GOP pushed Iowa win for Cruz only to blunt Trump and pump up Rubio

nytimes.com ^ | FEB. 2, 2016 | David Brooks

[Trumpinator]

Trump’s whole campaign was based on success breeding success, the citing of self-referential poll victories to justify his own candidacy.

What happened in Iowa was that some version of normalcy returned to the G.O.P. race. The precedents of history have not been rendered irrelevant.

Ted Cruz picked up the voters who propelled Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee to victory in previous caucuses. His is a Tea Party wing in the G.O.P. But its size and geographic reach is limited.

The amazing surge for Marco Rubio shows that the Republican electorate has not gone collectively insane. At the last moment, and in a state that is not naturally friendly to him, a lot of Republicans showed up to support a conservative who could conceivably get elected and govern.

Marco Rubio now has his moment. He is the only candidate who can plausibly unify the party. Desperate Cruz-hating Republicans will turn their faces to him.

The Republican Party usually nominates unifying candidates like Marco Rubio. The laws of gravity have not been suspended. He has a great shot. But he has to show one more burst of imagination.

[JoSixChip]

Right, because they could never get Cruz to support amnesty and TPP, oh wait they already did.

[ETL]

Putinator, er, “Trumpinator”, is a dedicated Putinista. One of the worst on the site. Why these creeps are allowed to remain here doing what they do, as obvious as it is, is a mystery to me.

[ETL]

It's good to know I am not alone in thinking this way.

There are plenty of people who think your way.

"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor"

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131219/185734707/Putin-Says-Stalin-No-Worse-Than-Cunning-Oliver-Cromwell.html
______________________________________

"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...

"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'..."

"The more I see and read about Mr. Putin, in power since 1999, and his 'managed democracy,' the more apprehensive I become about the future of Russia and the safety of its neighbors.

If Putin believes that the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states represents the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,' then it follows that Putin might well believe he should do something to repair the loss..."

http://web.archive.org/web/20090415000000*/http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
______________________________________

"The demise of the Soviet Union was the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century'," Putin said in 2005.

http://www.thetrumpet.com/article/11102.30640.0.0/asia/moscow-puts-the-soviet-squeeze-on-neighbor-nations
______________________________________

______________________________________

"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism's crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100711090651/http://article.nationalreview.com/365528/forgetting-the-evils-of-communism/jonah-goldberg
______________________________________

"The demise of the Soviet Union was the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century'," Putin said in 2005.

"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor"

[Randall_S]

Please don’t tell me you fall in the paranoid camp of accusing Trump of being a “KGB” agent.
Of all the ludicrous things...
Russia, matter of fact, is doing the work in the world that the United States is failing to do. If not for Russia, Syria would be completely extinct of Christians and overrun by ISIS.
If not for Russia, Israel would literally be alone on the world stage. If not for Russia, Sisi’s government would be in trouble.
Russia is a traditional and Christian nation. Sure, it’s corrupt, but the United States is just as bad.

[CPT Clay]

Not a fan of David Brooks.

[Trumpinator]

I am not a fan of Brooks - but to me he is sort of the GOP insider beltway guy that epitomizes the GOP establishment. He does not represent true grassroots Republicans.

[Trumpinator]

ETL is more annoying than harmful. I think his posts hurt his own arguments - Sadly, I do think he thinks Trump is a KGB agent and maybe there are KGB under his bed.

[BuckeyeTexan]

We have rules, n00b. Well, more like a set of guidelines than actual rules really.

First, when you speak of another freeper, you ping that freeper as a courtesy. See how I pinged dead? There ya go.

Second, you don’t excerpt copyrighted material from a leading (*spits*) newspaper, add your own title, and post it as personal material. Copyright infringement lawsuits are expensive.

Third, so long as a freeper has been here longer than you, he can address you as n00b. For example, dead gets to call me a n00b because to him I am one.

dead did not bear false witness. Now, as I said, behave.

[SteveSCH]

Congrats to Ted Cruz and all his supporters.

Now with that out of the way the bad news... Rubio is going to be the nominee.

It depresses me to say this but that’s the way I see it now. Cruz don’t have what it takes to go the distance with Rubes, and Trump... He’s been found out to be a paper tiger.

Hate to be defeatist, and I hope I’m wrong, but without Trump running the media down, the media and the GOPe will be all guns trained on Cruz after New Hampshire...

[Protect the Bill of Rights]

Did not realize there were exceptions when posting articles. Sorry.
(Live and learn)

[ETL]

Please don't tell me you fall in the paranoid camp of accusing Trump of being a "KGB" agent.

First of all, in case you haven't heard, the KGB no longer exists. They've been replaced by the FSB, an agency that Putin ran for a time. Second, I think it is possible that Trump is simply a dangerously naive chump.

