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Saturday’s Almost Coup Oddly Makes Putin Stronger
It’s fun imagining a cowering and weakened Putin but sadly it’s off the mark
He is indeed a tough nut to crack. While many of us rejoiced for a few hours on Saturday at both the imminent end of Putin’s 23-year reign of mediocrity and murder, and the image of the face-you-just-want-to-punch genuinely worried that maybe “they’re coming for me,” the whole thing ended with a bit of whimper.
The joke is on us, it seems, yet again. But I get the joke, so, I feel somewhat protected. If you think Putin has been wounded, time to think again.
When Czar Pavel I was killed in the middle of the night at the lovely Mikhailovksy Palace in St. Petersburg, he was supposedly found cowering behind some curtains. He even peed himself. I sincerely hope that Putin was urinating more than usual on Saturday; maybe, his appetite was gone and he suffered from dry mouth caused by his anxiety throughout the tense moments of OJ-Simpson like “ride on Moscow.”
We won’t know. Putin vanished and has not been seen since but, please, read, nothing into that. Putin is okay. He is probably bathing in yak blood somewhere and marveling at how damn lucky he always is.
Poor Pavel, though, wasn’t so lucky. The agitated officers strangled him that…
