Putin's Victory - With an 0bama Assist

For
their own crass political gain, our ambassador in Moscow, and our
president, have just helped the KGB to consolidate power in Russia.
They've turned a blind eye to the Russian efforts to help the maniacal
ruler of Syria to butcher his fellow citizens, and they've used the same
type of dishonesty to cover their tracks that was perfected in the
USSR. They've assisted a viciously anti-American dictator to seize total
power. In doing so, they've made Hillary Clinton look like Ronald
Reagan. It's a black day in American history.

On February 11, 2012, I tweeted at
Michael McFaul, America's man in Moscow. I chastised him for spending
his time tweeting at (indeed, I thought, flirting with) Tina Kandelaki
(one of Russia's many answers to Paris Hilton), and issuing lots of
other utterly frivolous tweets, instead of focusing on Russia's efforts to help Syria massacre thousands of civilians and its efforts to smear American adoptive parents as homicidal maniacs, telling the world they are not good enough to care for Russian orphans.

A few minutes later, he answered me. He stated: "The Obama administration, including me here, has been crystal clear in our condemnation of Russia's position on Syria."

It was a brazen, shameless lie.

What McFaul actually said about Syria on Twitter, three days before, was this:
"Productive meetings this week with Russian govt officials, even as we
disagree on Syria. Sharp contrast with public anti-US statements."
Then, he gushed: "In touring #Dreamliner, hope Obama learned about @Boeing JV w/ VSMPO-AVISMA. Great story of US-Russia collaboration."

Did he really say collaboration? Yes, he did.

So,
far from "condemning" Russia in Syria, McFaul had simply said there was
disagreement with Russia's policy, and he said it in the context of
praising Russia for "productive meetings" and emphasizing common ground.
Anyone with a lick of diplomatic experience knows exactly what this
meant: Go ahead and do what you want, Mr. Putin. We won't stop you.

And after that, the bloodletting in Syria got much, much worse, and McFaul started talking collaboration.

McFaul
didn't even try to post a link to any source where he'd issued such a
"condemnation." And he didn't even try to respond to me when I tweeted:
"Noticeably absent from your tweet is a link to any published quotation
in which you personally do so, or Obama." His non-response and lack of
documentation had all the earmarks of Soviet propaganda. Apparently, he
thought folks would just take him at his word, would be too lazy to
look at the record and see what he'd actually said.

And what's most important is that McFaul has barely more than 18,000 Twitter followers. Even if he had
condemned Russia on Twitter, hardly anybody would know it. Least of all
the people of Russia, more than half of whom have no Internet access at
all. What the U.S. Ambassador needs to do in a situation like this is
speak out, at length and in detail, in the mainstream media, including
the Russia media. McFaul was as silent as a McMouse in that regard.

What's more, to date McFaul still
hasn't said one single word on Twitter in defense of American adoptive
parents. Instead, he proudly posts photos on his Twitter account of
himself smiling and drinking champagne with Medvedev, a puppet ruler who Hillary Clinton has called "despicable"
for helping the Syrian government to murder women and children. McFaul
cares much more, in other words, about sucking up to Russians than for
the words of his own boss.

There
is, of course, a very good reason for McFaul to remain silent or lie
about such things: Speaking out would, he rightly believes, do his boss
Barack Obama devastating political harm. It would focus the world's
attention on the fact that Obama's vaunted "reset" with Russia had
failed totally, and Russia was flouting American (and world) opinion to
stand beside the Syrian butchers against the nation's people.

Russia is threatening us with nuclear reprisal. It is denying access to Russian children to Americans who want to adopt. It is relentlessly obliterating American values throughout the country, even going so far as to put a dead man who
dared speak out against official corruption on trial. It is massively
boosting military expenditure and challenging American interests in
every possible venue, all across the globe. It is giving heavy support
to the most virulent of America's enemies, including Syria and Iran. It is divesting in the American economy. And it attacks America, her values and her people, including McFaul personally, more viciously every single day.

Russia is, quite simply, our enemy. Way back in 2009 Garry Kasparov warned us about this on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
He explained how Russia wants to cause tumult in the Middle East
because doing so causes the price of oil to soar and this lines the
Kremlin's pockets. We see that policy playing itself out now in Iran and
Syria. The Obama administration is simply idiotic for thinking that
Russia would give up this cash flow under any circumstances.

