Prospect of Putin Presidency Gives Pundit the Vapors

I read a lot of opinion pieces so that you don’t have to. Some are good enough to make our Viewpoints section. Some are… special:

[P]olitical events in Russia will become more important in the coming years, and Americans should prepare for the leverage Russia will begin to exercise.

Photo-illustration; Painting of Peter the Great: Getty; Putin: Sergei Guneyev / RIA-Novosti for TIME
Putin as Peter the Great (click image for irritating commentary)

OK, I have fresh batteries in the flashlight, a week’s supply of nonperishables in the pantry, and jumper cables in the car. What other preparations should I make?

In foreign affairs Russia will continue to block interventions into countries like Syria with their permanent veto in the UN Security Council. Whatever one’s opinions might be on humanitarian intervention it is clear what an absurdity it is for a country like Russia, whose actions in Chechnya are not far removed from Assad’s in Syria, to be able to influence international humanitarian work.

Actually, your opinions on humanitarian intervention may determine whether you find Russia’s obstructionism offensive at all. If you consider humanitarian intervention a blood sport played by cynical opportunists, then you won’t be outraged when one cynical opportunist takes his ball and goes home. Furthermore, many on the receiving end of Western interventions would have difficulty distinguishing “international humanitarian work” from what Putin and his predecessors have done in Chechnya and what Assad is doing in Syria.

Russia will continue to wield its influence over Eastern Europe, a part of the world where liberal values are struggling.

Photo by Matt Barganier, Cluj, Romania
The only Vlad for me

Now we’ve entered the heart of Op-Edistan, where “liberal values” are always “struggling.” Would it help if we built more torture chambers in Eastern Europe?

It should worry Americans that Russia, straddling both Europe and Asia, will be able to dictate the pace of the twenty first century more and more.

Even if dictating the pace of a century were a real possibility instead of pundit claptrap, Putin could no more do it than Peter the Great or Josef Stalin could. This sort of threat inflation makes me appreciate the relative sobriety of China panic. The Russians are not even conceivably coming.

It looks like Russia’s influence will continue to be exerted under corrupt and illegitimate governments with a demonstrable disregard for civil liberties and expansionist mindset. Whoever is the President this time next year (probably Obama) should make more of an effort to establish good economic and diplomatic relations with countries still under Russia’s shadow, especially countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, in order to limit the amount of damage an presidency like Putin’s can inflict.

And to which head of state can we turn to limit the amount of damage a presidency like Obama’s (or Romney’s, or Santorum’s) can inflict? Who will save Americans and others from the demonstrable disregard for civil liberties and the expansionist mindset of the Kremlin on the Potomac? Is there an extraterrestrial force for good to which we can appeal?

9 thoughts on “Prospect of Putin Presidency Gives Pundit the Vapors”

  1. Seeing Russians get to chose between Peter the Great here and Gennadiy Zyuganov while Americans pick between Romney and Romney, Russians actually have more of a choice at their election. When was the last time Americans got to pick between candidates that were bad in very distinct ways? 1964, Goldwater vs Johnson?

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  2. OH dang Matt, that was good. "Is there an extraterrestrial force for good to which we can appeal?" Ummm, Green Lantern? Splatman? Voltron the Enforcer? Darth Cheney? Oh wait, he's got that bad ticker motif working but, I'm fairly certain that he is extraterrestrial.

    1. Cheney "bad"? Say it isn't so! Because his children amongst the warmongering crowd all know deep down in their soul of souls that he's really got good in him. They just KNOW it…!!! The FORCE tells them so. Never mind all the corpses piled about. Now I'll step down from my soap box of sarcasm.

  3. Didn't we Britain, US and Europe financed and support the overthrow of the Russian Tzarist system and install those wonderful Marxist terrorist like Trotsky Lenin, etc with a well choreographed and financed decades long smear and financial warfare campaign like we saw against Yugoslavia and now Syria, an aspect of which no historian has written about which not exclusively but mainly emanated from the conflict in the Pale of Settlement which was vehemently anti-Russia?

