Snip The United States’ current political crisis couldn’t happen here. Our Constitution (Section 44) doesn’t allow people with criminal records or those on trial to stand for parliament.
Snip From down under, we see a sick deluded man of no redeeming features, full of racial hatred, ignorance, bile and misogyny. A deluded, pathetic liar unsuitable for the highest office in the land, if not the world. He sees complex problems and impregnates them with populism and implausible black-and-white solutions.
His opinions on subjects of internal and international importance are so shallow that one would think he spent the entirety of his youth in the wading pool at the local swimming pool, or six years in grade 6, and never academically advanced.
He is a crash-through politician with a ubiquitous mouth. Trump remains an incoherent mess who bounces back after each disaster thinking he has been impressive while those around him are laughing their heads off. Entertaining in a uniquely American way, he might be to the hillbillies, but leadership requires worldly character.
This interview with Andrei Soldatov is excellent -- The Putin Files: Andrei Soldatov
FRONTLINE PBS | Official 240,712 views Oct 26, 2017
Watch author and journalist Andrei Soldatov’s candid, full interview on Putin and allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election – all part of "The Putin Files", FRONTLINE's media transparency project. Explore Soldatov's full interview and interactive transcript here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/in...
We have read much of it before, probably a good idea to read it again before getting into the video. Soldatov gives even contextual background, and brings Putin's rise alive. 2016:
Russia Today: why western cynics lap up Putin’s TV poison "Putin's Empire of the Mind How Russia's president morphed from realist to ideologue -- and what he'll do next." [...] While reputable news organisations from the BBC to the New York Times fire news reporters who try, however inadequately, to tell the truth, Russia Today has extended its reach. Putin is about to increase its $300m budget by 40% .. http:/// [oops, invalid link] . Its resources will soon compare with Fox News. But while Fox serves the peculiar tastes of the American right, Russia Today has global ambitions. The channel broadcasts in English, Arabic and Spanish and can reach 600 million people. It claims to have surpassed a billion hits on YouTube, and will add German- and French-language channels. For the supposedly pariah leader of a country whose population is collapsing and mafia economy stagnating, Putin has the best publicity money can buy. [...] --- Trump and Putin: A Love Story The attraction is mutual, but history shows who’s really using whom. By David Remnick , August 3, 2016 [...] A mural in Vilnius, Lithuania. Trump sees strength and cynicism in Putin. Putin sees in Trump a grand opportunity. Photograph by Aleksandr Lukjanov / Alamy Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Donald J. Trump are locked in a humid political embrace, which seems, at first glance, unlikely. Putin grew up in postwar Leningrad. In the dismal courtyard of his building on Baskov Lane, a hangout for local thugs and drunks, he and his childhood friends pursued their favorite pastime: chasing rats with sticks. His father, a wounded veteran, beat him with a belt. Putin’s way up, his dream, was to volunteer for the K.G.B. Donald Trump encountered few rats on his lawn in Jamaica Estates.Soft, surly, and academically uninterested, Donald was disruptive in class—so much so that his father, a real-estate tycoon of the outer boroughs, shipped him off to military school when he was thirteen. He did not set out to serve his country; he set out to multiply his father’s fortune. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” Trump has said. “The temperament is not that different.” P - Decades later, Trump has praised Putin as a forceful leader, a “better leader” than Barack Obama; Putin hardly conceals his hope that Trump will win election to the White House. What would be more advantageous for Putin than to see the United States elect an incompetent leader who just so happens to be content to leave the Russian regime to its own devices, particularly in Europe? Even as non-Democrats have variously described their own nominee as a “con .. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/hillary-clinton-trump-con-man-223776 ,” a “bully ,, http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/286901-gop-senator-trumps-a-privileged-bully ,” and a “borderline .. http://www.newsmax.com/Newsmax-Tv/jeb-bush-trump-withering-attacks/2016/02/16/id/714674/ ” 9/11 conspiracy theorist, Putin has acted as a surrogate from afar, dropping clear hints at his preference, slyly declaring Trump “bright” and “talented without doubt.” P - The Times has reported that hackers who broke into the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail trove—a cyber version of the Watergate burglary—were likely agents of the Russian Federation. [...] The fellow-feeling between the two is complex, but it is not hard to see who gets the better of whom. Trump sees strength and cynicism in Putin and hopes to emulate him. Putin sees in Trump a grand opportunity. He sees in Trump weakness and ignorance, a confused mind. He has every hope of exploiting him. P - Putin’s view of the world—of the future of Russia and its increasingly dangerous confrontation with the West—is rooted in the fall of the Soviet Union. His behavior and his resentments, to say nothing of his shrewd foray into our current electoral follies, are based entirely on that event. [...] By August, 1991, Putin was back in Leningrad, working for Anatoly Sobchak, the city’s liberal mayor, as a K.G.B.