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Putin Becoming a Saint for Certain Twisted Conservatives?
I just saw this Twitter quote posted by Scott McConnell, co-founder of The American Conservative magazine, from Jan. 15: “At least Putin doesn’t hate his own people and own country.”
I’m not sure what this quote is referring to exactly, if anything in particular.
Things like this can be said in a joking way, of course, and perhaps it is even true in some ways. I recently heard a Democrat historian who doesn’t fit the mold of a typical 21st century Democrat say that the biggest reason that American leftists don’t care about the opioid crisis is that it is killing off rural white men who 21st century leftists really do not care about anyway. Well, I’m sure that some leftists might care if the electrical grid, food supply, and transportation system crashes, but I’m sure they can think about that later.
Russia President Vladimir Putin’s Russians could still get slaughtered in Ukraine. It looks like 5,768 Russians have been killed in the Russo-Ukrainian or Donbass wars since 2014. That’s 2.38 times the number of American military personnel killed in Afghanistan in just eight years, as compared to 20 years for the Afghanistan War.
I have seen posts on Twitter from some likely conservative types who state that Ukraine is really part of Russia anyway.
Ridiculous, but if you really want to try to make that comparison, Belarus would probably be the better example. Only about 12% of Belarusians actively speak Belarusian; however, Ukrainian is the native language of about 68% of Ukrainians, with Russian being the native language for about 30% of Ukrainians, and 2% of the population using other languages. The percentage of 68% is quite a lot. The last American president to win more than 61.05% of the popular vote was James Monroe in 1820. Besides, native languages are not the only thing when it comes to determining the borders of a country. Some guy already tried Putin’s Sudetenland trick about 84 years ago. If language was the only important thing for determining a country’s boundaries, most of Latin America outside of Brazil and Haiti would simply be one giant Spanish-speaking continental nation. The Ukrainian language is apparently more similar to the NATO languages of Polish and Slovak than Russian anyway, with words borrowed from German, while Russian apparently borrowed more words from Turkish, Latin, and even French due to Peter the Great.
I’ve been told by some Twitter conservative types that the Ukrainian government is one of the most corrupt in the world. Yeah, I think they have been rated even slightly more corrupt than Russia itself, but most countries are rather corrupt to a certain extent except for a few ideal Nordic countries, which I am sure have their own problems. Some Twitter conservative types state that the people in Russia have much better lives than the people in Ukraine. Well, having a hostile Putin as a neighbor isn’t helping that situation. Besides, a person in Qatar on average is richer than the average American, but I have no desire to live there. Russia has had the same dictator since 1999. Ukraine has had six presidents and about 16 prime ministers since 1999. At least there is some democratic turnover there.
Putin may be the richest person in the world by some estimates. I wonder how he acquired all that wealth. I remember reading some article about how our NATO ally Turkey throws all of its disagreeable journalists in jail. Yeah, there’s is a lot of outrage about that, and I don’t think Putin does that. I think Putin just has his enemies killed or deported or both.
I think a lot of the Twitter conservative thought that is default defending Putin is because those people do not want the United States to send its citizens to get into a fight with nuclear-armed Putin, trying to save a corrupt government in Ukraine. That’s understandable, but American presidents should be more like former President Ronald Reagan and at least push back against evil whenever possible. This should be an ongoing concern of any American president. Reagan barely got involved in any military actions during his eight years as president other than Granada and a few strikes against Muammar Gaddafi, but he was also trying to find a way to support freedom and the forces of good.
Former President Donald Trump’s weird somewhat friendliness toward Putin was even a very minor reason why I essentially tossed my presidential vote away in 2016.
Any ideas about how to convince conservative default Putin fans that they have gone down some terrible path?
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Yet.
So far.
In answer to the question: No. People here who wrote things to the effect of “He has a point” in response to that speech translated by MEMRI and Brian’s post about it certainly don’t. Heck, I compared him to a Medici or a Borgia. Do you really believe that I -or anyone- thinks we’d be better off with Il Magnifico in charge in Washington instead of Gropin’ Joe? No. But…that does not mean we think funding the Italian Renaissance was a dastardly deed. Anally raping a papal nuncio in the town square? Now that was a dastardly, evil deed.
