...and I am not at all swallowing the propoganda that Obama and his cretins are putting out.
However, it is clear that you, OTOH, are more than happy to swallow and follow the propaganda tat Putin has laid down. And he is good at it. After all, as a KGB operative he ran agents and used it to great effect to control them.
In addition, he has honed those skills on the international front, particularly for any ethnic Russians anywhere, and most importantly for his own citizens, in maintaining power for the last 15 years as the leader of Russia, shrewdly getting around the Russian Constitution on a limit of eight years as President.
Putin is a shrewd and very calculating leader. And he must be respected. He has pined for a return to the glory days of the USSR and calls the fall of the Soviet Union the worst disaster to befall mankind in the 20th century. Read his book, First Person.
...I have. It is important to know your adversaries and he is a very important and dangerous adversary of these United States.
And he is not only playing Obama like a fiddle, he is ensuring that Obama keeps his word about being "more flexible," when he was caught on live mic saying so to Medvedev in 2012. Putin is probably enjoying causing him to go through unbelievable contortions, literally bending over backwards to show how flexible he can be for the Russians...as he promised.
How interesting that we now have Hillary and Kerry supporters at Freerepublic. How long did it take for you to swing the other way?