As Aristotle said every man is a tool, and so the masters of mankind keep choosing the right tools to the jobs at hand--each of them meant for their particular purpose or telos; Brezhnev for reducing the signs of live on the body of Soviet society; Gorbachev, as his name indicates, to be its anti-Soviet gravedigger; Yeltsin, the alcoholic buffoon, to stage the tragedy scripted by master villains as a comedy of a village idiot; and Putin, Marshal Pétain, the Petit, to make the "puta" way (Put), the only way open and left to Russia as a civilization and country

First there was a street hooligan and thug growing into a small man sent to be a director of a cultural center where he found East Germans to be culturally and politically very backward. His small network of snitches was quickly squealed. Except for him. His friends called him "the Mole."

Then from a "guardian of the socialist revolution and principles," he became a manager of Leningrad and the KGB turned into a mafia kingdom. Then the Yeltsin mafia family called him to the rescue. And G.W. Bush approved.

Then out of his commonly photoshopped visage a vision of the "last hope" and "savior of mankind" has been created thanks to the many daily fake stories made both in the West and Russia while guys and gals in Langley have been falling off their chairs dying of laughter, vaguely recalling Machiavelli's aphorism that "people are so dumb and vulgar that not to tap into such a vast resource and not to use would be the greatest stupidity and the most egregious sin which the Prince is liable to; but then he would be no Prince.

1. Of course, to say that a C/D student does world class strategizing has always been an overstatement
2. Nova Shpakova ‏@NovaShpakova  13m13 minutes ago

   @ieee_english Also, I dont see, even at best, that Putin is over there strategizing all these events - his advisors do that