Re: Putin: Russians love him!
On Dec 6, 2006, at 4:39 PM, Peter Lavelle wrote:
My very short reply to this is the following. The Republicans
expected Putin to be like Yeltsin - cave in to Western geopolitical
interests. For the Democracts, which had to take a different
approach, Putin has not live upped to Yeltsin’s “democratic
values” (whatever that means). So we are left with a very American
agenda to assess Russia - neither makes any sense.
I’m talking about people who are to the left of Dems, who nonetheless
take seriously all the crap about what a megalomaniacal autocrat
Putin is. You can say that Russia’s pretty free, and that he turned
around a country that was in a death spiral and they’ll act like you
beamed in from Mars.
Doug