We all know that George Bush looked into Putin's eyes and
was able to get a sense of his soul
.
And Joe Biden:
I said, 'Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul
.
And Rand Paul looked at Putin and decided:
"Some on our side are so stuck in the Cold War era that they want to tweak Russia all the time and I don't think that is a good idea,"
And of course when President Obama looked at Putin he saw:
Putin is slouching; looking like that bored schoolboy in the back of the classroom
So while the Republicans see Putin and react with delusion and fear, the Democrats see Putin as a soulless mischievous schoolboy (Psychopath) and prepare for the inevitable crises that is to come.
But what are Putin's base, the rich Oligarchs, seeing when they look at Putin these days?
According to Bloomberg, the Oligarchs are reacting with "horror"!
Russia’s richest businessmen are increasingly frantic that President Vladimir Putin’s policies in Ukraine will lead to crippling sanctions and are too scared of reprisal to say so publicly
Now why would they be so afraid of sanctions? While Republicans mock the Presidents sanctions as ineffective, President Obama
announced another round of sanctions just a few days ago. But even though the Republican bubble is consistently wrong about almost everything under the sun, maybe they finally got something right?
...
one Russian billionaire said on condition of anonymity. What’s happening is bad for business and bad for Russia, he said. “The economic and business elite is just in horror,” said Igor Bunin, who heads the Center for Political Technology in Moscow. Nobody will speak out because of the implicit threat of retribution, Bunin said by phone yesterday. “Any sign of rebellion and they’ll be brought to their knees.”...
The U.S. has already imposed penalties on state-run companies and members of Putin’s inner circle,...
Amid market turmoil provoked by the Ukraine conflict, the 19 richest Russians lost $14.5 billion since the start of the year, ...
All this war and talk of war has the country’s business elite “living in a state of fear” and trying to get their money out of the country, Kryshtanovskaya said by phone....
The threat of sanctions against entire sectors of the economy is now very real and there are serious grounds for business to be afraid,” Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Russia’s prime minister during Putin’s first term as president, from 2000 to 2004, said by phone from Jurmala, Latvia. “If there will be sanctions against the entire financial sector, the economy will collapse in six months.”
So while President Obama struggles to get us out of 2 separate quagmires that the delusional Republican bubble sacrificed so much of our treasury and so many of our youth to get us into, John McCain is still dreaming of another war that will finally fulfill his destiny of becoming a great American war hero.
While the President has made some foreign policy mistakes with lines in the sand, our soldiers who have been on foreign soils for too long are coming home and not on their way to new foreign lands. While the Republicans beat the war drums, President Obama is turning the economic screws on the thumbs of the soulless schoolboy.
Even yesterday, President Obama kept up the pressure on Putin by saying things like "President Putin has a direct responsibility to compel them to cooperate with the investigation". Let's face it, Obama has got Putin in a corner. Putin's reputation has been so damaged, even his fake press conference comes off as laughable.
Unfortunately, the Europeans foolishly built a fossil fuel dependency on Russia. If they begin to wobble over further economic sanctions, they could loosen the pressure on Putin. Hopefully, they've learned the damage a fossil fuel based economy can do to a nation and will speed up their transition to a renewable energy based economy.
So who are you going to believe about the effectiveness of the President's economic sanctions during this crises? The same right-wing pundits and politicians who pumped up their propaganda machine and marched the nation into economic and foreign disasters during the Bush administration? Or the Russian Oligarchs who watch with "horror" and are desperately trying to get their money out of the country?