In the wide multidimensional spectrum that makes a human, Putin and Reagan share a few leadership characteristics, that does not make them close, does not make them bestest buds, does not make them both someone I'd want to associate with (Reagan YES!!! Putin... well... no, never).
Does that mean I'd like to hang out with Putin's polar opposite, obama? Ummm, no, although the word hang might be in there somewhere.
Don't read too much into my post. ALL I'm saying is that Putin does not have direct personal culpability for this particular incident.
He has plenty of other blood on his hands that he is directly accountable for.
And he did set the stage that allowed this to happen, but he didn't order the murder of innocent civilians this time.
Besides, like Nixon, he can legitimately be held accountable for the cover-up!
“Don’t read too much into my post. ALL I’m saying is that Putin does not have direct personal culpability for this particular incident.”
That’s a ridiculous comment. It’s all but impossible for the separatists to have operated the SA-11 system without Russian training. It’s all but impossible that they even had the system at all unless the Russians gave it to them. And it’s highly questionable whether there’s been enough time since hostilities began for the Russians to train insurgent knuckleheads to actually use it. The fact that an easily identifiable commercial airliner was shot down instead of another military transport is the only thing that keeps me from believing this was done by idiot separatists rather than the Russians themselves. In any case, the responsibility for this falls directly onto the Putin regime absent an absolutely magnificent false flag operation run by the Ukrainians(which is kind of a tough sell given that the separatists were peacocking about the hit on the internet moments after the plane went down.
Putin crushes dissent at home just as he crushes freedom abroad. Is that the act of a patriot? Was Stalin a patriot? Putin said that Stalin’s purges were not as bad as the USA’s war in Viet Nam. Would a true Russian patriot try to justify Stalin’s barbarous communism? When a Russian tv station made fun of Putin, the station’s owner had to flee Russia and the government took over the station. Today Putin’s government controls practically the entire Russian media. When the head of the biggest Russian oil company wanted to sell a stake in his company to Exxon, Putin sent him to Siberia and nationalized the company! After terrorists attacked a Russian school, Putin seized the opportunity to abolish the election of all regional governors, and now he personally appoints them! If an American president did these things, would you call him a patriot? If Putin is a patriot, then Obama must be a patriot too, since he is trying to do to America what Putin has already done to Russia! Putin is not a patriot in any sense of the word. He is an unrepentant, unreformed Soviet imperialist! He has looted the Russian nation of billions to become one of the richest men in the world. He lives in stolen opulence while his people languish in squalor! He is nothing but a criminal and a thug and he is the tyrant that Obama only dreams of becoming.