Kids in the Hall predicted Putin in 1994

[dogknob]

[TlalocW]

1. That's one of my favorites

The ranting in itself was funny, but the payoff at the end is great.

TlalocW

[Celerity]

2. this has nothing to do with Putin, it is about communists (didn't the godless part tip you off)

Putin is RW oligarchical gangster pseudo-capitalist, who heavily relies on the reactionary RW Russian Orthodox Church for a large chunk of his power.

Putin is not a communist. Putin never gained high office power until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse

By the late Soviet period, though, K.G.B. officers like Putin were nearly as dismissive of Communist ideology as the dissidents were. “The Chekists in his time laughed at official Soviet ideology,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a former adviser to Putin, told me. “They thought it was a joke.” Putin, in 1999, admitted that Communism had been a “blind alley, far away from the mainstream of civilization.”

The US also played its part in the rise of Putin (via Yeltsin).

Boris Yeltsin allowed the oligarchs to rape the Russian assets & he installed Putin





Boris Yeltsin handed over power to Acting President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin

December 31, 1999

14:00 Moscow

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/37410


The true irony is that we worked to install Yeltsin as President of Russia (this occurred during the Clinton administration), to a second term (when he was failing badly in the polls) and that led to the cementing of the rise of the oligarchs and the culture of kleptocracy and ultimately to Putin himself (who Yeltsin appointed, first in 1998 to the head of the FSB (successor agency to the KGB) and then to acting Prime Minster in 1999.) The law of unintended consequences plays cruel tricks at times.


The U.S. Needs to Face Up to Its Long History of Election Meddling (The Atlantic Magazine)

Russian electoral interference has renewed the temptation for American leaders to do the same.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-us-has-a-long-history-of-election-meddling/565538/

snip

What many Russians, but few Americans, know is that 20 years before Russia tried to swing an American presidential election, America tried to swing a presidential election in Russia. The year was 1996. Boris Yeltsin was seeking a second term, and Bill Clinton desperately wanted to help. “I want this guy to win so bad,” he told Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, “it hurts.”

Clinton liked Yeltsin personally. He considered him Russia’s best hope for embracing democracy and capitalism. And he appreciated Yeltsin’s acquiescence during NATO’s march eastward, into the former Soviet bloc. Unfortunately for Clinton, ordinary Russians appreciated their leader far less. Yeltsin’s “shock-therapy” economic reforms had reduced the government’s safety net, and produced a spike in unemployment and inflation. Between 1990 and 1994, the average life expectancy among Russian men had dropped by an astonishing six years. When Yeltsin began his reelection campaign in January 1996, his approval rating stood at 6 percent, lower than Stalin’s.

So the Clinton administration sprang into action. It lobbied the International Monetary Fund to give Russia a $10 billion loan, some of which Yeltsin distributed to woo voters. Upon arriving in a given city, he often announced, “My pockets are full.” Three American political consultants—including Richard Dresner, a veteran of Clinton’s campaigns in Arkansas — went to work on Yeltsin’s reelection bid. Every week, Dresner sent the White House the Yeltsin campaign’s internal polling. And before traveling to meet Yeltsin in April, Clinton asked Dresner what he should say in Moscow to boost his buddy’s campaign.

It worked. In a stunning turnaround, Yeltsin—who had begun the campaign in last place — defeated his communist rival in the election’s final round by 13 percentage points. Talbott declared that “a number of international observers have judged this to be a free and fair election.” But Michael Meadowcroft, a Brit who led the election-observer team of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, later claimed there had been widespread voter fraud, which he had been pressured not to expose. In Chechnya, which international observers believe contained fewer than 500,000 adults, one million people voted, and Yeltsin—despite prosecuting a brutal war in the region—won exactly 70 percent. “They’d been bombed out of existence, and there they were all supposedly voting for Yeltsin,” exclaimed Meadowcroft. “It’s like what happens in Cameroon.” Thomas Graham, who served as the chief political analyst at the U.S. embassy in Moscow during the campaign, later conceded that Clinton officials knew the election wasn’t truly fair. “This was a classic case,” he admitted, “of the ends justifying the means.”

