Posted on 02/14/2008 9:06:23 AM PST by wideminded
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Vladimir Putin's four-hour performance at the Kremlin on Thursday mixed flirtatious banter with metaphors about snot and showed a gift for sarcastic brush-offs worthy of a stand-up comedian.
Putin twice referred to a runny nose during the annual presidential news conference -- to dismiss rumors about his personal wealth and to discuss the pressures of public office.
Newspaper reports about his alleged fortune were just rubbish, said Putin, "excavated from someone's nose and then spread on those bits of paper".
Explaining how he worked his guts out "like a galley slave" for eight years in the Kremlin, Putin said leaders must take firm decisions and not wobble in the face of adversity.
"Heads of state have no right to whinge, or drool for any reason... If they are going to slobber and blow snot and say things are bad, bad, then that's how it will be," Putin said.
The Russian was also sympathetic towards U.S. President George W. Bush. "Sometimes you have to make decisions that nobody else can make... Do you think Bush has it easy?" he said.
Many Russian journalists held up signs to attract Putin's attention in the Round Hall of the Kremlin packed with hundreds of domestic and international reporters.
When one young woman said she had a golden heart to present to him on Valentine's Day, Putin invited her to step down from her seat and pass it on to his officials.
Putin seemed to be thinking about European bodies, and not of the institutional kind, when another asked about a news article alleging Russia's gas giant Gazprom was eating into Europe's body.
"Why are the Americans so worried about a European body? Maybe because they want to tear themselves away from it, nice body that it is," he said, laughing and making generous hand gestures to illustrate his point.
To illustrate her question about demographics, another woman said she personally would like to have a child.
"Why are you asking me?" Putin shot back to applause from his audience, many of them regional Russian reporters who clapped enthusiastically at Putin's quips.
But there was no whiff of attraction when it came to a question about U.S. presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton and her comment that former KGB officers can't have souls.
"A state official must at least have brains," he snapped, one of several occasions when his easy-going facade slipped.
Asked about the guarantees about the rouble, Putin turned on the reporter. "What do you want? Do you want me to eat soil from a flower pot? Make an oath on blood?"
Spitting out the Russian acronym for the OSCE's election watchdog, that sounded very close to 'bitch' in English, he said Russia would not take lessons on democracy from Western observers.
"Well, let them rather teach their own wives to cook soup."
Putin was the only foreign leader to speak up for Bush back during the elections, when he was being daily accused of lying about the reasons for war in Iraq. He told newsmen at a news conference that Bush was not lying, that Russian intelligence agreed with Bush's assessments of Saddam's intentions.
Putin was also the first foreign leader besides Blair to offer concrete help when we decided to go to war in Afghanistan.
He's a complicated guy. Our relations with him are consequently rather complicated. People have said several times that Russia smuggled Saddam's WMD out of the country into Syria, which meant that it wasn't available for use against our troops. So while at one level, we have probably good reason to keep an eye on this guy, at another level he seems to have a relationship with Bush that goes beyond what protocol requires. I think the two men like each other.
If anyone knows if this is a common Russian expression, let me know.
We would have done better at the end of the Cold War have ditched NATO (which loves trying to figure out how it can do even less to help us, from Afghanistan to Iraq to everywhere else) and formed a joint defensive alliance with Russia.
Nobody would have been able to take on the both of us.
Instead, we opted for Kosovo, expanding NATO to include
most of Europe (as if Russia was still going to be the future enemy), and trying to say there was now only one Superpower.
That may have suited some wackos with agendas in the State Dept., but it didn’t conform to the needs of the real world, or of the USA.
With Putin, it's hard to judge his sincerity. Sounds like he doesn't think much about Hillary though.
I agree with you. I'm not sure how realistic it is, but I was hoping to see us build an alliance around the anglosaxons, India, Russia, and Israel. I agree that Kosovo has made that difficult, although part of the difficulty comes from Russia's own internal issues. They do like to play both sides of any issue, if there is money to be made.
And they don't want to be seen as being our vassal. So they will work on their alliance with India, and coincidentally we are working on our relations with India. So we aren't allied with each other, but we're both allied with India. And so on.
China is a potential threat that begs for a defensive alliance involving precisely India, the US, and Russia, but at the same time its a huge market to be tapped, so we find ourselves competing one another for business there at the same time that we are gaming war scenarios behind the scenes.
Islamic nationalism is a theat to these very same countries, but at the same time there is a lot of oil money to be made. So at the same time we both face issues with muslim terrorism, we are all trying to strike deals and form alliances with muslim states. So it gets complicated.
That's well put, and I agree.
...just rubbish, said Putin, "excavated from someone's nose and then spread on those bits of paper".
He does have a gift for picturesque speech. :-)
He’s a regular Yakov Smirnoff.
Maybe it’s a translation problem, but I’m not seeing a speck of humor in anything he’s saying. Almost seems like an SNL routine about a dictator who makes bad jokes, but everyone pretends he’s a wit so that he doesn’t have them shot.
Actually, before I get too carried away with plans for an alliance with Russia, maybe I should check and see if Russia is interested...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1970383/posts
quoting:
“Last Saturday, four Russian Tupolev-95 bombers took off in the middle of the night from an airfield at Ukrainka. Two of them headed for the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its escort, the guided missile cruiser USS Princeton. As two of the bombers got within cruise-missile range of the American ships, 500 miles away, four F/A-18 Hornets were launched from the Nimitz and intercepted them 50 miles out. One Tu-95 was escorted as it flew 2,000 feet above the Nimitz. The other Tupolev was followed as it circled at a distance of 58 miles.”
No, it isn’t.
Just another Putin’s improvisation.
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