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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
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Nov. 19, 2009
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Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review July 12, 2006 / 16 Tamuz, 5766

Try though he might, Putin can't extinguish democracy

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | MOSCOW — The Other Russia Congress met here today, with over 3,000 people in attendance, along with hundreds of police to keep tabs on them. They are a hardy bunch, daring to show their faces amid a growing crackdown on democracy in Russia.


One knowledgeable leader of the congress told us "there is no difference — none — between the level of repression now and that which prevailed under Brezhnev." While President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice content themselves with lamenting "backsliding" on democracy, the naked truth is that Russia is now as repressive as it was under communism.


"Extremist" groups can be barred from participating in elections — and President Vladimir Putin defines who is and is not an extremist. The media, newspapers and television, are firmly under government control. Opposition views are simply not heard, and the news media just parrot government propaganda. Putin has cracked down on Voice of America and Radio Free Europe broadcasts, threatening stations that air them, effectively reducing their range to only Moscow and St. Petersburg.


Members of the Duma are selected from party slates — i.e. handpicked by Putin — and direct-election single-member districts have been abolished. Putin appoints governors, and the last democratically elected governor was arrested last month.


The former catalyst for the freedom and democracy movement, Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is in prison, serving an eight-year sentence. The jail is 12 miles from the Chinese border in a uranium-mining area where the radioactivity reduces life expectancy to 42 years. His sentence might as well be death. And, to make his life even worse in this frozen hell, where temperatures drop to 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, his face was recently slashed by a fellow inmate and he was locked in solitary confinement until his hunger strike forced his release back to the normal prison population.


This is Putin's Russia.


But democracy is stirring. Important national leaders like former Prime Minister (under Putin) Mikhail Kasyanov, the leader of the People's Democratic Union, and former chess champion Gary Kasparov are attacking Putin's autocracy. Kasyanov might run against the dictator's handpicked choice in 2008 unless Putin changes the constitution to allow himself to run for reelection. If he does, Kasyanov will give him a heck of a fight.


And the Bush administration? Quiet as a mouse. Bush and Rice have allowed Russia to stay in the G-8 with a democracy record no better than China's, which remains excluded. They are even considering opening Western oil markets to Russian exports.


Meanwhile, Putin is using oil diplomacy — or really energy aggression — to try to cow his former satellites into submission. He has tried to quintuple gas prices to Ukraine. He's bribed former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder with a $300,000-year-job with Gazprom, the Russian gas company, to OK and help fund a pipeline from Russia to Germany under the Baltic. The pipeline threatens to cut off gas supplies to Poland and Ukraine to punish them for their apostasy. He won't buy Moldovan or Georgian wine to punish their freedom movements. (The United States should immediately lift its trade restrictions on wines from these two freedom-loving nations).


One has to ask whether the neocons of the Bush administration are on the job. No real pressure is coming from Washington, and Bush's approach is pathetically weak. Putin is buying them off with a commitment to take our used nuclear fuel off our hands and by seductive temporizing over the Iranian nuclear issue. If Bush were to stand up to Putin as President Reagan did to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, Putin would be unable to get away with the mayhem he is undertaking in Russia and its former empire.


Richard Nixon once said of Bush senior that the world would ask, "Who lost Russia?" (an echo of his own 1950s question about China) if he did not increase aid to Moscow. Now the question of who lost Russia comes up again. And the answer, surprisingly is President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Rice.

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JWR contributor Dick Morris is author, most recently, of "Because He Could". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.) Comment by clicking here.



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