EDITORIAL
Barack Obama, Traitor to American Values
Obama stabs liberty in the back
In a blog post on October 13th, as translated by Paul Goble two days later, Anton Orekh of the Echo of Moscow radio station declared that U.S. President Barack Obama had given up on the notion of democracy and human rights in Russia and would treat the country as a hopeless case on that score, the same as the U.S. had done to the USSR during the Cold War.
This came on the heels of a sensational story reported by the Kommersant newspaper quoting Obama’s Russia advisor Michael McFaul as saying “that the US no longer intends to teach Russia about democracy, creating tension with Moscow, and intends to concentrate on practical work with non-governmental organisations.” Oleg Orlov of the Memorial NGO allegedly then confronted (Russian link) McFaul about the remarks, and he supposedly denied making them.
The impression made by all this rumor-mongering, which Obama himself has certainly not denied, is predictable.
Goble writes:
Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the dean of Russian human rights activists who heads the Moscow Helsinki Group, said that “if America says: ‘we have democracy, and you can arrange things for yourselves as you like,’ then everything the democratic countries have achieved since 1975 [will go by the wayside.” Moreover, she continued, “if America and the rest of the world will silently watch while freedom of the press is suppressed [in Russia], while meetings and demonstrations are broken up, … while political parties are shackled and elections falsified, … then, in that case, [she said she thought] that the Nobel Peace Prize had been given to Barack Obama prematurely.”
It really makes no difference whether McFaul actually said what Kommersant reported, or whether that constitutes adminstration policy. What matters is that based on Obama’s conduct, such rumors are entirely credible. There is no tangible policy action to refute them. McFaul has not said anything significant since Obama took power to condemn Russian human rights atrocities, which have included numerous convictions by the European Court for Human Rights and a recent finding that Russia repeatedly violated international law when it invaded Georgia in 2008, and neither has Obama.
It’s perfectly clear now that the Obama adminstration consists of nothing but cowards and liars, and worst of all hypocrites. People who traded on claims in support of liberal values for elections purposes only to abandon them as soon as they received power.
This is an issue on which both Democrats and Republicans can agree Obama is a disastrous president. Liberals are now fleeing Obama’s ranks, seeing him for the traitor he is, and conservatives have been condemning his cowardice and duplicty for months now. Obama’s performance in Moscow was a disgrace, and it was entirely predictable that the ranks of liberal Kremlin opponents in Russia would shatter and panic based on the display of pathetic weakness they witnessed.
Barack Obama is this century’s Neville Chamberlain. Decades will be needed to recover from the damage he has already done to democratic values in Russia.
La Russophobe 
You are a racist. Your blog has been reported to the following civil rights agencies: ADL, Southern Poverty Law Center, NAACP and the ACLU. You will shut down you racist extremist!!!
Well, the Cult of Holy Obama has been heard from. This same sort of thing got so many to drink that Kool Aide.
Well, Kim, if you hate the President of USA as much as you hate the Prime Minister of Russia, why don’t you start a new blog: “La Americaphobe” and keep it going for the next 8 years that he will be in office in USA.
Probably because American government and diplomats do not cry about any “Americophobia”.
Example of “Russophobia”:
Russia condemned as “Russophobic” the planned expulsion of four diplomats from Britain over Moscow’s refusal to extradite a key suspect in the murder of former security officer Alexander Litvinenko in London.
http://www.america-russia.net/eng/news/155160637
(See also: “double standards”, another equally stupid Russian buzzword.)
I heard that Litvinenko was engaged in smuggling polonium. To kill people in such a way that the theatrical, even for James Bond too!
In Russia there is a blog “La Americaphobe”? Are you Michael Tal does not work for the KGB?
Sorry he won’t be there for 8 years
Only a clueless child from the kremlin would make such a remark – NASHI belong in moscow.
Isn’t Putin being racist for taking advantage of a black man?
No, it was President Bush and VP Cheney who are racists, because they took advantage of a black man – Colin Powell – by forcing him to deliver to the UN the notorious falsified report on non-existent Iraqi WMDs and Saddam’s non-existent alliance with AL Qaeda.
