Welcome! This is an unapologetic, agenda-free zone. Just commentaries on current events that’ll move you to think, laugh, rage, and even cry.
I fully appreciate why so many Americans winced at Russian President Vladimir Putin presuming to lecture the United States about the shortcomings of its democratic practices (in what had to have been a deliberately dated op-ed in the New York Times on 9/11). After all, with the notorious blunders of Iraq and Afghanistan still so raw in public consciousness,… Read more.
In an interview with the Associated Press and his state TV on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin indicated for the first time that he is not averse to backing U.S. strikes to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons. Although, perhaps this was just his way of trying to soften up Obama before… Read more.
President Obama should consider boycotting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia if the Cold War-era foe gives asylum to Edward Snowden, Sen. Lindsey Graham told The Hill on Tuesday. ‘I would. I would just send the Russians the most unequivocal signal I could send them,’ he said. (The Hill, July 16, 2013) The problem with… Read more.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (60) has become an international laughing stock for staging photo ops to make himself look more like an action hero than a political leader. Not least because so many of his stunts, like pretending to escort migrating cranes in a glider, make him look more like Johnny English than James Bond.… Read more.
For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside. One can be forgiven for thinking that, with those words, President Obama sealed Assad’s fate as surely as, with a thumb down, a Roman emperor sealed that of a gladiator. After all, as leader of the world’s only… Read more.
Yesterday virtually all major newspapers around the world featured one of two stories about Russia – both of which suggest that the recent restoration of Vladimir Putin as president marked the beginning of political repression at home and cold-war aggression abroad that are eerily reminiscent of Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror. In other words, where… Read more.
Political corruption has become so endemic in Russia that elections there are every bit the pro-forma farce they are in unbridled dictatorships like North Korea and Zimbabwe. This is why the only uncertainty about the outcome of yesterday’s presidential election was over what percentage of the vote Vladimir Putin instructed his apparatchiks to assign to his… Read more.
Saturday’s announcement of the scheme to restore Vladimir Putin as president of Russia was about as surprising as April’s announcement of the campaign to reelect Barack Obama as president of the United States. Actually, the only thing noteworthy about Putin’s announcement is the stupefaction pundits around the world are expressing about the way Russia’s incumbent president, Dmitry Medvedev,… Read more.
Much is being made in the Western media about yesterday’s sentencing of the erstwhile richest man in Russia, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, to six years in prison after being convicted of stealing oil from his own company and laundering the proceeds. Never mind that his conviction and sentencing were as predictable as the Sun rising in… Read more.
When Vladimir Putin plucked Dmitry Medvedev from obscurity in 2007 to succeed him as president of Russia, the consensus opinion was that Medvedev would be nothing more than a lap dog doing Putin’s bidding until Putin could resume his role as president in 2012. (The Russian Constitution provides that no president can serve more than… Read more.
