Once Again, Maria Sharapova Crashes and Burns

It seems like only yesterday that so-called “Russian” tennis player Maria Sharapova was crashing and burning in the All-England club in the Wimbledon final.  Playing a lower-seeded opponent, Sharapova was blown off the court in straight sets after just 85 minutes on the court. She struck a hideous total of just ten winning shots, saw her serve broken five times, tossed in six double faults and won just seven of nineteen games played.

But it wasn’t Wimbledon, that was last year, it was the Australian Open that took place yesterday, and saw Sharapova once again reaching the finals and collapsing just as spectacularly.   The match lasted just 82 minutes this time, even shorter than the last one, and Sharapova made a ghastly 30 unforced errors compared to just 12 by her opponent. She failed to win a single game in the second set and again saw her vaunted serve broken five times. Her second serve, supposedly one of the best in the game, totally failed, resulting in just three total points won in the entire match.  After reaching 3-3 in the first set, breaking her opponent’s opening service game, Sharapova did not win a single game the rest of the way through the match, losing nine straight.

McFaul & Obama Continue to Betray their Country

On Pajamas Media Kim Zigfeld exposes the mendacious treachery of Barack Obama and his Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul as they continue to carry out their despicable policy of appeasement regarding the Putin dictatorship.

And on the American Thinker, Zigfeld blasts Obama’s State of the Union address, which was as full of lies about Russia as a Politburo propaganda festival.

Michael McFaul is an Obama-Sized Idiot

“All in the open, all the time. Secrets only reinforce stereotypes. Cold war over long ago. Our time to do differently.”

That was one of the first tweets by America’s new ambassador to Russian Kremlin, Michael McFaul. Just before that, he’d tweeted: “This is going to be fun.”

One has to wonder what news sources McFaul has been reading, if any.

Not his own country’s official mouthpiece, the Voice of America, surely. If he’d read that, he’d know that Russia was threatening war with the United States if the latter dared to send any troops to Russia’s bosom pal, Syria.

Nor the Washington Post, which reported that Russia was making similar threats in the event of any military incursion into Iran, Russia’s other bestie in the region.

Also not perusing Time magazine, which revealed that the Kremlin was accusing the U.S. of shooting down peaceful Russian spacecraft, just for spite apparently.

In fact, the news virtually overflows with conclusive proof that the cold war is far from over. Russia is ruled by a proud KGB spy who spent his life learning how to hate and destroy America. He is rehabilitating Stalin, he is restoring the Soviet national anthem, and he is engaged in an all-out assault on American values. He is massively increasing Russia’s military budget and aggressively seeking to reestablish the Soviet empire.

In fact, the only one who doesn’t know the cold war is still being waged is Barack Obama, whose propaganda line McFaul is eager to reiterate to anyone stupid enough to listen. Talk about an ugly American!

 

Rogozin Declares War

“Iran is our neighbour. And if Iran is involved in any military action, it’s a direct threat to our security. We are definitely interested in the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But at the same time, we believe that any country has the right to have what it needs to feel comfortable, including Iran.”

That was newly promoted arch-nationalist Dmitry Rogozin, speaking to reporters in Brussels last week.  Now a deputy prime minister, just one of several new hard-liners brought into the Putin cabinet to support a crackdown in the run-up to presidential elections in March, Rogozin is speaking for the Kremlin.

And the Kremlin was saying, in other words,  not just that Russia supports Iran in its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, but that it will view an attack on Iran as an attack on Russia.

So much for the vaunted Obama “reset.”  The only thing that has changed since Obama became president is that Russia now sees it faces a weakling who will do nothing as Russia obliterates democracy at home and sows the seeds of discontent abroad, seeds which undermine the West and its values while at the same time working to drive up world oil prices so Russia can profit.

 

 

Lies and the Lying Russian Liars who Tell Them.

“You can’t have such strong capital outflow for so long.”

That was Russia’s Central Bank Chairman Sergei Ignatyev in April 2011, looking back on one of the most horrific fiscal quarters in Russian history.  But he promised the nation it could not continue, he promised that Russia would see capital inflows the rest of the year.

What actually happened was rather different.  The strong capital outflow did continue, and Russia recorded a net loss of over $80 billion in 2011, the worst year in Russian history except for 2008, when Russia’s stock market crashed and lost two-thirds of its value.  It was $5 billion more than “prime minister” Vladimir Putin predicted would be incurred in December, and $10 billion more than Ignatyev had predicted in November.

It was an absolute bloodbath, an utter repudiation of the Putin regime by Russian investors.

Why do the people of Russia continue to allow their chosen leaders to lie to them so brazenly, without consequences? Can’t they see that this exact form of misconduct is what destroyed the USSR? Don’t they realize that if their continue their reckless indifference to basic civic responsibility, their nation will be destroyed?

