Trust me, Comrades....

“Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall…”

With those words, President Ronald Reagan inadvertently broke it off in America’s ass. At least with the Soviet Union as the Bad Guys, we knew what we were getting. Now? Everyone is enamored of the notion that the Russians are Good Guys and our bestest buddies.

Back in 1989, what with all the perestroika and glasnost and general thawing of the Cold War, came the end of communism as The Holy Terror of the 20th Century. This was a Good Thing. Down came the Berlin Wall and Germany reunified. This was a Good Thing that I witnessed first hand at its earliest stages. The Warsaw Pact broke apart and Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania were again free to decide their own fates. The good people of Czechoslovakia parted ways amicably and became Slovakia & the Czech Republic. Sadly, the Yugoslavians broke up into a big nasty mess of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and a dozen other microrepublics all hating each other. But communism had failed and we all danced a merry jig.

However, we now had all these fledgling democracies teetering on shaky ground, rife with black markets, graft, corruption, and organized crime. This is was a Worrisome Thing. And then we had all these shady fuckers running around selling shoplifted Soviet weapons, from AK’s to tanks, MiG’s to manpack nukes. This was a Bad Thing.

But yet we still danced a merry jig, because at least they weren’t Communists.
They may have been unstable and dangerous, but they were unstable and dangerous “democracies”. The Czechs elected a novelist as their President, and the Poles, to no one’s surprise, elected everyone’s favorite shipyard electrician and union leader as president. Romania and Bulgaria had teething problems in starting their republics, too.

I’m still not 100% ready to trust the Russian government. It’s hard to trust people who grew up not liking us and in many cases still don’t like us, who have many many nuclear weapons to point at us, and many more that they claim to have destroyed but damned well didn’t. It’s a big country with lotsa places to hide little bombs.It's still sometimes hard to trust people I once trained to go to war against.

The current ranks of political apparatchiks and nomenklatura in Russia grew up knowing nothing but communism until the early 90’s, and you didn’t get to any decent managerial positions by thinking the Amerikanskis were comrades. (C’mon, despite changing governments you can’t expect to just replace EVERYONE who ran the administrations; that’s a lotta people to instantly replace with people who know how to run infrastructure). So you have all these hard-line, dyed-in-the-wool Reds who are about to be very unemployed and start humming Yankee Doodlevitch. It was under the Soviet systems that these guys developed their power bases. You can call it “democracy” all you want but I assure you that deep down the place (and military) is still being run at least somewhat like the Politburo did before Smilin’ Mike Gorbachev tore down that wall.

The Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB, Committee for State Security) became the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB, Federal Security Service). Just because you change names doesn’t mean you changed missions, and why hire an ass of new people when you have perfectly well-trained employees already in-house? Though the FSB handles demoestic stuff like our FBI and the FIS (Foreign Intelligence Service, or formerly the KGB’s First Chief Directorate) is like our CIA and does the spying on us. The KGB gave us former Soviet leaders Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev, and now current Russian president Vladimir Putin. (Former heads of the KGB have run Moscow since November 12, 1982.)

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Putin smile, except for that rther awkward incident where he kissed that little boy on the abdomen. He just kinda looks at you with cold dead eyes as if contemplating where to dump your body. The dude scares me.

He makes backdoor deals with people who don’t like us, such as Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He still owns as ass of nukes. He’s said that if we put up a misile defense shield in Europe to defend our NATO allies against missile attacks from the Midle East, he’ll see that as aggression and start pointing nukes at us again. What a dick. And he says it lke they ever stopped ointing nukes at us in the first place. Please. Believe THAT and I’ll sell you some of Colonel Khadaffi’s Jheri Curl juice.

Good old Vlad comes over to visit last month to schmooze and make nice with noted genius Gee-Dubya Bush at Dad’s house in Maine, to eat lobstah, go fishing, and presumably work out some issues. More like “I’ll fly over, eat his food, drink his Scotch, chill on the ocean, feed him a line of govno and then go back to waiting for his term to end so I can kick the next poor bastard in the balls”.

His advance party of FSB/FIS agents were caught by a watchful clerk at the state liquor store in Portsmouth, NH trying to pass a phony $100.00 bill for two bottles of Scotch. Liquor store manager Mike Smith said the cashier used a special pen to mark the bill to test its authenticity. "It turned a color that it's not supposed to, and when he saw that, he grabbed the bill back and left," said Smith.

Portsmouth police received a call from the liquor store that the man and his friends were on foot, headed to the nearby Holiday Inn. (I’m intimately familiar with both locations. It’s a 2-minute stroll.) Police responded to the scene; a dispatch message on the police scanner said diplomatic immunity might be involved. But police said that diplomatic immunity was not invoked because police did not make any arrests. The media hushed it up pretty quickly.

So we have the Russian intelligence apparatus passing phony American bills all over the place (don’t feed me any bullshit that they were given a fake Benjamin at the Piscataqua Savings Bank on Pleasant Street. They make these bills to finance their operations overseas at our expense) and we have another former KGB head pointing nukes at us and making buddy-buddy with assclowns who hate us. But the American Sheeple think he’s our friend.

Not cool.