In the weeks before Russia's March 4 presidential elections, the Putin regime expelled a leading Kremlin-critical French reporter from the country, pulled a popular Kremlin-critical TV show from the air and called the producers of a second show before the prosecutor and sacked the board of directors at the leading Kremlin-critical radio station . It placed the nation's leading independent newspaper on the brink of bankruptcy. It has denied a
place on the ballot to the leading Kremlin-critical politician and has
not permitted any pro-democracy candidate to challenge Putin for the
presidency. It has even gone so far as to carry out a show trial to convict a Kremlin-critical attorney who is not even alive any longer, having been tortured to death in a Kremlin prison.

By
far, the most accurate bit of reporting on Putin's Russia today that I
saw during the recent presidential election cycle that ended in a
dominating win for former KGB spy Vladimir Putin, one of the world's
great America bashers, came from the always excellent Leon Aron of the
AEI think tank. Aron interviewed opposition leader Yevgenia Chirikova
at length on the virtual pages of the Foreign Policy website, and here's
what she told told him:
"It seems to me that our problem is not Putin but the people. For [we
should be] more demanding with respect to our own lives, with respect to
what we see out of our windows, and resist every time when government
functionaries offend us." The people of Russia said nothing as their
government murdered women and children in Syria, just as they said
nothing when their government marched into Georgia. Afterwards, they
returned Putin to power in a landslide.

But McFaul has to be blind to all that if he wants to keep his job, blind even to Russian efforts which compare him to a pedophile. His focus has to be doing everything he can to help his boss win reelection by supporting
the narrative that Obama has changed Russia's view of the USA for the
better through his "reset" policy. So neither he nor Obama have spoken
out once, not a single time, to condemn any of these horrifying Russian
actions.

And when confronted, just as they always did in the USSR, McFaul simply lies about it.

A recent policy statement from
the Obama administration says this: "Our engagement with Russia remains
important, and we will continue to build a closer relationship in areas
of mutual interest and encourage it to be a contributor across a broad
range of issues." Obama is aggressively pushing for more and more
international trade benefits for Russia even as it foments terror throughout the Middle East and obliterates domestic democracy

That
is Obama's policy towards Russia in a nutshell. Another word for it is
"reset." Still another word is "appeasement." Whereas Ronald Reagan
wanted to confront a nation that scorned American values and attacked
America at every opportunity, Obama wants to befriend that nation and
help it carry out its malignant policies aimed at our destruction.

So
it can hardly be surprising to see Obama and McFaul stand mute while
Vladimir Putin manipulates Russia's electoral process, crushes dissent,
and anoints himself president for life as if Russia were Egypt or Syria
or Iran or Venezuela, not coincidentally the nations Russia counts as
its closest friends. This cartel of America-haters, a new Warsaw Pact,
is bent on American destruction.

Nor
can it be surprising to see Putin not only romp back into power in a
first-round landslide, as he has just done, but to see him declare he'll
be in power forever before
the votes have even been counted. This is the final net result of the
Obama "reset," which means no real opposition to Putin. The KGB
reasserts itself in the formal corridors of power, its litany of murders
on Putin's behalf (Polikovskaya, Estemirova, Starovoitova, and so many
others) goes unpunished, and Putin turns Russia into a banana republic
with oil and gas instead of fruit.

So
let's be perfectly clear: Our president helped Putin win. He helped
Putin keep of the mendacious pretext that Dmitri Medvedev was president
for the past four years, when in fact Putin was pulling the strings. He
helped Putin sweep his murderous rampage against democracy under the
carpet, and he helped Putin gain traction supporting American enemies in
the Middle East and across the globe. He did it all so he could tell
the world he had made friends with Putin where George Bush had made an
enemy, seeking to score points with his political base.

And
let's be clear about one thing more: The ultimate culprits in this
horrendous political disaster in Russia are that benighted nation's
citizens, who have never given true democracy a fair chance and who have
been far too ready to turn the clock backwards and hand power to a
malignant cabal of KGB agents. Russia, more than anyone else, will pay
the same heavy price for this reckless conduct as did the USSR.