RUSSIA

Anti-War.com: NOW THEY'RE AFTER PUTIN

The decisive victory of Russian President Vladimir Putin's "United
Russia" slate of candidates for the Duma is the occasion for a new round of
Putin-bashing, with "human rights officials" condemning the election
results as "a retreat from Russia's democratic reforms."

Just what is a "human rights official," anyway? The way the Associated
Press puts it, one might almost suppose that we're talking about
elected officials here, or else guardian angels appointed by God to watch over
the human race in His stead. In either case, these unofficial officials
deserve to be recalled forthwith, just on the basis of their phony complaints
about the Russian electoral process:

"International observers delivered a blistering assessment of the vote,
calling it free but not fair. Taxpayer money and state television was
used to benefit a few parties, monitors said in their criticism."

When the Republicans run television ads featuring Bush's Top Gun
landing on that aircraft carrier, I wonder if these same monitors will lodge
complaints about inappropriate use of taxpayers' money. The
state-supported media of the OSCE countries – in whose name the rebuke to Putin was
issued – all have an indisputable political bias, and the problem is
even worse in Eastern Europe.

Bruce George, head of the OSCE's "parliamentary assembly," had the
nerve to pontificate that the election "failed to meet ... international
standards."
The White House endorsed this hypocritical hyperbole, noting "concerns
about the fairness of the election campaign. We share those concerns."
George openly worried that, "because of the use of administrative
resourcesand the biased media, legitimate democratic opposition parties would
notget the 5 percent of the vote they need to enter parliament."

If every government that used "administrative resources" to gain
electoral advantage were to be expelled from the ranks of democratic nations, who
would be left? As for "biased media" – is this something that the
Western media, which "embedded" itself in the U.S. government's war propaganda
machine, have the right to lecture the Russians about?

The real complaint of Putin's Western critics is that the Russian
parties favored by Washington and its Euro-weenie satellites – Yabloko and the
Union of Right Forces – failed to get the 5 percent required to garner
seats in the Duma. The election was "free but not fair" – because they
didn't like the results.