As Vladimir Putin’s tanks begin to roll forth from Russia like Sauron’s legions from Mordor, a pair of American villains is working hard to undermine our resolve against the greatest threat from Europe to American values and power, and indeed to world peace, since Adolf Hitler.
Evgeny Feldman, a photographer for the maverick Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, recently visited a book store in Moscow and tweeted [1] a photograph from amongst its shelves. Among volumes on one topical shelf such as The Crimes of the U.S.A. and The Third World War and Forward to Victory, in which authors offered bloodthirsty attacks on America and her values and called for its obliteration, one tome stood out. Emblazoned on its cover was the Russian title Прокончит с ФРС by an author identified as Рон Пол.
This was a Russian translation of 2009′s End the Fed [2] by former Texas congressman and presidential primary contender Ron Paul, latched onto by Russian nationalists as an admission by an American that America is a fundamentally evil country leading the world down a path that leads to global ruin.
Days earlier another former U.S. presidential primary contestant, Pat Buchanan of the disgraced Nixon administration, published an opinion column in which he asked, seemingly on behalf of the Russian Kremlin: “How Would We Feel If Putin Told Us What To Do? [3]” Sounding just like Neville Chamberlain, Buchanan viciously attacked Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for proposing legislation standing up to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Georgia, and urged the U.S. to simply ignore Putin’s bloodthirsty [4] reign of terror there.
Paul and Buchanan are two individuals who have been decisively repudiated — humiliated, really — at the polls by the people of the United States. More than two-thirds [5] of the American population currently views Russia as an enemy, precisely as Mitt Romney said during the last presidential campaign, and major magazine covers [6] bluntly and dramatically reflect the nation’s horror at Putin’s aggression. Indeed, signs of it are everywhere [7].
Yet the likes of Paul and Buchanan continue to beat the drum of appeasement and indeed collaboration with Putin’s evil, neo-Soviet regime. Time magazine called [8] End the Fed a “curious mix of the sensible and the delusional” and said that it teaches nothing about economics but much about what goes on inside Paul’s skull. The same can be said of Buchanan. Both men mix tiny bits of truth with great tidal waves of delusion to come up with policies that obliterate American values and world leadership and leave the field to despotic tyrants like Putin in the belief that nothing can touch Fortress America, which should simply watch the world burn.