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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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I agree. I just despair of trying to contain it all in a single point of view.
Five Eyes is the best group-sourced domestic spying that money can buy.
Obama is worse for America than Putin, yes? He’s also worse for America than Putin is for Russia, yes?
And Putin’s no commie. You don;t hear him going on about the dictatorship of the proletariat or the withering of the state, etc. He’s a corrupt, murdering thug who Gets Stuff Done. Putin is managing the wreckage of communism. SOmeday things may be better over there, and they’ll have corrupt Putin and his dog-whipping hypocritical treatment of disfavored but less powerful corrupt thugs to thank for it. Or maybe you think Russia is a Jeffersonian Democracy just waiting for Millard F. Fillmore to gently assume the desk?
The Obamacrats, meanmwhile are *employing* the wreckage of communism to infect this once Jeffersonian Democracy with the sewage rising in our our streets, on our media, in public office, and in the way we count (ha!) votes.
Give me Putin any day. Put him in America and he’ll be between Teddy and Nixon. Put Obama in Russia and he’ll be Pol Pot.
#YGDR
Because you don’t understand this, you also “threw away [your] vote in 2016”, your words not mine. I can’t fix your problem.
Long time no speak. Here close to the border there is some real concern that someone in Western Ukraine actually has small, new portable, low yield tactical ‘dirty’ warheads built since 2014. Matters may spiral out of control if and when used (wherever at or far behind the actual front if not deep into Russian territory) when fear and panic take over during a multi vector attack closing in on major cities.
I’m fine saying Xi is an evil person too.
That’s fair. I still don’t think that’s a reasonable way to view it. I’m perplexed by many on the rights need to bolster their political migration to a more populist, less free market, non-liberal politics with a blanket defense of clowns like Trump and cretins like Putin. Okay, democrats are unhinged, the progressive deep state is real, etc. etc. Doesn’t change the fact that Trump was his own greatest liability, Putin is a thug and a dictator, and we shouldn’t embrace either just because our domestic political opponents oppose them.
… say what you want about Obama, and he did plenty of asinine [REDACTED], you couldn’t say this about him. And consolidating power, enriching yourself and your cronies, and expanding your borders through armed invasion may be “getting stuff done,” but its not anything I would look for an American executive to emulate.
I have no problem with people who voted for Trump. I agree with lots of the reasons to vote for Trump. I think the never Trump mopes who suddenly decided that Biden was basically the same thing as McCain (who I also didn’t much like) were idiots, have likley always been idiots, and bad people to boot. I roll my eyes at nearly every Gary post here on Ricochet, and think the worst thing that can be said about someone in political commentary is that they work for the Bulwark.
And there it is. Have fun in Obamney’s gulag. May your moral purity sit lightly about your ankles.
Except you would not the moment you disagreed with Putin and wanted a change, which you would suddenly realize was impossible. Putin only called out woke tyranny to tweak conflict here. He does not want a stable constitutional republic here.
Everybody on this site is Little People, who neither affect nor embarrass our betters in Moscow. I mean Washington. Roger Stone was dragged out of his house in a pre-dawn SWAT raid with CNN invited for what boils down to questioning the narrative. Look around, man — you’re soaking in it.
Most Russians are as free to write whatever they think as most Americans are. Because they are Little People.
That’s a bit much. And Mussolini got the trains to run on time but the country was destroyed.
Putin is a thug. We don’t need any thugs here.
Yeah it kind of does change that fact. Unless you’re using those words “unhinged” and “deep state” as regular partisan hyperbole instead of sober descriptions, in which case I disagree.
I also disagree that anyone can define populism in any meaningful way that couldn’t be applied equally to people or things they like. At least no one’s done it so far.
I understand the pushback on BDB on this point. I even agree. However, the distinction is barely there. Murder; invasions of other countries for political gain; actual ability to vote a political change. Even those points are likely debatable. Senators don’t have people killed, Michael.
That isn’t the dominant descriptor of Xi the way it is for Putin, though. How confident are you in the publicly available evidence against Putin? How confident are you that there isn’t some cache of evidence against Xi that isn’t public but would have been if it were anybody else? How confident are you that some little guy like you or me could withstand the propaganda onslaught if we were to find ourselves in somebody’s crosshairs? Could we be made to appear evil?
Could an evil man be made to appear innocent or event virtuous?
Actually France does but Germany has the North Sea, not the Atlantic.
Looks like INstugator hasn’t been back to address things. The “point” he makes is stuff that I already talked about in the rest of that comment.
Any of the tiny countries in Europe, particularly western Europe (not the Balkans, and certainly not Turkey for crying out loud) are all “North Atlantic” countries even without the exact coastline — as I indicate in the comment. Let’s don’t lose sight of the actual goal — opposition to Russian expansion, from the standpoint of Western Europe.
And Italy got themselves on the winning side of the war at the last minute — we wanted them to stay on our side. Hence NATO membership. That doesn’t detract from the point.
How embarrassing.
Now who’s being Naive?
Ted Kennedy did it himself.
This whole thing has a “Hitler liked dogs, you like dogs, so you are just like Hitler” vibe about it.
Putin said something that Conservatives tend to agree with. Conservatives pointed out that Putin was right and the current leftist American Government was wrong on the issues at hand.
That does not make Putin a Saint, it does not make him a good guy. He can be an evil scumbag and still be right about something.
I don’t recall the quote exactly but in a speech Obama bemoaned how many regulatory agencies were involved in governing fishing, it was his belief in the speech that this was too out of control. He was right from a conservative stand point, this did not make Obama a Saint or even a deregulator, it just made him right about something.
The main way I see the sentiment conservative sentiment about Putin is even this guy gets it. As in a bad guy gets this why doesn’t our leadership get it.
To be fair, he was only concerned because it made it harder for him to get control.
This concept could even be applied to the conservatives agreement with President Donald Trump, who may be a conservative today but certainly was not thought to be conservative in 2015, because he got a bunch of key things right.
Indeed, I had noticed that the laziest “Literally Putin” arguments came from the Never-Trumpers. It all rhymes with MSNBC’s Russia hoax theme song.
Get over yourself dude.
Sure I did. Take a look at comment #66
You expanded on your thoughts about the whole thing, which I appreciate. You didn’t address the cheap shots in your earlier comment which indicated to me that you only read one line of my own comment, and then came off the top rope with trivial “corrections” already addressed in my original comment.
I’ll just assume that I’m missing something you’re saying. I usually agree with you, IIRC.