Vlad the Stabilizer
Gets Time’s nod as Man, excuse me, Person of the Year. What a waste:
Try KGB Android of the Year. Here he is. Tinpot despot of a third-world shithole masquerading, yet again, as a world power.
Third-world shithole may be a little inaccurate. Make that other-world criminal enterprise, as that place really is in a Twilight Zone all its own, and is in fact powerful enough to be a nuisance, as Russia’s recent sale of uranium to Iran demonstrates.
Of all the people who they could have chosen, how did they happen settle on this two-bit vampire?
In a year when Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize and green became the new red, white and blue; when the combat in Iraq showed signs of cooling but Baghdad’s politicians showed no signs of statesmanship; when China, the rising superpower, juggled its pride in hosting next summer’s Olympic Games with its embarrassment at shipping toxic toys around the world; and when J.K. Rowling set millions of minds and hearts on fire with the final volume of her 17-year saga—one nation that had fallen off our mental map, led by one steely and determined man, emerged as a critical linchpin of the 21st century.
Critical linchpin? This is going to be good.
Russia lives in history—and history lives in Russia. Throughout much of the 20th century, the Soviet Union cast an ominous shadow over the world. It was the U.S.’s dark twin.
Yeah. America’s twin Igor. Stirring prose about the sordid oversized Potemkin Village, though.
… if Russia fails, all bets are off for the 21st century. And if Russia succeeds as a nation-state in the family of nations, it will owe much of that success to one man, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
I shudder to think of Russia succeeding according to the vision of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Anyway, someone needs to tell Time that Russia’s population is plummeting because half the nation doesn’t care to procreate and the other half is drinking itself to death.
TIME’s Person of the Year is not and never has been an honor. It is not an endorsement. It is not a popularity contest.
I’d call it a disgrace. At least Time didn’t fall for the world’s other leading charlatan … even if it was a photo finish.
At its best, it is a clear-eyed recognition of the world as it is and of the most powerful individuals and forces shaping that world—for better or for worse. It is ultimately about leadership—bold, earth-changing leadership.
Well, that mark was missed. Too bad Time couldn’t see fit to recognize accomplishment that may thwart a genocide, but that has been a chronic problem for the bulk of the American news media this year. Anyway, Time gets tough on the Putster.
Putin is not a boy scout. He is not a democrat in any way that the West would define it. He is not a paragon of free speech.
No kidding. Time links to a long windy six-screen thumbsucker about Putin that I didn’t bother to read. Presumeably they elaborate on the “not a boy scout … not a democrat … not a paragon” parts. Don’t forget to throw in “menaces the West with sabre-rattling,” “sends agents to murder opponents overseas,” “manipulates other nations with the gas spigot” and “provides enriched uranium to nuke-happy end-timing mullahs.”
He stands, above all, for stability—stability before freedom, stability before choice, stability in a country that has hardly seen it for a hundred years.
Time here veers away from its weird blend of exaggeration and understatement into outright falsehood. Russia’s seen stability all right. Stability by the Gulagful. A lot like the kind of stability Vlad is headed for.
Here’s John McCain re Putin at the Boston Herald today: ”I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B.” The Herald article doesn’t mention it, but McCain liked Petraeus for Man of the Year, as well. Petraeus got runner-up status from Time behind the world-saving peace nobelist; a children’s novelist J.K. Rowling, and a(nother) erstwhile commie despot. Which is to say that Petraeus was thrown in pretty much as a token.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:34 pm on Wednesday, December 19, 2007
15 Responses to “Vlad the Stabilizer”
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December 19th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
I agree. I picked Petraeus as man of the year, quoting O’Reilly:
“The hate-Bush crowd simply will never admit anything good can come from the Iraq conflict. These people are bitter, dishonest, and of course, damaging to America.
A fair amount of people can oppose the war in Iraq yet want to see their country succeed in that place. There’s no question that a stable Iraq is good for the world because it provides a bulwark against Islamic terrorism and Iranian expansion.
The cost has been great. We all know that. In suffering and cash. And the Iraqi government is still a mess. But General Petraeus, backed by a brave and professional U.S. military, has restored much order, largely defeated the Iraqi A Qaeda thugs, and at least given the good people of that country a chance to prosper. General David Petraeus is “The Factor” person of the year by a wide margin.”
I was hoping for Petraeus all along. He really is the man of the year!
http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/vladimir-putin-is-person-of-year.html
December 19th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Excellent take Jules. With this as the keeper…
“Russia’s seen stability all right. Stability by the Gulagful.”
What a willful blindness to history those folks at Time take. Nothing matters to them but what they ‘think’ will sell magazines… but just for this week… their vision for the future as blank as that for the past.
