{"id":22113,"date":"2013-09-14T08:06:21","date_gmt":"2013-09-14T12:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22113"},"modified":"2017-09-25T21:53:17","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T01:53:17","slug":"vlad-the-journalistic-impaler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/14\/vlad-the-journalistic-impaler\/","title":{"rendered":"Vlad the (journalistic) Impaler"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Steyn<\/a> on the sudden re-emergence of Russia on the international stage:<\/p>\n

For generations, eminent New York Times<\/em> wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty\u2019s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman\u2019s more recent effusions to the \u201cenlightened\u201d Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times<\/em> would eventually figure it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin\u2019s impressive debut on the op-ed page this week.<\/p>\n

It pains me to have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I\u2019d be a KGB torturer. His \u201cplea for caution\u201d was an exquisitely masterful parody of liberal bromides far better than most of the Times<\/em>\u2019 in-house writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law, was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no longer seen as \u201ca model of democracy\u201d but instead as erratic cowboys \u201ccobbling coalitions together under the slogan \u2018you\u2019re either with us or against us.\u2019\u201d He warned against chest-thumping about \u201cAmerican exceptionalism,\u201d pointing out that, just like America\u2019s grade-school classrooms, in the international community everyone is exceptional in his own way.<\/p>\n

All this the average Times<\/em> reader would find entirely unexceptional. Indeed, it\u2019s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama\u2019s core platitude: \u201cWe must work together to keep this hope alive.\u201d In the biographical tag at the end, the Times<\/em> editors informed us: \u201cVladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.\u201d But by this stage, one would not have been surprised to see: \u201cVladimir V. Putin is the author of the new memoir The Audacity of Vlad<\/em>, which he will be launching at a campaign breakfast in Ames, Iowa, this weekend.\u201d <\/p>\n

As Iowahawk ingeniously summed it up, Putin is \u201cnow just basically doing donuts in Obama\u2019s front yard.\u201d It\u2019s not just that he can stitch him up at the G-8, G-20, Gee-don\u2019t-tell-me-you\u2019re-coming-back-for-more, and turn the leader of the free world into the planet\u2019s designated decline-and-fall-guy, but he can slough off crappy third-rate telepromptered mush better than you community-organizer schmucks, too. Let\u2019s take it as read that Putin didn\u2019t write this himself any more than Obama wrote that bilge he was drowning in on Tuesday night, when he took to the airwaves to argue in favor of the fierce urgency of doing something about gassed Syrian moppets but not just yet. Both guys are using writers, but Putin\u2019s are way better than Obama\u2019s \u2014 and English isn\u2019t even their first language. With this op-ed Tsar Vlad is telling Obama: The world knows you haven\u2019t a clue how to play the Great Game or even what it is, but the only parochial solipsistic dweeby game you do know how to play I can kick your butt all over town on, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Steyn on the sudden re-emergence of Russia on the international stage: For generations, eminent New York Times wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty\u2019s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman\u2019s more recent effusions to the \u201cenlightened\u201d Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,1119,13],"tags":[158,213,671],"class_list":["post-22113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-russia","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-newspapers","tag-vladimirputin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5KF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22114,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22113\/revisions\/22114"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}