Putin's "tirade" is making my 87 year old Dad melancholy.

"How can we find ourselves in a position to have to listen to Russia accuse us of this"? He asks.

And he's right. It was always THEM who "disappeared" people. THAT was the country that tortured people and maintained gulags.

And now it is us.

:cry:

I think he's expressing the exasperation other world leaders are experiencing.

http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2007/02/11/0138_type82914type84779_118135.shtml

"The history of humanity certainly has gone through unipolar periods and seen aspirations to world supremacy. And what hasn’t happened in world history?

However, what is a unipolar world? However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making.

It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.

And this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. Because, as you know, democracy is the power of the majority in light of the interests and opinions of the minority.

Incidentally, Russia – we – are constantly being taught about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves.

I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world. And this is not only because if there was individual leadership in today’s – and precisely in today’s – world, then the military, political and economic resources would not suffice. What is even more important is that the model itself is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilisation. "

The Germans have habeas corpus; we do not. Somewhere in the lowest depths of hell, Adolph has to be saying "Gotcha!"

to secure a peaceful coexistence with russia is gone. heck of a job bush

Just ask which leader preemptively invaded another country on false grounds and without the UN's approval?

Putin is saying what many other citizens and statesmen in America and in the world are saying- that Bush has acted unilaterally without regard for the world community. Do other leaders like Chavez, Putin, and Kofi Anaan have a right to say when they think things have gone too far?

Maybe a Russian leader can help stop an American president's war. Who knows.

n/t

I remember as a kid that the USSR were the big baddies.

It was unexpected and wonderful to see them go away. I thought they'd always be out there, and that we would always be free.

For someone who is 87, the idea that the Russians could be the ones who are more free is probably too much. I don't think they are, even now, but it's still ironic to even think about it. Your father is seeing things he thought he'd never see (that the US government would claim the kind of power Chimpy/Cheney claim for the executive branch and that the Russians would live under anything lighter than a totalitarian dictatorship).

finds it hard to believe that it has actually happened. This is a guy who got to France on D-Day +5

Can you imagine reconfiguring our borders, as Russia has done? MKJ

to ruin the years of work done to cool off the tensions between US and Russia. I listen to the news and shake my head. It can't get worse yet it does. I fear we don't have time for all the studies, the proposed resolutions, the hearings, whatever you want to call it. I am afraid for tomorrow. How can we have fallen so far. Add why does **** have any supporters left? What is wrong with them that they can not recognize we have insane people at the helm. I find myself either sick or angry every time I hear the news. I am at the point that I don't know what to say any more.

They have a John Wayne view of the world. "We are the good guys and everyone else wears black hats, and if you disagree, you are a American hater and a commie." Though some are coming around, many will have their heads exploded if reality set in.

and their war pofiteering friends.

What's nowo the #1 US export? VIOLENCE.

the bush extravanganza is almost totally media driven, and it's the pigmedia that today must distract people from thinking about junyer, and what he's wrought, by lying and focusing on tom and nicole etc. we must TAG the media with bush, and hammer away at them that they will be judged on their actions re bush, so they should beware if they want to survive! treason is treason, after all....

Soviet citizens became experts at "reading between the lines" in order to discern the truth in the propaganda that they were fed by Pravda (means "truth" in Russian BTW) and other Soviet state run media outlets.

Most Americans these days lack the capacity to realize that they are being fed a steady diet of propaganda. Propaganda doesn't mean all lies, it means slanting the truth toward a particular viewpoint and them mixing in some outright lies, like the Niger uranium story for instance.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
-- Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

"Fascism should rightly be called corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power--Benito Mussolini "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
--Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906

"Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants, it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants. A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished."
--Michael Rivero

The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities. It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapons capability, to support presidential policy. Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target of its lies.

— Ralph McGehee, Deadly Deceits

"One of the penalities for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

- Plato

"Few of us can surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

- Arthur Miller

"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."

- Dresden James

:applause: MKJ

It pains me to say it.

Make no mistake.

Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, Mama!