I’m Sure Medvedev Told Putin To Rely on Reason and Remember It’s 2012
Russia’s soon to be ex-Potemkin president Medvedev gave a condescending lecture to Mitt Romney in response to the Republican presidential candidate’s identification of Russia as America’s pre-eminent geopolitical foe:
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday sharply suggested that Mitt Romney use his head and remember what year he’s living in after the Republican presidential contender said Moscow was America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”
Romney described Russia in those terms while criticizing President Barack Obama for his caught-on-tape remarks to Medvedev that he would have more room to negotiate on missile defense if he is re-elected in November.
During a briefing Tuesday in Seoul, where he and Obama were attending a nuclear security summit, the Russian leader said Romney’s remarks “smacked of Hollywood” and sounded as if they came from the Cold War era.
Medvedev advised the White House hopefuls, including Romney, to “rely on reason, use their heads,” adding, “that’s not harmful for a presidential candidate.” He further said, “It’s 2012, not the mid-1970s, and whatever party he belongs to, he must take the existing realities into account.”
Given that Putin’s presidential campaign was wall-to-wall with snarling Cold War rhetoric straight out of the 1970s-rhetoric far more extensive, virulent, and dramatic than anything Romney said-I’m metaphysically certain that Medvedev called Putin into his office and “sharply” lectured him about the benefits to a presidential candidate of relying on reason; using his head; avoiding language smacking of Hollywood; and taking existing realities into account.
It’s actually quite amusing to imagine how that would have played out. Probably not that amusing for Medvedev, in the same way that the process of becoming a steer isn’t that amusing for the calf. Which is exactly why it didn’t happen, and never could have happened.
What’s less amusing is the administration’s blindness to the fact that Putin’s rhetoric isn’t rhetoric, and the fact that the lowing steers in the American media (and popular entertainment, like Jay Leno) are also unable-or unwilling-to evaluate Putin’s Russia, and its adversarial posture to the US, with clear-eyed reason. I’m hardly a Romney fan by any stretch, but on this issue he is far more realistic, and relying far more on reason, than all those carping on him.
And when it comes to Russia, he is certainly far more realistic and reasoned than the man whose job he wants.
“Given that Putin’s presidential campaign was wall-to-wall with snarling Cold War rhetoric straight out of the 1970s-rhetoric far more extensive, virulent, and dramatic than anything Romney said…” bullshit. Putin said the U.S. had an obsession with security and intervening everywhere to secure that and this obsession was ultimately doomed to create more enemies and failure. In fact he and Rogozin both preface almost every remark about the U.S. I’ve seen with a sarcastic ‘our partners’ or ‘our colleagues’, not use of the term ‘enemy’ even though when observing how many U.S. military bases surround Russia it would be difficult to say with a straight face that their deployment has nothing to do with Russian military power.
Meanwhile, you have Karl Rove’s sorry ass PAC running stupid ads about Russians forming ranks on Red Square without telling the audience the footage is from VICTORY DAY aka VE DAY celebrations which G.W. Bush attended in 2005. After watching it I also noticed they cut the footage of the old babushkas wearing their medals and the U.S., French, and British military attaches delegations to the annual event out too. Because presumably that would be too scary.
And finally, since we’re talking about rhetoric and not facts here, let’s go down the ledger, shall we just since the collapse of the USSR?
Russia
Chechnya 1994 (bloody/dirty war, but fought on own territory)
Chechnya 2000 (ditto above)
South Ossetia and Abkhazia and brief occupation of undisputed Georgian territory for a few weeks, 2008
likely slaying of Ibn Qattib and some terrorists in Qatar
U.S.
Bosnia air strikes and massive CIA/BND support for Croatian ethnic cleansing of Operation Storm 1993-1995
Kosovo/Serbia 1999 with ex-CIA admitting KLA bunch of terrorists and drug/women trafficking thugs
(exempting Afghanistan as self-defense, and since Russia backed that intervention and continues to support it logistically)
Iraq 2003-2011 5,000 U.S. KIA and conservatively 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths from ensuing civil war, tossing out Lancet estimate of one million
Libya 2011
drone strikes Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan
tally up the respective body counts, including the black Africans slaughtered by anti-Gaddafi forces, and get back to us about which country has more reason to fear whom.
