Topic: WorldNetDaily
It's a given that Erik Rush is going to say ridiculously anti-Obama things. And he does just that in his March 5 WorldNetDaily column, complete with italics:
Obviously, Obama does not care if his detractors declare that he is weak or inept at foreign policy, any more than he cares if they believe he is a poor economic manager or leader on domestic issues. His policies, which have been detrimental to America on every front – economic stability, national security, domestic tranquility, foreign policy – are the sabotage of an enemy operative, not the careless acts of a ham-handed politician.
But Rush is also jumping on the pro-Putin bandwagon being steered by his fellow WND columnists:
The Western press as well as Republican leaders are beating the drum of Putin wishing to “restore the Soviet Union,” being an international bully, a retrograde dictator and so on. We know that Ukraine has been a contested area for centuries. We also know that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and that Putin is an authoritarian leader. However, he is also dealing with factions (in the neighboring Ukraine, Dagestan, Chechnya and Armenia, to name but a few) that are replete with those who hold anti-Russian sentiments, including militant Islamists, some of whom have very recently carried out suicide bombings within Russia. This was precisely the reason for widespread safety concerns at the Winter Olympics at Sochi.
[...]
As I’ve recently reported in this space, the close ties between Islamists and Hitler’s Third Reich are a matter of the historical record, as are the ties between the Svoboda Party’s progenitors and the Nazis of World War II. So not only does Putin see himself fighting anti-Russian sympathies and factions in the region, he may even see himself potentially fighting neo-Nazis.
More significantly, Putin is fighting the efforts of the Obama administration, which has dedicatedly supported not only Russia’s enemies in Ukraine, but the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadists globally.
While the nationalist and borderline neo-Nazi Svoboda Party is a faction in the coalition that overthrew the Russian-backed government in Ukraine, as Slate notes, it's inaccurate to paint all Putin opponents in Ukraine as neo-Nazis, as Rush is trying to do.
As with his fellow WNDers, Rush is relying on pro-Putin propaganda. Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books points out that before the overthrow, then-President Viktor Yanukovych's regime was denouncing the opposition as not only Nazis but Jews as well.
There seems to be some cognitive dissonance there. But Rush will ignore that since he got in his minimum daily requirement of Obama derangement.
