Our corporate media had a good week of it moaning about Putin's latest aggression against the hapless Ukrainians, so anything I read in Doug Saunders me-too column in the Globe today I'd already read several times. I guess Doug is down to one weekend column due to his employer finding efficiencies. Don't sweat it, Doug, the new Amazon warehouse in Vaughn will be hiring soon!
You'll be fine.
Anyway, taking a break from sowing generic chaos and instability around the world, Putin has once again gone out of his way to pay special attention to the immediate threat on Russia's doorstep, Poroshenko's model democracy next door. That's because he's afraid that the Russian people will sooner or later realize that life is so much better there, and they too will demand a Nuland/Payette democratic transfer of power to someone more amenable to taking direction from Washington than the habitually recalcitrant Putin.
Then life will be good!
This line of reasoning, and it is certainly not original to Doug Saunders, as his contemporaries in other major media outlets have been beating this drum all week and Doug had to wait for his weekend slot, contains an inherent contradiction that the apologists for American exceptionalism tend to avoid addressing, which is this; if Putin is indeed "weak and isolated," as we are continuously led to believe, then how does he manage to sow all that global chaos and instability? And not only that, he manages to sow world-wide mayhem with a war chest not 10% of the USA military budget!
Clearly, the man is a genius!
Either that, or our mainstream pundits are full of shit.
The crux of Saunders' imaginary thesis is that Putin is at his most dangerous when cornered, as he is now. How do we know we've got Putin cornered? His approval rating is down to 60%.
Let's apply that logic to the cornered career criminals in the Nations of Virtue. Macron and Merkel are under 30%. The greatest leader since Moses is in the high 30s. Trump is in the low 40s. Our own PM Fluffy is barely over 50%.
But Putin is on the brink because he's only got a 60% approval rating?
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