President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Russia had information that the United States was planning to launch new missile strikes on Syria, and that there were plans to fake chemicals weapons attacks there.
‘We have information that a similar provocation is being prepared … in other parts of Syria including in the southern Damascus suburbs where they are planning to again plant some substance and accuse the Syrian authorities of using (chemical weapons),’ [he said].
(Reuters, April 11, 2017)
Only two words explain what Putin is doing here: lying and projecting!
The psychopathology afoot here is called projection. It is defined by people attributing to others traits, faults, and blame that inhere in themselves. And it explains almost every insult Trump has hurled at his opponents throughout this presidential campaign.
So when you hear him calling other people crooked, insecure, weak, beholden to special interests, liars, etc., be mindful that he’s just revealing self-conscious truths about himself, unwittingly.
(“Forget the Clinton Foundation. Shut Down the Trump Organization!” The iPINIONS Journal, August 26, 2016)
Specifically, Putin is projecting blame onto phantom terrorists – not only for last week’s gas attack, which he knows his puppet Syrian regime perpetrated, but also for future attacks, which he knows it plans to perpetrate (if only in a vain and diabolical effort to further implicate the phantom terrorists and vindicate him).
But Putin is also deflecting blame for his manifest failure to oversee the complete destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons. You may recall that he famously promised to do so in exchange for Obama taking his finger off the trigger, which would have launched many more missiles at Syria in 2013 than the 60 Trump launched last week.
That said, I alluded above to Trump because he lies and projects more than any politician in the history of mankind. As it happens, his notorious “birther” claim is probably the best (or worst) example of both.
Specifically, he said he had information that Obama was born in Kenya and was planning to perpetrate the biggest fraud in US history. Yet it’s arguable that Trump is the one who perpetrated the biggest fraud in US history by colluding with Putin (via WikiLeaks and Russian peddlers of fake news) to get elected president of the United States.
Apropos of which, in “The Issue Is Not Whether Russia Affected the Outcome of US Election,” December 12, 2016, I delineated (some of) the many reasons why the election collusion/bromance between Putin and Trump was doomed to implode. The most notable reason for this looming day of reckoning is that Putin will finally realize that, despite his flirtation, Trump’s policies towards Russia (especially re Ukraine-related sanctions) will be no different than Obama’s.
Frankly, the institutional constancy of US foreign policy is such that Trump could not alter its trajectory even if he wanted to. Nothing telegraphs this quite like Trump defying his own election rhetoric yesterday by signing a treaty to admit Montenegro into NATO, thereby expanding rather than disbanding it for being “obsolete.”
In other words, Trump was bound to disappoint Putin – just as he was bound to disappoint the poor fools who thought he really would, or even could, get Mexico to pay for that wall. Which suggests that Putin is not nearly as smart as he’s reputed to be.
And the more Trump disappoints him, the more Putin will have to explain himself to all of the Russians he had drinking champagne toasts to Trump’s election. Not least because he had them convinced that Trump was his puppet who he could manipulate to lift crippling economic sanctions in short order.
I cannot overstate this looming day of reckoning for their relationship. And nothing will characterize it quite like Putin unleashing the same leakers of secrets and peddlers of fake news to humiliate Trump and undermine his presidency who he unleashed to undermine Hillary and help elect Trump (i.e., the political execution of the proverb – live by the sword, die by the sword).
NOTE: For the uninitiated, the “little green men” in my title has nothing to do with Martians. It’s a mocking reference to the patented way Putin secretly dispatched camouflaged Russian soldiers to sow unrest in eastern Ukraine. He then denied they ever set foot there, insisting instead that Ukrainian vigilantes were trying to frame Russian soldiers for their misdeeds.
Truth be told, Putin has become so reliant on denying the undeniable to further his political interests, he’d think nothing of denying Americans landed on the moon to do so.
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