Dear “Michael Tal”/Photophobe the Libertarian Retard – bizarro LR from Bizarro Universe (where Russia has the “the largest ever” population of 152 million, where Georgia is alligned with al-Qaeda, where the bunches of links that you’re copy-pasting en-masse actually work, where what you call “your Russian radar” actually “works perfectly” instead of I guess being a typical post-Soviet piece of crap, and where Ron Paul will eventually win and give back America back to you because you’re not a smelly Latino immigrant but rather a proud member of a Russian-Jewish higher race).
I guess it’s not nice making fun of an obviously mentally challanged person like you, but I just can’t stop myself:
1. Do you seriously think being black is some natural predisposition for a black man like Colin Powell to be “taken advantage” of by evil crackas like George “W” Bush, Dick “Dick” Cheney and Condoleezza “Snow White” Rice?
I think the opinion like this would be pretty racist, but anyway try and let’s play along,
2. Who are the white racist “taking advantage” of Obama’s blackness right now? (Besides the so-called “Russian government”, that is.)
What the father of Sergey Brin (Jewish programmer and founder of Google) has to say about why he rescued his family from the anti-semitism of Russia/the USSR.
“One of Michael’s stories particularly strikes me. In the summer of 1990, a few weeks before Sergey’s 17th birthday, Michael led a group of gifted high school math students on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. He decided to bring the family along, despite uneasiness about the welcome they could expect from Communist authorities. It would give them a chance to visit family members still living in Moscow, including Sergey’s paternal grandfather, like Michael, a Ph.D. mathematician.
It didn’t take long for Sergey, a precocious teenager about to enter college, to size up his former environs. The Soviet empire was crumbling and, in the drab, cinder-block landscape and people’s stony mien of resignation, he could see first-hand the bleak future that would have been his. On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, “Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.”….
…..At a bagel shop across the street from the Maryland campus where he has taught dynamical systems and statistics for 25 years, Michael talks of the discrimination that drove him to take his family out of Russia. It’s a bitter cold day in College Park, reminiscent of winter in Moscow. Over a lunch of soup and sandwiches, Michael explains how he was forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college. Officially, anti-Semitism didn’t exist in the U.S.S.R. but, in reality, Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities. Jews were excluded from the physics department, in particular, at the prestigious Moscow State University, because Soviet leaders did not trust them with nuclear rocket research. Unfortunately for Michael, astronomy fell under the rubric of physics.
Michael opted to study mathematics instead. But gaining acceptance to the math department at Moscow State, home of arguably the brightest mathematicians in the world, also proved exceedingly difficult. Discrimination there was administered by means of entrance exams for which Jews were tested in different rooms from other applicants—morbidly nicknamed “gas chambers”—and graded more harshly. Nevertheless, with help from a well-connected family friend, Michael was accepted and in 1970 graduated with an honors degree.
“I had all A’s except for three classes where I got B’s: history of the Communist Party, military training and statistics,” he says. “But nobody would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish. That was normal.” So Michael became an economist for GOSPLAN, the central planning agency. “I was trying to prove that, in a few years, living standards in Russia would be higher than in the United States,” he says. “And I proved it. I know enough about math to prove whatever you want.”
He continued to study mathematics on his own, sneaking into evening seminars at the university and writing research papers. After several were published, Brin began a doctoral thesis. At the time, a student in the Soviet Union could earn a doctorate without going to graduate school if he passed certain exams and an institution agreed to consider his thesis. Michael found two advisers, an official adviser, an ethnic Russian, and an informal Jewish mentor. (“Jews could not have Jewish advisers,” he says.) With their help, he successfully defended his thesis at a university in Kharkov, Ukraine, but life didn’t change much even after he received his Ph.D….
….The history of Russian Jewish emigration in the mid-1970s can be neatly summarized in a joke from the era: Two Jews are talking in the street, a third walks by and says to them, “I don’t know what you’re talking about but yes, it’s time to get out of here!”
