Oh, so yeah, Lawrence O'Donnell is rude and abrasive, interrupting the lovely Julia Ioffe, the most beloved and published Russian-American journalist on Russia, and he comes off sounding like a know-nothing douche.

But Julia Ioffe is wrong anyway.

So yeah, it is like Reza Aslan in the hands of the anchor on the Fox book show. The Fox newscaster was a bumbler and insensitive to the realities of the PC code, but it doesn't matter ultimately except to the PC crowd because Aslan is a pedantic and arrogant fraud. He's not a historian or a professor of history, although he takes on the task of writing about "the historical Jesus." Rather, his profile as an instructor of creative writing with a degree in sociology is serving his agenda in writing a revisionist history of Jesus to fit his geopolitics.

Too bad Julia didn't have a book on Amazon to shoot up to number one like Reza's did!

@Lawrence (imagine the supreme ego of getting your own first name only on Twitter) may not have reported from Moscow — Ioffee tries to pull the life experience credits on him — but it doesn't matter.

While it comes off as blustering assholery, he's absolutely right that Putin owns the media in Russia, and he shouldn't even have been bullied into saying "some" by Julia. Putin basically owns all of it, and doesn't have to personally write instructions to the anchors and journalist of federal state TV channels, they know what has to be said. They even know when to strategically run a bit of criticism of him, likely instrumented by Surkovskaya propaganda, when they have to, to enable the crowds to let off steam.

Sure, there's a few small outlets like Ekho Moskvy or Novaya gazeta that have some private ownership or corporate ownership  not completely in Putin's oligarch bag, and he hasn't completely got his claws into but that doesn't mean anything in the end — journalists are assassinated, Putin doesn't investigate or prosecute their deaths, they lose.

To compare Putin to Obama, saying they are similar in that Obama doesn't control anything is to be willfully evasive about the vertikal.

For Julia to keep banging away with that over-confident hipster assertiveness that "people who haven't been to Russia don't get it" just isn't credible. We've been to Russia. We get it. It's absolutely true that the minute Snowden entered the Sheremetyevo transit lounge, he was in Putin's total control. Derp, we know that doesn't mean literally Putin is micro-managing it (although I bet he was doing a lot of that, even re-writing scripts like "as odd as it sounds coming from my lips!") But certainly, as O'Donnell very aptly put it, Putin is firmly in control of the overall shape of the propaganda line around Snowden.

And as he very accurately explained it — to Ioffe's protestations — Russia's claim that it "couldn't" do anything but give him asylum is bogus — and is only valid within the contours of its own propagandistic active measure, i.e. he had to save face.

I'm not at all surprised that Julia is hawking the Kremlin line that Russia was somehow presented with a fait accompli and "couldn't" do anything once the Bolivian plane was down. That's the sophisticated line that the hipster journos are flogging to make it sound like they are neither East or West, but best themselves, but it really does only play into Moscow's hands.

Russia can't do anything? It's hands are tied? Really, Julia?

Oh, nonsense. If we are to believe Izvestiya, the diplomats that met Snowden at the airport were from Venezuela and Ecuador. They spirited him away — in a way, Putin seems to have partly outsourced part of the Snowden problem. Okay, we don't believe Izvestiya. But interesting that bit about Latin Americans greeting him, eh?

Of course, Snowden could have flown from Vladivostok across the Pacific to Caracas, although it would be an endurance test. And say, don't these people have ships?

That direct Minsk-Caracus flight that goes over Lithuania, which won't protest…dog-leg it to Germany….hmm….

It's not really about that. Part of the Kremlin propaganda shtick has always been to pretend that we live in this Unipolar World dominated by America — even literally, when it comes to planes and downing them "in anger".

Russia would be absolutely no different. In fact, when Moscow downs planes, it downs them like Flight 007 from South Korea, remember?! That's how they roll.

No, it's about posturing and playing the whole thing out — Ioffe is right about that, and right about the anger that she is picking up directly from White House staff.

This myth that Snowden became a "head-ache" for Putin, as granulated and sophisticated as it sounds to the IR set, really is for the birds. There is every indication that WikiLeaks, already in the tank with Putin, scripted this from the get-go. And there's every indication — now that we've heard Lonnie Snowden, Edward's father, warble rhapsodically about the strong man Putin, that the former NSA hacker doesn't have any qualms about being in the embrace of Mother Russia, any more than he was bothered by being behind the Great Chinese Firewall, which he added to with a hood over his head while he typed in his passwords.

This is all theatrics.

