by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:
On June 28th, the Washington Post ran their normal type of international news reporting, which is stenographic transmission of the lies by the regime’s selected spokespersons, such as the Post and the New York Times did, for example, back in 2002 about “Saddam’s WMD” and which reporting suckered their subscribers to believe George W. Bush’s arrant lies about that, and so to set up the basis for Americans to invade Iraq on the basis of the lies by Bush and his henchmen (including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and other leading Democrats). (Why are those types — neocons — still in power in America?) But, this time, it was about Russia and the need for regime-change in that country — not in Iraq.
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The ‘news’-report was titled “Putin’s standing as global strongman in jeopardy after revolt”, and as evidence for its case that the Prigozhin treachery has weakened Putin, it presented a number of U.S.-Government-approved (NOT blacklisted) ‘experts’, such as the article’s reporter saying that
the Russian leader’s failure so far to take a tough stance against the mercenaries, or punish those involved in the mutiny, is denting the cultivated image that he always controls events — something the Kremlin projected to the wider world, as well as in Russia, said Dmitri Alperovitch, a foreign-policy analyst who heads the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank.
“This is shocking to dictators because this is not how they would put down a mutiny,” he said. “Many of Putin’s supporters are quite confused and wondering about his ability to be the strong leader and strong authoritarian dictator he portrays himself to be.”
The Silverado Policy Accelerator is a Washington DC propaganda operation to “accelerate” the propaganda, and it advocates for the neoconservative position by arguing that, “At the dawn of the 21st century, the U.S. is embroiled in a new contest for global leadership with its strategic competitors.” In other words: competition is 100% win-lose, there isn’t ANY win-win: America must conquer any competitor — all competition is war; none is cooperation. It’s headed by Mr. Alperovitch, who co-founded the CrowdStrike firm that Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired to ‘document’ that Donald Trump was colluding with Vladimir Putin, and then Alperovitch/CrowdStrike got the ex-MI6 fraudster Christopher Steele to ‘document’ the lie. As the great investigative journalist Aaron Mate (far too good to be hired by an outfit such as the WP) headlined, “Indicted Clinton lawyer hired CrowdStrike, firm behind Russian hacking claim” and he reported that, “Co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch, the public face of Crowdstrike’s DNC server work, is a former senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the pro-NATO think tank that has long promoted a hawkish policy toward Russia.” And, “As I revealed in 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul Pelosi have invested up to $1 million in Crowdstrike. As of September, the Pelosis’ stake in the firm had yielded a reported $717,000 profit.” Insider-trading is common on Capitol Hill and is the reason why its members tend to become multi-millionaires after they became s‘elected’ to Congress, even if they weren’t so before that.
The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos whose Amazon Web Services supplies the cloud computing to the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department, NSA, and CIA and earns therefrom the majority of Amazon Corporation’s profits.
Anyway, the WP’s ‘news’-article opens by asserting that the villainous Putin’s main goals are “to restore Russia’s role as a world power and promoting himself as an authoritarian alternative to the United States and the West.” All of the ‘experts’ that it presents as its sources are neoconservatives (people whose top priority is to make America’s being the world’s most powerful country permanent no matter what the cost), and one reason that this is worth pointing out is that the predictive track-record of neocons has been absolutely abysmal, almost 100% false (and not ONLY on “Saddam’s WMD”); so, any ‘news’ organization that doesn’t remove all such individuals from its list of “experts” to consult on matters of opinion (and this WP article is supposed to be news-reporting instead of opinion; but even as opinion its writer ought to have been fired long ago) is journalistically not just in the gutter, but in the sewer. (Why does anyone buy such sewage? But lots of people do.)
Since the article refers to Putin as being a “dictator,” what evidence does it provide to back up that obviously propagandistic allegation? Many opinion polls have been taken in Russia regarding Putin’s job-approval rating from the residents in that country, and some of these polls have been done by U.S.-and-allied polling firms, but the only periodic polling of that has been by Russia’s own Levada polling organization, and its findings have been consistent with the sporadic Western-sponsored polling on the matter. Currently, Putin’s job-approval rating is at the high end but not the all-time highs of his record ever since 2000, which has always been between 59% approval at the lowest, and 89% at the highest. In January 2022 just before invading Ukraine, it was 69%; and, ever since March 2022, it has been around 80%. Only time will tell whether “Putin’s standing as global strongman [is] in jeopardy after revolt”, but here, for comparison, is the similar polling, this from Gallup, on the job-approvals of America’s own Presidents during this same period: The peak was George W. Bush’s September 2001 90%, and that declined to the low of 25% in October 2008. Obama’s was steadier at near 50%. Trump’s was steady near 40%. Biden’s, thus far, has been steady near 43%.
An interesting fact about G.W. Bush’s polled job-approval percentages is that his numbers plunged almost steadily throughout his eight years in power. By contrast, subsequent U.S. Presidents had steadier numbers. In any case, Putin’s average of around 75% has dwarfed the U.S. numbers, and has been much steadier, and for much longer a time. The idea for Presidential term-limits is therefore obviously bad. Terminating FDR’s Presidency at the end of 8 years would have been extremely stupid, and so would terminating Putin’s Presidency at the end of 8 years have been. When a great leader comes along, no law should exist to prevent that person from running for another term.
