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Vladimir Putin might be the luckiest man alive when it comes to his enemies. They all keep dying in the most natural and not at all suspicious ways! They slip and fall from tall buildings a lot. They get mysteriously poisoned. They accidentally set off grenades on their private jets 20,000 feet in the air.
So while we still have not heard Russia’s official excuse for the dissident Alexei Navalny dropping dead in an Arctic Circle prison colony, we’re sure it will be a good one:
The prison service in the Yamalo-Nenets district said Navalny had “felt unwell” after a walk on Friday.
He had “almost immediately lost consciousness”, it said in a statement, adding that an emergency medical team had immediately been called and tried to resuscitate him but without success.
“The emergency doctors declared the prisoner dead. Cause of death is being established.”
Lame. He was in a prison colony above the Arctic Circle, and they can’t be bothered to get creative? Not even a nod towards “eaten by a starving polar bear”? Or “tried escaping via the Dyatlov Pass”?
LIKE THESE.
Russia Still Leads World In Poisoning, Falling Off Buildings, And Being Beaten To Death ‘Accidents’
Navalny was Putin’s most prominent domestic critic, which quite frankly makes it a miracle he made it this long. He endured trumped-up embezzlement charges that critics believe were prosecuted to disqualify him from running for office and that landed him in prison a decade ago. He survived assassination attempts that left him mostly blind in one eye and landed him in a German hospital with poisoning from a Novichok nerve agent, which coincidentally has also been how several of Putin’s other enemies met their maker. In prison the last few years, he has endured several mysterious medical episodes that had doctors in Russia openly calling for Putin to allow him to be treated, a brave call to make in a dictatorship where protesting the Ukraine war can land you in prison yourself.
Finally a couple of months ago, Russian authorities moved Navalny to the prison above the Arctic Circle, where it was impossible for his lawyers and supporters to have as many eyes on him. Then he suddenly dropped dead, allegedly. Nothing suspicious here!
AND LIKE SO.
And darn Putin’s luck, this crazy thing happened right when Tucker Carlson was about to completely change the worldwide perception that Putin is a bloodthirsty oligarch who does not care a whit for his people and will happily send them to mass death to satisfy his dreams of empire. How was Tucker going to pull that off? Apparently with whatever in the actual fuck this is:
Yep, that’s Tucker visiting a Russian grocery store, where he discovers you can rent a grocery cart and get your money back automatically when you return it, using what to Tucker seems to be Jetsons-level futuristic technology but will be familiar to anyone who has shopped at an Aldi’s or rented a baggage cart in a major American airport anytime in the last few decades.
We are then treated to the sight of Tucker being just blown away by racks and racks of baked bread, as if every goddamn Wegman’s and Ralph’s and Harris Teeter in America hasn’t had the same racks since, oh, forever. “The low-carb lifestyle has not swept Russia,” he tells us, perhaps imagining that back home Americans only eat pizza with cauliflower crust now.
Bananas! Oh look, Russia has bananas! At least for now. Soon it may not, thanks to Putin banning banana imports from Ecuador due to an arms trade tiff. No worries, the nation’s well-known tropical climate should make it easy for Russians to grow their own bananas.
Russian wine from occupied Crimea! Sure, twist the knife a little. Yeah Russia has been slaughtering Ukrainians by the thousands, but now Moscow grocery stores have good wine, so it’s a wash.
Then we get to the pièce de résistance, when Tucker hits the checkout stand and finds out how little this entire cart of groceries is going to cost him compared to what he has to pay back in Joe Biden’s America:
“We didn’t pay any attention to cost as we were just putting in the cart what we would eat over a week. And we all came in around four hundred bucks … it was $104 U.S. That’s when you start to realize ideology maybe doesn’t matter as much as you thought … If you take people’s standard of living and tank it through filth and crime and inflation and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want … you’re wrecking people’s lives in their country. And that’s what our leaders have done to us. And coming to a Russian grocery store, the heart of evil, and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders. That’s how I feel, anyway.”
The average wage in Russia is $791 per month, which means if a Russian spends $100 a week per week on groceries, he is spending well over half his monthly salary just on food. In fact, as of July 2021, over half of Russians spent 60 percent of their monthly pay just on food.
But yeah, sure, Tucker the multi-millionaire struggles to stay within his weekly grocery budget at Publix. (Actually he might, we hear Publix can be pricey.)
And all this sucking up to Putin might be for naught anyway, as this week the Russian president told an interviewer he’d been disappointed that Tucker didn’t ask him tough questions. And Tucker tried so hard to go the “cradle the balls, work the shaft” route! After bragging to audiences about his awesome portrayal of Putin, he must be so disappointed.
THIS ONE.
Oh, one more thing, from four days ago at the World Government Summit in Dubai (thanks to Media Matters for noticing):
EMAD ELDIN ADEEB: You should challenge in the roles of an interview, and you’re a master in your business. It’s not for me to give you a lecture about that, but you should challenge some ideas. For instance, you didn’t talk about freedom of speech in Russia, you did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about restrictions on opposition in the coming elections.
CARLSON: I didn’t talk about the things that every other American media outlet talks about. […] Because those are covered and because I have spent my life talking to people who run countries in various countries and have concluded the following. That every leader kills people, including my leader. Every leader kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be a leader.
Good thing his comrades are busy explaining right now that really, didn’t Joe Biden kill Alexei Navalny, by putting Trump on trial?
These things are the same, ever and always.
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