Trump used to make nice with world leaders who he thought he could deal with. Odd how some people don’t get that if you’re nice to someone you have a better chance of reaching an agreement with them. At the same time Trump was pretty hard on Russia when it came to foreign policy. Funny how so many people could not see that, either.
A lot of the trouble between Trump and the media was that media people are word people, they think that the words one utters are the most important thing about a person. Trump has a totally different way of thinking about the language. To him words were just tools to be used in whatever way best served one’s needs. The important thing was one’s actions.
Trump is like the construction manager who will say anything, lie exaggerate, cajole, threaten, berate, praise. Whatever gets the job done on time and under budget.
On time and under budget is what characterized all of Trump’s real estate development construction projects.
Indeed. See also, Australia.
Indeed. It’s sorta kinda like saying that if someone opposed invading Iraq in 2003 it means they thought Saddam Hussein wasn’t a psychopath. It’s entirely possible for someone to have an unvarnished view of Vladimir Putin but also to not see any superior replacements waiting in the wings.
The Rus Vikings established themselves first in Kiev. Moscow came later. Kievan Rus eventually extended from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. It collapsed in the 12th century. In its wake the regional powers of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine arose. The Mongol invasion of 1240 applied the coup de grâce to Kievan Rus. Thus the histories of Russia and Ukraine are deeply intertwined. I suspect the horror of the Holdomor has driven a powerful wedge between the two.
Are you paying attention to where we are right now? Obama set the stage for this and Trump interrupted the plot.
My impression is totally that Trump loves American. Trump came into office facing a situation which an American President should not have to face, that of a major destructive effort from inside by the government aided by corporate America and global Marxists. These people are so intent and anxious about their objective that Biden, as POTUS, might actually achieve his promise to unite America, just not in the direction his handlers preferred.
I asked those like some our friends here today “what was it specifically you didn’t like about Trump as President?”.
Your assertion is ridiculous. You are talking about the USSR, I’m talking about Russia. Keep up.
And I really don’t care about journalists. Litvinenko was a traitor. Under our very own constitution, the penalty for treason is death. And I get a little suspicious of the incestuous Western media circles when their martyr is someone who is close to Berezovsky.
Trump wasn’t four-square behind NATO. It is fair to claim he eventually strengthened NATO but at one point he did say that NATO may be obsolete. Knee-jerk is to conjure up the boogyman of the neocons every time someone says something critical of Trump.
What kind of question is that? Trump was commenting in response to a question about Putin’s assassinations of Russian journalists. When has the CIA ever assassinated journalists within our borders?
Trump made a glib comparison between what Putin has done regarding his domestic political enemies and what has been done overseas by our CIA, etc. It is in no way a valid comparison. I’m not saying we always get it right. We frequently don’t but they are not the same things.
You are really missing something here. Trump relegated Putin and Russia to a lower level of concern for America’s future because he recognized the plotting of Democrat-Socialists politicians like Obama and Clinton setting us up to join the Globalists collectivism. Biden, who has never been identified as Progressive or Leftist IIRC, is so enamored along with Dr. Jill that he is POTUS, that he has turned willing, when presented with the preferred options of his handlers, to do many things he has said he was against in the past. I’m not convinced that Putin is allied with the Western Globalists, I think they operate independently and Putin would like some restoration of the Soviet Union. The domestic Democrat-Socialist Party, aided by the federal bureaucracy, public media, big tech, and complicit establishment Republicans, substantially undermined Trump’s presidential term.
It’s a valid criticism of neocons in general and this author specifically. This post is titled with a hyperbolic straw-man argument. Saying that Putin gets something right (at least) is tantamount to granting sainthood?
No one wants neocons running things if this is the kind of logic they employ. It has nothing to do with Trump.
And yes, NATO just might be obsolete. But I guess we can’t elect Presidents who speak frankly and expose artifice, can we?
Wow, you and I picked exactly the same comment to respond to.
NATO has been obsolete since the wall fell. Only our Five Eyes allies are trustworthy.
