SIMILARITIES

Strange as it may seem, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Vladimir Putin have, in some ways, similar personal characteristics. Both are tremendously astute politicians, which some English-speaking people call “political animals.” For instance, when they are in deep trouble, they have an instinctive tendency to do something which distracts people’s minds towards another direction. The latest example comes from Russia

where, last weekend, Putin inaugurated a grand ferris wheel, similar to what one finds in other capital cities such as London, at the VDNKH Moscow theme park, the perfect place for a family retreat, he said. This inauguration took place whilst, simultaneously, the Ukrainian Army was routing the Russian one in northeastern Ukraine, something which surely most Russian citizens had no idea about, thanks to their government’s vast propaganda machine. For those of us living here, there is no need to give examples: every time something unpleasant shows up for Cristina, a distracting topic is pulled out of a hat, preferably if it includes some agitation against the press, the Judiciary or the opposition.

The trouble for these two persons is that they seem to ignore that, in the final instance, Abraham Lincoln’s famous saying: “...but you can’t fool all the people all the time” will catch up with them sooner or later (this writer tends to believe sooner), because “it’s BOTH the Republics, dammit”!

Harry Ingham, City