    Even Stalin who helped coordinate and organise oil and factory strikes in Azerbaijan and Russia in an article in Brdzola newspaper (December, 1901) decried Russification.

    “Groaning are the oppressed nationalities and religions in Russia, among them the Poles and Finns. Groaning are the unceasingly persecuted and humiliated Jews, deprived even those miserable rights that other Russian subjects enjoy the right to live where they choose, the right to go to school, etc. Groaning are the Georgians, the Armenians and other nations who can neither have their own schools nor be employed by the state and are compelled to submit to the shameful and oppressive policies of Russification.”

  4. The Russian opposition sometimes acts like an extraterrestrial force to me.)) Yesterday I posted on the social site some findings regarding the fake video about "paid" pro-Putin march participants. The opposition argued that
    a. since the fake was easily discerned, it must be done by the Putin's supporters (doesn't matter that it was downloaded by the opposition channel)
    b. since the "participants" were showing "coupons" for payments that actually were Sex-shop coupons with 5% discount offer it must be the pro-Putin propaganda since Putin's well known for his "connection to the pornography business" ))
    The election campaigns have never been so downright dirty before…

    2. If SEX is involved then you can be certain the NSA (Naughty Sex Addicts) or a host of other alphabet soup agencies, pimping their pornography of violence, have got their John Thomases inserted somewhere.

  5. Could any other foreign powers influence be any worse than the US especially against Christians?

    Since the 70’s the US/Britain and their foreign agents composing of Saudi, Pakistani and Turkish linked intelligence businessmen like Sheik Klahid bin Mahfouz the premier financer of Islamic terrorism who the US used to sell the PROMISE spyware to Mid East countries through Credit Suisse and National Commercial Bank.

    Chechnya a completely lied and misrepresented conflict who the western mass media and “terror experts” will not even admit a significant terrorist presence and connection despite the fact they established 3 camps in Afghanistan under the Taliban including the main one in Khost were the 98 Embassy bombings and 9/11 terrorists were recruited from is not some small civil independence conflict but a gateway for US/Turkey Britain and their allies to spread pan-Turkic/Turanian theology/movement throughout Russia and Eurasia with the main groups supporting Chechens being based in Turkey like the Grey Wolves so they can control Eurasian oil and gas.

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  6. The March presidential elections could be 100% clean and the NED sponsored "opposition" would still claim that it's "stolen" – and they'll have the Western MSM as their echo chamber, sans evidence. In the early polls, Putin has something like a 25% lead over his nearest contender, so why exactly would Putin need to "rig" the election? if anything, he'd want it to go as smoothly and fairly as possible since he enjoys such a huge lead. I notice that whenever the MSM runs these stories on voter fraud in Russia, they NEVER include early polling numbers to see if the voting results actually match them.

    I wonder why?

      1. I hear ya. The Americans are always so quick to dismiss elections in countries whose voters elect someone Washington dislikes, but then we have the farce of an "election" in Yemen (a client regime) with ONE person on the ballot, and this is hailed as an example of Yemen's democratic reform by the MSM. Really! When the whole fiasco occured in Floirda, I remember people who raised concerns were roundly dismissed.

  7. The AP just published another anti-Putin article (as they've done daily the past few months) about a 'human chain" protest in Moscow. Naturally, the numbers are "disputed" and the AP yet again failed to present any poll numbers to show who was leading in the upcoming election (they only claimed "Putin is expected to return" without stating that he was far ahead in the polls). Instead, the article insinuated that Putin was under pressure to "win fairly." Has our MSM completely morphed into a propaganda racket? Something is simply wrong when they can't provide basic facts such as polling data so readers can have a clearer picture of what's happening. They've done the same thing with their "reporting" on Iran's nuclear activities, which is why Amercians now believe that we must attack Iran and that they have nukes. It's all about sewing a false narrative.

