GOP candidates slam Trump over Putin praise (Trump really scaring me-OK with killing journalists?)

Fox News ^ | Dec. 18, 2015 | Barnini Chakraborty

[mtrott]

What started as a seemingly mild admiration between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin took an uncomfortable turn Friday when the GOP White House hopeful seemed to defend the Russian president’s strong-arm tactics – and dismiss his alleged killing of journalists and others who cross him.

[lewislynn]

The only thing Scarborough was concerned with, really concerned with, was the killing of journalists. Sez it all.

Kill all the lawyers journalists.

[McGruff]

A concern troll is a person who participates in a debate posing as an actual or potential ally who simply has some concerns they need answered before they will ally themselves with a cause. In reality they are a critic.

[LS]

Good. Thanks. BTW, if you go to the bottom, you'll see that the list under Yeltson and Medvedev is as long as Putin's. Must be a Russian thing.

I don't doubt that a former KGB head has people assassinated. Welcome to a thugocracy. But Putin is hardly outside the norm, and I never, ever heard a complaint when it was Yeltsin, Gorby, Medvedev, or whomever.

[editor-surveyor]

Some of them,but the stink pots won’t

[LS]

Thanks. Looks like Medvedev and Yeltsin about equaled Putin’s numbers. Must be a Russkie thing.

[TigersEye]

Do you remember what George W. Bush said about Putin after he looked into his eyes?

I remember him being castigated up one side and down the other here on FR for saying it.

[ETL]

Stalin was good leader too [sarc]

"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"

[Aleya2Fairlie]

I think that’s exactly what Trump meant.

[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

[1rudeboy]

What’s wrong with killing journalists?

On the new FR? Absolutely nothing. Let Obama do it. Putin does.

[Balding_Eagle]

Lies

That’s all mtrott and his ilk have.

Even the most cursory listen to the segment (and I link it up thread) shows mtrott and his ilk are peddling lies.

That’s what happens when Cruz supporters don’t hold their candidate to honest standards, they have no standards either.

[ETL]

I don't doubt that a former KGB head has people assassinated. Welcome to a thugocracy. But Putin is hardly outside the norm, and I never, ever heard a complaint when it was Yeltsin, Gorby, Medvedev, or whomever.

If you didn't hear about it during Putin's long time in power (10+ years), you certainly wouldn't have heard about the other cases.

[DoodleDawg]

I’m sure that Trump looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul and figured he was a good guy. That’s happened before apparently.

[1rudeboy]

Do you remember what George W. Bush said about Putin after he looked into his eyes?

I do.

I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He's a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country and I appreciate very much the frank dialogue and that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship.

Who would've figured that so many FReepers would come around to embrace George W. Bush in 2015? [chortle]

[babygene]

“Seriously? There is a list from here to the moon of Russian journalists who have mysteriously vanished or were found to have been murdered.”

So that means Putin killed them? LOL

My guess would be that Putin has never personally killed anyone...

[LS]

I thought the other guys were supposed to be “democrats”?

[Brilliant]

“the show anchors pointed out that Putin has been accused of killing political opponents and reporters as well as his aggressive history of invading countries.”

“’Our country does plenty of killing also,’ Trump said.”

Isn’t that the kind of answer a Democrat would give? Trash America first?

[mkjessup]

The difference between the cases is that, when Breitbart and Hastings died, FReepers didn't rush here to post that it's ok because Putin does it. So why does Putin get the pass?

I'm not giving Putin a pass on it, far from it. And I don't think any self-respecting FReeper does either.

But the fact remains that our government which once-upon-a-time was "Of the people, By the people and For the people" has lost the moral high ground, we as a Nation have adopted more Soviet-style behavior than anyone could have thought possible, and before we claim to have lily white hands to condemn Putin with, we better take a good long hard look at our own national conduct and what has been done "in our name" by the federal fascists in Washington.

[DesertRhino]

“challenged Trump over the fact that Putin kills journalists and opponents. “

Never been a one proven, not one. In a country with widespread street crime, with a giant mafia, with oligarchs who were strong enough to physically grab entire industries and who want to operate in a gangster style with government answering to them. With others that want to go legit and have back door deals with EU bankers if they can overthrow the government, and with as many moslems as we have Mexicans, there are a lot of ways to get murdered in Russia. Lots of different toes to step on.

Yet, every murder is blamed on Putin by the opposition, and our homosexualized fascist leaders and media run with it.

I’m beginning to doubt the facts of what is always “known” to be true.

[WilliamIII]

Media hate Putin over the gay thing. All these accusations about thuggery may be true, or may not be. I hear the claims, but I don’t see the proof. Maybe it exists, but the fact mainstream media claims something, doesn’t make it true, it isn’t proof. I don’t believe mainstream media without proof.

This much I know: Russia has lower income taxes than US. in this sense, our tax system is more thuggish than theirs.