EU Riga summit 'not against Russia', Merkel says

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8. Obama Is Defaming Putin, Complains Harper’s Cover Story

In the Harper’s cover story on the Obama presidency, “What Went Wrong,” David Bromwich recapitulates mostly familiar grounds of left-wing disenchantment with the administration. (It is not available online because Harper’s hates the internet.) Bromwich, though, arrives on creative new ground when he gets around to denouncing Obama’s policy toward Russia, which involves such crimes as “the defamation of Vladimir Putin”:

Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, boasted in December 2013 that the United States had spent $5 billion since 1991 in the attempt to convert Ukraine into a Western asset. The later stages of the enterprise called for the defamation of Vladimir Putin, which went into high gear with the 2014 Sochi Olympics and has not yet abated.

Sadly, Bromwich does not spell out the details of this campaign of defamation, leaving his readers to imagine. Poor Putin, viciously smeared by Obama. His only crime was loving the eastern portion of Ukraine a bit too much, and, perhaps, shirtwear too little.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/obama-is-defaming-putin-complains-harpers.html