Eric:
> So one does have to make a choice then. You're
either
> with the Russians or you're against them?
No, that would be sandbox politics, as Chris well knows.
It's just that Chris, who is as affected by the marginality and irrelevance of leftists in most of the developed capitalist countries, also has a tendency to transfer his subjective sentiments onto geopolitical actors who are not soliciting his opinion one way or another. Thus, when Bob Morris suggests that the Russian state is comprised by "thugs", he takes it very personally.
I see this sort of thing *all the time*. Friends of mine whose cultural tastes for Sarah Silverman or "The Wire" lead them to hallucinate that they are geopolitical advisors to George W. Bush against a resurgent Imperium Teutonicum.
One day, when and if an actual left manages to emerge, this sort of psychological transference will be completely unnecessary.
Until then, we would do well to follow Johannes Agnoli's suggestion (paraphrasing Lenin) that "patience and irony" are our tools in decidedly non-revolutionary times.