THE RIGHT'S VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE:

In a downright surreal passage, Cohen argues that Putin has shown "remarkable restraint" so far but faces mounting public pressure due to "vivid accounts" in the Russian state-run media of Kiev's barbarities against ethnic Russians. Can he really be unaware that the hysteria is being whipped up by lurid fictions, such as the recent TV1 story about a 3-year-old boy crucified in Slovyansk's main square in front of a large crowd and his own mother? Does Cohen not know that Russian disinformation and fakery, including old footage from Dagestan or Syria passed off as evidence of horrors in Ukraine, has been extensively documented? Is he unaware that top Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin himself, have publicly repeated allegations of war crimes that were quickly exposed as false, such as white phosphorus use by Ukrainian troops or a slaughter of the wounded in a hospital? But Cohen manages to take the surrealism a notch higher, earnestly citing the unnamed "dean of Moscow State University's School of Television" (that's Vitaly Tretyakov, inter alia a 9/11 "truther") who thinks the Kremlin may be colluding with the West to hush up the extent of carnage in Ukraine.

Offering introductory remarks was Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who, over the course of a three-decade career in Washington, has made the improbable journey from Cold Warrior to slavish defender of the Russian regime. Rohrabacher, who came to Washington as speechwriter for the Reagan White House, is now doing the same sort of legwork for his old nemeses in the Kremlin, who, in his view, are worthy allies in our shared struggle against militant Islam. "We could not have done it without them," is how he described Russian cooperation in our overthrowing the Taliban, apparently laboring under the belief that granting the United States overflight rights to bring down a radical Islamist regime on its southern flank somehow represented a concession on the part of Moscow.

Rohrabacher told the audience how, following the 2004 Beslan school massacre, in which nearly 200 children were killed after being taken hostage by Chechen terrorists, he called a "high-level person" in the George W. Bush administration to propose that the president "go to Beslan and stand shoulder to shoulder with Putin." Tying America's struggle against Islamist terrorism with Russia's would be inadvisable on several levels, not the least of which is that Russia's way of dealing with the problem largely consists of leveling entire cities. Indeed, this is a tried-and-true Russian strategy dating back to their war in Afghanistan--a war that Rohrabacher himself took part in as a fighter with the mujahideen--when the Russians inflicted nearly a million deaths. As for Beslan, to this day, parents of the victims criticize Putin for his handling of the crisis, alleging that their children lost their lives as a result of the botched rescue effort, as was the case when Putin ordered his security services to pump poison gas into a Moscow theater seized by Chechen terrorists. Thankfully, wiser heads within the White House prevailed, and the Bush-Putin photo op never happened. (Rohrabacher was the only elected official who turned up at the event. Lozansky said that Sen. Amy Klobuchar reserved the room, revealing a strange Minnesota connection: At last year's World Russia Forum, which took place just months after the annexation of Crimea, the Minnesota secretary of state spoke in opposition to sanctions, complaining about how a "U.S.-Russia Innovation Forum" scheduled to take place in St. Paul had to be canceled on orders from the State Department.)

Next up was the redoubtable Stephen Cohen, America's most notorious Kremlin apologist. Falsely labeling the conflict in Ukraine a "civil war," Cohen called for a "new détente" between Russia and the United States. This would suit Cohen well, as the old détente effectively conceded Soviet mastery over Eastern Europe, which is exactly what Cohen wants the West to do today. Cohen lamented how, not long ago, "both sides had legitimate spheres of influence," (or what he prefers to call "zones of national security") yet after the collapse of the Soviet Union, America and its allies disregarded the "conception of parity" and "treated Russia as a defeated nation." Washington's relationship to Moscow has since been characterized by "constant meddling in Russia's internal affairs," and the problem has only gotten worse. "This vilification of a Russian leader is unprecedented," constituting nothing less than "an illness." Cohen would presumably prefer all those gays, journalists, and other liberals--in the true sense of the word, not the form in which Cohen and other "progressives" of his ilk have perverted it--would just shut the hell up. [...]

It says something about your intellectual credibility as a scholar of Russia when the only outlets to feature your work are Russia Today and The Nation, the magazine edited by your spouse. Addressing the confab, Editor Katrina vanden Heuvel praised her publication as one that "repeatedly champions ideas labeled 'heretical' only to see them championed as conventional wisdom later." People who challenge the conventional wisdom on the situation in Ukraine are "marginalized and vilified" here in these United States, she complained (as opposed to those who express "heretical" ideas in Russia, who--if they're not shot in the back four times like opposition leader Boris Nemtsov--are thrown in jail). Like her husband, vanden Heuvel criticized the "demonization" of Putin, as if the man's critics needed to invent facts about his horrible record, and took a surprising swipe at The Washington Post, where she writes a column, calling it "Pravda on the Potomac. A regime change newspaper." (Which is more than can be said of The Nation. It's just Pravda, in English).

Vanden Heuvel introduced a panel of has-bens, "formers" all around: former AP reporter Robert Parry, former UPI editor Martin Sieff, former International Herald Tribune Asia bureau chief Patrick Smith, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, now the proprietor of the internationally renowned news source RayMcGovern.com. Like all regular guests of RT, the men channeled embitterment over their flailing careers into critiques of the "mainstream media." Parry, who accused the U.S. government of withholding information about the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, complained about how no one in the State Department returns his calls. McGovern spoke of Russia's "so-called aggression" in Ukraine before asking, "How can Russia trust a serial liar? And by that I mean John Kerry." It was at some point in the midst of Sieff's spiel about how the Western powers were leading us back to the carnage of World War that I decided I had better things to do.

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