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Originally Posted by JD Barleycorn
By the way CJ (and your little dog EVA) and Timmie, those were SOVIET bombs.
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Soviet eh, speaking of Soviet leadership ..
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB official, has pursued a program of systematic human rights abuses and violations against the freedoms and liberties of the Russian people. Like his comrade, Belarusian dictator
Alexander Lukashenko — who still commands the Belarusian KGB and has been cited by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other groups for his persecution of political opponents, journalists, Westerners, and Christians — Vladimir Putin is a ruler whose control over Russia threatens the long-term strategic, geopolitical interests of the United States and continues to perpetuate a cycle of neo-Soviet totalitarianism.
None other than former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev has decried Putin’s totalitarian and statist policies. In other words, Putin is more communist than a former officially communist Soviet premier — in the words of the Soviet premier himself. This was reported in an interview Gorbachev gave with the
New York Times in October 2010, in which Gorbachev voiced growing frustration with Putin’s leadership, saying that he had undermined Russia’s fledgling democracy by crippling the opposition forces:
“He thinks that democracy stands in his way,” Mr. Gorbachev said. “I am afraid that they have been saddled with this idea that this unmanageable country needs authoritarianism,” Mr. Gorbachev said, referring to Mr. Putin and his close ally, President Dmitri A. Medvedev. “They think they cannot do without it.”
In an interview, Mr. Gorbachev even described Mr. Putin’s governing party, United Russia, as a “a bad copy of the Soviet Communist Party.” Mr. Gorbachev said party officials were concerned entirely with clinging to power and did not want Russians to take part in civic life.
Mr. Gorbachev was especially disparaging of Mr. Putin’s decision in 2004, when he was president, to eliminate elections for regional governors and the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Those positions are now filled by Kremlin appointees. The impact of this change was illustrated in Mr. Medvedev’s dismissal last month of Moscow’s longtime mayor, who was replaced with a Putin loyalist.
“Democracy begins with elections,” Mr. Gorbachev said. “Elections, accountability and turnover.” Mr. Gorbachev feels that he put Russia on the path toward being a functional democracy, only to have Mr. Putin block its progress. “Russia has a long way to go to usher in a new system of values, to create and provide for the proper functioning of the institutions and mechanisms of democracy — the institutions of civil society.”
Most recently, Gorbachev leveled further criticism at Putin and Medvedev, as he is approaching his 80th birthday celebration, which ironically, will not be held in Moscow, but at Royal Albert Hall in London. Gorbachev is upset that Russia is regressing to totalitarian ways he thought he defeated during his stint as the harbinger of perestroika and Russia’s supposed transition to democracy. He described Russia as an “imitation” of democracy where parliament and courts lack independence from the government and the main pro-Kremlin party is a “bad copy” of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Referring to the ruling United Russia Party, Gorbachev also said that Putin should
step down from office and not seek reelection next year:
I criticize United Russia a lot, and I do it directly. It is a party of bureaucrats and the worst version of the CPSU — the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Regarding our parliament, I cannot say that it is independent [and] also our judiciary does not fully comply with the provisions of the constitution
OK , Reagan and Putin are the same...anything you say !!!
Mr. Gorbachev even described Mr. Putin’s governing party, United Russia, as a “a bad copy of the Soviet Communist Party.
If we went to war with Russia, who among us would be rooting against Obama winning
