Posted on 12/24/2007 10:39:35 PM PST by winner3000
Vladimir Putin will now use Time magazine's honor to enhance his own power.
BY GARRY KASPAROV Sunday, December 23, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Ever since President Vladimir Putin took office eight long years ago, the political and media leadership of the West have had a full-time job trying to look on the bright side of Russia's rapid turn from democracy.
The free press has been demolished, elections are canceled and rigged, and then we hear how popular Mr. Putin is. Opposition marches are crushed, and we're told--over and over--how much better off we are today than in the days of the Soviet Union. This week Time magazine named Mr. Putin its 2007 "Person of the Year."
Unfortunately, there is no silver lining to Russia's descent into dictatorship. If anything there is a look of iron to it.
Condoleezza Rice, hardly a Putin critic, said recently that Russia "is not an environment in which you can talk about free and fair elections." A good start, but this comment was not made where one would imagine--perhaps at a press conference insisting that Putin's Russia be removed from the G-7 for making a mockery of democratic practices. No, her remark came as a side note to her very early endorsement of Mr. Putin's handpicked heir to the throne, Dmitry Medvedev.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Aw shucks, I’m sure it’s only millions and millions. :-)
No matter how many times they explain that the Man of the Year is not meant to be an honor, but simply a recognition for whoever had the greatest effect on the world for good or bad, some people still don't get the message.
“Last week, 22-year-old opposition activist Yury Chervochkin died in hospital after several weeks in a coma. He had been beaten nearly to death an hour after making an anxious cellphone call to our offices saying he was being followed by members of the organized-crime task force known as UBOP, which has become the vanguard of the Kremlin’s war on political opposition. A witness saw him clubbed repeatedly by men with baseball bats.”
There was a time when being named Time’s Man of the Year actually meant something. Those days are long gone; most of their picks are ludicrous.
So, does Putin actually qualify via their own guidelines?
...I'm not defending either TIME or Putin...
That is the problem. TIME has no morals when it decides what "influence" is, yet it retain a clear political agenda. Was GW Bush "Man of the Year" when he liberated millions of people in Iraq, well? TIME hides behind the academic criteria of "influence". Yet everyone will see the man on the cover that serves the agenda.
Here are their choices for the last decade:
1997 Andy Grove
1998 Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr
1999 Jeffrey P. Bezos
2000 George W. Bush
2001 Rudolph Giuliani
2002 The Whistleblowers (employees of WorldCom, Enron, FBI)
2003 The American Soldier
2004 George W. Bush
2005 The Good Samaritans (Bono and Bill & Melinda Gates)
2006 You (the Information Age)
2007 Vladimir Putin
I'd say choosing GW Bush TWICE is pretty good. They chose "The American Soldier" for the liberation of Iraq.
What more do you want?
Didn’t time list Rasputin and their Man of the Year in 1916? They have gone from the Mad Monk to the Mad Monkey. I wonder what they are smoking over there to pass over General David Patraeus?!
In terms of the number of journalists killed there, the only country more dangerous for journalists than Russia is Iraq.
I don’t even know who Grove and Bezos are!
TIME is a biased rag.
You forgot the “Barf Alert” winner3000.
Industrialists of the electronic age.
No argument there.
Amen. Congratulations to the Wall Street Journal for printing Garry Kasparov’s column, and congratulations to Garry Kasparov for having the courage to write it. Garry Kasparov should run for president of Russia. Go, Garry, go!
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