One of the few things Russians do really well, with a truly national passion and zeal, is stealing.
If we excluded from the U.S. population everyone who works for or invests in a large private business and everyone who has a Facebook account, how many people would we have left? That’s the small group of Americans that the government of Russia may not be spying on. And it appears Obama is teaming with the U.S. extreme right to give the Russians a free hand in doing so.
This month, it was revealed that the government of Russia is actively using hacking and cyber warfare to spy on American companies and perhaps even Facebook users. The news came on the heels of Americans learning that Russian hackers lurked behind the massive recent compromising of credit card data at retail giant Target.
If word from two high-ranking congressional leaders that Russia assisted Edward Snowden in stealing U.S. secrets, and the likes of Barack Obama telling them that Russians can be trusted, were not sufficient to convince Americans that they face a new cold war with Vladimir Putin’s despotic regime, this latest sequence of events certainly ought to be.
Stealing is one of the few things Russians do really well, with a truly national passion and zeal. According to Transparency International, in fact, only 42 nations on the planet do it better, and Russia is unrivaled among the major industrialized countries. Gambia, East Timor and Ethiopia are all substantially more honest than Russia, TI reports.
[…]
