Seems Vlad the Poisoner is just as thin-skinned as Donald Trump.
With eleven time zones, Russia is the world’s largest country by far.
Россия used to be an Empire, with царство and everything else needed to rule as an absolute monarch (as George III was ’til another George, the father of our unusual nation, that is, George Washington and friends told Crazy George to send his redcoats back across the ocean, and they left with great reluctance, ’til the redcoats came back in 1812, trying desperately to get their colonies back, they burned the White House, the War of 1812 was pretty much a draw, only from that war General Andrew Jackson (1767 – 1845) later on got to be president after John Quincy Adams (as to Jackson, Trump’s hero: must read: Faulkner’s Appendix to The Sound and the Fury, in which Faulkner described Jackson perfectly in one Faulknerian paragraph).
As befitted Imperial Россия, the aristocrats there spoke French, and they even spoke a little русский язык, good for them, maybe.
Then Lenin took over, killed a lot of people, followed by Stalin, who killed many many more. Followed by other dictators and now they have Putin, a former KGB Colonel who became fluent auf Deutsch when he was stationed as a spy in Berlin and elsewhere.
As a spy, and as himself, Putin is much better at lying than Trump. After all, he’s had a lot of practice. If you’re a spook, first thing you gotta do is learn how to lie convincingly. Trump, by contrast, told at least twenty lies a day, and his base loved it, and they still love him, and they are his de______les. Which is how come it will take decades to get back to how it was under President Obama, President Clinton, and President Carter.
As Trump’s long ago National Security Advisor, John Bolton (he of The Mustache) said, Putin played Trump like a violin.
Seems clear to us here at AP that long before Trump audaciously, and for no good reason other than egotism, announced on January 15, 2015, as he descended his gold escalator with Trophy Wife Number Three, that he’s America’s Savior, that Putin had the goods on Trump. After all, in the spy business, the best way to blackmail somebody is to videotape that person (usually a man) having sex with a woman he’s not supposed to be having sex with.
Putin’s been divorced from Людмила Александровна Очеретная since 2014, but that’s not a problem for him because power is an aphrodisiac. Just ask Lord Acton (1834-1902): “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority” (words later redacted by NYSE CEO Sydney Willliams III).
Sex is clearly an issue for Trump, simply because he thinks he’s entitled to it whenever he feels like it. Ask Stormy Daniels and Playboy playmate Karen McDougal. We never did ask associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones, who was with Trump 24/7, how often he and Melania cavorted (wrong word for an ugly man as obese as Trump), but we have it on good authority from our Chief International Correspondent, associate solitary reporter Larry Theis, who is fluent in Slovene (Theis, as we have said before, has never been to France, doesn’t have a single word of French, but he’s fluent in Hungarian, Polish, Korean, Cantonese, Portugese, Spanish, Brazilian, Catalan, Byelorussian, Serbo-Croatian, Finnish, and a multitude of other languages, including Navajo) that Melania never really wanted to live in the White House.
Since Trump kowtowed to Putin, thus nearly irreparably damaging our relations with Vlad the Emperor, now Putin and President Biden (very smart man, he) are in the Mutual Spatting Business. This we’ve known for some time, because, as we know full well, “The Intelligence on Russia Was Clear. It Was Not Always Presented That Way,” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/us/politics/russia-elections-trump-intelligence.html?referringSource=articleShare.
After Mr. Biden accurately said that Putin’s a killer, Putin erupted in fury (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/world/europe/russia-biden-putin-killer.html?referringSource=articleShare), which is why we said at the outset that Putin is just as thin-skinned as Trump.
But Joe Biden knows how what to do.