Putin Prosecution Backed By Pitchfork Mob

Criminal Injustice, Democracy, Individual Rights, Law, Propaganda, Russia

The criticism leveled at Russian justice by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for the prosecution and subsequent conviction on theft and money laundering of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. As the Russians rightly countered, the sentences Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev received pale compared to comparable prosecutions by American justice:

Take Bernard Madoff in the United States. He got a life sentence and no-one blinked – Putin told reporters who asked him about the case during a trip to Paris to negotiate new gas pipeline and auto manufacturing deals.

You can’t argue with that come-back.

Nevertheless, the trial of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky looks a lot like a politically motivated show trial, ordered, ostensibly “by the Kremlin to punish Khodorkovsky for financing Russia’s beleaguered opposition.”

Dimitri Simes, “president of the Nixon Center, a foreign policy research organization,” takes a nuanced look at Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

“He started as a tycoon. He was a very ruthless tycoon. He took a lot of government property, paying very little, and actually using government loans, which he never repaid, to become very wealthy.
He was, politically, very ambitious. He wasn’t just supporting opposition parties, but he was entertaining the possibility of becoming prime minister himself, curtailing Putin’s power.
Having said that, once he was arrested, he proved to be a man of courage, determination, eloquence. The government wasn’t able to break him. And when he was arrested first time in 2003, I really liked Khodorkovsky personally, and I was sorry for him, but, politically, I had mixed feelings, because he was threatening the government in a very ruthless way, using the money he got illegally to mount a political challenge.
What they are doing to him now is totally beyond the pale. It is not just selective justice. It’s really no justice at all.”

Says Anna Vassilieva, “head of the Russian studies program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies”:

“What does it tell me and tells all of us is that the power belongs to someone who exercises strength, not justice, not pardon, as we were hoping until the most recent phrase that Putin announced.
What we see is history repeating itself. Russian rulers are afraid to make compromises. And, obviously, allowing Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev free would be a sort of a compromise that no one can afford, because they know they will lose the trust.
We have to remember that — the trust of the population — we have to remember that the highest ratings Putin and Medvedev enjoyed were during August 2008, during the war with Georgia. And there was no chance that they would exercise the opportunity to compromise.”

[SNIP]

Let’s remember this: Be it in the US or in Russia, the masses are foursquarely behind their governments when it comes to the zealous, over-prosecution of the rich. Putin has the support of the pitchfork-wielding Russian folks. That’s democracy in action.

My, but the convicted has such beautiful, refined features.

UPDATED: The Republican Tart Trust (Mercer Mainstream?)

Feminism, Free Speech, Ilana Mercer, Law, Media, Republicans, Sex

Where do the Republicans find their woman commentators? A fulminating female named Jedediah Bila, who bills herself as a conservative, called Julian Assange of the WikiLeaks notoriety a rapist. (Bobbing head S.E. Cupp, also a “conservative,” backed her up with vigorous … nods.) The two dim bulbs appeared on David Asman’s “America’s Nightly Scorecard.” As I mentioned in “Condomned by Law,” Swedish sexual harassment law is more diabolical than anything the radical American feminist jurist Catharine Mackinnon could dream up in her sweetest dreams—Mackinnon’s baleful influence on American and Canadian jurisprudence cannot be underestimated.

But if Bila and her conservative cohort agree that having consensual sex without a condom is tantamount to rape—Mackinnon’s work is done.

I do not wish to hear these imbeciles’ views on Assange’s free press and due process rights, do you?

UPDATE: What makes a reader of this site imagine that I decide on which TV news programs I will appear (none, so far, except one PBS program)? Guess what? The producers and writers of the cable news programs decide who to ask on their more-or-less conformist shows. That this is so unintuitive to readers implies an optimistic faith in the cognoscenti to whom they look up; they really believe that the chicks whose words they lap up are indeed cutting-edge thinkers, and that by mere chance ilana mercer is not among them.

“WE ARE [indeed] DOOMED.”

The reader should let the producers and anchors of his favorite shows know about his preferences. Telling this marginalized writer to free up her busy schedule and, presumably, stop rejecting invites to join mainstream TV Talkers is worse than ridiculous.

Again: I’m floored to find-out that readers of this space believe an-out-of-the-mainstream writer, who has never echoed the mob, can pick and choose the forums she frequents to showcase her work. That someone holds such a naive, optimistic impression about the mainstream media (and Fox is a bastion of banality, for the most), and the power of the ousted individual in American society knocks my socks off.

If readers entertain the notion that I’ve been shunning all those invitations I get to appear on Fox Business and News—I’ll repeat the gloomy mantra with which I’ve been sealing each post these days:

“WE ARE DOOMED.”

This is, however, a good opportunity to ask you to fully comprehend the degree to which truth-tellers and original thinkers are sidelined in your society and to support this site. My new book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, is currently under consideration, but I fear that promoting it will ultimately fall to me alone (as has been the case for almost a decade). The work is simply too explosive. So kindly spare a thought, first, to the degree to which this writer’s voice is marginalized. And, second, to the need to support her mission.













As for S. E. Cupp: there is no accounting for aesthetic taste. Other than youth, however, I see no aesthetic merit in little Lolita’s vacant visage. As for this Fox-panel staple’s smarts: She is a studiously dumb chick, whose contribution to ideas is to gesture wildly and grimace, while portentously parroting mind-numbing banalities.

America’s Most Admired

Affirmative Action, America, Barack Obama, Bush, Politics, Pop-Culture, Race, South-Africa

They are two ponces who’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives, unless the wholesale destruction of a couple of countries is considered honest work. The one has made his fortune off the American, racial-spoils system; the other off the privileges accrued to a political dynasty. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll “President Barack Obama is Americans’ Most Admired Man of 2010, substantially ahead of the former presidents, iconic religious leaders, and others who fill out the top 10 list.”

America’s second choice is George Bush. One has to, at least, admire the consistency of the majority’s damning affinities: Both men are remarkably similar in their political philosophy and destroyer capabilities.

About hot favorite Nelson Mandela, coming in at 4th place, I’ll quote from my address to the HL Mencken Club, on the occasion of its 3rd annual meeting in October of 2010, which will be published shortly by VDARE.COM, and is titled, “Why Do WASP Societies Wither? South Africa As A Case Study”: “Republicans have slipped between the sheets with the fashionable Left. Today they are as eager as the next drug-addled supermodel to press flesh with Nelson Mandela” (a former terrorist and avowed communist).

“WE ARE DOOMED.”

‘Apocalyptic Pain’ Coming Down The Pike

Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation

Another obstetrician who says “no” to spending is Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. The good doctor has warned of “apocalyptic pain’ from an out-of-control debt that could cause 18 percent unemployment and a massive contraction in the economy that would destroy the middle class.” This is what this “leading Republican deficit hawk said in an interview that aired Sunday” on Fox News.

Sen. Coburn, who recently issued a report on government waste, warned that the U.S. only has about three or four years to get its fiscal house in order or it could find itself facing austerity measures seen in Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and earlier in Japan.

For one, we already have that level of unemployment:

The real unemployment rate is 16.3 percent. The discrepancy between the official and the awful numbers has arisen because the former count, conveniently, “only those who have looked for work in the last four weeks.” “Hundreds of thousands of people, some discouraged by their failed job searches, left the labor force. The labor force includes only those who are either employed or are looking for work.”

Coburn is a good man. But hitherto there have been too few good men like him. The band (of fools) has played on for too long. “WE ARE DOOMED.”