snip


It was openly hailed here in the US:

Time Magazine

July 15, 1996

http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html



“Yanks to the rescue”: Time’s not-so secret story of how Americans helped Yeltsin win 1996 presidential election

https://off-guardian.org/2018/02/19/yanks-to-the-rescue-times-not-so-secret-story-of-how-american-advisers-helped-yeltsin-win-the-1996-presidential-election/


Hollywood even made a 2003 movie with Jeff Goldblum about it:

Spinning Boris

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324619/

Russian political elite hires American consultants to help with President Yeltsin's re-election campaign when his approval rating is down to single digits.

Director: Roger Spottiswoode

Writers: Yuri Zeltser, Grace Cary Bickley (as Cary Bickley)

Stars: Jeff Goldblum, Anthony LaPaglia, Liev Schreiber

[dogknob]

3. The skit talks about what Russia will do after the fall of communism.

And Putin is just as godless as Trump.

[Celerity]

4. you need to listen to it again, it is a satire of a William F. Buckley type who is trying to

wind up a new Red Scare/Cold War. ('Communists never die')

Also Putin himself may be godless, put Putin's Russia surely is not. It is hyper-reactionary RW Christian at multiple interlocks of its power pyramid.

[dogknob]

5. Of course he's doing Buckley.

And of course KITH would not have what's been unfolding for the last several years, but it's hard not to see a lot of similarities between the language used in this sketch and what's happening now.

[Celerity]

7. not really, as the video's paranoia is over a communism revival

but let's set that aside

surely you then must be very upset with the role the US played in the rise of Putin

so ironically though foreign inherence (the US's, as documented above) in their Presidential election in 1996

plus the insisting on the huge expansion of NATO

the law of unintended consequences


Russia-US ties zigzag wildly during Putin’s rule since 2000

https://apnews.com/article/f337ec9a82954fd3af53bf2b716fb03b

A brief glance at the ebb and flow of those relations since 2000:

___

EARLY HOPES

When Putin was first elected in March 2000, U.S.-Russia ties were bitterly strained over the U.S.-led NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Those tensions contrasted with friendly relations between Moscow and Washington under President Bill Clinton and Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, throughout the 1990s. Putin quickly sought to establish warm ties with Clinton and other Western leaders. When Clinton visited Moscow in June 2000, the Russian president even suggested that Russia could join NATO — a proposal that has failed to get traction. In July 2000, Putin tried unsuccessfully to persuade North Korea to abandon its missile program when he paid a surprise visit to Pyongyang en route to the G-8 summit in Japan.

___

BRIEF PARTNERSHIP

Soon after President George W. Bush’s inauguration, Putin met with him in Slovenia in June 2001. The meeting helped establish friendly ties, with Bush famously saying that he came to trust Putin after looking him in the eye and getting a sense of his soul. Putin became the first foreign leader to call Bush after the Sept 11 attacks, and he welcomed the U.S. deployment to formerly Soviet Central Asia for the war in Afghanistan. In another goodwill gesture, Putin shut down Soviet-era military facilities in Cuba and Vietnam. U.S. missile defence plans cast a shadow over otherwise warm ties, but Russia and NATO signed a 2002 pact that set up a joint council to tackle common threats such as terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

___

TENSIONS RISING

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Russia criticized, marked a turning point and ties began to sour. Moscow viewed the 2004 Orange protests in Ukraine against a fraudulent presidential vote as an attempt by Washington to expand its clout and hurt Russia’s interests in the former Soviet nation. The tensions kept boiling and a brief war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 led to a freeze in Russia-U.S. relations.

