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Pity poor Edward Lozansky.
There he was on Monday morning about to open his sick, sordid little confabulation of Russophiles, seeking to dupe unwary Americans into dropping their guard and allowing Vladimir Putin to further consolidate his malignant rule over Russia. He'd lined up financial support for his dastardly enterprise from the Kremlin's propaganda TV network, Russia Today, and he was even given an op-ed column in the Moscow Times to publicize it. All the bedraggled Russophile garbage across the land was converging on Washington DC for his "World Russia Forum" including even the vile Yuri Mamchur of Russia Blog.
And what happens? He opens up his morning edition of the Washington Post and what does he find? An op-ed column by none other than leading Russian dissident Oleg Kozlovsky (shown above in the loving embrace of Vladimir Putin's neo-Soviet goons), a column accusing his benefactor of turning Russia into a giant neo-Soviet gulag!
And it wasn't just any op-ed. It ran in the upper left corner of the hard copy of the paper and included the above photograph of Kozlovsky -- not one but two distinct honors for the column, showing the Post's influential editors stood behind Kozlovsky 1,000 percent.
Ouch. Miracle if Lozansky wasn't rushed to the emergency room with a nasty case of acid reflux. Lozansky is well known to regular readers of my blog La Russophobe; we've exposed him repeatedly in prior posts as the fundamental fraud he is. Reading Kozlovsky's terrifying words, its impossible to see Lozansky as anything other than a modern Neville Chamberlain.
Lozansky claims that presidential candidate John McCain is "alone" in his stark opposition to Russia, but in fact it's neo-Soviet collaborators like Lozansky that stand alone, surrounded by their truly ridiculous, detached-from-reality, neo-Soviet lies. In a classic bit of Soviet dishonesty, he claims that the U.S. needs Russian uranium to run its nuclear reactors; in fact, Russia itself just inked a deal to import uranium from Australia, without which it couldn't run its own reactors. Moreover, the idea that the U.S. should ignore Russia's barbaric desecration of the institution of democracy just so that it can get hold of Russian energy resources defiles the very foundations of American civilization. This man is truly beneath pond scum.
Lozansky claims that Russia needn't worry about McCain's threat to oust Russia from the G-8, because the other members wouldn't go along. Apparently, he thinks McCain is crazy and off the reservation. But if that is so, why is Lozansky so worried? The fact is that McCain can, with the stroke of his pen, make the G-8 choose between the U.S. and Russia as members. If he does that, the nations of Europe won't have to think twice before siding with their NATO ally.
The only person Lozansky actually names as disagreeing with McCain is the senile lunatic professor Steven Cohen, whom La Russophobe has, like Lozansky himself, repeatedly discredited for the ridiculous gibberish he spews from the radical Nation magazine published by his own wife. The fact that Lozansky is insane enough to believe that Professor Cohen's opposition means that one of the most powerful figures in America's foreign policy establishment stands alone is proof positive, all by itself, of what a ridiculous fraud Lozansky really is.
And then, in classic bit of Russian insanity, he completely contradicts himself. He states:
To be fair to McCain, the other two presidential front-runners, Democratic Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have not offered a positive-thinking agenda for Russia either, pledging to be tougher with Russia than Bush and endorsing further NATO expansion by accepting Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance. All three presidential contenders have promised to expand the Bush administration's effort to "spread democracy," a policy that an overwhelming majority of Russians see as a thinly veiled smoke screen to strengthen the U.S. position in the world at the expense of Russia.
Hmm. So then, it seems that McCain isn't really so alone after all, now is he? No wonder Lozansky is getting desperate.
In his MT op-ed, Lozansky complains that he'd invited McCain to attend the Forum and debate his hard line on Russia and was apparently surprised to find that McCain was ignoring him. Of course, Lozansky doesn't say a single word about his failure to extend any Forum invitations to any Russian opposition figures -- such as Garry Kasparov or Kozlovsky himself. Though Mr. Lozansky's forum made a place for pro-Russian propaganda from Russia Today and many other sources, no such place was laid for the United States -- nor did his column say a single word about any changes any Russian leader needs to make to accommodate the U.S.