“I’ve known for a long time that my father wasn’t able to pursue the career he wanted,” Sergey tells me. As a young boy, though, Sergey had only a vague awareness of why his family wanted to leave their native Russia. He picked up the ugly details of the anti-Semitism they faced bit by bit years later, he says. Nevertheless, he sensed, early on, all of the things that he wasn’t: He wasn’t Russian. He wasn’t welcome in his own country. He wasn’t going to get a fair shake in advancing through its schools. Further complicating his understanding of his Jewish identity was the fact that, under the ardently atheist Soviet regime, there were few religious or cultural models of what being Jewish was. The negatives were all he had.”
http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2007/2007-02/200702-BrinFeature.html
If I remember correctly LR once tried to cover race matters for David Johnson’s list and does state in the comment policy that racist commentators will be banned. I myself have had reason to criticize some members of this blog for racist commentary and do not regard the site as a whole as racist although of course a few oddballs write things here and there. Anyone who reads LR knows her commentary minces no words. Her statements on all subjects related to her passionate beliefs are always a true verbal strafing to people she believes deserve it. As she believes regular decent behavior can and ought to be expected from Russians and it is condescending to think otherwise ; she holds to the same for black people. Please reconsider your harsh judgement of this blog.
Corey,
Of course Kim is a racist. For example, when Russia created a women-only traffic police unit, Kim twisted this in racist anti-Russian GENETIC form:
https://larussophobe.wordpress.com/2006/08/30/kremlin-concludes-russian-men-are-genetically-corrupt/
Kremlin Concludes Russian Men are Genetically Corrupt
“MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia is to create its first women-only traffic police unit because commanders believe they are less corrupt than men, a newspaper reported on Monday.”
———————————
Michael,
Michael, I think Kim is just being a typical American female chauvinist pig. LOL. But if you say so it must be so!
Well said LR, you hit the nail on the head fair and square with this thread!
Who the hell is this Jamal Watson II, by the tone of his comment he sounds like a misguided twit who wants to control what people think and write.
To him freedom of speech is a non event that should be stifled like it is in RuSSia.
As a suggestion JWII, emigrate to Putler’s RuSSia where your services will be more appreciated/valued.
Please, another thread down the drain because a moronic troll pulled the trigger first?
There are a lot of decent posters who are gone because of this.
I am appalled at the implicit white supremacism seen here. It is unacceptable in this day and age that white people such as yourselves would stoop to the lowest form of behaviour when discussing America’s first black president. You truly should be embarrassed. Obama is doing an incredible job for the American people. He is much better than that moron George Bush your far right hillbillies seem enamored with.
White supremacism is coming to an end and you: La Russophone – your blog WILL be shutdown. A task force is being developed as I speak. We members of the African American community will not tolerate your racist distortion of our President’s accomplishments.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize which by itself is a testament to his political prowess and experience.
No, Jamal. While Obama has all makings of a great man, he hasn’t accomplished much yet in terms of deeds, so the Nobel Prize was too early.
In fact, the way he has given up his health care agenda to please the Republicans, he may never accomplish what he needs to accomplish.
Go take a cold shower.
So, Mr Watson, you are appalled at the “implicit white supremacism” of criticizing your president’s foreign policy incompetence, but aren’t you appalled at the fact that your black president appeases a government that tolerates (and is often complicit in) daily (often deadly) attacks on non-white people? Some would call this hypocrisy, others would call it pure idiocy.
You kinda remind me of the “Jewish” Michael Tal who doesn’t seem to be too bothered about Russian neo-Nazis desecrating Jewish graves or murdering non-Slavs (with the tacit encouragement of the Russian authorities). And you both remind me of the “Black Führer of Harlem” (an African American Nazi character from a Kurt Vonnegut book).
Just two weeks into his presidency. Just think what two years will bring. Will he give into Putin’s demands to sell Alaska back? That will get rid of his rival Palin. Not that’s not just smart diplomacy. That’s smart politics.
Putin is demanding that the U.S sell Alaska back to them?!
Buy back? Well, his court jester Vladimir “Zhirinovsky” Edelstein (NOT JEWISH) demands take it back by force.
He has also threatened to seize Alaska from the United States, to launch a nuclear strike on Japan, to flood Germany with radioactive waste, and to occupy the Baltic states. [and much, much more]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/667745.stm
Whether Mr. Zhirinovsky is serious about restoring Alaska to what was once imperial Russia remained unclear after his press conference last week. But his party emblem offers a clue; it includes a map of the czarist empire embracing everything from Finland to Alaska.
