At long last, former Russian president and notorious booze-hound Boris Yeltsin dies

Hilarious GREAT piece from Rollingstone. I couldn't say it any better myself. This is pure artwork to the eyes. It amazes me that civilization just sat around while this pig had his horrendous romp.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/14272792/the_low_post_death_of_a_drunk

Boris Yeltsin was always good for a laugh, which is probably why on the occasion of his death people outside of Russia are not calling him words like scum and monster, but instead recalling him fondly, with a smile, as one would a retarded nephew who could always be counted on to pull his pants down at Thanksgiving dinner.

Like most people who lived in Russia during the 1990s -- and Russia was my home throughout Yeltsin's entire reign as Russian president -- I have a wide variety of fond memories of the Motherland's drunken, bloblike train wreck of a revolutionary leader. My favorite came in 1995, at a press conference in Moscow, when a couple of American reporters perfectly captured the essence of Yeltsin by heckling him as he stumbled into the room. As he burst through the side entrance with that taillight-red face of his, hands wobbling in front of him in tactile search of the podium, the two hacks in the back called out: "Nor-r-r-r-r-r-m!" Such a perfect moment, I almost died laughing. Boris Nikolayevich, of course, was too wasted to hear the commotion at the back of the room.

In those early days of the revolution, you see, the most worthless, drunken and lazy of the peasants became temporary big-shots with puffed-up communist titles and accompanying important-looking little red vinyl badges just by ratting out the rich farmers, called kulaks, of which Ignatiy was one. They would "razkulachivat" (de-kulak) the kulaks by denouncing them to the secret police and having them sent to prison camps -- and once they were safely gone, the little bastards would appropriate the boss' shit for themselves and spend their days getting drunk in his haystacks, a peasant version of paradise on earth.

That was what Marxism looked like in the 1930s in Russia. Boris Yeltsin's father Nikolai saw this happen to his family and so he moved away from Butka, to the city of Kazan, to work construction at the site of a machine-building plant. During that time the Yeltsin family lived in a workers' barracks where men, women, children and the elderly slept on top of each other like animals and fought, literally fought, with fists and lead pipes, for crusts of bread, or a few feet of space upon which to sleep at night. The communist government found its leaders among the meanest and greediest of the children who survived and thrived in places like this. Boris Yeltsin was such a child. As a teenager he only knew two things; how to drink vodka and smash people in the face

I'd say "simplistic" more than anything. While he gets in some jabs and anecdotes, the article smacks of the pseudo-intellectual screeds of the 19th century where whole races and nationalities were described one way or another. His remarks on Russian history would be better left out as the gloss over an incredibly complex past and leave the reader with the idea that Russians are nothing but rats perpetually fighting over a piece of rotten corn. Hardly.

The excruciating snobbery, the cruelty, the contempt of the eternally comfortable. This is the guy who "hilariously" complained that the Rwandan genocide was unfortunate because an uglier race was slaughtering a more beautiful one.

But he's cute as hell, and of course "smart."

The early part of the article is messed up. How can he accuse the peasantry of not having advanced itself for hundreds of years when at the time of the revolution they'd only been emancipated from serfdom for about 50 years. Similarly he paints Yeltsin out to have been some kind of collectivization hooligan in his teenaged years. Yeltsin's teen years went from 1944, a time where collectivization had already been accomplished. The criticism of Yeltsin's regime is valid though. He presided over an economic scourging of his people.

O'Rourke. Hitchens. And now, Taibbi.

Taibbi is going to have to cultivate a "trademark" vice, like smoking, or drinking, or fucking little girls. Like all the rich bad boys do.

--p!
A Rolling Stone hero is nothing to be.
(After St. John of Liverpool)