We can't help but wonder how Americans would have reacted in 1938 to a forum sponsored by a state-owned Nazi TV network and calling for "economic, political and military alliance" with Hitler's Germany. Since the sponsor of Lozansky's conference is Russia Today, Putin's propaganda network (recently condemned by the New York Times), one would hope Americans will be just as suspicious of his effort, kicked off by the Russian ambassador. Does Mr. Lozansky, a card-carrying Kremlin shill, really believe Americans might be foolish enough to believe he's concerned about their national security interests as well as those of Russia?
Simply put, Americans can't trust Kremlin mouthpieces like Mr. Lozansky to look out for their best interests, and won't do so no matter how much Kremlin money greases the skids. Fool me once, Mr. Lozansky, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!
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Comments
Steve Nelson says:
A shame the former proprietor of this blog has let it get overgrown with spambots. And a shame that he turned it over to the likes of "Kim Zigfield" aka "La Russophobe".
Over at Little Green Footballs, they’re quoting “La Russophobe”, an anonymous troll that unfortunately, is published on Pajamas Media, as an authority on Discovery Institute’s Real Russia Project and its website, Russia Blog.
Plenty of very popular bloggers, like the New York Times bestselling author and geostrategist Thomas P.M. Barnett, have permalinked to Russia Blog and have occasionally cited it on their websites. But I suppose Kim Zigfield thinks Tom Barnett is a "traitor" too.
The author of Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson, strongly dislikes the Discovery Institute for its position advocating “intelligent design theory”. Regardless of how one feels about these scientific and culture war issues, they have nothing, zilch, to do with Russia or the Real Russia Project, except that Mr. Mamchur happens to work in the same building as the ID folks and has the name of their think tank on his website. Nonetheless, one would search Russia Blog in vain for the slightest mention of intelligent design or its advocates. So much for the idea of Russia Blog as a conspiracy to promote ID in Russia!
For the record, this troll “La Russophobe” has never provided the slightest evidence that they have travelled to Russia or speak Russian. By all evidence, this person or group of persons cannot look up the names of Russian institutions on yandex.ru or other websites, since he/she/they typically derides anyone not having a page on Wikipedia or getting any ENGLISH-language Google hits as “losers”.
For her, if Yuri Mamchur of Discovery Institute claims to have a degree from the Russian Tax Academy of Law, and this university cannot be found using an ENGLISH language Google search, then Mr. Mamchur’s degree is presumably fake and this institution does not exist, or at least, can be said to be "highly dubious". Who cares whether nobody knows where Kim Zigfield went to school? She's a troll.
Naturally, La Russophobe did not correct her false post about Mr. Mamchur upon being confronted with the Russian-language website of the Russian Tax Academy of Law by several commenters, a Moscow institution that has existed for many decades. For La Russophobe, only a mailed diploma and dozens of other pieces of evidence from someone’s personal life would suffice, but alas for her, Mr. Mamchur, values his privacy, and did not care to send documentation to an anonymous troll without so much as a P.O. box. Would you? If Kim Zigfield did use her real name before attacking real people, would she then claim that "the KGB" will come after her in New York? Please, what a drama queen!
La Russophobe’s pattern, like that of any troll, is to always put the burden of proof on real people using their real names and always ask “have you stopped beating your wife lately” type questions. This was one reason why after two posts on Russia Blog in 2006, “Kim Zigfield” became the only person ever to be banned from Russia Blog. The editors of the website made an announcement at that time as to the reasons why. Kim Zigfield and her sock puppets were demanding that the editors of Russia Blog fact check and rebut every single comment made toward her or against her, as well as engaging in schoolyard insults of anyone who disagreed with her. This is akin to demanding that Tom Barnett, Richard Fernandez, or any other blogger who gets hundreds of comments a week read and respond personally to every single one, a physical impossibility for any sane person with a life outside of blogging (even for Charles Johnson!).