[Trumpinator]

Trump is the only one that can dissemble the Clinton playbook. Rubio would run a more high energy version of Jeb. You can tell Rubio has nervous energy - he stutters - catches himself as he mispronounces a word because he is speaking fast and he looks shaky and nervous because of the timber in his voice.

[Trumpinator]

This is a vanity with some comments from an editorial to show my opinion has some validity. That was my intent anyway.

[ETL]

Putin, once critical of Stalin, now embraces Soviet dictator's tactics

Carol J. Williams, reporting from Moscow
June 11, 2015

Only six years ago, President Vladimir Putin visited the Polish port of Gdansk, birthplace of the Solidarity movement that threw off Soviet domination, and reassured his Eastern European neighbors that Russia had only friendly intentions.

Putin spoke harshly that day of the notorious World War II-era pact that former Soviet leader Josef Stalin had signed with Adolf Hitler -- an agreement that cleared the way for the Nazi occupation of Poland and Soviet domination of the Baltics -- calling it a "collusion to solve one's problems at others' expense."

But Putin's view of history appears to have undergone a startling transformation. Last month, the Russian leader praised the 1939 nonaggression accord with Hitler as a clever maneuver that forestalled war with Germany. Stalin's 29-year reign, generally seen by Russians in recent years as a dark and bloody chapter in the nation's history, has lately been applauded by Putin and his supporters as the foundation on which the great Soviet superpower was built.

Across a resurgent Russia, Stalin lives again, at least in the minds and hearts of Russian nationalists who see Putin as heir to the former dictator's model of iron-fisted rule.

Recent tributes celebrate Stalin's military command acumen and geopolitical prowess. His ruthless repression of enemies, real and imagined, has been brushed aside by today's Kremlin leader as the cost to be paid for defeating the Nazis.

As Putin has sought to recover territory lost in the 1991 Soviet breakup, his Stalinesque claim to a right to a "sphere of influence" has allowed him to legitimize the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine and declare an obligation to defend Russians and Russian speakers beyond his nation's borders.

On May 9, the 70th anniversary of the Allied war victory was marked and Stalin's image was put on display with glorifying war films, T-shirts, billboards and posters. Framed portraits of the mustachioed generalissimo were carried by marchers in Red Square's Victory Day parade and in the million-strong civic procession that followed to honor all who fell in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War.

Putin's embrace of Stalin's power-play tactics is applauded by many Russians and other former Soviet citizens as the sort of decisive leadership they longed for while watching communism collapse around them. To the proponents of a reinvigorated Russia, reformist Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, are seen as having submitted Russia to Western domination.

Over the last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has presented dictator Josef Stalin's bloody 29-year reign as the foundation on which the Soviet superpower was built.

Stalin lives again, at least in minds and hearts.

Stalin "kept us all together, there was a friendship of nations, and without him everything fell apart," said Suliko Megrelidze, a 79-year-old native of Stalin's Georgian birthplace who sells dried fruit and spices at a farmers market. "We need someone like him if we want peace and freedom from those fascists in Europe and America."

Such sentiments are no longer confined to those with actual memories of the Stalin era. A poll this spring by the independent Levada Center found 39% of respondents had a positive opinion of Stalin. As to the millions killed, 45% of those surveyed agreed that the deaths could be justified for the greater accomplishments of winning the war, building modern industries and growing to eventually give their U.S. nemesis a battle for supremacy in the arms race and conquering outer space.

The share of Russians who look back approvingly has been increasing steadily in recent years, and the segment of those who tell pollsters they have no opinion on his place in their history has shot up even more sharply, said Denis Volkov, a sociologist with the Levada Center.

He points to this year's massive Victory Day events as the Kremlin's message to ungrateful neighbors that they owe their peace and prosperity to the wartime deaths of more than 20 million Soviet citizens.

"The figure of Stalin is being justified through the war," Volkov said. "There is an attitude now that, yes, there were repressions and, yes, there were huge losses, but we won the war after all."

Victory exonerated Stalin's excesses, just as it does Putin's "strongman" posture toward neighbors and former Soviet subjects now outside the Russian Federation's borders, Volkov said.

Stalin's standing among his countrymen has waxed and waned with the political upheavals that have wracked the Soviet Union and Russia. He was so dominant a figure in Soviet citizens' lives by the time of his death on March 5, 1953, that hundreds of thousands poured into the streets of Moscow in a chaotic outbreak of mourning when word of his passing reached a public taught to believe that life was impossible without Stalin -- the Bolshevik nom de guerre he adopted, signifying "man of steel."

