I Learned It From Watching You

Nice little blurb in Salon's War Room today. The part that I like:

Now, the unexpected. When George Bush sat down with Vladimir Putin in Bratislava last week to deliver his long-awaited lecture on civil liberties and freedom of the press, Newsweek says Putin shot back with an attack of his own: "We didn't criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS."

Bush was apparently slack-jawed, and senior White House aides were angry. "Putin thought we'd fired Dan Rather," one administration official told Time. "It was like something out of '1984.'"

Newsweek , rising to the defense of freedom of the press in these United States, says it’s "all too clear" that Putin sees the relationship between Bush and the American media as being "just like his own." Presumably, that means that Putin thinks Bush controls the U.S. media in the same way that he controls the Russian media. We can’t imagine where he got that idea.

Brilliant. It's a little odd that someone from the Bush administration would bring up 1984. I would think that considering the policies they have in place, they would rather keep mentions of George Orwell to a minimum. Anyway, good for Putin! He's a fascist asshole, but it takes one to know one, eh Vladdie?