LR/DR founder and publisher Kim Zigeld has added a third publication to her portfolio of employers: RUSSIA! magazine joins Pajamas Media and American Thinker as host to Kim’s commentary on the Land of the Midnight Gun.
Kim’s first essay for RUSSIA! is up and running now, it’s a dialogue with fellow Russian columnist Georgy Bovt regarding the latest round of anti-democratic crackdowns by Vladimir Putin entitled “Kung Fu Putin.” Pow!
The last time the Winter Olympiad was staged, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada, Russia received a paltry total of just three gold medals, failing even to make the top ten nations on that criteria. It was a disastrous, humiliating disgrace for Russia, which had only 15 medals in total, placing it sixth overall in that category.
The next Winter Olympiad will be staged in Sochi, Russia next year. Costs have soared completely out of control, and the event will cost significantly more than the Summer Olympiad recently hosted by London, even though the winter games are a much smaller enterprise. The reason isn’t that the Russian games will be so luxurious, of course, but that Russian corruption has eaten away the nation’s resources. Russia is trying to hide the burden on the national treasury by using “contributions” from state-controlled companies instead of budgetary funds, but nobody is fooled.
But that craziness is nothing compared to the completely deranged, psychotic statements of Russian Olympic Committee President Aleksandr Zhukov. He has gone on record as predicting that Russia will triple its total medal count and multiply its gold medal count by a factor of five!. It will win 15 gold medals and 45 total medals, he says, to lead all nations. That is one more gold medal than gold total winner Canada won in Vancouver, and 8 more total medals than world-leading USA won in Vancouver.
You read that right: Russia claims it will win five times more gold medals and three times more total medals just because the games are held on Russia soil. A cynic might say the only way that could happen would be by cheating.
Compared to 2006, host Canada only managed to double its gold-medal count in Vancouver, and its total medal count increased by just two medals, from 24 to 26. In other words, there was virtually no increase in total medals, Canada simply got significantly better at a half-dozen events where it had previously won less than gold.
Russia’s pie-in-the-sky, emperor’s-new-clothes craziness is nothing new. Soviet leaders used to make insane statements like this all the time, and of course Russia is ruled by a KGB spy who himself issues deranged statements of this kind on a routine basis. When Russia fails to deliver on this promise, the reason will be clear: Russia is all crazy talk, no action. It prefers to create a world of self-deception than to roll up its sleeves and get to work.
Over on the mighty Pajamas Media mega blog, Kim Zigfeld exposes NYU/Princeton professor Steven Cohen for the treacherous little weasel he is. Cohen has a blog on the Voice Russia website, and tirelessly campaigns in favor of KGB dictator Vladimir Putin and his merciless crackdown on American values.
On January 18, 2013, Daniel Sanford of the BBC breathlessly tweeted: “In-form Maria Sharapova wipes Venus Williams off the court at Australian Open 6-1, 6-3.”
Six days later, still on the Sharapova band wagon, he gushed: “Maria Sharapova beats fellow Russian Ekaterina Makarova to reach Australian Open semi-finals.”
But he was strangely silent on January 24th. That’s when Sharapova met her very first tough, serious opponent in draw, one Na Li from China. And though ranked well below Sharapova, the Chinese opponent blew Sharapova off the court in easy straight sets, breaking Sharapova’s serve five times and allowing her to win only four of 16 games played.
In form? Sharapova tossed in a whopping 32 unforced errors and added a revolting six double faults. The much more diminutive Chinese player, who had won only four of twelve prior contests with the Russian, decisively whipped Shamapova in every aspect of the game, exposing the Russian’s route to the semi-finals for the fraud it was.
Two of the three Russians who reached the quarter finals at the Aussie this year turned in disgraceful performances there, and the only reason one reached the semi finals was that two met each other in the quarters. Sharapova, surely one of the luckiest humans who ever lived, faced the second-lowest seeded player to reach the quarters, and in the fourth round was lucky enough to be one of only four players in the round of 16 to face an unseeded opponent. Each and every opponent she met before the semi-finals simply collapsed and handed her the match. When she finally met someone not quite so obliging, she herself collapsed like a house of cards.
Sharapova isn’t even a real Russian. She left her country when a young child and chooses to live in the USA, though her massive wealth would allow her to live anywhere. To the extent she can play tennis at all, it’s because of American teachers, and she virtually never goes home for a visit. She’s married to a non-Russian. As if to confirm this, and add insult to injury, she was booted off the Russian national tennis team.
To be fair, Sanford wasn’t the only one to totally miss the boat on Shamapova, plenty of other journalists did too: Check out this idiot for example claiming that “champagne Sharapova” had “plenty left in the tank.” But Sanford is one of those reporters we watched breathlessly misreport the Russian opposition movement, claiming it was changing Russia forever when in fact it was doing no such thing. So it’s particularly important to point out he’s still ranging far from the path of truth.
There simply aren’t that many places you can read the truth about Russia from folks who actually understand the place. Fortunately for you, this is one of them. If you had been following our coverage of Maria’s misadventures, you wouldn’t have been the least surprised by what happened in the semis at this year’s Aussie Open.
In a January 10, 2013 piece for Russia Beyond the Headlines, the Kremlin’s wholly-owned propaganda mouthpiece in English, Alexey Dolinskiy wrote: “A February 2012 U.S. Gallup poll showed that only 2 percent of Americans see Russia as an enemy.”
It was an absurd lie. The Gallup poll in question did not ask Americans whether Russia was “an” enemy, it asked whether Russia was America’s “greatest” enemy. Another Gallup poll that same month showed that negative attitudes on the part of Americans towards Russia had nearly doubled over the prior four years, while positive attitudes had fallen by by 15%. There is a consistent trend of increasing hostility towards Russia by Americans as Russia becomes ever less democratic. RBTH headlines ignores that, of course, because it is not consistent with its propaganda efforts to undermine American opposition to the Kremlin. And this consistent trend is all the more impressive because throughout this period the Obama administration has been engaged in relentless pro-Kremlin appeasement.
During the last U.S. presidential election, Republican challenger Mitt Romney called Russia America’s “greatest geopolitical foe” because it is “the nation which lines up with the world’s worst actors” against the United States. And there’s no disputing this contention. Russia has sided strongly against democracy with murderous regimes all across the world, from Cuba and Venezuela to Egypt, Libya and Syria. More than 60 million Americans voted for Romney to become president.
Then there’s Obama’s own Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who recently gave a speech which was closely similar to the “Iron Curtain” speech delivered at the outset of the Cold War by Winston Churchill. She warned that Putin is now working feverishly to bring back the dark days of the USSR and Russian domination of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia.
Europe maintains similar or even more intensely hostile views towards Russia.
Russia Beyond the Headlines, of course, like its Kremlin masters themselves, simply doesn’t care about the facts. Instead, all it wants to do is churn out propaganda that will undermine American resolve to confront neo-Soviet crackdowns and aggression.
Dying Russia 