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PUTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN!

You will MOD yourself down! Or face the consequences!

Because he is trying to build up a personality cult. It would appear Mr Putin has deigns on power greater than the Russian Presidency.

You know, there are probably a lot of frustrated Washington bureaucrats and military types that would love to see a re-emergence of a Soviet Russian state--we'd be fighting real commies again, and not elusive and often invisible terrorists.

That's what Iraq was at least partially about. Saddam Hussein was a very visible public figure -- it gave the folks back at home something to 'rally around.' With the War on Terror we're now back to shadow fighting enemies that we know very little about who sneak around blowing up stuff and killing troops. Does this last description sound familiar? It should if you know anything about the Vietnam War.

If there's a big boogieman out there, we need to build weapons and tanks and planes and spend big bucks doing it. But the public rarely rallies behind a cause that looks confusing and hopeless... the American public likes the classic "the good guys (U.S.)" vs "the bad guys (Russia, Saddam, Ax1s of da 3v1l, etc.)", not us vs. some tactics.

if anything, europe is way more agitated than the usa. this is because the eu expanded into old soviet bloc countries and a russian awakening from its post cold war hangover is feeling rather nationalistic about it's old sphere of influence. witness the latest conflagration in estonia over just a world war ii statue of a russian soldier being moved

plus the recent summit in samara resulted in nothing but serious discord [spiegel.de]

so russia and europe are seriously butting heads right now, but the usa? not so much

the cold war was characterized by an ideology which directly threatened the usa. communism was dead set on taking over the world. so it was a real global struggle. now, russia is just a garden variety autocracy. if russia went into chile or peru or bolivia in the cold war, the usa would get agitated: communism spreading. but russia could go over now and give tanks and kalishnikovs to these countries and it would be no big deal: there is no ideological oomph behind the gesture, no real threat in terms of ideas. communism has died, lost its lustre, no one seriously believes in it anymore

and today? today we have islamic fundamentalists who are dead set on putting large swaths of the world under sharia law. and the meddling usa is a prime enemy of that effort, so it will be targetted big time. in some ways this new world is less dangerous, because massive world war of huge armies and scary war machinery won't be unleashed at the slightest gaffe or bravado. but in other ways, the threat of fundamentalist terrorism is more dangerous, since if someone sets a nuke off in times square, there is no clear line of accountability. if russia nuked times square, red square would cease to exist too. if times square gets nuked today, who can you blame?

IMHO, if you want an objective news coverage, you have to look at the Internet, where an open uncensored discussion is possible.

This must be some usage of the word "objective" with which I am not yet familiar.

("Less corporate-dominated", I'd agree. But "objective" ...?)

It speaks well of the net progress in the ex-USSR from the mid-eighties to now that a) these journalists weren't shot/sent to Lefortovo and shot/sent to cut down trees in Siberia until they didn't need to be shot, and b) that the rest of the world has heard about it. On the time scale of massive societal shifts, things are still looking up. Backsliding, certainly, but it's still a far cry from the heyday of Soviet control.

Tell that to Anna Politkovskaya and Paul Klebnikov, or the other Russian journalists who have been assassinated in recent years. Trying to read this as somehow being good news sounds disturbingly like the Neocon concept that democracy is somehow the long-term natural outcome of the human history, Bush's "people want to be free" theory. That idea is misguided as best, and as Iraq shows, dangerously unrealistic at worst. Western democracy is no more the natural outcome for a group of people than a house is the natural outcome for a pile of plywood, nails, and two-by-fours. Like making a house, democracy takes a lot of hard work and design, and continual upkeep. The developments in Russia- along with Russia's efforts to spread fear with its polonium assassinaton, and poisoning Ukraining politician Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin- suggest a deep, broad move towards totalitarianism. The odds of Russia emerging with a free society are good, but the outcome is not certain. It is too soon to pat ourselves on the back.

Consider that the emergence of western-style democracies with individual rights and accountable heads of state is a recent development, something that has only become fully developed in the past few hundred years. Meanwhile, China has been ruled by totalitarianism of one form or another for thousands of years. So, looking at the big picture, isn't the sure money on totalitarianism to eventually take over the world, not democracy? Sure, the spread and success of democracy has been a remarkable success story... but for a while, it looked like Communism might well be the system to take over the world, and then that fell apart almost overnight. How can we be so certain that democracy won't be a similar historical anomaly? Remember how certain people were that democracy would take root in Iraq, and beat out the forces of the Baathists, radical Islamists, militias and criminals? Every time something went wrong, instead of looking at the possibility we were failing, we patted ourselves on the back and said, "Yes, but look at the big picture! It's so much better than it was under Saddam!". Democracy still may win in Iraq, but our arrogance and complacency, our certainty that it would win out over the forces of totalitarianism, religious extremism, and anarchy, have vastly reduced the chances that it will.

Don't read this the wrong way. I actually agree with the Neocons on one issue: democracies should promote democracy outside their borders. But I think we need to understand that while this fight may be winnable, fighting for freedom is a hard, uphill fight, and that we are not necessarily destined to win the fight.

Kinda like how the U.S. main stream media does not mention Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul.

Corporate media focuses on serious candidates, which are easily distinguished from non-serious candidates because ... um ... because if Kucinich or Paul were serious candidates, they'd be getting more media coverage.