Obama Bows to Potemkin Putin

Russia saw more protests in the first three months of 2010 than it has seen over the past few years. A wave of demonstrations swept from one end of the country to the other. From Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, demonstrators for the first time made both economic and political demands, shouting “Down with the tariff increase!” and “Putin must go!”

The gap between the people and the government is widening further and further. _MoscowTimes

If more Russians could wake up from a vodka-sotted nationalistic stupour long enough to see how Putin's rule is destroying Russia, we would see even more protests in Russia. But Russians are too busy committing suicide, getting drunk, and dying of HIV / TB / heart disease / liver disease / and a growing curse of COPD, to comprehend how their government is sucking their irreplaceable life's blood.

Today, before our very eyes, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s once seemingly impregnable regime may be fading in the same way as its predecessors. In just ten years, Putinism, which was consciously designed by its image-makers as a simulacrum of a great ideological style, has run through all the classical stages of Soviet history. Indeed, Putinism now seems like a trite parody of all of them.
_TaipeiTimes

And yet the Obama - Pelosi reich is frantically rushing to provide Putin's pathetic Russia with a nuclear strategic advantage over a much larger, stronger, and richer United States. Why is Obama bowing to Potemkin Putin?

Because he is doing what he has wanted to do all his life -- what he has been saying that he would do if he ever got the chance. He is in the process of "dealing with" the fly in the ointment of a glorious dream that he inherited from his mother. A magnificent vision of a world without the anti-socialist hegemon.

Even if Obama is to be only a one-term president, he intends to make that one term count, in a way that is irreversible. He has already set the US on course for a catastrophic level of national debt that is 90% of national GDP before the end of the decade. We will see what other damage he can do in the time he has left.

Hope and change. The reality of Obama's form of the latter (change) makes the former (hope) so much more necessary than it ever was before. And so much more futile.