Friday, July 14, 2017

GOP Right Wing kissed Putin's ass before Trump


Some elements of the Republican Party have been planting great sloppy wet kisses on Putin's ass long before this last election. They have just been waiting for their Great Shining Orange Prince to lead them to the Promised Dacha.
Years before the words “collusion” and “Russian hacking” became associated with President Vladimir V. Putin, some prominent Republicans found far more laudatory ways to talk about the Russian leader.

“Putin decides what he wants to do, and he does it in half a day,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and longtime friend and adviser to President Trump, gushed in 2014.

Mr. Putin was worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, K. T. McFarland said in 2013, before going on to serve a brief and ill-fated stint as Mr. Trump’s deputy national security adviser.

“A great leader,” “very reasoned,” and “extremely diplomatic,” was how Mr. Trump himself described Mr. Putin that same year.

Though such fondness for Mr. Putin fell outside the Republican Party’s mainstream at the time, it became a widely held sentiment inside the conservative movement by the time Mr. Trump started running for president in 2015. And it persists today, despite evidence of Russian intervention in the 2016 American election and Mr. Putin’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies at home.

The veneration of Mr. Putin helps explain why revelations about Russia’s involvement in the election — including recent reports that members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle set up a meeting at which they expected a representative of the Russian government to give them incriminating information about Hillary Clinton — and Mr. Trump’s reluctance to acknowledge it, have barely penetrated the consciousness of the president’s conservative base.

Mr. Putin is no archvillain in this understanding of America-Russian relations. Rather, he personifies many of the qualities and attitudes that conservatives have desired in a president of their own: a respect for traditional Christian values, a swelling nationalist pride and an aggressive posture toward foreign adversaries.

In this view, the Russian president is a brilliant tactician, a slayer of murderous Islamic extremists — and not incidentally, a leader who outmaneuvered and emasculated President Barack Obama on the world stage. And because of that, almost any other transgression seems forgivable.

“There are conservatives here who maybe read into Russia things they wish were true in the United States,” said Angela Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University. “And they imagine Russia and Putin as the kind of strong, traditional conservative leader whom they wish they had in the United States.” To these conservatives, she added, “Russia is the true defender of Christian values. We are decadent.”
Another example of the poisonous influence religion has on life. And isn't it fun to see old Rudi Ghouliani as one of Pooty's cheerleaders. This raises the question of whether an Italian can be a made man in the Russian Mafia?

Comments:
Curious idea, Putin's Russia as defender and champion of Christian values, inasmuch as Putin's Russia is Russian Orthodox church, and we are awaiting, in a few years, the one thousandth anniversary of their final and permanent break from the Roman Catholics. Oh sure, the Muslims have a three hundred year head start on the Orthos in holding their own dispute with the Roman church, but on a scriptural basis, both crowds have no use for the religion dominant in our neighborhood.

Of course, to get really hardnose in the faith department, one ought to ask the wing nuts which flavor of Christianity do they think Putin is championing. He ain't gonna like the Catholics, they are at the fundament of the break, but those Protestants have only shown an interest in flattening Russia, so they are no closer to interfaith harmony.

So I say that it is very odd that modern Repubs would look to an infidel for saving them on religious grounds.
 

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