12/2/2023 0 Comments Julia ioffe speaking russian![]() ![]() (Ironically, this is the approach Putin’s domestic critics accuse their president of using: How do you get back at the West for blacklisting Russian officials involved in the killing of the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky? Ban American adoptions of Russian orphans! They’ll never know what hit ‘em!) And as I recall, because apparently nobody in this town does, Putin went into Georgia on Bush’s watch, right smack dab in the middle of us having over 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq.” Obama repudiates the “crazy Nixon” thesis, which says, essentially: Be crazy, be unpredictably harsh, and geopolitics are your oyster. Bush was overly rational or cautious in his use of military force. ![]() “I don’t think anybody thought that George W. “Look, this theory is so easily disposed of that I’m always puzzled by how people make the argument,” Obama says. Just like the ‘costs’ Obama imposed on the Assad regime in Syria?”īut did Obama’s refusal to bomb Syria in 2013 really give Putin the green light in Ukraine? It is a question Jeffrey Goldberg poses to Obama, who, of course, swats it away. ‘Costs?’ Vladimir Putin must have thought. Bush speechwriter and American Enterprise Institute fellow, wrote in 2014, “you could hear the laughter emanating from the Kremlin-followed by the sound of Russian military vehicles roaring into Crimea and seizing control of the peninsula. ![]() “When President Obama declared Friday that ‘there will be costs’ for any Russian intervention in Ukraine,” Marc Thiessen, the former George W. It’s not a college lecture, sure, but maybe at least let the expert get a word in? “Otherwise,” Ioffe wrote, “don’t waste my fucking evening.” O’Donnell, at least, played the good sport on Twitter, linking to Ioffe’s original article on the matter, calling it the “best thing” he read on the subject, and adding, “Thanks for joining us.Since the summer of 2013, when President Obama walked up to the red line over the use of chemical weapons in Syria and then pivoted away from it, it’s become something of a truism among Washington hawks that this bit of cowardice paved the way for Russia’s Vladimir Putin to take Crimea and invade eastern Ukraine some six months later. She proceeded to make a simple, bullet-pointed list of arguments that would never be allowed on cable television because they reveal an ability to think outside a black or white, good or bad, America or Russia dichotomy. In a post for the New Republic, Ioffe insisted, “god damn it, I know my shit.” Obama’s decision to not meet with Putin one-on-one, she wrote, was a good one, but it was larger than Snowden. The segment, mercifully, ended, but the fight did not. In general, people who haven’t been to Russia tend to overestimate their abilities.” Ioffe added, “We really overestimate Putin’s abilities.” O’Donnell, voiced raised Newsroom style, stressed Putin’s all-consuming power and exclaimed, “Let’s not be ridiculous about this!” and “We’re getting absurd now!” To which Ioffe asked, “Have you reported out of Russia?” “But I think you do overestimate the Russians. “They had and still have complete power over his every breath,” especially Putin. Russia had “complete, total, absolute control over that outcome,” he said. “There was really nothing the Russians could do,” said Ioffe, which really set O’Donnell off. She argued that Snowden was a “headache” for Russia, but that the country could not let him go once the Bolivian plane thought to be holding him was downed in Austria. First, Ioffe, a Moscow-based “expert” (her word) on Russia, appeared on the show. MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell and New Republic journalist Julia Ioffe had it out last night in a most entertaining fashion over Russia’s handling of the Edward Snowden case, ending in a withering blog post in which the writer called the talking head an “angry grandpa” and accused him of “O’Reilly”-ing her. ![]()
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