More Idiotic Gibberish about Russia on the Pages of the New York Times

The Gray Lady has published yet another ludicrously inane piece of disinformation about Russia.  On Sunday, Andrew Kramer wrote about a recent Kremlin effort to Photoshop opposition leader Navalny next to Boris Berezovsky under the headline “Smear in Russia Backfires, Online Tributes Roll In.”

The article is misguided at its core.  The fraudulent photograph was not published online but in the physical press, and its purpose was not to undermine Navalny with his online supporters.  To the contrary, it had the exact opposite purpose, to destroy any vestigial support Navalny might have with the mainstream press and in the general, non-virtual, population.

Russia Rejects Christmas

Both Russian “President” Dima Medvedev and Russian “Prime Minister” Vladimir Putin attended church services on Russian Orthodox Christmas, which occurs on January 7th. But very few of their fellow citizens followed their lead.  A shocking 90,000 people did so in Moscow, less than half the number that went to church in St. Petersburg, a city one-half Moscow’s size.  And across the country in Russia, just 2 million people went to church — barely more than 1% of Russia’s population.  Nearly 100,000 security forces were marshaled to keep these worshipers in line, lest the church’s words in support of the protest movement lead to Russians getting out of hand.

It appears, then, that very little has changed in Russia since Soviet times. The country is ruled by a proud KGB spy and the vast majority of Russians reject religion. Those who do not are closely supervised by governmental forces. If there is one change, it is that now Russia’s rulers rather than seeking to wipe out the church are instead seeking to manipulate  it for their own purposes.  Thus, even though Patriarch Kirill warned the Kremlin to heed the concerns of the protesters, he also issued a stern warning to the protesters: “If demonstrations ahead of the 1917 revolution had ended in the expression of peaceful protests and had not led to a bloody revolution and a fratricidal war, Russia would have had a population of more than 300 million and would have challenged or maybe even surpassed the United States from the point of view of economic development.”

More Spectacular Misreporting on Russia by Ellen Barry of the New York Times

Ellen Barry

There she goes again.

Via “reporter” Ellen Barry the New York Times is publishing some of the worst Russia journalism to be found anywhere these days.

We already reported on two other egregiously misleading articles by Barry in the NYT, and now we have a third. On New Year’s day, Barry published “A Dilemma for Russian Leaders, to Suppress Protests or Not” and the NYT touted it as a main feature on the home page of its website.

Ironically, that same day the Moscow Times reported that the Kremlin had ordered mass arrests of protesters just the day before. No dilemma here, folks. When Putin wants to arrest, he does so.

And that wasn’t the only key fact Barry totally ignored.  She also chose not to mention that protest activity in Moscow other than the 12/10 and 12/24 rallies organized by nationalist Aleksei Navalny were dismal failures (we refer specifically to the rally Yabloko organized and the demonstration in support of opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov — in both cases, only a tiny fraction of the Internet support materialized on the streets, and organizers were embarrassed).  Moreover, she ignored the fact that the protests on 12/24 were not remotely national in scope; Navalny was exposed as being unable to generate support of that kind.

Barry also chose to ignore recent polls that clearly show Russians rejecting both the message and the messenger where Navalny is concerned, and those that show support for Putin rising markedly the more Navalny works to discredit him.   Far from calling for “political rights” as Barry inaccurately reports, the only thing the protesters have asked for has been rerun of the parliamentary elections so that the communists and nationalists can collect (even) more votes.

Barry’s attempt to link the Moscow protests to the revolution that toppled the Tsar is so ludicrous as to bespeak mental illness. Navalny has not even tried to become a candidate for office, much less does he preside over anything remotely like a national political movement. And for good reason:  He doesn’t have a national base of support, just a clique in Moscow that follows him on the Internet.  He’s a Russian version of Joel Osteen or Howard Stern.

Then Barry just starts lying. She writes: ” The crowd is pausing now, as for a deep breath.” That’s totally false. The reason the crowd is pausing is to drink itself silly for several weeks in celebration of the New Year’s holiday. It’s pretty telling that Russians care more about a drunken party than they do about their country’s future.  Also pretty telling how aggressively Barry seeks to rationalize this failure rather than expose it.

One has the distinct impression that, at least subconsciously, Barry knows that the lack of arrests on 12/10 and 12/24 is not good for her narrative about revolution in Russia, a narrative which just so happens to call for her Russia-reporting services to become much more important and sensational (only a coincidence, of course). So she’s eager to invent a rationalization which has Putin fretting and worried about what to do next.  But the fact is that the protesters are simply not that scary, and Putin can’t be bothered to confront them.  The protesters don’t have a dog in the March presidential race, just as they didn’t have one in the parliamentary elections in December.  They don’t have a credible agenda, and they don’t show real revolutionary fervor (they won’t demonstrate at all in the month of January).  Putin is not the least bit unclear about when to order arrests and when to ignore the protesters. It is the protesters who are fretting and worrying, and Putin who is smiling.

Quite simply, this is not journalism, it is  self-interested cheerleading, and Ms. Barry ought to be ashamed. We call for her to apologize and begin telling the truth about the protests in Moscow.