Comment by Mr. X — March 31, 2012 @ 8:18 pm
Where Russia has mil bases outside its own territory:
1 South Ossetia
2 Abkhazia
3 Syria (Tartus — likely to be replaced by Greece’s Pireaus if your Twitter pals get their wet dream and Assad is overthrown, and which was supposedly the transit point for those CGI generated missiles allegedly bound for Venezuela)
4 Kyrgizstan — Russian portion of Manas air base next to U.S. installation there/jointly run
5 Armenia (near Ngorno Karabakh?)
6 Azerbaijan – Gabala, 20 yr lease for half a billion
7 Ukraine – Crimea base, paid for with cheaper natural gas
8 almost forgot Moldova disputed territory of TransDniestr, though don’t know how many troops are left there
If I missed any other bases in the ‘Stans or perhaps one less publicized outpost in Mongolia, by all means let me know.
USA
Military bases in 120 countries or principalities worldwide
Comment by Mr. X — March 31, 2012 @ 8:22 pm
Like I said, no wonder you hate Foust. You can’t argue your way out of a paper bag on this stuff, whereas he’s at least been to the ‘Stans and I’ve lived in Moscow for some time as an expat.
Comment by Mr. X — March 31, 2012 @ 8:23 pm
Of course Mr.X is so retarded he kind of forgets that in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the Russians (like the Serbs he loves so much) were conducting ethnic cleansing campaigns and committing mass murder.
So now tell me X, why is it that you consider Chechnya Russian territory, but do not consider Abkhazia and South Ossetia Georgian territory, after all, the UN and 99% of the rest of the world do not recognize these areas as independent of Georgia, but as part of Georgia.
Comment by Andrew — April 1, 2012 @ 8:12 am
Andy, I’m ignoring you, cuz I’m not out to debate the rights or wrongs of borders drawn by Gori-native son Dzughashvili and whether they were predjudiced against Ossetians and Abkhaz or get into who killed more of whom in the early 1990s. I just want you and your pals in Tblisi kicked off the U.S. taxpayer teet, period.
I’ll stick with this for SWP and his Twitterati pro-Establishment, anti-conspiracy theorist conspiracy theorizing friends:
If Liberty Lynxh thinks the birther thing is such stupid nonsense, where’s the original microfiche? I have a certified copy of my birth certificate from many years earlier produced in the late 1980s, it looks nothing like Obama’s which looks like another certified copy of mine produced in 2007 long after computers got involved. Why can’t they produce an older one if the original microfiche doesn’t exist?
Why is Sheriff Joe Arpaio staking all of his credibility on it?
Why is Jerome Corsi, who had a highly decorated career in the State Department, willing to lie about Obama’s birth certificate? Why was he expelled from Kenya where Obama’s distant cousin Odinga is a member of the government when he investigated the issue in 2008?
Why do you contend the documents Corsi found and published in multiple books related to the NAFTA summits chaired by George W. Bush and a North American Union/security perimeter are inauthentic? Why is the U.S.-Mexico border practically wide open, if the chief aim were not an eventual EU-style merger? Why do you refuse to blog about or discuss Operation Fast and Furious, besides one parting reference to AG Holder’s kryshe? Why do you stick with nice, safe topics like writing about Putin from 4,000 miles away instead of the criminals in your own government?
What exact big issues besides energy and maybe the individual mandate which Liberty Lynx’s boy Romney also supported are you all willing to debate versus the Obama people? You certainly won’t touch the criminal stuff with a twenty foot pole.
And why is Putin’s KGB past a complete and full explanation for his mentality while Obama’s CIA grandparents the Dunhams explain nothing about his rapid rise or the obscurity with which his grades and earlier statements/associations are jealously guarded?
And lastly why this urge to lump all people who refuse to accept pro-Establishment cover stories with the Kremlin? Could it be post-NDAA your setting them up to be viewed as agents of a foreign power and hence, subject to arrest and indefinite detention?
