Sochi 2013

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What the neocons cannot stomach after all the anti-Soviet propaganda of a half-century is the fact that the Russian people are not our enemies. They are the kind of people a Russian Norman Rockwell would have depicted like those our own Norman did, peasants attending church and feeding the chickens, children playing in the snow, soldiers going off to war with their mothers left crying in train stations. Crude provocations such as Jew lists being circulated by Russians in eastern Ukraine are as false as the WMD our very own neocons put out 12 years ago in order to get us into war with Iraq.

All one had to do is watch the opening and closing winter Olympic ceremonies to see what Russia is all about. It is not about thieving and greedy oligarchs, most of whom hold dual nationalities, Israeli and Russian, but about Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, all of whom a BBC correspondent identified as “€œall Russians, you know.”€ Gee thanks. Russian athletes won more medals and did their nation proud, and while Putin watched with pride, we, the Americans, always under the boot of anti-Soviet lobbies and the op-ed fools of the Times, watched as our team was represented by a lesbian tennis great, Billie Jean King, as an intended insult to the Russian state because Russian law forbids homosexual teachings to preteens. Go figure.

The EU is an unelected Politburo that overturns national referenda. Russia has always been and most likely always will be headed by an authoritarian government. President Obama is now showing his naïveté by trying to forge a new long-term approach that applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy. It is as useless as sending a tennis player to insult Mother Russia.