At the time that Kim Zigfield was banned, this person also claimed, that she could not find powdered cane sugar when she was in Russia (naturally, the year and cities she visited remained totally unspecified) and that it probably still did not exist in the country, along with many other basic consumer staples. When expats and Russia Blog readers from St. Petersburg to Sakhalin laughed at this, she declared that it was up to the editors of Russia Blog to produce bags of powdered sugar from the darkest corners of Siberia to disprove her statement. Typical troll behavior, the burden of proof is always on someone else.
Little Green Footballs’ “lizardoids” have cited La Russophobe’s claim that the Real Russia Project, the program of Discovery Institute which publishes Russia Blog, is somehow affiliated with Russia Today TV, a Moscow-based, Russian government funded English language news channel that was launched in 2006 to give Russia its own equivalent of Al-Jazeera.
Russia Blog has occasionally reposted Russia Today’s videos, but otherwise there is no evidence for this claim, and in fact, there is no affiliation, anymore than Kim Zigfield is affiliated with many of the news sites she reposts.
Kim Zigfield also claimed, in a convoluted, conspiratorial paragraph worthy of a John Birch Society member, that Russia Blog is connected to Russia Profile, a tiny bimonthly magazine that publishes out of the same old Soviet RIA Novosti building that Russia Today occupies in Moscow. However, other than a rare crosspost, and Russia Profile republishing Russia Blog’s content, there is no relationship there either. Most of the time, Russia Profile’s editors, like the editors of another website called iPutin, simply repost Russia Blog content without requesting permission, perhaps because they use a webcrawler to pick it up. iPutin also picks up KZ's rants.
As for Russia Blog’s alleged connection with David Johnson, a Maryland-based Russophile who maintains a very large email listserv on Russia, like Tom Barnett, Mr. Johnson simply picks up Russia Blog content when he chooses to do so. There is no affiliation, and Mr. Johnson often posts articles harshly critical of Russia and its present leadership. Mr. Mamchur has done so as well, but like Time magazine, Mamchur has decided to give some credit where credit is due for the positive economic changes that have taken place in Russia these past few years.
La Russophobe implies that Russia Blog is part of a Kremlin-backed propaganda effort in the U.S., and Charles Johnson says its articles “read like a press release from the Kremlin”. But who backs La Russophobe? Obviously it someone’s fulltime job, and not just the hobby of someone living in New York City, a very expensive place to spend hours every day on a hobby. Charles Johnson isn’t interested in such questions, even when his own readers confront him with La Russophobe’s track record of making wild accusations against anyone with a different point of view about Russia - that is, anyone who doesn’t think that modern Russia is the Evil Empire reborn. So I suppose she would have to include Thomas P.M. Barnett on that list, even though he briefs the Pentagon and has a huge number of fans in the U.S. military, and perhaps, the Secretary of Treasury and Deputy Secretary of Treasury for seeking more capital from Russia's sovereign wealth fund to invest in the U.S. Ditto for the Pentagon procurement folks who use Russian Antonovs to support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just because Kim Zigfield cannot find a link to the AP or Reuters saying that the An-124s are flying doesn't mean it isn't happening. It's called original reporting from original sources, maybe she should look it up.
Thanks to Pajamas Media’s editor and the editor of this site for finally allowing someone to finally set the record straight. I do not wish to engage the “Lizardoids” over on their turf at LGF or register with Mr. Charles Johnson, as he clearly has his mind made up even when confronted by his own readers with contrary facts about the credibility of “La Russophobe” and others.
Anything further I could say to him, as with “Kim Zigfield”, would get distorted and twisted beyond recognition before being reposted. And when “Kim Zigfield”, who is probably not a woman but a man, gets called to account for his/her slanders of anyone who disagrees with her, she plays the victim, saying “you slander La Russophobe”. That’s like saying someone is slandering Superman or Mickey Mouse - not a real person using their real name, or even a genuine dissident. New York City isn’t Teheran, Baghdad, or Beijing.
Over at LGF, Robert Spencer, the bestselling author of the book “Defeating Jihad”, which is what LGF is supposed to be all about, is also accused of being a religious fanatic, and has clearly had it with the fever swamps. Just because LGF is a right wing libertarian fever swamp instead of a leftwing one like the Daily Kos doesn’t make it any better (i.e. if Dinesh D’Souza and Spencer have the same publisher, ergo, Spencer must endorse D’Souza’s views, ergo, if Russia Blog has Discovery Institute on its masthead, everyone who contributes to it must endorse intelligent design, even when they say otherwise, if Kim Zigfield says Russia Profile is the same thing as Russia Blog or that they are connected just because the names sound the same and there has been some crossposting, ergo, it must be true).
