E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, looking at Russian thug and war criminal Vladimir Putin's recent annual speech on the state of his country:
"Here’s a scoop for you: Vladimir Putin is sounding like someone who wants to enter the 2024 Republican presidential primaries.
How else do you explain that in the middle of his bellicose speech Tuesday promising success in his assault on Ukraine, the Russian dictator fired a series of heat-seeking verbal missiles into our culture wars.
'Look at what they’ve done to their own people,' he said of us Westerners. 'They’re destroying family, national identity, they are abusing their children. Even pedophilia is announced as a normal thing in the West.' Never mind that Russia is a world leader in sex trafficking.
Putin didn’t stop there. In one rather convoluted passage, he came out against same-sex marriage, backed off a bit, and then doubled down. [snip]
It has become a habit to cast the struggle over Ukraine in Cold War terms. Maybe that’s natural, given Putin’s old job as a KGB agent and his determination to expand Russia’s imperial reach to something closer to the hegemony once enjoyed by the old Soviet Union.
But it’s closer to the truth to see Putin as trying to build a right-wing nationalist international movement (no pun intended). And it’s obvious that his embrace of social and religious traditionalism is aimed at winning over right-wing opinion in the democracies and splitting the traditional right.
You don’t have to watch Fox News commentators waxing warm about the Russian president to see that this strategy is working. Opposition to helping Ukraine is growing among rank-and-file Republicans." (our emphasis)
Putin is succeeding as far as the extreme MAGA right in this country is concerned. Recent polls cited by Dionne indicate that support for aid to Ukraine has slipped in the past year, no doubt due to the likes of fifth columnists like Tucker "Tovarich" Carlson's yeoman efforts in broadcasting Kremlin talking points. There are examples in other countries like the UK (Nigel Farage), France (Marine LePen) and Hungary (Viktor Orbán) of far right movements that have received support from Putin, overtly or surreptitiously. With the twice-impeached, disgraced leader of the Republican / Secessionist / Shooters party openly admiring and currying favor with Putin, it's not hard to see why his sheeple follow.
