Mark of Zenpundit has some, IMHO, very sensible things to say about what appear to be attempts in some quarters to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin. Read it on your own, but here’s the money shot:
Vladmir Putin is at best an illiberal democrat. He has used strongarm tactics to break the power of the Oligarchs over Russia’s government and he is censoring the press through pressure, confiscation, intimidation and legal harrassment. The war in Chechnya under Putin is being carried out with the usual trademarkRussian mixture of brutality and incompetence. Putin has steadily consolidated most of the levers of power in his own hands. These are things which the United States should regard with a concerned wariness when dealing with the Russian Federation.
But if Vladmir Putin is no Thomas Jefferson, he isn’t Joseph Stalin either. He has been elected democratically and enjoys wide, deep, support and dissenters are not being herded into camps behind barbed wire. Putin is not the enemy of the United States and he is a determined reformer who is by all reports, honest. Can that be said of Khordokovsky, Berezovsky, Gusinsky and the other Oligarchs who have looted Russia of hundreds of billions of dollars with the help of mafia crime lords and ex-Communist fixers ? These characters do not have clean enough hands for any respectable American conservative to imagine they represent the free market or for any American liberal to pretend that these looters are democrats. In Chicago, we have a term for ” businessmen” like the Oligarchs:
“Mobbed Up”
Read the rest on your own.
(Hat tip to Simon World)
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
What’s a guy got to do to get some good press?
Putin is a “democrator”. He’s using democracy as an verbal ideology, he’s not taking it serious as a functioning political system. The behaviour of a typical Tschekist…
Dogbert, this would be a good time to explain why you are using an eerie picture of Putin as your gravatar.
I use it because I like people to see that even a great and fearsome leader like Putin was a sweet little boy once, beloved by his parents and friends.
Plus, he looks a bit like Macauley Culkin, which is cool.
Hey, that’s exactly why I use that pic of me when I was little! (Except substitute “goofy and procrastinating” for “great and fearsome”).
Putin looks like he had a receding hairline even back then.
By the way, he doesn’t look sweet… he looks like a brooder, like he’s full of anxiety because he once had a sexual thought about his aunt, and who occasionally tortures small rodents in the garage or behind the shed.
I’ll just say I was relieved to know that wasn’t you.
There are definitely far worse potential Russian leaders than Putin, but I don’t think he should get a free passfrom the West.
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