Putin is no Churchill, and no Stalin, either

A few weeks ago, I wrote in depth about Der Spiegel's piece about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a new Churchill and how he had not only gotten hoist on this petard, but was keeping himself hanging.

So, what about his counterpart, Russian President Vladimir Putin?

I've semi-regularly called him Vlad the Impaler, after Vlad Tepes, aka Count Dracul. But, that's a figure from many centuries ago,  that works primarily as a pun of sorts.

What Putin is NOT is Uncle Joe Stalin. First, contra the tankies, he's not a Communist. Second, while Stalin, at least theoretically, opposed Russian nationalism continuing from Tsarist times — a stance that, as Lenin's Commissar of Nationalities, helped get us into the situation we're in — Putin is indeed a Russian nationalist.

So, if not Stalin, and not Vlad Tepes, as he predates post-Thirty Years War modern nationalism, who is he?

Could he be, per Montefiore's book on Stalin as the Red Tsar, some sort of Black Tsar? A quasi-fascist tsar? I mean, post-Yeltsin, he shook down the oligarchs just enough .... to line his pockets, keep them in line, yet keep them loyal by protecting them.

But, not a fully fascist one. Yes, Prigozhin owned a few things, but government ownership of the means of production without a dictatorship of the proletariat? Putin's not a fascist; of course, compared to Mussolini, Hitler wasn't totally a fascist,either.

As for trusting Putin? Or, per Norm Finkelstein, saying his invasion is "justified"? Uhh, no.

Let's start with John McCain vs. George W. Bush. Without supporting McCain's idea then, or others today, of expanding NATO to included Ukraine (or Georgia), he was right when he responded to Bush by saying that, contra Shrub, when he looked in Putin's eyes he saw three letters — "KGB."

In one of the KGB's more odious moments, in the early 1980s, it was the apparent originator of the claim that the US had engineered the AIDS virus for population control of African-Americans, Black Africans, or both. And, in South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki, this led to horrendous AIDS deaths. In the US, it built on Black mistrust of the medical world because of things like the Tuskegee experiments. You know, the KGB in which Putin served 1975-90.

Ken Paxton, Coppell ISD and falling for "sting" videos

Setting aside the asshattery of Kenny Boy Paxton suing Coppell ISD for being DEI or whatever? If you're a school superintendent in Texas, how do talk to some rando coming to your district without thoroughly vetting them, which Superintendent Evan Whitfield apparently failed to do with Accuracy in Media's non-ambush videographer?

I mean, to get into a building, AIM's dude had to present a driver's license. In these days, at a school district of any size, if I don't know who "Accuracy in Media" is (assuming the dude was truthful about who he was working for), I do teh google. I also google dude's name. And, since we have his DL, I use Google Images or similar to match his face with what's available online, and to see if that matches otherwise.

I mean, it's 2025. How do you fall for a sting video, especially on a subject like this?