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  12. Keep sharing such excellent post like this in future too. Informative and good article. I like it very much. Have very interesting content to read out. Thanks dude

  16. Seeing Russians get to chose between Peter the Great here and Gennadiy Zyuganov while Americans pick between Romney and Romney, Russians actually have more of a choice at their election.

  18. OH dang Matt, that was good. "Is there an extraterrestrial force for good to which we can appeal?" Ummm, Green Lantern? Splatman? Voltron the Enforcer? Darth Cheney? Oh wait, he's got that bad ticker motif working but, I'm fairly certain that he is extraterrestrial.

  19. Cheney "bad"? Say it isn't so! Because his children amongst the warmongering crowd all know deep down in their soul of souls that he's really got good in him. They just KNOW it…!!!

  20. Didn't we Britain, US and Europe financed and support the overthrow of the Russian Tzarist system and install those wonderful Marxist terrorist like Trotsky Lenin, etc with a well choreographed and financed decades long smear and financial warfare campaign like we saw against Yugoslavia and now Syria, an aspect of which no historian has written about which not exclusively but mainly emanated from the conflict in the Pale of Settlement which was vehemently anti-Russia?

  21. Even Stalin who helped coordinate and organise oil and factory strikes in Azerbaijan and Russia in an article in Brdzola newspaper (December, 1901) decried Russification.

  22. “Groaning are the oppressed nationalities and religions in Russia, among them the Poles and Finns. Groaning are the unceasingly persecuted and humiliated Jews, deprived even those miserable rights that other Russian subjects enjoy the right to live where they choose, the right to go to school, etc. Groaning are the Georgians, the Armenians and other nations who can neither have their own schools nor be employed by the state and are compelled to submit to the shameful and oppressive policies of Russification.”

  23. The Russian opposition sometimes acts like an extraterrestrial force to me.)) Yesterday I posted on the social site some findings regarding the fake video about "paid" pro-Putin march participants.

  24. The opposition argued that
    a. since the fake was easily discerned, it must be done by the Putin's supporters (doesn't matter that it was downloaded by the opposition channel)
    b. since the "participants" were showing "coupons" for payments that actually were Sex-shop coupons with 5% discount offer it must be the pro-Putin propaganda since Putin's well known for his "connection to the pornography business" ))
    The election campaigns have never been so downright dirty before…

  26. If SEX is involved then you can be certain the NSA (Naughty Sex Addicts) or a host of other alphabet soup agencies, pimping their pornography of violence, have got their John Thomases inserted somewhere.

  27. Could any other foreign powers influence be any worse than the US especially against Christians?

    Since the 70’s the US/Britain and their foreign agents composing of Saudi, Pakistani and Turkish linked intelligence businessmen like Sheik Klahid bin Mahfouz the premier financer of Islamic terrorism who the US used to sell the PROMISE spyware to Mid East countries through Credit Suisse and National Commercial Bank.

  29. You're so cool! I don't think I've read anything like this before. So good to find somebody with some original thoughts on this subject. Thanks for starting this up. tava tea

  31. OH dang Matt, that was good. "Is there an extraterrestrial force for good to which we can appeal?" Ummm, Green Lantern? Splatman? Voltron the Enforcer? Darth Cheney? Oh wait, he's got that bad ticker motif working but, I'm fairly certain that he is extraterrestrial

  32. Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Sochi Tuesday when the Black Sea holiday resort town comes into the ending stages of arrangements for holding the Winter season Olympics.

    Yet security worries that have cast a shadow in the lead-up to the Games were augmented when 2 Austrian participants experienced a warning.

    Wolfgang Eischer, spokesperson for the Austrian Olympic Committee, informed CNN the body received a message, presented in German, threatening 2 women participants of the Winter Olympic team. He would not demonstrate whether or not the letter was published in Russia.

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