This is stupid, mindless, pack behavior from people that pride themselves on being smarter and more mature than the Kos Kidz and other denizens of websites they call the sewers of the Internet.
Steve Nelson says:
A shame the former proprietor of this blog has let it get overgrown with spambots. And a shame that he turned it over to the likes of "Kim Zigfield" aka "La Russophobe".
Over at Little Green Footballs, they’re quoting “La Russophobe”, an anonymous troll that unfortunately, is published on Pajamas Media, as an authority on Discovery Institute’s Real Russia Project and its website, Russia Blog.
Plenty of very popular bloggers, like the New York Times bestselling author and geostrategist Thomas P.M. Barnett, have permalinked to Russia Blog and have occasionally cited it on their websites. But I suppose Kim Zigfield thinks Tom Barnett is a "traitor" too.
The author of Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson, strongly dislikes the Discovery Institute for its position advocating “intelligent design theory”. Regardless of how one feels about these scientific and culture war issues, they have nothing, zilch, to do with Russia or the Real Russia Project, except that Mr. Mamchur happens to work in the same building as the ID folks and has the name of their think tank on his website. Nonetheless, one would search Russia Blog in vain for the slightest mention of intelligent design or its advocates. So much for the idea of Russia Blog as a conspiracy to promote ID in Russia!
For the record, this troll “La Russophobe” has never provided the slightest evidence that they have travelled to Russia or speak Russian. By all evidence, this person or group of persons cannot look up the names of Russian institutions on yandex.ru or other websites, since he/she/they typically derides anyone not having a page on Wikipedia or getting any ENGLISH-language Google hits as “losers”.
For her, if Yuri Mamchur of Discovery Institute claims to have a degree from the Russian Tax Academy of Law, and this university cannot be found using an ENGLISH language Google search, then Mr. Mamchur’s degree is presumably fake and this institution does not exist, or at least, can be said to be "highly dubious". Who cares whether nobody knows where Kim Zigfield went to school? She's a troll.
Naturally, La Russophobe did not correct her false post about Mr. Mamchur upon being confronted with the Russian-language website of the Russian Tax Academy of Law by several commenters, a Moscow institution that has existed for many decades. For La Russophobe, only a mailed diploma and dozens of other pieces of evidence from someone’s personal life would suffice, but alas for her, Mr. Mamchur, values his privacy, and did not care to send documentation to an anonymous troll without so much as a P.O. box. Would you? If Kim Zigfield did use her real name before attacking real people, would she then claim that "the KGB" will come after her in New York? Please, what a drama queen!
La Russophobe’s pattern, like that of any troll, is to always put the burden of proof on real people using their real names and always ask “have you stopped beating your wife lately” type questions. This was one reason why after two posts on Russia Blog in 2006, “Kim Zigfield” became the only person ever to be banned from Russia Blog. The editors of the website made an announcement at that time as to the reasons why. Kim Zigfield and her sock puppets were demanding that the editors of Russia Blog fact check and rebut every single comment made toward her or against her, as well as engaging in schoolyard insults of anyone who disagreed with her. This is akin to demanding that Tom Barnett, Richard Fernandez, or any other blogger who gets hundreds of comments a week read and respond personally to every single one, a physical impossibility for any sane person with a life outside of blogging (even for Charles Johnson!).
At the time that Kim Zigfield was banned, this person also claimed, that she could not find powdered cane sugar when she was in Russia (naturally, the year and cities she visited remained totally unspecified) and that it probably still did not exist in the country, along with many other basic consumer staples. When expats and Russia Blog readers from St. Petersburg to Sakhalin laughed at this, she declared that it was up to the editors of Russia Blog to produce bags of powdered sugar from the darkest corners of Siberia to disprove her statement. Typical troll behavior, the burden of proof is always on someone else.