-affiliated aide. The coup lasted only three days. The plotters failed to follow the standard putsch handbook. A coup, Lenin instructed, must “first seize the telegraph,” the means of communication. They didn’t. There were renegade reports all over the media, rallying the resistance. The coup’s leaders were comically disorganized, often drunk, and, above all, unwilling to shed the blood necessary to overcome popular resistance. Just as Gorbachev refused to open fire in the capitals of Eastern and Central Europe to retain the “near Empire,” the coup plotters lacked the cruelty of their Stalin-era heroes. They could not bear to unleash the tanks on their countrymen or even arrest Yeltsin, who bravely rallied the forces of opposition. [...] Putin reacted to the coup with ambivalence. Having sided with Sobchak through the ordeal, helping to insure his security, he was at a loss when the drama ended. Where would he go? The August events, he said, “tore my life apart. . . . There were no prospects, and in general it was clear what would happen with the intelligence service.” Putin claims that he resigned from the intelligence services after the coup, though he is fond of saying, with evident conviction, “There is no such thing as a former K.G.B. man.” P - By Christmas, 1991, the Soviet Union itself was a memory. Gorbachev, who struggled to form even a loosely confederated union out of the fifteen Soviet republics, blamed Yeltsin and the leaders of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus for plotting illegally to dissolve the bloc. But the truth was that, by that time, the union itself was a mass of internal uprisings for independence—first in the smallest republics, the Baltic states, and then in the Slavic heart of the union, Ukraine and Russia. P - Putin was less ambivalent about the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2005, he called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the past century.” Although it was Yeltsin who brought Putin to Moscow, Putin has expressed barely concealed contempt for the nineteen-nineties, the Yeltsin era, as a period of unrelieved chaos, theft, and humiliation. [...] Putin’s hold over public opinion unquestionably depends on his ruthless stifling of dissent and the media. But he also appeals to something that is harder to quantify, something deep in the psychology of a people just twenty-five years distant from the fall of the Soviet imperium. Putin gains tremendous plaudits by refusing to take moral or political direction from the West. He has taken to lecturing the West for its sins and hypocrisies—in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Libya, and elsewhere—its “moral bankruptcy,” its godlessness. Bravado became his way of appealing to his own people. His military actions in Crimea and Syria are meant not only to display a geopolitical toughness but also to rouse a Russian people who were humbled and insulted by the weakness that followed the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras. Many Russians are, despite the censorship of televised news, quite well informed, and they know that Putin is hardly their Lincoln. And yet he speaks to the grievances and indignities of many millions of Russians; he speaks to the restoration of Russian self-respect. This appeal is hard, given Putin’s brutality and his cynical disdain for individual rights and democratic aspirations, to understand from a distance. People in the West, Alexievich told the Times recently .. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/21/books/svetlana-alexievich-a-nobel-laureate-of-russian-misery-has-her-english-debut.html, “do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West. There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.” P - It is safe to say that, on a strictly intellectual level, Donald Trump understands little of this. In recent weeks, he has made it plain that he is ignorant of the basics of contemporary Russian and geostrategic reality. He has declared NATO “obsolete” and has suggested that he might do away with Article 5, which promises that an attack on one member state is an attack on all. He makes the threat not because he is interested in reassessing anything as complex as global-security strategy but, rather, because not every member state is forking over its dues. P - Trump is muddled in the essentials. He has admitted that he doesn’t read much. It shows. On Sunday, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Trump said that in his Administration Putin would never send forces into Ukraine. When Stephanopoulos reminded Trump that “they’re already there,” the candidate forged ahead like a school kid bullshitting his way through an oral exam that he had not bothered to prepare for. [...] “Putin wants the United States to be taken up with its own problems, and forget about things like Ukraine and Crimea,” Sergei Parkhomenko, an activist and broadcaster for Echo of Moscow, told me. “It seems to him that, if the United States elects Trump, all of America will be taken up for at least a year trying to ‘digest’ him. P - “But there is a second reason,” Parkhomenko continued. “Putin is convinced that absolutely everything in this world is done for money. He is a religious fanatic, and money is his god. With money, it is possible to solve any problem, buy any interlocutor. He bought the Olympic Games, he bought the World Cup. It will be easy to deal with Trump. He won’t need to use words in negotiations, only figures. When they don’t agree, it will only be necessary to find the right price.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125582447
One from 2015 -- Russian Duma Dissident Believes West Must Save Ukraine to Defeat Putin [...] Ponomarev believes that the United States needs to provide military support to Ukraine but avoid fueling perceptions that the conflict there represents a showdown between Russia and NATO. “I would advocate to work with other eastern European governments, such as Poland or the Baltic countries, to send their old weapons from before they joined NATO to Kiev,” Ponomarev told FP. “Such a move would undermine the Kremlin’s internal message that the war in Ukraine is a civilizational conflict between Russia and the West. Instead it would show that all of eastern Europe is just as against this as Washington or Brussels.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=111917894
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