EDITORIAL: Dima “Dumbass” Medvedev

EDITORIAL

Dima “Dumbass” Medvedev

“This is not a remark of mine but a verdict. Remarks are what you say. Everything I say is cast in granite.”

—  Russian “president” Dima Medvedev, speaking to Russian industrial leaders at Gazprom’s headquarters last week.

“Cast in granite”? Something can’t be cast in granite.  Casting is for liquid metals like iron or bronze.  And, um, Dima? Verdicts come from judges and juries, not elected administrators.  

The so-called “president” of Russia is, in other words, an idiot.  And he was just getting started showing it.

Indeed, Medvedev ended 2009 the way he began it:  Looking like a goofy dumbass who makes George Bush seem like Winston Churchill by comparison.

In an end-of-year interview with the Kremlin lackeys who run the Kremlin-controlled TV networks, Medvedev declared that “благодаря усилиям правительства и Центробанка,  инфляция по итогам 2009 года будет ниже прошлогодней – соответственно, примерно 9% против 13%.”  Translation:  “Thanks to the efforts of the government and the central bank, inflation in 2009 was lower than in the year before, just 9% compared to 13%.”

This comment was so inane that not even the reporter from state-controlled RIA Novosti who reported it could help from noticing that “this fact can hardly be called a victory of the authorities. The slowdown in price growth we should probably attribute to falling consumer demand and a number of seasonal factors.”  In other words, Russia’s level of price inflation fell in 2009 because of the massive financial crisis, which meant that nobody in the country had any money to spend.  With no demand, prices naturally fell in the hopes of making sales to the impoverished population.

Medvedev then met with industrial leaders and remarked “what a difference” as he compared the puny sums spent on R&D by Russian companies like Gazprom and Rosneft to those spent by Western firms like Royal Dutch Shell.  Unfortunately, Russia’s president-in-name-only isn’t sufficiently educated about his own government’s policies to know that the Kremlin seizes virtually all revenues generated by the national energy industry and spends them on profligate projects like provoking a new cold war and invading Russia’s tiny neighbors in acts of imperial conquest.  This leaves Russian energy firms with precious little money for anything, much less investment in future projects.

Not once did Medvedev acknowledge any possible fault on his own part in regard to any of these issues.  Not once did he criticize Vladimir Putin, whose government is entirely responsible for the ills Medvedev was describing, much less did he fire Putin in favor a more competent manager.

And he was still not done raving. He then began publicly demanding, heedless of financial reality, that Russian lenders reducing the interest rates they charge for loans. Never mind, of course, that Russian banks are awash in bad debt, a crisis that is expected to get much worse next year.  Medvedev wants to throw gasoline on that raging inferno and turn it into a conflagration.

Russia’s population is languishing in extreme poverty, not ranking in the top 130 nations of the world for adult lifespan, and Medvedev has nothing to say about it.  Even if he had said his remarks were cast in bronze or iron, his statement would still be gibberish, because everyone knows that he does not call the shots in the Kremlin.  Rather, his words are written on tissue paper that can disappear at a moment’s notice, at the whim of the man who really runs Russia, Vladimir Putin.

We find it strange, to say the least, that Russian people tolerate Medvedev.  They are, as we know them, obsessed with the idea of holding “prestige” in the eyes of foreigners, and yet before this world this man and his puppet regime make them a laughing stock.  But they do nothing.  They allow him to grow ever more ludicrously arrogant, until he really believes his words are written on granite tablets as if he were God Almighty himself, until, like the infamous Emperor with his “new clothes” he begins uttering absolute nonsense and humilating Russia before the eyes of a slackjawed world.