Little Green Footballs’ “lizardoids” have cited La Russophobe’s claim that the Real Russia Project, the program of Discovery Institute which publishes Russia Blog, is somehow affiliated with Russia Today TV, a Moscow-based, Russian government funded English language news channel that was launched in 2006 to give Russia its own equivalent of Al-Jazeera.
Russia Blog has occasionally reposted Russia Today’s videos, but otherwise there is no evidence for this claim, and in fact, there is no affiliation, anymore than Kim Zigfield is affiliated with many of the news sites she reposts.
Kim Zigfield also claimed, in a convoluted, conspiratorial paragraph worthy of a John Birch Society member, that Russia Blog is connected to Russia Profile, a tiny bimonthly magazine that publishes out of the same old Soviet RIA Novosti building that Russia Today occupies in Moscow. However, other than a rare crosspost, and Russia Profile republishing Russia Blog’s content, there is no relationship there either. Most of the time, Russia Profile’s editors, like the editors of another website called iPutin, simply repost Russia Blog content without requesting permission, perhaps because they use a webcrawler to pick it up. iPutin also picks up KZ's rants.
As for Russia Blog’s alleged connection with David Johnson, a Maryland-based Russophile who maintains a very large email listserv on Russia, like Tom Barnett, Mr. Johnson simply picks up Russia Blog content when he chooses to do so. There is no affiliation, and Mr. Johnson often posts articles harshly critical of Russia and its present leadership. Mr. Mamchur has done so as well, but like Time magazine, Mamchur has decided to give some credit where credit is due for the positive economic changes that have taken place in Russia these past few years.
La Russophobe implies that Russia Blog is part of a Kremlin-backed propaganda effort in the U.S., and Charles Johnson says its articles “read like a press release from the Kremlin”. But who backs La Russophobe? Obviously it someone’s fulltime job, and not just the hobby of someone living in New York City, a very expensive place to spend hours every day on a hobby. Charles Johnson isn’t interested in such questions, even when his own readers confront him with La Russophobe’s track record of making wild accusations against anyone with a different point of view about Russia - that is, anyone who doesn’t think that modern Russia is the Evil Empire reborn. So I suppose she would have to include Thomas P.M. Barnett on that list, even though he briefs the Pentagon and has a huge number of fans in the U.S. military, and perhaps, the Secretary of Treasury and Deputy Secretary of Treasury for seeking more capital from Russia's sovereign wealth fund to invest in the U.S. Ditto for the Pentagon procurement folks who use Russian Antonovs to support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just because Kim Zigfield cannot find a link to the AP or Reuters saying that the An-124s are flying doesn't mean it isn't happening. It's called original reporting from original sources, maybe she should look it up.
Thanks to Pajamas Media’s editor and the editor of this site for finally allowing someone to finally set the record straight. I do not wish to engage the “Lizardoids” over on their turf at LGF or register with Mr. Charles Johnson, as he clearly has his mind made up even when confronted by his own readers with contrary facts about the credibility of “La Russophobe” and others.
Anything further I could say to him, as with “Kim Zigfield”, would get distorted and twisted beyond recognition before being reposted. And when “Kim Zigfield”, who is probably not a woman but a man, gets called to account for his/her slanders of anyone who disagrees with her, she plays the victim, saying “you slander La Russophobe”. That’s like saying someone is slandering Superman or Mickey Mouse - not a real person using their real name, or even a genuine dissident. New York City isn’t Teheran, Baghdad, or Beijing.
Over at LGF, Robert Spencer, the bestselling author of the book “Defeating Jihad”, which is what LGF is supposed to be all about, is also accused of being a religious fanatic, and has clearly had it with the fever swamps. Just because LGF is a right wing libertarian fever swamp instead of a leftwing one like the Daily Kos doesn’t make it any better (i.e. if Dinesh D’Souza and Spencer have the same publisher, ergo, Spencer must endorse D’Souza’s views, ergo, if Russia Blog has Discovery Institute on its masthead, everyone who contributes to it must endorse intelligent design, even when they say otherwise, if Kim Zigfield says Russia Profile is the same thing as Russia Blog or that they are connected just because the names sound the same and there has been some crossposting, ergo, it must be true).
