British And French: Less Confidence In Bush To Do The Right Thing In World Than Putin - Politics on The Huffington Post

Now here is a rare instance where I side with the Bush administration: British And French: Less Confidence In Bush To Do The Right Thing In World Than Putin (Huffington Post).

Putin has been very deliberately reconstructing a police state in Russia after the fall of Stalin's USSR. The recent elections were a sham in which the opposition parties were harassed and subject to arbitrary arrest.

Bush has governed in a similarly autocratic and fundamentally undemocratic fashion. Opponents have been smeared as 'unpatriotic'. Torture and arbitrary arrest have become state policy without any objection from the Supreme Court and rather less objection from Congress than should have been the case.

But for all this, none of the Bush administration 'achievements' are going to outlast it for very long, except that is for the pardons, the deficit and possibly the recession. Putin's Russia on the other hand is going to become very much less democratic before there is any improvement.