EDITORIAL: Putins’ Raving Russophile Minions

EDITORIAL

Putin’s Raving Russophile Minions

Things did not start off on the right foot for new U.S. President Barack Obama.  First his attempt to take the oath of office went haywire and had to be done all over again the next day. Then it was revealed that the famous musicians he hired to play at the inauguration were string-synching. And then no sooner had he announced the closure of the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, than it was revealed that a prisoner previously released from the facility because of human rights concerns like those Obama is purporting to defend has become a major leadership figure in the Al Quaeda terrorist network.

Given Obama’s continuing and very disturbing silence concerning such Russia issues as race murder, energy warfare against Ukraine and the Markelov assassination (he’s been president for a week now, or maybe we should say weak, and not a peep out of him — though he’s found time to fire a shot across China’s bow), all these distractions might have made us worry about the prospects for the Obama presidency, particularly where Russia is concerned, were it not for the lunatic ravings of Boris Kagarlitsky in his most recent Moscow Times column.

We’ve repeatedly exposed Kagarlitsky’s lunatic ravings here on this blog, and his most recent treatise attacking Barack Obama therefore gives rise to suspicion on our part that Obama must be doing something right. It appears Kagarlitsky is afraid America is going to do well and he simply can’t stand the idea.

He writes:

Obama’s  [economic recovery] plan is exactly what the United States — and the rest of the world — needs right now. The only problem with it is that it will never work. Obama’s proposal is an attempt to save the flawed U.S. system from itself without instituting any fundamental changes, and therefore his economic recovery program is doomed to fail.Even a schoolchild can see the contradictions in the president’s stimulus plan. Obama proposes huge increases in government spending while at the same time lowering taxes. Where is he going to find the money to fund his expanded version of the old New Deal? At some point, Obama will step into fiscal quicksand when it turns out that runaway inflation and an enormous national deficit have caused the U.S. government to default on its debt obligations, much like what happened in Russia in 1998 and Argentina in 2001.

Sounds vaguely like the senile gibberish spewed by Igor Panarin, does it not?  Caught between the rock of their own failure and the hard place of American resurgence, the Russophile minions of Vladimir Putin are getting desperate fast, and it seems no extent of neo-Soviet nonsense is too broad or ludicrous to latch onto.

Even a schoolchild can see the embarrassingly laughable contradiction between saying “Obama’s  [economic recovery] plan is exactly what the United States — and the rest of the world — needs right now” and then that “the only problem with it is that it will never work” since “Obama’s proposal is an attempt to save the flawed U.S. system from itself without instituting any fundamental changes, and therefore his economic recovery program is doomed to fail.” So what the world needs is an American plan that’s doomed to fail?  Perhaps the MT needs to instiute a no-vodka policy for it columnists.

Kagarlitsky goes on:  “In recent years, the private sector in the United States has been more corrupt and inefficient than even the worst of Soviet bureaucrats.” Seems he can’t make up his mind whether the U.S. is just like Argentina or just like the USSR.

He continues:  “The people and Congress should evaluate the results of Obama’s programs with the same scrutiny that shareholders do in a publicly traded company.” Is it actually possible that this Russian nationalist maniac thinks the people of the United States will believe he’s concerned with their best interests, rather than his own and Russia’s?  Is that how far gone the so-called intelligentsia in Russia are these days?

This frenzy of desperation from the Russophile hoards is deeply disturbing.  We see here a fundamental detachment from reality, and obliviousness to facts and  criticism, which is no different from the blindness that characterized the USSR, and destroyed it.  Kagarlitsky lives in a country whose stock market is down 70%, foreign reserves and currency down 30%, all in less than a year.  A country that rolling out plans to create a “president for life” dictator, a country where the average man doesn’t live to see his sixtieth year.  And yet he feels he has plenty of free time to offer advice to a country which his own is routinely buzzing with nuclear bombers and seeking to undermine at every opportunity.

And so it goes in Vladimir Putin’s neo-Soviet Russia.