Putin the salesman
NOTE: An update-related laptop crash kept me from posting this while on the road on Sunday. Two hours of Windows reset and some rebuilding later, it’s fixed.
When health insurance industry whistleblower Wendell Potter spoke here (pre-pandemic), someone asked about those ubiquitous Medicare advantage TV ads. Stay away, Potter advised. Sure, they make the plans sound good, Potter said. They know what you’ll buy.
So does former KGB agent Vladimir Putin.
The Russian dictator is selling. The American right is buying, and some on the left too. If Putin sounds as if he’s running for president in 2024, that’s no accident, writes E.J. Dionne:
“Look at what they’ve done to their own people,” he said of us Westerners. “They’re destroying family, national identity, they are abusing their children. Even pedophilia is announced as a normal thing in the West.” Never mind that Russia is a world leader in sex trafficking.
Putin didn’t stop there. In one rather convoluted passage, he came out against same-sex marriage, backed off a bit and then doubled down:
“And they’re recognizing same-sex marriages,” he said. “That’s fine that they’re adults. They’ve got the right to live their life. And we always, we’re very tolerant about this in Russia. Nobody is trying to enter private lives of people, and we’re not going to do this.”
Well, not quite, but he pressed on: “However, we need to tell them, but look at the scriptures of any religion in the world. Everything is said in there. And one of the things is that family is a union of a man and a woman.”
You can bet Putin reads scripture like George C. Scott in Patton: “Every goddamn day.”
Putin is working to create a right-wing nationalist movment worldwide, Dionne suggests. Right-wing extremists in this country are lining up to join, polls indicate.
Dave Neiwert, an authority on right-wing extremism, commented Sunday on the parallels between the Nazi view of Ukraine and the Russian one today:
“I was struck how the [Nazi] burning of Belarussian villages bears no slight resemblance to the [Russian] bombing of Ukrainian theaters,” Neiwert tweeted.
Dionne focused Sunday on how Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican widely assumed to be running for president in 2024, has shifted with Republican opinion away from support for Ukraine. But it is also important to monitor opinion on the far left.
There is a brand of progressive who wakes up each morning and asks, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the progressivest of all?” They are so programmatically opposed to U.S. government action, to U.S. historical imperialism, to the military-industrial complex, and to finding fault with anything Democrats in power do, that some have bought into Russian rhetoric and oppose U.S. aid to Ukraine’s fight for survival.
Putin may know what the American far right will buy, but he also understands “horseshoe politics” and what some on the far left will.
Responding to but-what-about-slavery and but-what-about-the Wagner-Group pushback from the left on Sunday, Neiwert answered, “There have been no Ukrainian bombings of Russian theaters, no wanton massacres of Belarussian civilians.”
Last week in a press conference, a reporter asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy what his worst day of the war was. He replied, “Bucha.”