I'm not good at Photoshop but you just know that fish has "NYT editorial board and readership" all over it…Photo by kremlin.ru

I love the notion that Putin hoodwinked the government of the world's most powerful country, but a few generalist pundits spotted the trap.

— Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) September 13, 2013

I wish we had an intelligentsia in our country, like they do in Russia.

But we don't.

We don't even have a credible military class.

Instead, we have public relations firms.

Oh, I know, some people gave it their best shot. Max Fisher, who can be despicable, produced a fairly good parsing of Vlad's op-ed.

Julia Ioffe did so well that I was almost going to suspend my suspicions regarding her pro-Putinanity.

She turned in a particular astute paragraph:

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists." This is another wonderful Russian habit, one of looking facts in the face and then subjecting them to an adolescent epistemological artillery strike until nothing is anything and nothing is knowable. It goes beyond conspirological thinking to a kind of warped post-post-post-modernism, where words and things disintegrate into sand but somehow, in a Russian's hands, come together to form what could maybe, possibly be a cogent argument that looks suspiciously like a sand castle. This is one reason why Putin, presented with evidence of Assad's chemical attack on August 21, called it "otherworldly idiocy," before constructing his own theorem based on some pretty otherworldly assumptions.

Ah, but then, look at her last paragraph — like a Brezhnev-era bee-hive hair-do baba, she suddenly reverts to referring shrilly to "US aggression" – as if it weren't Putin who was arming Assad with $1 billion in weapons and covering for Syria on the UN Security Council with repeated vetoes, even on neutral statements condemning the mere use of chemical weapons without determining agency.

A lot has been written about the story behind this op-ed.

But to see the real torture of our intellectuals, look at the man-handling of the NYT Public Editor's changing explanation.

First, she felt called on to even do a column because so many people screamed — she cites some typical ones.

Then she was forced to "update" by telling us what Rosie Gray at BuzzFeed had to tell us, not the Times, that this was a PR piece.

Then she had to update again about a whole awkward incident in which the Moscow news bureau looked like it was involved in something that was supposed to be on the editorial side in New York, and the optics on that had to be fixed…

I happen to know someone close to the principals on this affair and I asked him why the Times ran this awful craven thing — and on the 9/11 anniversay!

First, he was defensive over my complaint that it was on 9/11 — he even questioned whether it really was. (It was, and that was awful, like letting Vlad win the war on terrorism — over us.)

Then, he justified the placement of the piece because many voices on the subject should be heard, and VVP's was one of them.

Ugh — he's not just a voice with an opinion, he's arming a mass-murderer, lying about chemical weapons use, and pretending he's going to fix things here.

But then what he said next beat all.

He said that while Putin may want to censor him, he would not censor Putin.

And that was just awful. Because turning down Putin's op-ed piece isn't "censorship" (as a non-state actor, of course newspaper editors can place what they want). It's just good judgement.

Putin does not require the New York Times an an outlet in order to enjoy his right to free speech at home and abroad while he is renting the First Amendment, if you will, as a foreigner.

He can put his magnus opus on RT, the Kremlin's propaganda outlet in the West, which avidly covers every aspect of American dissent, particularly Anonymous hackers, WikiLeaks, and Snowden, not surprisingly.

He could put his piece anywhere, really, including the Pravda that McCain is now going to appear on and which is scorned as passe by the cool kids now in the US chattering classes.

And then the NYT could report on it, which is all that it deserves.

Hosting it is an unethical act and it is not fitting for a newspaper that claims to have the public trust and serve as the fourth estate.

What was also icky was the way Andrew Rosenthal snottily told us that it is not the job of the NYT to support or oppose the government — as if our questioning of our elite intellectuals' Putin-tropism we're just craven state symps or Obama bots who can't seem to grasp the role of a free press in a free society.

Sure, Andy, but here's the thing: it is the job of the New York Times to support good faith, too.

And not support KGB-style active measures to influence public opinion in sinister ways.

How can we get an intelligentsia in America?

If you Google the term, you get a coffee company.

I try to picture what I mean, and I get something French, something Bohemian…

I think Susan Sontag, but she died…. Michael Moore or Amy Goodman — certainly not!

Honestly, I don't know how to fix this problem, but THAT it is a problem I think you won't doubt. Intelligentsias are forged, not made.

I'm thinking of Akulin on Twitter today saying tentatively, do you mind if I post something that isn't political today?

Well, it seems some Russians aren't happy with their intelligentsia these days, either…