Comment by Mr. X — April 1, 2012 @ 6:24 pm
Funny too how you love to joke about Turbo Tax Timmy but never bothered to look at his family tree:
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1852/article_detail.asp
The maternal family that raised Barack Obama, which is highly relevant to our understanding, is the subject of New York Times reporter Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother. But though this book tells us that grandmother Madelyn Dunham’s favorite color was beige, that Stanley Dunham and daughter Ann (Barack, Jr.’s, mother) shared a certain impulsiveness, and contains interviews with and personal information on countless of Ann’s high school friends, it sheds no light on what the Dunhams were doing with their lives that led their daughter to take a practical interest in international affairs. Magically, Ann Dunham goes from peeking her shy 17-year-old head out of Mercer Island, Washington (“a young virgin,” writes Janny Scott), to intimacy with a very foreign person, and a few years later with another, and then to work in one of the Cold War’s key battlegrounds. Meanwhile her mother, about whose professional activities the book says nothing, becomes a bank executive. Did Ann speak any foreign language? Had the Dunhams ever taken any trips abroad? The book does not say. A Singular Woman gives the impression that Ann’s Indonesian husband, Lolo Soetoro, was just a geographer drafted into the army, a minor, unwitting part of the bloody campaign that wrested Indonesia from the Communists; and that Ann’s work in that country was anthropological-humanitarian, as if for her U.S. policy were irrelevant. It certainly was not for her employers—the U.S. government and contractors thereof.
Self-styled investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reports that Madelyn Dunham, the mother of Barack’s mother, Ann Dunham, who became vice president of the Bank of Hawaii soon after her arrival there, was in charge of escrow accounts. Madsen’s credibility is certainly checkered. But if he is correct about which department she headed, Madelyn Dunham must have supervised the accounts that the U.S. government used to funnel money to its “gray” and “black” activities throughout Asia. Among the conduits of the CIA money through these accounts to secret CIA proprietaries was a company—Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong—some of whose officers were serving CIA officers. This is a company whose 1983 IRS audit the CIA stopped. Vice President Madelyn Dunham, in charge of these very matters and hence necessarily “witting” (as they say at Langley), would have had to be more than a small cog in the machine. People do not rise to such stations from one day to the next.
Again, if Madsen is correct, two photos belie the portrait of her husband Stanley Dunham, Barack’s grandfather, whom young Barry called father, as an insignificant furniture salesman. One, in the early 1950s, shows Stanley with his daughter, Ann, wearing the insignia of Beirut’s elite French language school, Notre Dame de Jamhour. Was the family ever in Lebanon? How did Dad get the sweater? U.S. government influence operations are a likelier explanation than the furniture business for any Lebanese connection in the 1950s. Another photo, published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1959, shows Stanley Dunham escorted by uniformed U.S. Navy officers, greeting Barack Obama, Sr., as he arrived in Hawaii from Kenya. Because Obama was among 80 other Kenyans whom CIA had chosen for sojourns in the U.S. to influence them, it is logical that he and others like him would have been placed around the country in the hands of trusted handlers. The greeting photo suggests that Dunham may well have been one of these, and hence that the Kenyan did not meet Dunham’s daughter, Ann, in a classroom. This would fit the chronology: Classes started on September 26. Ann was pregnant by early November. Obama was housed at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center facility funded by the Asia Foundation, itself funded by CIA.
Anyone and everyone knew that Barack Obama, Sr., and others like him had been brought to America to be influenced. How big a part of his attractiveness to her, and hence how big a reason for the pregnancy that produced Barack, Jr., was the foreign affairs angle? The hagiographies, including A Singular Woman, suggest that foreign affairs were the farthest thing from her mind. Yet Ann’s second child was born in a marriage to another such person at the East-West Center. The Indonesian government had sent Lolo Soetoro to the East-West Center as a “civilian employee of the Army.” But when the shooting started, Soetoro went on active duty, it seems as a colonel. This was arguably the CIA’s most significant covert operation, the replacement (between 1965 and 1967) of Indonesia’s dictator Sukarno with the Suharto regime that lasted until 1999. Few people on the face of the earth did not realize how important a struggle this was. Suggesting as does A Singular Woman that a very intelligent, very married Ann Soetoro was innocent of and indifferent to the political implications of the struggle she was involved in is incredible.
After the overthrow, Ann ran a “micro-financing” project, financed by the Ford Foundation, in Indonesia’s most vulnerable areas. Supervising the funding at Ford in the late ’60s was Peter Geithner, whose son would eventually serve hers as U.S. secretary of the treasury. In addition to the Ford Foundation, the list of her employers is a directory of America’s official, semi-official, and clandestine organs of influence: the United States Information Agency, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank. While running a project for five years in Pakistan, she lived in Lahore’s Hilton International. Nothing small time, never mind hippyish.