Trump understands power and how to approach corrupt or bent institutions. He was always throwing words around off the cuff, some not so good, but real stuff was always real, it worked for him. How did off the cuff remarks or real policies work for everybody after Reagan? Let’s be clear we’re facing the destruction of the nation. Neither Bush understood it, and whether Clinton did, or didn’t, isn’t relevant.
Yes, he did. And our FBI here at home. In fact we have no idea what they are doing domestically anymore, or on who’s behalf they are ‘enforcing’ our laws. There’s no oversight. These are rogue agencies. I’m no longer so certain these aren’t the same things.
Right, and I wasn’t four-square behind by daughter when I told her she may not advance to the next grade. Never mind that that woke her up a little and she started doing what she was supposed to do.
Besides – NATO may actually be obsolete.
LOL. And is it really that out-of-line to speculate that NATO may have jumped the shark when Merkle’s Germany makes a deal to make itself more dependent on Russia for fuel supplies, while short-changing NATO fiscal obligations for years?
I’m no longer certain either, and that is highly disturbing to me. That this isn’t priority A number 1 for all politicians might be even more disturbing.
As soon as Trump was in the White House he faced this kind of behavior that resulted in the loss of General Flynn as a Presidential advisor and we found out later that this was initiated in the Obama White House after Trump’s election.
Fixed it for you.
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More neocon hyperbole. Fox is now a “mouthpiece” for Putin! What a maroon!
That’s just stupid. You can oppose the American left without sidling up to a pinko commie Russian dictator.
Based on all the available evidence, I think you can make the call that Putin is probably evil.
I won’t speak for anyone else, but my interpretation of BDB’s comments is that it’s getting harder to tell the difference between Obama/Biden progressive deep state and a pinko commie dictator. Rigged elections; whatever op was deployed against President Trump by the IC; whatever op was run by the IC to cover for Clinton and Biden corruption and wrongdoing; selective enforcement of law; covid authoritarianism; increasing calls for censorship and a more than willing propaganda wing in the big techs.
I can’t argue with that and I don’t really want to. However, I’m aware now of just how much information I thought I knew is wholly dependent on trusting that I’m being told the truth, that the information isn’t outright propaganda, isn’t factually inaccurate, isn’t opinion masquerading as objectivity, isn’t accurate but materially incomplete. I’ve learned just how much that trust is misplaced when it concerns serious matters, and now I question everything including the supposed extremism and evil of people like …. Trump.
Sometimes it’s easy – I don’t need to trust if there is plenty of info that doesn’t need to be filtered. Putin is clinging to power; he’s pressing military incursions for expansion (lebensraum, one might call it); he cooperates willingly with oppressive regimes. All objective demerits to be sure.
Xi does the same plus some. Is it universally accepted that Xi is an evil thug? No, it isn’t. Why not? The answer calls both the lack of Xi criticism and the universal Putin judgement into question.
For that matter, aside from the military incursions, we can say the similar things about institutions like Google or Apple. Helping places like communist China restrict internet access for its population.
I’m perfectly willing to draw a line around all of them as dangers to me and the American way of life, but that isn’t what happens. Inevitably some politically advantageous distinction is asserted (fairly in some cases), but then all of the examples need the same treatment of drawing distinctions and declaring people and life to be too complex to reduce to black and white. The trouble is that people get selective about applying these strategies. I can go either way if it’s applied fairly and toward truth.
Outstanding thread. Very well executed, @thecloakedgaijin.
One Trump story impressed me. He heard some people gripe about the new style of catapults on the new aircraft carriers, and there were some teething problems getting them to run reliably. He pushed HARD to yank those out and install steam systems like we previously used.
But he was wrong. Flat wrong. I think a bunch of people spoke to him off line and the next time he was talking about naval aviation, he asked the navy Captain (perhaps the commander of the aircraft carrier) about putting steam systems in. That Captain was very polite but stood his ground and wouldn’t budge on pushing ahead with the new systems. Trump gave up, and was able to walk it back based on this Captain standing his ground. I don’t know if that was set up, but even if it was set up more kudos to Trump for staging it.
I’m sure there’s a lot more to that story, but that’s all I know.
Maybe you missed it, but Obama installed the deep state apparatchiki who now runs this dump. It’s you who has lost the plot.