Oh, Please Say it is Not So, Roger K!

Putin’s Horrifying Mirror:

What was it about Putin’s op-ed that so inflamed establishment opinion? In a word, it is the fact that it was a perfectly accurate mirror.  The Washington nomenklatura  and their liberal enablers looked into Putin’s op-ed and they saw a most hideous sight: their own rancid clichés repeated back to them in mocking, church-like tones.  “A Plea for Caution From Russia” — how dare he say to us what we have been saying to troglodytic conservatives for decades? And in our paper,  the New York Times. (That was Putin’s final act of genius, to publish  his column in the liberals’ own Bible, where his high-horse moralistic tones — right down to his concluding invocation of God and equality — would be sure to echo most forcefully.) That pulpit had been hitherto reserved for liberal demagogues: how dare a renegade like Putin don the cassock and deliver our own sermon to us?  What gall! What effrontery!

For that was his sin: saying to liberals what liberals for years have been saying to anyone who would listen.  As James Piereson pointed out in a stellar column yesterday, “what President Putin said in his column is pretty much what American liberals and leftists have been saying about the United States since the 1960s.” Go back and take a look at what he wrote. If you feel your palms getting slightly moist, if there is some clutching at the back of your throat, if, like Senator Menendez, you “almost want to vomit,” it’s because your own emetic pieties are particularly noxious when they are first regurgitated by someone else.  Those are those hardest to swallow. Piereson is right: “there is nothing the least bit new or controversial in anything Mr. Putin wrote in his column.” It’s just what leftists from Obama on down have been saying for years, only now someone else is saying it to them.

Indeed.

What actually galled me wasn't what Putin said (or the fact that he had the chutzpah to say it in the "Paper of Record"), so much as the "Paper of Record" had the temerity to print it on the anniversary of 9/11 (oh, I'm sorry, I meant to say Patriot Day).