“I don’t think any of us expect to be giving up Alaska any time soon,” said President Clinton when asked about it last week. On the other hand, noted Tom Bodett, an Alaska humorist and motel chain spokesman, “For that fringe element up here attempting to secede, this may be the foreign country they’re looking for.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/19/weekinreview/the-world-alaskans-don-t-want-to-be-anyone-s-siberia.html
Corey wrote:
> Putin is demanding that the U.S sell Alaska back to them?!
That sounds intriguing. Where did you get that? And how much money has he offered so far? If he wants, I will gladly sell him my own house for $10 million. Our real estate prices are in toilet, so I will consider even lower offers.
If Puitn starts buying real estate, he may solve the US real estate crisis. Viva free market!
Alaska in the 19 century was given to the U.S. in the lease. Communists do not acknowledge any debt left over from old Russia and Alaska was given so free America
поиск
No, it was sold.
> Michael McFaul as saying “that the US no longer intends to teach Russia about democracy, creating tension with Moscow, and intends to concentrate on practical work with non-governmental organisations.”
That sounds great. Helping democratic forces in Russia is the best way to see Russia return to democracy. However, this should be done in a quiet way so that not to make the democratic forces look like they are mercenaries for a foreign country.
>M. Tal: “However, this should be done in a quiet way so that not to make the democratic forces look like they are mercenaries for a foreign country.”
And they are right!
LR wrote:
——————
Medvedev as the New Gorbachev?
Here’s an interesting bit of analysis from Reuters, suggesting that Dima Medvedev may be the new Gorbachev.
Something quite extraordinary is happening in Russia. Slowly but surely, the monolithic political system that has held together in Russia for most of the past decade is coming apart
——————
Wow, it looks like you are saying that since Medvedev and Obama came to office, Russia is beginning to recover from the damage that was done to democratic values in Russia when Putin and Bush were in office.
> Barack Obama is this century’s Neville Chamberlain. Decades will be needed to recover from the damage he has already done to democratic values in Russia.
Ha? Make up your mind. Are things beginning to look better in Russia or worse?
This post contains a forged quotation. According to the Ekho Moskvy Radio, Lyudmila Alekseyeva actually said: “if America says: ‘we have democracy, and you can arrange things for yourselves as you like,’ then everything the democratic countries have achieved since 1975 to ensure security and cooperation in Europe will go by the wayside.” I perfectly understand LR’s motives (or those of Paul Goble who is her source) for this juggling with words: such things as bombing of Serbia and the establishment of a criminal enclave in Kosovo can hardly be considered as conducive to security and cooperation in Europe, can they?
Of course not, why?
This might be only the looting of Georgia and the establishment of a criminal enclave in the former South Ossetia Autonomous District.
Geographically, neither Georgia nor South Ossetia are Europe. :-)
You suck at geography.
This “Jamal Watson II” seems to be just your ordinary anti-white Nazi.
By the way, Watson, or whoever you are-in our country to criticize the President doesn’t mean to be Americanophobic. It is only in moronic Rasha to criticize Putler or Dima or whatever is wrong with that country is considered to be russophobic.
Idiot.
LR, let me humbly submit that you have been taken.
“Jamal Watson” – the Second, no less, is a kremlinoid, operating on the basis of “on the Internet noone knows you’re a dog.”
It’s about the same as the little kremlinoid “Michael Tal,” who claims to be Jewish.
You have been had, along with the others who bothered to respond to that tripe.
LR, look at the very first post: “you have been reported…..”
That is a sovok kremlinoid mentality, posted by someone who does not know how things really work.
Straight out of the sovok handbook – “racist” and “anti-Semitic” America.
elmer, these fools linger on here because they get fed. It’s a trough they return to every day under new monikers and with a sockpuppet that originates from the same keyboard. Who’s invention are they? I have my guesses.
The pattern if you are paying attention is pretty obvious.
They have, and I don’t think there are more than two people behind all of the monikers, succeeded in degrading LR’s site. More intelligent people read the garbage and pass on it. So it’s everyday looking at the same lame troll bait and the kneejerk responses to the bait.
They get fed. It’s sad.
Unfortunately Penny, in many respects you are wrong.
People like “Michael Tal/Phobophobe/Ostap Bender” and “I am Russian” etc will continue to post regardless.
It is however extremely important to counter their stupid arguments, lies and fabrications, not to mention thier deliberate and malicious editing of quotes from other sources, by posting accutate quotes, and articles by experts and international rights groups, the UN etc.
