In an interview with The Economist published over the weekend, Obama got in this little dig at Russia:
Russia doesn’t make anything. Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking.
But as Mark Adomanis points out, none of these statements is factually accurate. So why, then, did the president make them? Zenon Evans wonders:
It’s bizarre that Obama criticized Russia on these fronts when there’s plenty of legitimate issues – like Moscow’s crackdown on civil rights, the pro-Western political opposition, and independent media – that he could have addressed instead. These, of course, don’t have much bearing on the war Russia is waging against Ukrainian sovereignty or the mass killing of civilians on a Malaysian plane, but whether it’s due to a lazy team of fact-checkers or deliberate rah-rah nationalism to boost the U.S. by comparison, dubious talking points don’t help the Obama administration resolve the current crises.
Hearing the president say “Russia doesn’t make anything” will only inflame anti-American sentiment among Russian civilians, thereby reinforcing Putin’s own ballooning cushion of popular support. And, there’s need for healthy debate about the U.S.’s actions against the Kremlin throughout this war, but by spouting some easily-debunked information, Obama effectively invites skepticism of the accuracy of other White House claims about Russia.
But Dylan Matthews figures he was playing up the overall idea that Putinist Russia has no future:
[T]he fact that Obama felt compelled to say this — inaccuracies and all — is interesting. The implicit argument being countered here is the idea that, as TIME magazine recently put it, a “Cold War II” is afoot and Russia might present a real rival to the US. But one crucial thing that made the Soviet Union a plausible rival was that, for much of the world, Communism was an extremely attractive ideology, one embraced by guerrilla and resistance movements across the globe and thus capable of pulling numerous countries into the Soviet orbit. As Obama points out, there’s nothing so attractive about 2014′s Russia, which profoundly limits how successful it can be as a world power.
The Dish 