““Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country,” McCain told Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It’s kleptocracy, it’s corruption, it’s a nation that’s really only dependent upon oil and gas for their economy.”………………..”

I must admit it is a great sound bite. He is right about the corruption and kleptocracy and the funny political game that keeps Putin and his sidekick Medvedev in power forever. But, ah, Senator McCain, suppose next time you fly into Riyadh or Doha or a couple of other cities in our region and you are asked about this funny statement? I mean especially about that oil and gas station and the corruption and kleptocracy?

“Masquerading as a country”? Which reminds me of a long history, of a few dead gentlemen and ladies like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Pushkin and Turgenyev and Borodin and Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov and Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin (look him up) and Valentina Tereshkova (look her up), and some others. And a few places that probably suffered more than any other places in the last century: Stalingrad, Leningrad, Crimea (when it was Russian), Smolensk, etc, etc.……..
And then there were the soldiers who liberated Auschwitz: they were not from the EU (many of those were helping round up the victims) or from France or Saudi Arabia.
Then there was the Okhrana and the Gulag. And there was Stalin, but he was not Russian, he was a Georgian. No, not Dixie or CSA, the other Georgia, the one Senator McCain said “We are all Georgians” about.

Cheers
mhg