December 19th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Absolutely Petraeus should have won and over here in Aust we should lining up LtC Kilcullen for Australian of the Year
December 19th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
While just a few days ago, ole (”KGB forever”) Vlad reportedly threw a 20 something opponent in “psychiatric” prison as he could have made life somewhat uncomfortable for Vlad.
As in that case and the killing of Alexander Litvinenko by Polonium 210 in London, the slaughter of Anna Politskayaho…the jailing of the Yukos guy…
…who doesn’t think of the Gulag Archipelago and Solzhenitsyn’s accounts of all the glorious “Soviet” era of disappearinganyone who might be a potential thorn in the side of “the state” ?
It is profoundly ludicrous for Time magazine to do that.
I recollect (yet again) why I suspended my Time magazine subscription a very long time ago.
December 19th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Anna Politskayaho
Anna Politskaya
Sorry for that misspelling, blame the wine, and the disgust.
December 20th, 2007 at 12:12 am
I see Time magazine continues it’s time honored tradition of fellating dictators and fools.
December 20th, 2007 at 11:40 am
As long as their readership keeps heading for the dumper, JeffS, I’m satisfied.
Person of the Year? What a laugh. More like Walking Undead Corpse of the Year. Lenin’s mummified body looks better than that picture.
December 20th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I hate Time magazine SO much. I saw this article yesterday, linked from Pajamas, and got really disgusted just skimming it briefly.
Thanks for your take, Jules. Made me feel a bit better.
December 20th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Hey they HAD to give it to Vladdie! Both Nickolai Bukharin and Yuri Andropov are agreeably dead.
December 20th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
What a disgusting, evil creature Vlad is. As if we didn’t have enough on our plate.
Russia is just one more reason why we needed to handle the Middle East with the gloves off. All we’ve done is shown our many, many weaknesses. We’ve given him reason to think he can get away with anything–and he is doing just that.
December 20th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
I canceled my Time subscription 15 years ago because of drivel like this, and with the biased way they write their “news” stories. I have low expectations for Time and they never fail to go under them. What really galls me though is the garbage that Bono writes about big Al - I have always liked Bono as an artist, and as a humanitarian, and I am right with him on ending poverty, AIDS and the suffering in Africa. And I have read many interviews over the years and although you knew he was a bit left, he always had a practical bent, and a spiritual bent that I admired — totally unlike most of the loony “artiste” crowd who only know to spout off. But his over the top buy in to global warming, equating it with spiritualism and seeing Al Gore as some kind of leader??? Man, three huge, swinging strikes in the space of 5 paragraphs. What a waste.
December 20th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
This shows the short-sighted foolishness of the liberal-left. Putin’s push to make Russia a great power agian is an attempt to reanimate a corpse. Someday the price of oil will decline again and Vlad will have nothing left to inflate the country with. His works will vanish with a pop of the baloon.
It’s a shame that most Russians like being tyrannized, but there it is. Now they can wallow in sufferingand oppression once again to their hearts’ content.
As for Al the Warmmonger, in five or so years there will be a new crise du jour for the environmentalists, possibly the “inevitable” new Ice Age, as in the 1970s. The warmmongering will be forgotten and the same people will tell us that the computer models prove that we must do X, Y and Z to save the Earth, and oh yes give them power to control the world economy as well. Al will be heading the parade.
Petraeus was the logical candidate. Success in Iraq may still revitalize the whole Middle East. If it does, in twenty years or so TIME will be claiming that they supported it all along.
December 22nd, 2007 at 8:57 pm
[...] other views on the Putin-POTY thing, I strongly recommend Bob Amsterdam, Micheal Weiss, and Jules Crittenden. Each is very different–Bob’s is thoughtful and gentle, Jules’s is thoughtful and [...]
December 23rd, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Hail Putin!
Putin is good leader.
Why does the media-industrial-complex hate this good and noble man so much? He is no way similar to Chavez, and he is no dictator. He has in fact scrupulously adhered to the Russian constitution. His extraordinary popularity is…
January 27th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
[...] The article goes on to say Kayanov only polls about one percent of the electorate, which raises a question of whether there are in fact highjinks involved and why the Kremlin would bother. The opposition is already sufficiently muffled, marginalized and divided, and it looks like the Russians will agreeably vote to extend autocracy. Then again, we’re talking about a Kremlin that apparently opted to solve its ex-spy PR problem by offing said ex-spy, creating all kinds of headaches, so maybe they don’t want any embarrassing expressions of pro-Westernism. The squelching of Russia’s faltering efforts to break out of political adolescence were briefly touched on in TIME’s otherwise laudatory celebration of the Russian strongman, Vlad the Stabilizer. [...]