Dick Cheney, and that's a serious problem for global prosperity, security and liberty. Once again to be clear, I'm not trying to point the finger and blame one end of the political spectrum or the other. I see disgusting things emerging from every part of the political spectrum all the time, I'm as frustrated about many of these things as you are, and I'm thoroughly convinced it's because most politicians are immature schoolchildren at heart who weren't satiated by all the popularity contests they bullied their way into winning back in high school. I think the recent Republican gamesmanship is absurd, and demonstrative of the same kind of oblivious mentality that once led Indiana's state congress to attempt to change the value of pi to 3.2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill). Rather than studying global warming in detail and preparing strategies to deal with it, they act as if they can simply legislate it away. But when it comes to Putin specifically, I don't see how your blanket accusations against the Republican party can hold. Aren't there hawks on the right who hold Putin to be a vile, disgusting criminal and advocate for hardline economic warfare if not direct military intervention?
It will be interesting to see how the "peace talks" go today in Moscow. I expect, the talks today will be fruitless. And even if there is an agreement, how long will it last? If history is any gauge, any agreement will not last very long. Just as Hitler didn't honor his agreements, history has show Putin doesn't honor his agreements. Putin wants Ukraine and he will do whatever it takes to get it. It is just that simple. I think the West needs to impose further sanctions and write Russia off as a total loss. Let Russia wallow in its putrid waste until it can function in civil society. Whatever happens, Merkel is scheduled to meet with President Obama on Monday. I anticipate that Monday talk will be followed by further sanctions and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the West begin shipments of lethal weapons to Ukrainian. It probably won't stop Putin's aggression. But it will make his land grabs more expensive. I think the game plan will be to turn Ukraine into another Afghanistan for Putin. When the body bags start flowing back into Mother Russia in increasing numbers it will become more difficult for Putin to explain away his "vacationing" troops in Ukraine to the Russian populace.
Just let them have Ukraine already, they are going to get it anyway. The next country they invade, we should nuke one Russian city.
Better yet, we give each Eastern European nation one nuke to do with what they will. I guess some could share one. I bet if Ukraine had a nuke, they would not have been invaded. (not my idea, it's from Dan Carlin).
Well it looks like there is no deal. It appears the peace talks failed, though they are still talking. I think they are deluding themselves. Putin will never cease his attempts to takeover Ukraine. Former American Ambassador McFaul believes the US will begin arming Ukraine and the announcement will come this week. McFaul also believes Ukraine will be a very prolonged problem. It isn't going away anytime soon. There is a report out that Putin suffers from Asperger Syndrome. That might be interesting, but it really doesn't help. Putin is delusional. Putin sees the world as a zero sum game, and he suffers from paranoia. I guess all dictators suffer from paranoia. The bad news is it's the same kind of paranoia we have seen in past dictators and has in the past resulted in the deaths of millions of men, women and children. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome
It looks like Western nations have imposed a deadline of Wednesday on Mother Putin. If Putin doesn't conform by Wednesday, more sanctions will be unleashed on Mother Russia. But it sounds like the sanctions are still pretty watered down. It seems the Dutch have no interest in freezing Russia out of international payment systems. Little wonder as Royal Dutch Shell which has invested heavily in Russia will come out a big loser. Royal Dutch Shell accounts for more than half of the Dutch GDP. Oil revenues account for 75% of the Dutch GDP. So that leaves the US holding the cards. Should the US begin supplying Ukraine with "defensive" weapons? I think so. Those opposed, including Merkel say that would increase the violence. I am sure it would. But doing nothing will increase the violence too. Adding more people to your sanction list which is what the new sanctions are, is essentially doing nothing. I think it is time for something else. We need to either cut Russia out of international payment systems and/or begin supplying Ukraine with weapons. So while the West has imposed another deadline, Russia has announced Mother Putin does not and will not hold to those deadlines. One thing is for sure, whatever happens, it will be interesting. Merkel and Obama will have a joint press conference sometime today. I look forward to hearing what they have to say. I don't think Putin will change in the least. Whatever happens, agreement or not, Putin will continue to be Putin, and he will continue his aggression in neighboring states so long as he is physically able to do so. The West needs to make that aggression as expensive as possible. That means cutting Russia out of the international payments systems and supplying Ukraine with weapons. Yeah, Ukraine will get bloodier. But Ukraine is going to get bloodier no matter what we do or do not do. Let's not deceive ourselves. Only Putin can stop the bloodshed in Ukraine by withdrawing his troops.
are you some sort of a sociopath or do you just get off on killing people. the ukrainians deserve their freedom and it should be supported. and as crazy as putin is he is not going to annex ukraine.
The people that advocate a nuclear power taking on another nuclear power are the ones leading us to WWIII.
I don't suppose you have heard about The Cold War? Nuclear powers have been fighting proxy wars with each other decades with no WW III. Alternatively, we can make Putin emperor of the world, give him whatever he wants and do whatever he commands.
Yeah, I don't want another one! I thought we were done with that. Ukraine has been under the Russian sphere of influence since before the Czars, it's nothing like a slippery slope.
are you sure it's noth 200% in facts petroleum and derivates make up 20% of their exports link (shell does make worldwide 555.8 billio n or roughly 80% of the Netherlands gdp of wich they pay like 378 mil taxes+ Would delivering weapons stop Russia? depends on how much money is in Russia. If Putin cuts back spending people start loosing their jobs. How much does that war costs Putin? (I'm sure he would have to had payed his soldiers anyway) but theirs Always a cost missiles, tanks and people support don't come for free. Ukraine stopped paying pensions in the donbass that alone should be a mayor cost
And that makes sense to you? It makes no sense to me. Oil does account for 20% of Dutch exports. But that wasn’t the issue. The issue was GPD, and the issue was Royal Dutch Shell and its contribution to Dutch GDP. You’re conflating two different issues. That is exactly the point I made. And that is a major reason for Dutch reluctance to impose sanctions on Russia. Royal Dutch Shell is heavily dependent on one company which has significant investments in Russia. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...deals-with-exxon-shell-imperiled-by-sanctions Not immediately, but over time it might. When Russia soldiers began coming home in body bags during their Afghanistan invasion, Russia did change of course and withdrew its troops from Afghanistan. Supplying weapons to Ukraine is just another tool to increase the price Putin must pay for his aggression towards neighboring states. While Putin has no qualms about other people dying, he does value his own skin. Sanctions haven’t stopped Putin. So there is no reason to expect Putin will experience a sudden epiphany and transform from a power hungry fascist dictator into a benign lovable and reasoned dictator. The war is expensive, but not for the reasons you attribute. Russian soldiers and pensioner are paid in rubles. Putin can print rubles all day long. What Putin cannot do is supply his troops and pensioners with goods and services that must be purchased with foreign currencies. And as Putin prints more rubles, he debases his economy. That is one reason Russia is now facing double digit inflation. Putin has a unique way of looking at things. He doesn’t look at profit or loss. He measures value in terms of power. Ukraine is important because Ukraine is a significant supplier of Russian arms. The manpower, design, and construction of Russia’s military is heavily dependent on Ukrainian ore, refining and manufacturing. So Ukraine has value to Putin that goes beyond monetary value. Ukraine is integral to Putin’s dreams of empire.
so your not denying your bloodthirstyness? you may not view the peoples lives your so willing to casually throw away as meaningful but they are. don't talk about others spider own your own calls for violence.
