Dumbest Comment of the Day?

And no it's not from a Congressional Democrat!

Rather, the winner is Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Lavrov had the temerity to claim that the recent tit-for-tat expulsion furor between his country and the United Kingdom was the product of Gordon Brown's ascension. Not the fact that the Russian government killed Alexander Litvinenko and won't admit it while stonewalling an extradition request. Nope, it's all Gordon Brown's fault.

Russia's nearly as thuggish as it ever was back in the bad old days of the USSR, and many of the old institutions are back, albeit under new names. It's subscription-only now, but there's a worthwhile piece on Putin-worshiping youth organizations with more than an eerie resemblance to the Young Pioneers of old. Murdering dissidents and playing coy about it is old hat, no doubt something Putin picked up while working at the KGB (indeed, the Litvinenko assassination strongly resembles that of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978, also using poison).

It also prompts another question: when are we going to stop deluding ourselves about the nature of the Russian government and start treating them like the autocratic thugs they are?