|
|
|
Putin Versus the Kremlin on the Potomac
|
Globalism; Posted on: 2007-12-10 14:36:23 [ Printer friendly / Instant flyer ]
|
Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party scored an overwhelming victory in the country’s parliamentary elections last Sunday, winning almost two-thirds of the vote and 315 of the 450 seats in the Duma.
Why the Council on Foreign Relations Hates Putin
by Srdja Trifkovic
The election was widely seen as a referendum on the past seven years of Putin’s leadership, and he scored a resounding victory. He will step down as Russia’s president next spring confident that he will continue to be the key player in the country—in whatever formal guise—for many years to come. Barring an act of God, four years from now he’ll be back for two more terms as president.
Putin is the most popular leader in Russian history, with a personal approval rating in excess of 80 percent. He can afford to mock the orchestrated Russophobic hate-fest that is raging in the Western media and the political class. He ridiculed George W. Bush for trying to cast doubt on the regularity of Russia’s elections while failing to take note of far worse abuses by the “pro-Western, reformist” Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia.
The State Department bureaucracy’s impotent sneers notwithstanding, Putin was justified in limiting the number of foreign observers of the election. How many Russian monitors are on hand to check pregnant chards in Florida and dead souls on electoral rolls in Chicago? Russia is neither a banana republic nor a Western colony—to the everlasting chagrin of Messrs Soros, Brzezinski and their ilk—and the very notion of “monitors” was presumptuous. In any event, the presence of Western observers guarantees nothing: they were curiously loath to take note of rampant irregularities under Boris Yeltsin. Washington did not mind the pliant drunkard’s illegal dissolution of the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1993 and his use of tanks and artillery against legally elected representatives.
Putin is hated by the Western, and especially American, elite class. He is not loathed because he is not a Western-style “democrat”: far more obvious failures of such American “friends and allies” as General Musharraf, President Mubarak, or Prime Minister Erdogan (let alone King Abdullah), are tolerated and politely glossed over. Putin is hated, in general, because he does not subscribe to the Weltanschauung of the Western elite class, and in particular because, under his guidance, Russia has ceased to be up for grabs . . . like it was in the dreadful decade of the 1990s.
Full article
|
|
News Source: Chronicles
|
|