This is stupid, mindless, pack behavior from people that pride themselves on being smarter and more mature than the Kos Kidz and other denizens of websites they call the sewers of the Internet.
Steve Nelson says:
A shame the former proprietor of this blog has let it get overgrown with spambots. And a shame that he turned it over to the likes of "Kim Zigfield" aka "La Russophobe".
Over at Little Green Footballs, they’re quoting “La Russophobe”, an anonymous troll that unfortunately, is published on Pajamas Media, as an authority on Discovery Institute’s Real Russia Project and its website, Russia Blog.
Plenty of very popular bloggers, like the New York Times bestselling author and geostrategist Thomas P.M. Barnett, have permalinked to Russia Blog and have occasionally cited it on their websites. But I suppose Kim Zigfield thinks Tom Barnett is a "traitor" too.
The author of Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson, strongly dislikes the Discovery Institute for its position advocating “intelligent design theory”. Regardless of how one feels about these scientific and culture war issues, they have nothing, zilch, to do with Russia or the Real Russia Project, except that Mr. Mamchur happens to work in the same building as the ID folks and has the name of their think tank on his website. Nonetheless, one would search Russia Blog in vain for the slightest mention of intelligent design or its advocates. So much for the idea of Russia Blog as a conspiracy to promote ID in Russia!
For the record, this troll “La Russophobe” has never provided the slightest evidence that they have travelled to Russia or speak Russian. By all evidence, this person or group of persons cannot look up the names of Russian institutions on yandex.ru or other websites, since he/she/they typically derides anyone not having a page on Wikipedia or getting any ENGLISH-language Google hits as “losers”.
For her, if Yuri Mamchur of Discovery Institute claims to have a degree from the Russian Tax Academy of Law, and this university cannot be found using an ENGLISH language Google search, then Mr. Mamchur’s degree is presumably fake and this institution does not exist, or at least, can be said to be "highly dubious". Who cares whether nobody knows where Kim Zigfield went to school? She's a troll.
Naturally, La Russophobe did not correct her false post about Mr. Mamchur upon being confronted with the Russian-language website of the Russian Tax Academy of Law by several commenters, a Moscow institution that has existed for many decades. For La Russophobe, only a mailed diploma and dozens of other pieces of evidence from someone’s personal life would suffice, but alas for her, Mr. Mamchur, values his privacy, and did not care to send documentation to an anonymous troll without so much as a P.O. box. Would you? If Kim Zigfield did use her real name before attacking real people, would she then claim that "the KGB" will come after her in New York? Please, what a drama queen!
La Russophobe’s pattern, like that of any troll, is to always put the burden of proof on real people using their real names and always ask “have you stopped beating your wife lately” type questions. This was one reason why after two posts on Russia Blog in 2006, “Kim Zigfield” became the only person ever to be banned from Russia Blog. The editors of the website made an announcement at that time as to the reasons why. Kim Zigfield and her sock puppets were demanding that the editors of Russia Blog fact check and rebut every single comment made toward her or against her, as well as engaging in schoolyard insults of anyone who disagreed with her. This is akin to demanding that Tom Barnett, Richard Fernandez, or any other blogger who gets hundreds of comments a week read and respond personally to every single one, a physical impossibility for any sane person with a life outside of blogging (even for Charles Johnson!).
At the time that Kim Zigfield was banned, this person also claimed, that she could not find powdered cane sugar when she was in Russia (naturally, the year and cities she visited remained totally unspecified) and that it probably still did not exist in the country, along with many other basic consumer staples. When expats and Russia Blog readers from St. Petersburg to Sakhalin laughed at this, she declared that it was up to the editors of Russia Blog to produce bags of powdered sugar from the darkest corners of Siberia to disprove her statement. Typical troll behavior, the burden of proof is always on someone else.
Little Green Footballs’ “lizardoids” have cited La Russophobe’s claim that the Real Russia Project, the program of Discovery Institute which publishes Russia Blog, is somehow affiliated with Russia Today TV, a Moscow-based, Russian government funded English language news channel that was launched in 2006 to give Russia its own equivalent of Al-Jazeera.