What we see with O'donnell is that he is more of an old-line socialist, even older than Obama, who runs more to the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) line.

So what we're seeing is the kind of sparks that flew with Lenin screaming that social democrats are social fascists…

But O'Donnell is as much of a stealth socialist as Obama, and that's why when he counsels the Dems to move to the right just to get elected and then do what they want, Greenwald can pounce on him because Glenn isn't stealthy about his radicalism, it's all there on Twitter.

So when O'Donnell says this to Glenn Greenwald, you can get how he went off on Julia Ioffe:

"Glenn, unlike you, I am not a progressive. I am not a liberal who is so
afraid of the word that I had to change my name to progressive.
Liberals amuse me. I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the
extreme left of you mere liberals, okay? However, I know this about my
country. Liberals are 20 percent of the electorate. Conservatives are 41
percent of the electorate, okay?…You can sit there and pretend that
liberals should run more liberal in conservative districts. You love the
loss of the Blue Dogs. The only way, the only way you have a chairman
Barney Frank, there's only one way, that's by electing Blue Dogs. It's
the only way. That's the only way you have a Speaker Pelosi."

He might as well have said, to transpose this to Ioffe:

"I am not a liberal who is so
afraid of Putin that I had to change my name to progressive.
Liberals amuse me. I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the
extreme left of you mere liberals, okay? However, I know this Russia. Navalny voters are 20 percent of the electorate. Military-industrialists are 41
percent of the electorate, okay?…You can sit there and pretend that
liberals should run more liberal in conservative districts. You love the
loss of Surkov. The only way, the only way you have Prime Minister Medvedev, there's only one way, that's by electing nationalists. It's
the only way. That's the only way you have Sobyanin as mayor."

Since O'Donnell was so rude and abrupt with her, Ioffe printed her responses at the New Republic.

She's still wrong.

America isn't "dangerously naive" about the post-Assad Syria, they just aren't dangerously cynical like Russia. Each day they let Russia keep not get paid-up ownership of the Syria mass crime against humanity and be ashamed before the world is a day they made that post-Assad reality worse.

Ioffe quotes the even more authentic realist hipster Lukyanov:

And for all the Kremlin's pouting, there's also a consensus in
Moscow that, well, there's not much left to talk about. "Obviously,
Obama just can't come to Moscow with Snowden there, but they made clear
they're not totally shuttering the relationship," says Fyodr Lukyanov,
editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a voice that,
traditionally, is not far from the Kremlin's line. "Okay, well now, the
score is now 1-1, but the other problem is that the relationship has no
content now. Even if Obama came to Moscow, it's not really clear what
they'd talk about." Lukyanov, who wrote
exactly this almost an entire month ago, elaborates: "No one is
prepared to discuss a new agenda"—Asia, who gets what in the Arctic—"and the old one is totally exhausted."

But wait, there isn't anything actually exhausted about the old agenda, guys.

Iran — Russia was always duplicitious there, never did enough, and could do more, and never does. It's happy to let Iran continue to be an irritate.

Afghanistan — Vladivostok route for NDN — Really, you think Putin wants the US to stay in its backyard? You're serious? Of course not. Putin just takes the long view, and outsources Central Asia in part to China and America until this thing is over in Afghanistan and it can muscle back in even with its creaking CSTO. Russia does have bases around there, you know. We don't.

Spies — Ioffe isn't credible when she claims that the spy "exchange" with Chapman et. al. — the sleepers — was somehow quiet and low-key. First of all, it wasn't an exchange — it was one-way. That was different than many actual swaps of the Cold War era. Second, the Russians did retaliate hard — by expelling some of our CIA agents, notably the guy in the funny wig with the form letter offering euros for espionage — and then, of course, Snowden. Nothing at all quiet and low-key about any of this, and that's how it has to be seen: painful retaliation for Chapman and co.

Security in Europe — Russia continues to try to crack the Helsinki consensus on arms as well as rights, and reserves the right to strike installations the US might put into Eastern Europe to repel Iranian attacks. What? Wasn't Russia supposed to be for peace, and for pressuring Iran?

Okay then. Old agenda! Sure, let's move on to China!

Oh, and that idea that Obama "can't" cancel his plans to go to the G20? Because "the other countries didn't do anything wrong"? No. They did. They agreed to this disgraceful ceding of power and prestige to Putin when they shouldn't have. They should be canceling over Snowden and every other issue instead of whining about the NSA. The greatest source of the enormous number of destructive cyber-attacks on Europe comes from Russia.