Nikita Khrushchev, who finally prevailed in attaining the leadership after five years of Kremlin infighting, began a campaign of de-Stalinization in 1961, moving Stalin's embalmed remains from public display next to Vladimir Lenin's to a less prominent grave near the Kremlin wall. Stalingrad, the hero city that symbolized the Soviets' watershed battle to turn back the Nazis, was renamed Volgograd, and statues and busts were removed, and streets, institutes and schools were renamed.

But the erasure of Stalin's name and likeness served also to stifle discussion of his vast crimes: Siberian exile or death sentences for political opponents, collectivization of agriculture during which millions starved, deportation of minorities and property seizures that impoverished generations. It wasn't until Gorbachev came to power in 1985 that a candid recounting of his era was attempted.

Even Putin, earlier in his presidency, fell in line with the collective spirit of criticism of Stalin’s errors. During the visit to Poland in 2009, a year after he had sent troops to seize territory in sovereign Georgia, Putin appeared to reassure Russia's nervous neighbors that the nonaggression pact that paved the way for war and division 70 years earlier was to be remembered as immoral.

The Aug. 23, 1939, Molotov-Ribbentrop pact's secret protocols doomed Poland to Nazi occupation a week later and gave the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania to the Soviet Union. Millions of citizens of those betrayed territories died at Stalin's hand, in political purges, summary executions and slave labor camps.

The scope of Stalin's brutality remains a topic of heated debate. Late Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn once claimed in an interview that as many as 110 million died from the dictator's vast array of repressions between 1921 and 1959, including prisoners who succumbed long after Stalin's reign. Historian Viktor Zemkov, at the other extreme, puts the number of deaths attributable to Stalin at 1.4 million.

"The estimates of 110 million to 1.4 million speak for themselves -- a hundredfold disagreement," said Dmitry Lyskov, a state television talk-show host who mounted a failed campaign four years ago to put Stalin's visage on city buses to commemorate Victory Day.

The Russian Military-Historical Society, established by Putin in 2012, announced this year that a new Stalin museum was to open in May in the village of Khoroshevo, 140 miles northeast of Moscow. Stalin spent the night of Aug. 4, 1943, in a small wooden home there, the closest he came to visiting frontline Soviet troops during the four-year fight to defeat Germany.

The sanitized exhibits recounting Stalin's contributions to the war effort and postwar recovery were ready by the planned May 9 holiday. But the opening was postponed amid local opposition led by the Tver regional leader of Memorial, a group dedicated to shedding light on Russia's totalitarian era.

Yan Rachinsky, a leader of Memorial's Moscow chapter, calls the museum "ridiculous," and Stalin's single night there irrelevant to the war victory two years later.

The stillborn museum was one of several official efforts to honor Stalin this year: A statue was erected in the southern city of Lipetsk, and splashed with red paint the night it was unveiled. A bronze likeness of the dictator was put up to mark the February anniversary of his 1945 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta, a Black Sea resort now inaccessible to most of the world as only Russian aviation serves the contested Crimean peninsula.

Stalin has weathered more than six decades of historical revisions to maintain his standing as a rival to the West, "which is the context in which he interests Putin," said Nikolai Svanidze, a writer and historian whose grandfathers died in Stalin’s political purges.

"Just as Stalin defeated the West 70 years ago by capturing half of Europe," Svanidze said, "we are defeating the West again today. Crimea is our Berlin, our Reichstag, and there is no way it will be restored to Ukraine in the foreseeable future."

Svanidze also predicts there will be no more credible elections as long as Putin chooses to stay in power. That, he said, is another parallel with Stalin's lifetime sinecure as Soviet leader.

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-stalin-model-20150611-story.html

***********************************************************

"For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.

He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin's administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004."

"On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

[Randall_S]

Yes, that’s why “KGB” was in quotes....
I know enough history to recognize that Putin, and Russia, respect Stalin (to this day) for defeating Hitler.
So whatever you want about Stalin, but he had the Russian people behind him in WWII. And that will not be forgotten, even if it’s lost on American commentators.

[ETL]

I know enough history to recognize that Putin, and Russia, respect Stalin (to this day) for defeating Hitler.

Meanwhile Stalin murdered at least 3 times as many people.

[Randall_S]

Again, I don’t need a history lesson. I’m aware of the counts.
You, on the contrary, do not seem to be able to assimilate other perspectives. In this case, the perspective of Russians - not only Putin, but Russians at large.

[Protect the Bill of Rights]

Like I said, live and learn. :). God knows my “to learn” list is a long list

[dead]

Gracias, Buck. I’m not generally a rule cop, but the new headline was absurd on its face. I appreciate the support.

[demshateGod]

There is no way Trump will be president. Polls show 30% of Republicans will never vote for him. If he’s the nominee, the lesser of the evils would be either of the Rats. Frankly, this whole Trump phenomenon fills me with dread like I’ve never felt before.