But you are his apologist. You're not the one who comes up with excuses for bad US behavior.
No, and nor do I need to. The US has a vast machine for doing that already. However, I have a deep disgust for the hypocrisy. When Russia backs the government of Syria it is evil but when the US backs Islamic terrorists it calls itself good. Should Russia back Assad? Considering that the ACTUAL peaceful opposition in Syria has won concessions from Assad and there is no reasonable scenario where those concessions would be honoured by Islamic extremists and the US is not including the peaceful opposition at the table but insisting on its hand picked mercenaries being recognized as the true opposition, I think the US play on this game is far worse than Putin. Compared to the US, Putin is taking the moral high ground. I know that you have disagreed with me on this for a long time. You are firm in your opinion that funding ruthless religious terrorists and fomenting civil war to topple a secular regime is an end of sufficient good that it justifies the "temporary" evil - even though the reformers who started this didn't want and don't want civil war or theocracy. The US has behaved much worse than the Russians in Syria.
However, when anyone else does the exact same thing you stay silent. Russia invades Chechnya?
Exact same thing? Russia and Chechnya have been at war for over 200 years. It's a "bad" thing, sure, but it's not exactly the same thing. The latest war is basically a war of independence which makes it much more like the US Civil war than any current war of conquest - the conquest being much further in the past. For all intents and purposes Chechnya is part of Russia. If Hawaii tried to leave the US or Quebec tried to leave Canada ... it could get ugly.
Georgia shells Ossetia, which is disputed and inhabited by people that see themselves as Russians and Russia rolls through Ossetia and kicks Georgian butt. They degraded military targets in Georgia then left after five days. I'm no sure what US campaign that would parallel. NATO was not happy with the leader of Georgia about that little episode.
and by Syria drops cluster munitions on Syrians?
The use of cluster bombs is deeply wrong in my opinion, but who is the US to criticize Syria on this. The US reserve the right to use cluster bombs and won't sign any treaties banning their use. If the US condemns someone for cluster bombing people (any people) then why isn't it necessary to point out that they are hypocrites? And our illustrious Harper is asserting the right for Canada to use cluster munitions even under the treaty if it happens to be participating in a joint campaign with a non-treaty member - that would be the US and that would be ALL our campaigns. So why is it OK just to ignore the fact that when Canada criticizes Syria for using cluster bombs it's not because Canada thinks cluster bombs are wrong.
And when we talk about Syria dropping cluster bombs on its own people IN A CIVIL WAR we don't care if certain other countries haver no objection to killing their own citizens and whatever innocent civilians are around those targets so long as it is done with a hellfire missile from an unmanned drone and not a cluster bomb. By what right can "we" make these criticisms of others when we reserve the right to do almost exactly the same thing.
If it's wrong for them then it's wrong for us but we shouldn't be trying to fix them before we fix us. See the mote in your own eye before criticizing the speck in anothers. And does it really matter, when we cluster bomb other people, that they aren't "our" people? If we were not at least as bad as Russia in every way (and we are much worse because we CAN be) then it would be fair and useful to criticize Russia. In fact, it might even be fair to criticize Russia if we were criticizing them for things we aren't actually doing ourselves.
So Russia passes a law saying you can't tell kids about gays. OK, we can say that's wrong but the US has no right to say it so long as it has a majority of states with similar laws. And does Russia's law really rise to the level that we should condemn it over and above the anti gay laws of so many of our friends. Iran puts gays to death and that is so much more heinous - but so do Mauritania, Sudan and Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Mind you, there is a lot of sympathy for the position of hanging gays in certain Christian groups. Maybe it's not the persecution so much as who's doing it that matters, eh?
Yes the US wants Ukraine, as does the EU and as does Russia. It's really up to Ukraine and it's really Russia that is meddling the most in the Ukraine.
Russia is meddling because they have relations with the politicians. The US also has relations with the politicians. But the US is paying protesters to protest and has been funding and training protest groups for years. It's the same networks here that fomented the Balkan war and the Libyan insurgency from Benghazi and others. And, as the intercepts show, the US is heavily involved in influencing and elevating "opposition" leaders.
So far so not surprising - but Russia is willing to cut Ukraine a much better deal that the EU is. The EU will give them some beads and blankets and then rape them like Greece and give them over to NATO to build a US base on. That's about all they'll get.
Because Russia is on the weak side of this deal they are offering a much better financing arrangement and significant energy benefits. Accepting the Russian deal will be better over the next few decades for the Ukrainian people than accepting the EU offer. If the EU were forced to improve its offer that would be seen as a defeat. They'd much rather win dirty. It's a power thing. Hegemony demands unconditional surrender.
and your response to my contention that petty anti-Russianism is agenda drivin:
Now you're just going into wacko land.
The Olympic Rings "debacle" is a debacle in your mind and that's about it.
Not at all in my mind. In my mind it was a minor malfunction unworthy of reporting. The fact that Russian TV cut away to show rehearsal footage was even less newsworthy, but, oh, what a lovely little cheap shot to trot out against the people we love to hate.
The rings fail was funny and will live on to be an internet meme for the same reason all other memes exist: it was funny.
Oh. It was FUNNY. I thought it was merely unfortunate. I guess I'm just weird. Like in Vancouver, instead of going "Har har" when something goes wrong I feel bad for the people that worked so hard to pull something off and then had it go wrong on the big day. I will practice having less empathy so I can watch those hilarious "skateboarding gone wrong" videos on the internet that seem so popular.
If Harper had the CBC doctor the video feed to show perfectly lit cauldrons in Vancouver I would have lambasted him for that and I suspect you would too.
The music tracks for the live bands at the London Olympics were pre-recorded. Oooh. I detect the sinister machinations of Tony Blair. Not.
Politicians want things to go well because they have a lot on the line - but the technicians and the directors and the artists all want it to go well too. Should we consider that they might have had something to do with it as well?
