Amid reports that Ukrainian separatists (in collusion with their Russian patrons) are destroying evidence from the Malaysian Flight 17 debris field, Josh Marshall notes a striking similarity between separatist leader (who at first claimed credit for the shoot down) Igor Strelkov and fantasists in another part of the world. Marshall first quotes from a Dave Remnick New Yorker blog posting, then adds his commentary:
“Strelkov is well known for leading historical reënactments of Russian military battles, like you have in the States with the Civil War reënactors,” Pavlovsky said. “It used to be a fantasy world for people like him, but now they have a realm for their imaginations.”
So that's who you're dealing with: some mix of civil war reenactor or Tea Partier decked out in revolutionary garb, with a mix of reckless aggression and comical incompetence. Here we have them break into nursing homes to photographs senator's comatose wives*; there Putin gives them heavy armaments designed for full scale land war in Europe.The comparison can't be dismissed off-hand. Remember the tea-bagging right-wingers in this country who compared Putin favorably to President Obama? We do.
UPDATE: Igor's floating a ghoulish theory that only a madman or moron would believe:
According to the Associated Press, rebel commander Igor Girkin [a.k.a. Strelkov] said on the Russkaya Vesna website that witnesses to the crash have informed him that “a significant number of the bodies weren’t fresh” when they fell from the sky. He also claimed that many of them had been drained of blood and stank of decomposition because they had been dead for days.
* Bonus points for the Chris McDaniel reference!
