President Barack Obama is said to have “snubbed” Vladimir
Putin, Russia’s president.
The snub was intended to send a signal to Mr. Putin
following Mr. Putin’s warm embrace of Edward Snowden, America’s “most wanted”
secret leaker.
Several months ago, Mr. Snowden, a mid-level
spook, leaked to a columnist for the US edition of The Guardian, a British
publication, a cache of information concerning a
massive spying operation. Following publication of some of the information, Mr.
Snowden took refuge in the Moscow airport, where he hunkered down for several
weeks in limbo scouring the world for a place where he could remain untouched
by the prehensile grasp of authorities in the United States.
Eventually, Mr. Putin opened wide the arms of mother Russia
to Mr. Snowden, who was given temporary sanctuary by Mr. Putin.
This bruised the feelings of Mr. Obama, who snubbed Mr.
Putin by cancelling a summit with the cagey Russian president.
Mr. Putin has, it may be conjectured, a huge mass of valuable
information at his disposal, and Mr. Obama has the satisfaction of a snub – not
an unprofitable exchange from Mr. Putin’s point of view.
In mother Russia, the snub is little more than a joke, according to a report in Bloomberg News:
“One freshly minted Russian witticism, picked up by the news site Gazeta.ru, portrayed the
U.S. president as a jilted suitor: ‘Obama won't see Putin because Putin is
already seeing Snowden.’"
It’s only a matter of time before jay Leno molds that one
into a comic bullet.
The White Houses’ statement on the snub is couched in
pre-reset, cold permafrost: “
Mr. Obama, according to the statement, was “looking forward
to” the summit meeting in Saint Petersburg. The president had canceled the
one-on-one meeting with Mr. Putin because of “our lack of progress on issues
such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations,
global security issues, and human rights and civil society in the last 12
months."
Oh, yes... and concerning the spook now crushed in Mr. Putin’s
loving embrace, “Russia’s disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden
temporary asylum was also a factor that we considered in assessing the current
state of our bilateral relationship."
Message received, titters noted.
On the social network Vkontakte, newspaper editor Vitaly
Tretyakov snarked, “This is clearly a political defeat for Obama. Russia,
strictly speaking, does not care. What could we expect from Obama's visit? A
second reset? But the first one failed. A second detente? Who even remembers
the first one?"
How sad, anti-Putinists blogger Oleg Kozyrev twittered, “that
Obama did not refuse to meet with Putin because of human rights violations in
Russia, but rather because of rights violations in the U.S."
Mr. Snowden, having secured an apartment in Moscow, is now
looking for a job and sending cordial greetings to his family in the United
States, inviting them to visit him soon.
Mr. Obama is rubbing his walloped noggin, no doubt wondering
how he might turn this embarrassing loss into a victory. No one in Mr. Obama’s
Chicago political Mafia would want this political crisis to go to waste. With a
little help from Mr. Obama’s reliable left of center media, Mr. Obama may yet be
able to turn this lump of coal into a diamond.
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