Failure to do so is lazyness, both intelectual and moral.
If we were to take your line there would be no point in Kim’s blog, because it would “only attract trolls”
I think you might be taking it too seriously ;)
Quite possibly, but then again I do live next door to the nabijuarebi Russians, so I am more inclined to take them seriously than others.
Too seriously sometimes I admit :)
Cheers Robert.
> “Jamal Watson” – the Second, no less, is a kremlinoid
Paranoia galore?
When you own a blog, you have the right to delete the garbage.
And sometimes you should.
Penny, I think that Andrew may have a point here, to a certain extent.
There is a lot of disinformation posted here by kremlinoid trolls, and it does indeed need to be countered.
Having said that, I don’t think there is any need to counter the “racism” claptrap posted by “Jamal Watson” – the Second, no less – to any great extent.
Let me put it this way, slightly off topic.
A friend of mine from Ukraine has a daughter who, for some reason, is attending the rashan orthodox “church”, where the “priest” is telling her not to attend any Ukrainian church in Ukraine, because there are “розкольники” (rought translation – “anti-unifiers,” meaning anti-union between roosha and Ukraine, and anti-supremacy of Maskva patriarch, and Kiril and his $36,000 watch over everyone else, and anti-rooshan imperialism) in the Ukrainian churches.
Where is she getting some of her information?
rooshan orthodox web sites.
Now, as has been pointed out before, every other orthodox church welcomes people with open arms, and Ukrainian, Georgian, etc (except rashan) don’t prohibit you from going to other churches, whether or not there are “розкольники” there.
Because the other churches are not playing politics, like the rashan orthodox church, Maskva Patriarchate.
So, to a certain extent, I think Andrew has a point – it’s important to counter the deliberate disinformation.
elmer and Andrew, thread after thread of spewed troll nonsense versus reasoned responses and what has anyone learned from it? Not much, just the futility of wasting time with a teenage prankster or a dysfunctional American racist and maybe an occasional genuine Russian pro-Pootie sycophant.
So, just who are you educating, Andrew?
You assume that others reading the idiotic troll screed here need our help in figuring out their lies, blatant racism and anti-Americanism. I don’t think that they do.
More helpful to advancing the cause of a freer Russia would be linking information that that an occasional Russian that might view this site can’t access or would find useful.
I think both of you are giving far too much value to the critters that game this site.
Penny, although I’m an admirer of your valued input! I must, this time and with due respect – meaning no offence meant – disagree with you on your reply to both elmer and Andrew.
I believe that their input as to our regular (KGB) trolls is very to the point and valued, as it allow one – i.e. me (and I hope other readers) – to see the picture from another, and relevant perspective.
As a point of interest all priests of the RuSSian Orthodox church are also members of the KGB, where the latter calls the former “Our little brothers”. For more information on this subject I refer you to former Chief of Counter-Intelligence and Major General, KGB, Oleg Kalugin’s excellent book “SPY MASTER”.
I respect you opinion and criticism as well as elmer’s and Andrew’s.
We respectfully agree to disagree about the trolls. Where you see the misguided KGB I see plain vanilla American sociopaths doing the posting for the most part.
By the way Penny, I greatly enjoy your posts and think that you make a great contribution.
Kindest regards,
Andrew
And when kremlin propagandists state that Ukrainians are their brother, it reminds me of George Orwell’s book – 1984 – or Cain and Abel – from the Bible.
Genesis 4
8 Cain said to Abel, his brother, “Let’s go into the field.” It happened when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and killed him.
8 ¶ І говорив Каїн до Авеля, брата свого. І сталось, як були вони в полі, повстав Каїн на Авеля, брата свого, і вбив його.
Yeah. It’s amazing how all of this IngSoc stuff fits the RusFed state ideology and policies:
Penny – what Andrew said.
Except – I wonder who Jamal Watson THE FIRST was.
So much for Obama’s new diplomacy.
Looks like the Iranians (spurred on by the Russians no doubt) are continuing their practice of playing for time.
http://www.rferl.org/content/Iran_Fails_To_Accept_UN_Drafted_Nuclear_Deal/1859562.html
Iran Fails To Accept UN-Drafted Nuclear Deal
Obama advertisement in russia:
http://englishrussia.com/?p=2847