___

A RESET AND A NEW COLD WAR

President Barack Obama moved to “reset” ties with Russia soon after his election, visiting Moscow in July 2009. Even though Putin continued to call the shots as prime minister, Obama focused on building warm ties with Putin’s ally, President Dmitry Medvedev. When Medvedev stepped down in 2012 to let his mentor reclaim the top job, Putin accused the U.S. of fomenting mass protests in Moscow against his return to the presidency. U.S.-Russia relations steadily degraded as the Kremlin moved to stifle dissent, tighten restrictions on foreign nongovernmental organizations and ban U.S. adoptions of Russian children. They plunged to a new low in 2013 when Russia granted political asylum to NSA contractor Edward Snowden despite U.S. requests for his extradition. When Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president was driven from office in February 2014 after months of protests, Putin blamed the U.S. for engineering his ouster. Moscow quickly annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and offered support to pro-Russia separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine, triggering Western sanctions.

snip



Putin Says He Discussed Russia's Possible NATO Membership With Bill Clinton

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-putin-says-discussed-joining-nato-with-clinton/28526757.html

Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that he once raised the possibility of Russia joining NATO with then-President Bill Clinton, and that Clinton said he had "no objection." Putin delivered this account in a series of interviews with U.S. film director Oliver Stone set to air later this month on the U.S. television network Showtime.

Excerpts of the four-part series have been released online in recent days, including one obtained by Politico in which Putin discusses NATO, whose eastward expansion following the collapse of the Soviet Union has long angered Moscow. Speaking with Stone in what appears to be Putin's presidential plane, the Russian leader recalls one of his final meetings with Clinton, who left office in January 2001.

"During the meeting I said, 'We would consider an option that Russia might join NATO,'" Putin says. "Clinton answered, 'I have no objection.' But the entire U.S. delegation got very nervous."

In a March 2000 interview with the British television journalist David Frost, Putin was asked whether "it is possible Russia could join NATO." Putin, who at the time was serving as acting president and weeks later was elected to his first term, responded, "I don’t see why not." Russia has repeatedly accused NATO of stoking tensions with its expansion toward its borders.

snip



BBC BREAKFAST WITH FROST
INTERVIEW:
VLADIMIR PUTIN

MARCH 5TH, 2000

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/breakfast_with_frost/transcripts/putin5.mar.txt

DAVID FROST:
Tell me about your views on NATO if you would. Do you see NATO as a
potential partner, or a rival or an enemy?

PUTIN:
Russia is part of the European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country
in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilised world. So it is
hard for me to visualise NATO as an enemy. I think even posing the question
this way will not do any good to Russia or the world. The very question is
capable of causing damage. Russia strives for equitable and candid relations
with its partners. The main problem here lies in attempts to discard previously
agreed common instruments - mainly in resolving issues of international
security. We are open to equitable co-operation, to partnership. We believe
we can talk about more profound integration with NATO but only if Russia is
regarded an equal partner. You are aware we have been constantly voicing
our opposition to NATO's eastward expansion.

DAVID FROST:
Is it possible Russia could join NATO?

PUTIN:
I don't see why not. I would not rule out such a possibility - but I repeat - if and
when Russia's views are taken into account as those of an equal partner. I
want to stress this again and again. The situation that was laid down in the
founding principles of the United Nations - that was the situation that obtained
in the world at the end of World War Two. All right, the situation may have
changed. Let's assume there is a desire on the part of those who perceive the
change to install new mechanisms of ensuring international security. But
pretending - or proceeding from the assumption - that Russia has nothing to
do with it and trying to exclude it from this process is hardly feasible. And
when we talk about our opposition to NATO's expansion - mind you, we have
never ever declared any region of the world a zone of our special interests, I
prefer to talk about strategic partnership. Its attempts to exclude us from the
process is what causes opposition and concern on our part. But that does not
mean we are going to shut ourselves off from the rest of the world.
Isolationism is not an option.

[tblue37]

6. Killer bees are old news. Now it's murder hornets.