Russia Blog has occasionally reposted Russia Today’s videos, but otherwise there is no evidence for this claim, and in fact, there is no affiliation, anymore than Kim Zigfield is affiliated with many of the news sites she reposts.
Kim Zigfield also claimed, in a convoluted, conspiratorial paragraph worthy of a John Birch Society member, that Russia Blog is connected to Russia Profile, a tiny bimonthly magazine that publishes out of the same old Soviet RIA Novosti building that Russia Today occupies in Moscow. However, other than a rare crosspost, and Russia Profile republishing Russia Blog’s content, there is no relationship there either. Most of the time, Russia Profile’s editors, like the editors of another website called iPutin, simply repost Russia Blog content without requesting permission, perhaps because they use a webcrawler to pick it up. iPutin also picks up KZ's rants.
As for Russia Blog’s alleged connection with David Johnson, a Maryland-based Russophile who maintains a very large email listserv on Russia, like Tom Barnett, Mr. Johnson simply picks up Russia Blog content when he chooses to do so. There is no affiliation, and Mr. Johnson often posts articles harshly critical of Russia and its present leadership. Mr. Mamchur has done so as well, but like Time magazine, Mamchur has decided to give some credit where credit is due for the positive economic changes that have taken place in Russia these past few years.
La Russophobe implies that Russia Blog is part of a Kremlin-backed propaganda effort in the U.S., and Charles Johnson says its articles “read like a press release from the Kremlin”. But who backs La Russophobe? Obviously it someone’s fulltime job, and not just the hobby of someone living in New York City, a very expensive place to spend hours every day on a hobby. Charles Johnson isn’t interested in such questions, even when his own readers confront him with La Russophobe’s track record of making wild accusations against anyone with a different point of view about Russia - that is, anyone who doesn’t think that modern Russia is the Evil Empire reborn. So I suppose she would have to include Thomas P.M. Barnett on that list, even though he briefs the Pentagon and has a huge number of fans in the U.S. military, and perhaps, the Secretary of Treasury and Deputy Secretary of Treasury for seeking more capital from Russia's sovereign wealth fund to invest in the U.S. Ditto for the Pentagon procurement folks who use Russian Antonovs to support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just because Kim Zigfield cannot find a link to the AP or Reuters saying that the An-124s are flying doesn't mean it isn't happening. It's called original reporting from original sources, maybe she should look it up.
Thanks to Pajamas Media’s editor and the editor of this site for finally allowing someone to finally set the record straight. I do not wish to engage the “Lizardoids” over on their turf at LGF or register with Mr. Charles Johnson, as he clearly has his mind made up even when confronted by his own readers with contrary facts about the credibility of “La Russophobe” and others.
Anything further I could say to him, as with “Kim Zigfield”, would get distorted and twisted beyond recognition before being reposted. And when “Kim Zigfield”, who is probably not a woman but a man, gets called to account for his/her slanders of anyone who disagrees with her, she plays the victim, saying “you slander La Russophobe”. That’s like saying someone is slandering Superman or Mickey Mouse - not a real person using their real name, or even a genuine dissident. New York City isn’t Teheran, Baghdad, or Beijing.
Over at LGF, Robert Spencer, the bestselling author of the book “Defeating Jihad”, which is what LGF is supposed to be all about, is also accused of being a religious fanatic, and has clearly had it with the fever swamps. Just because LGF is a right wing libertarian fever swamp instead of a leftwing one like the Daily Kos doesn’t make it any better (i.e. if Dinesh D’Souza and Spencer have the same publisher, ergo, Spencer must endorse D’Souza’s views, ergo, if Russia Blog has Discovery Institute on its masthead, everyone who contributes to it must endorse intelligent design, even when they say otherwise, if Kim Zigfield says Russia Profile is the same thing as Russia Blog or that they are connected just because the names sound the same and there has been some crossposting, ergo, it must be true).
This is stupid, mindless, pack behavior from people that pride themselves on being smarter and more mature than the Kos Kidz and other denizens of websites they call the sewers of the Internet.
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