MB Civic

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12623429/the_low_post_bushs_buddy_vlad_is_getting_out_of_hand/print

More classic Taibbi. I get a huge kick out of reading this guy’s posts… here’s excerpts:

The same America that tirelessly agitated for anti-communist dissidents like Andrei Sakharov has apparently decided that the murder of modern Russian dissidents is a non-starter — even if those “Russian dissidents” happen also to be American citizens, like the recently-assassinated American-born reporter Anna Politkovskaya. Or even if those dissidents were attacked on Western soil, like Federal Security Service defector Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned recently in England…

What people have to remember about repression of the press is that it isn’t just a matter of murdering the odd incorrigible investigative journalist. In places like Russia the fight has two fronts: You put a boot in the ass of the troublesome minority when it demands it, but you spend most of your time with the other half, the mainstream media, peopling it with cowards and lackeys and half-bright clerks who’ll sell out their mothers for a new Skoda and a trip once a year to some shitty third-class beach in Ibiza. As the experience of both post-communist Russia and America has proven beyond any doubt, the vast majority of journalists in this world will roll over for anyone who pays the bills even without the threat of violence. But you get a much more enthusiastic crowd of reportorial ball-washers and ass-kissers when you dash the brains out of the rare malcontent who steps out of line, and this is what Putin has achieved in Russia…

Putin said the following to a German newspaper: “I think … [Politkovskaya’s] death had far more impact than her articles.” That’s the kind of man Putin is. A woman is brutally murdered and one of his first thoughts is to shit on her work in the foreign media. He doesn’t even have the shame to pretend that he cares about Anna Politkovskaya, doesn’t even feel a need to pull the “Her death is a great loss” game even in Europe. Why? Because he clearly and correctly perceives that there will never be any repercussions in the West for any of this stuff. A hundred Russian journalists could end up with bullets in their brains and the leaders of the West still wouldn’t cancel their Asian pajama parties with Putin. Not since he’s become such a good capitalist and earned his way into the WTO…

Early on Monday I saw that Sergei Ivanov, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), had announced that we can all relax now, because Russia had nothing to do with Litvinenko’s poisoning. According to Ivanov, since 1959, when the Soviets assassinated Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bander, Russia “has not been involved with the physical liquidation of troublesome Russian persons.”

According to Ivanov, Litvinenko’s poisoner should be looked for “among his circle in London, probably.” Naturally, when an FSB agent defects to London and begins investigating the mysterious deaths of various Russian dissidents, the first place to look for his attackers, when he is poisoned, is among the British. Those people are animals!..

None of these mysteries in Russia ever get solved. In the best-case scenario, a couple of drifters from Dagestan will run a light in the Tekstillshiki district in the near future and wake up the next morning to find themselves unmasked as the murderers of Anna Politkovskaya. Then they’ll contract tuberculosis or fall down a flight of steps while awaiting sentence in Lefortovo. Litvinenko will turn out to have accidentally put poison on his own toothbrush. No one will believe any of it, but it will mean these stories are formally over. And Vladimir Putin will be free to go to the next Asian summit. Where, after all, he has nothing but friends, who like to tell lies of their own.

The ultimate irony – the USA and the USSR becoming clones … the USSAR … sorry to be morbid, but if we keep going where we’re going (i.e. if we bomb Iran) how long before someone like Amy Goodman or Bill Moyers or Ray McGovern or Robert Parry or Sibel Edmonds or Keith Olbermann “dies mysteriously”.
-MAB