The vast Putin/Trump conspiracy
It was political b.s. with a fascinating, familiar ring
— except for it being in Russian.
It was the inaugural speech launching yet another presidential term for Vladimir Putin. Or as we like to think of him here, Trump’s buddy, Boris Badinoff.
There was no sign of Rocky the Flying Squirrel. Or Bullwinkle. But the video indicated that all of the rest of the nomenklatura — the roster of Kremlin VIPs — were in attendance, decked out in the fanciest duds available in Moscow.
The setting of Putiin’s address was a venue fitting for a czar, in fact, created by and for a czar
— the glittery-with-gold Grand Kremlin Palace. There were no seats for the audience. Forced to stand in the palace’s great hall, the attendees shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and fidgeted. Volodya, as his oligarch pals call him, meanwhile slogged through his text, looking up only occasionally from the podium. (What, no teleprompters in Russia?)
A spell-binder Volodya is not. And he has none of the inclination to go off on meandering, stream-of-consciousness riffs and entertaining tangents, as his coconspirator Trump is apt to do. Strictly a stick-to-thescript sort of guy, Volodya seems to be. Had he been in attendance, Trump surely would have admired, or even have envied, the excessive opulence, the garish grandiosity of the palace real estate.
As for Putin’s message, there was no boasting by the former Committee on State Security (KGB) colonel how he had slickly sidelined the feared and tough Hillary Clinton and substituted the accommodating patsy who’s now in the White House. Rather than reveal the diabolical details of how he diverted Hillary’s electoral votes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin to Trump, Putin disappointingly opted to drone on through material every bit as exciting as the principal’s morning announcements over the school intercom. The speech — provided by Pravda online, with English subtitles — made you wonder just what it is America and Russia keep quibbling about.
Putin pledged to improve Russian healthcare and education, to make government more open and responsive to taxpayers and less onerous to business. He urged — does this ring a bell? — “national unity.” And he gave a Democratic Party-sounding shoutout to Russia’s “multicultural” heritage. But — ominously — he also threw in some Republicanesque stuff. He stressed “traditional family values.” He urged the young to heed these values which, he said, had “guided the older generation” through hard times. Be mindful, he added, of the sacrifices Russian patriots made for their country and “respectful of the history of the Fatherland.”
Sounds menacingly right-wingish! Presumably our 17 intelligence agencies, plus Special Counsel Mueller, CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times have upped their threatlevel alerts to Defcom 4, at a minimum, given the sinister signs of proliferating collusion everywhere. Let’s hope somebody, somewhere, at last is finally listening to Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who sounds as if she may have in her hands a list of 205 Trump/Putin State Department colluders. (Or maybe 57. Or 81.)
Meanwhile, Pravda — the privately owned online version, not the old government-run print version — espied a subtext in Putin’s speech. Russia, it seems, has its own Swamp to deal with. Putin didn’t exactly don a “Make Russia Great Again” ushanka. But he did rail against the “slackness and complacency” of sluggish government and its “bureaucratic red tape.” Doesn’t sound that far removed from shouting out: “Mwe NOOZHnee ahsooSHEET bahLOtah!” (A rough transliteration of “We must drain the swamp!”) Putin would never say something like that out loud because he’s no “cheap populist,” said Pravda in a dig at Trump. But Putin has his own understated version of Trump’s MAGA, with his call for “A New Russian Breakthrough.” He exhorted Russia to throw off its historical habit of bogging itself down in a slough of stultifying, smothering government.
Is there a bigger personification of that obstacle than the 5’7” (if that) Putin himself? Yes, there is, says Pravda. It’s the Russian state. Putin has “many problems,” says Pravda, “and the Russian state is the first one of them.” The Russian political system, according to Pravda, “resists change.” (Sound like a familiar complaint?) And attempts at reform only tend to make the system dig in its heels deeper, adds Pravda. (Sound familiar again?)
Pravda online, though privately owned, is always careful not to be disrespectful of the Kemlin powers that be. It cautiously points out that Putin himself embodies the Russian tendency to stick with the status quo, to nudge change along half-heartedly, if bothering to do so at all. Other observers of the Kremlin note that Putin has never seemed much inclined to reflect on Russia’s haunting question, famously posed by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “We removed Stalin from his mausoleum, but how do we remove Stalin from his heritage?”
Kremlin watchers cite an old Russian proverb as describing a national attitude that’s long given inertia the upper hand in Russia. “Work is not a wolf,” goes the proverb. “It won’t run off into the woods.” In other words, if you don’t complete a task, don’t sweat it. It’ll be waiting there for you when you eventually get back to it.
There you have yet another shared Russia-America characteristic. The dung beetles of the U.S. Congress, rolling their little balls of manure to and fro, could have this proverb engraved on the corner stone of the Capitol.
Meanwhile, when Putin fusses over the urgency of a New Breakthough for Russia, his fretfull subtext may be that his nation, once one of the premier major-league franchises, has slipped down into Double A, despite its redoubtable military and nuclear weaponry and oil reserves. Russia has fallen behind Brazil in population. And its per-capita GDP lags down there, adjusted for purchasing power, not far ahead of Mexico, with Mexico narrowing the gap.
Although Russia’s entire GDP is only roughly the equal of New York’s, and nearly nine times smaller than China’s, the latter-day Muscovy boyars still managed to scrape together financing to help Trump cope with his debts, according to the word being whispered around America’s Swamp.
In this light, our own nomenklatura tell us, it’s reassuring to know that the Inspector Clouseaus of our 17 intelligence agencies are gum-shoeing the Czar of Potemkinland and his Manchurian Candidate puppet in the White House.
As Joe McCarthy once expressed the sentiment, in so many words — with conservatives cheering him on — and as Congressman Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence expresses it today, in so many words — with liberals cheering him on — you can never be too paranoid.