Obama Tells Europe that Conservatism is Coupled to Putin

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Yves Herman

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Yves Herman

By Neil Munro.

President Barack Obama used his set-piece speech in Europe on Wednesday to couple Vladimir Putin’s crudely nationalist takeover of Crimea with the increasingly popular opposition to his big-government, progressive agenda.

“Casual indifference [to President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Crimea]… would allow the old way of doing things to regain a foothold in this young century,” he declared.

Progressive “ideals have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power… Often this alternative vision roots itself in the notion that by virtue of race or faith or ethnicity, some are inherently superior to others and that individual identity must be defined by us versus them,” he claimed.

Throughout his speech, Obama contrasted progressives’ supposedly universalist ideals with conservatives’ ideal of smaller governments that are tailored to the preferences of their unique populations.

The progressive ideals include the “United Nations and a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international law and the means to enforce those laws,” he said.

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Lindsey Graham: Russia’s a Gas Station Acting Like a Country

By Todd Beamon.

Russia is merely “an oil and gas company masquerading as a country,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said in an attack Wednesday on both Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.

“The value system of Mr. Putin is that of a KGB colonel,” the South Carolina Republican said on the Senate floor, Politico reports. “I understand where he is coming from because of his value system. I just don’t agree with it.”

Graham was joined by Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire in accusing Putin of manipulating Moscow’s vast oil resources to expand its power throughout the world.

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