Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP
President Donald Trump salutes a Marines honor guard as he disembarks from Marine One upon arrival at the White House in Washington, Monday, Feb. 6, 2017 from a trip to Florida.
Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017 | 2 a.m.
By now, it’s takes a lot for a remark from President Donald Trump to be considered shocking.
But Trump hit that level with his comment to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly about Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview released Sunday.
The comment came during an exchange that started with O’Reilly asking Trump if he respected Putin. Trump said he did, which led to O’Reilly asking him how he could feel that way about “a killer.”
“You got a lot of killers,” Trump said. “You think our country is so innocent?”
Astonishing. That’s the same argument that Russia and other nations that have been hostile to the U. S. — Iran and Libya among them — have used against us. Now Trump trots it out, apparently comparing Russia’s actions to ours while aligning himself with Russian secret police and Middle Eastern extremists who have been saying the same thing for years. Retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey called it perhaps the most anti-American statement ever by a president, and he’s right.
As Republican Sen. Marco Rubio pointed out in a tweet, it’s particularly offensive considering that Putin has long been suspected of involvement in the poisoning of his political enemy Viktor Yushchenko, a president of Ukraine.
“When has a Democratic political activist been poisoned by the GOP, or vice versa? We are not the same as #Putin,” Rubio tweeted.
True, and Rubio only scratched the surface. The list of Putin enemies who are dead or missing is a long one that includes: Russian press minister Mikhail Lesin, who died of blunt force trauma to the head; Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent who died after drinking tea that had been laced with deadly polonium-210; journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot point blank in the head after writing a book critical of Putin; Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister of Russia under Boris Yeltsin who was shot four times in the back after accusing Putin of being paid off by oligarchs; and Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of the Russian edition of Forbes, who was killed in a drive-by shooting after investigating wealthy Russians and exposing corruption.
The list goes on.
No wonder Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also distanced himself from Trump on the matter.
“Putin’s a former KGB agent. He’s a thug,” McConnell said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He was not elected in a way that most people would consider a credible election. The Russians annexed Crimea, invaded Ukraine and messed around in our elections. And no, I don’t think there’s any equivalency between the way the Russians conduct themselves and the way the United States does. ”
Well, maybe that used to be the case before Trump became the president. Alarmingly, we now apparently do have something in common with Russia — our president feels free to vilify and discredit our government.
It all begs a question: Which side is our president on?
