The Tea Party has a longstanding love affair with Putin. I wonder if Russia [View all]

[pnwmom]

has been helping the Tea Party for years.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/06/tea-party-putin-moscow-ukraine/

year ago, well before U.S.-Russia relations began their precipitous unraveling, conservative pundit Pat Buchanan set right-wing circles in the United States abuzz by suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “one of us” — a paleoconservative defender of traditional Christian values and a foe to “homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values” personified by Barack Obama’s America.

Even while opposing Moscow’s subsequent annexation of Crimea and its strong-arm tactics in eastern Ukraine, prominent far-right voices — from Sen. Ted Cruz and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to many at Fox News — gleefully lauded Putin’s strength and decisiveness as hallmarks of a “real leader.”* Other pundits, meanwhile, pontificate over what this apparent paradox says about the Tea Party, the libertarian movement that has arguably consumed the Republican agenda.

But no one has considered what the comparison says about Putin’s Russia. Both Tea Party America and Putin’s Russia share patriotic and ultraconservative Christian worldviews, which each fears is under threat from liberal forces both at home and abroad. This fear — even among a passionate, educated, and politically savvy population — is reinforced by partisan media outlets that fundamentally recast history to confirm rather than challenge preconceptions and that spin outlandish conspiracy theories in the process.

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In Russia, Putin’s conservative base also gets its news from a singular partisan perspective: broadcasts on state-run television. With a near-total monopoly on the airwaves, pro-Kremlin TV is like Fox on steroids. Since 2011, attacks on independent publishing, television, radio, print, and even social media have dramatically narrowed the space for independent journalism and debate. From its dominant perch, pro-Kremlin media has dramatically shaped public opinion with its omnipresent, fear-laced narrative of a Russia besieged politically by the United States, culturally by liberal European values, and demographically by darker-skinned immigrants crossing the porous southern border — themes no doubt familiar to American conservatives.

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