Comment by Mr. X — April 1, 2012 @ 6:26 pm
“Could it be post-NDAA your setting them up to be viewed as agents of a foreign power and hence, subject to arrest and indefinite detention?” And by this I clearly don’t mean mighty SWP and the Twittering hordes, but the Cointelpro boys.
Comment by Mr. X — April 1, 2012 @ 7:14 pm
Hmmmm, actually Stalin made Abkhazia and South Ossetia much larger than historically, including areas such as Khodori, Gali, etc that were not part of the Abkhazian principality. In South Ossetia, he doubled the size of the territory, including many areas that were not settled by Ossetians. Also you should note that even by the 1960’s, Ossetian immigrants were a minority in Tskhinvali.
Stalin drew the borders to punish Georgians, particularly for their resistance to Russian/Communist rule.
BTW, I know you have a limited grasp of history, but Stalin was actually biased in favor of Abkhazian and Ossetians, he exempted Abkhaz from military service, while 330,000 Georgians out of a population of 4.5 million were killed in ww2. He is also “the great son of the Ossetian people” his father being an Ossetian, his mother was half Georgian, half Russian.
Oh, and X, you do realize that all of the 6 attempts to assassinate Stalin were carried out by Georgians don’t you.
He is still a hero, particularly to Ossetians and Russians. He is somewhat unpopular in Georgia.
Comment by Andrew — April 1, 2012 @ 10:43 pm
SWP you got it exactly right.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/his-worst-mistake-obama-surrenders-to-vladimir/
Romney’s display of leadership and patriotism is heartening. Maybe there is more to him that meets the eye, and there doesn’t have to be anything more for him to be a far better candidate to lead the USA in the new cold war with Russia than the treacherous Barack Obama.
Comment by La Russophobe — April 2, 2012 @ 4:57 am
JAY LENO! Yeah what’s with that dude not evaluating Putin with clear eyed reason and shit? JAY FUCKING LENO! Wake up to the enemy #1! Save the American people with your hair! LENO! LENO!!
Comment by andrewi31 — April 4, 2012 @ 12:05 am
Tell Andrew what do you feel about the fact that only “31% of students are proficient in mathematics at least to the baseline level at which they begin to demonstrate the kind of skills that enable them to use mathematics in ways that are considered fundamental for their future development.”
(The equivalent figure for Russia: 71%).
He is still a hero, particularly to Ossetians and Russians. He is somewhat unpopular in Georgia.
Indeed.
http://02varvara.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/monument-to-stalin-in-gori.jpg
Comment by Da Russophile — April 4, 2012 @ 4:52 pm
BTW, as readers can probably tell, I’m no longer Sublime Oblivion. I’ve gone back to the future, now blogging and commenting as “Da Russophile.”
Comment by Da Russophile — April 4, 2012 @ 4:55 pm
Massive capital flight continues in Putin’s Russia.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303299604577323401787710184.html
Comment by La Russophobe — April 4, 2012 @ 5:20 pm
Cointelpro Reggie still has’t answered this question:
25.Oh yeah and one more thing for Reginald Quills – how many aides current and former to Willard Mitt Romney are or have been on the payroll of a foreign power (Randy Scheunemann, cough cough), compared to Ron Paul?
Comment by Mr. X — April 4, 2012 @ 7:01 pm
BTW Mr.X, A new school notebook for Russian students, with a heroic picture of Stalin on the cover, has sold out.
It is now the most popular notebook for Russian schoolkids.
Comment by Andrew — April 4, 2012 @ 10:04 pm
Here is a profile of the man Russians consider their moral compass, who is in fact one of the leading scumbags in the nation:
http://dyingrussia.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/holy-crap/
Comment by La Russophobe — April 5, 2012 @ 5:55 am
Russia, the unhappy country.
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs%20Writing/2012/World%20Happiness%20Report.pdf
Comment by La Russophobe — April 5, 2012 @ 6:07 am
Here is what Romney’s acceptance speech should say about Russia:
http://dyingrussia.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/if-we-were-writing-romneys-acceptance-speech/
Comment by La Russophobe — April 6, 2012 @ 1:10 am