Commenter Hunter Gatherer last night:
If the 2016 GOP POTUS primary was held right at this moment, Putin would win easily. I’m surprised nobody’s polled how well Putin would do in a GOP primary.
SteveM has been all over this topic for a while.
Oh, it makes me wonder: why haven’t any Republican presidential candidates bared their chests and run around doing macho things on camera? We had Perry pointing guns in the air and Paul Ryan posing in badly photoshopped pictures with dead deer, but why not go the Full Monty, or at least the Half Monty in this case?
Craig
To understand Russians today, you have to know that they hate communism, but they think the Soviet Union was awesome.
To understand Republicans today, you have to know that they hate Russia, but they think that Vladimir Putin is a hero.
Hawes
Oh God! I just had a mental image of Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh and Eric Cantor with their shirts off chopping wood and wrestling weasels.
Thanks for that.
Renie
Please tell me that headline and video is snark.
some guy
To understand Russians today, you have to know that they hate communism
To understand Greeks today, you have to know that they hate democracy
To understand Chinese today, you have to know that they hate Confucius and Buddha. plus Mao doubleplusgood
To understand X today, you have to know that they hate Y
go Z
ranchandsyrup
Paul Ryan lifting weights and talking about p90x and rage against the machine while looking like Roy from the Simpsons Is as close as they’ve got.
jl
@Craig: There is an old joke that I heard here and in the Baltics, Something like ‘capitalism is the ruthless exploitation of men by other men, but in communism it is just the reverse’ The joke is in the two ways you can interpret that.
pseudonymous in nc
It’s Faux Nation, which is to Faux News what RenewAmerica is to Townhall.com.
But yeah, it’s not as if we didn’t already know GOPers love the idea of a posturing “man’s man” in charge, given how they tried to project that onto Bush the lesser.
NotMax
Well, there was Congressman Christopher Lee…
some guy
Pravda on the Hudson, always good for a laugh. (google says: NY Times, todays edition. casting doubt upon Fee Syrian Army publicist Liz Sly, rival edition, )
cf. Iran, space monkeys, sublime gesture towards Elliot Abrams biggest #1 fangirl
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/new-images-of-syrias-first-lady-and-irans-space-monkey-cast-doubt-on-two-reports/
Calming Influence
Holy Shit! I really thought that “highlight reel” thing was a joke.
jl
I can’t watch the clip. Does it have pics of Putin in his light aircraft guiding migrating endangered birds to a safe haven?
Someone said, maybe a malicious commenter here, that he dressed up in bird costume for that stunt, and I almost believed it.
Would be nice if the reel had that, so the wingers would remember that Putin also has some commie lib tendencies. Might cool their ardor a little.
Edit: And, any clips of Putin body surfing? Eh… that is a risky sport, suited for he-men, and being shirtless all the time doesn’t kind of stand out as being a little… you know.. kind of.. hmm.. ‘odd’ is probably best word for it.
Roger Moore
@NotMax:
And Carlos Danger.
? Martin
Well, most of them do speak highly of rape, so they’re trying.
JGabriel
Hunter Gatherer:
Man, I hope Tom Jensen at PPP sees that, because you know Jensen would run that poll in a heartbeat.
NotMax
@Roger Moore
A song which cries out for a parody version as “Shirtless Congress Man.”
You’ve texted out a photo
And thrown away your job
jl
How do GW’s Hockney-esque shower stall self-portraits figure into all this?
I am interested, but no wise cracks from you jokers about Barney, OK? Leave the Late Barney alone.
Lucy Montrose
I thought during his 2002 gubernatorial race, Romney went shirtless for a campaign ad; but it appears to have been a rumor:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/4/2/113344/9585
This one definitely looks Photoshopped: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2007/05/mitt-romney-pretty-fly-for-white-guy-uh.html?m=1 (get the brain bleach)
some guy
allahu ahkbar for the Times. nothing escapes them.
Keith P
Well, whadya know…
jl
@? Martin: Come to think of it, we do have quite a few manly man beefcake from GOPer pols, Mostly in scandals of them trying to score something or other on singles sites, and similar high toned manly stuff.
David Koch
They’re in love with a puny, angry, drunken dwarf
Mnemosyne
Remember, kids, only wimps wear bicycle helmets.
Honestly, do these people think we can’t Google these things?
Mnemosyne
@jl:
I thought that was Anna Paquin. At least, that’s how I remember the movie.
The manliest of manly men always get their best ideas from children’s films.
Roger Moore
@David Koch:
Putin is actually a teetotaler, which many Russians see as a very admirable (and rare) trait. They especially liked that as a contrast to Yeltsin.
KG
The obvious answer is that none of them would look good without a shirt
@Mnemosyne: as weak as this will sound, one of the things I’d hate about being president would be having to do things like wear a bike helmet because I’m an example.
Mnemosyne
@KG:
I’m guessing it’s also a Secret Service requirement. They don’t want to have to explain why they let the Leader Of The Free World take a helmet-less header over his handlebars when he hit a rock.
I always wear a helmet, but that’s because I know how clumsy I am, and that the squirrels around here are trying to kill me.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
Squirrel!!!
KG
@Mnemosyne: oh, I’m sure. But I’m just the opposite. I don’t wear a helmet, regardless of where I’m riding, in fact, I was 14 or 15 when California passed the law requiring minors to wear a helmet and didn’t ride my bike again until college. Just never liked them
ETA: guessing it’s also a recent thing. Couldn’t imagine Reagan would have worn a helmet on his horses
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
True story: even with the legendary Glendale drivers, the worst bike accident I was in happened because another cyclist broadsided me. Though, actually, Glendale drivers aren’t bad at all with bicycles — I’ve run into far more assholes in Burbank and Pasadena.
(For the non-locals, one of the legendary Glendale drivers. This is the funny bakery crash where no one was killed or injured, unlike the sad one about a year ago.)
KG
@Mnemosyne: be honest, it was just the little old lady in Pasadena
Mnemosyne
@KG:
I’m not super-fond of helmets, but I’m even less fond of brain injuries, especially preventable ones. A helmet isn’t going to do much good if you get hit by a car going 40+ miles an hour, but it will sure help if you wipe out on an oil spot in the road and hit your head on the curb.
Plus I have an awesome-looking helmet, which helps ease the pain of conformity.
Bob In Portland
Saw Dion at a folk festival in England in 1971. Awesome guitarist. The back picture on his Sanctuary album was from that festival. The song “Sanctuary” is about Berkeley, CA.
roxy
@Mnemosyne: I like the Eight Ball and Atlantic Blue helmets
Hunter Gathers
So how much longer do we have to wait for Putin’s Nailin’ Palin? I’d be big seller at CPAC.
Keith P
@Hunter Gathers: Nailin’ Palin 2: The Rise of Vladimir the Impaler
Citizen_X
@David Koch: Does Putin even have a shirt?
David Koch
@Hunter Gathers: +69
David Koch
@Citizen_X: It’s hilarious. The wingers are homophobic, but they swoon over some tiny little guy’s bare chest.
PhoenixRising
@Mnemosyne: The accident I’ve actually been in, caused by a stuck rear wheel on badly finished road surface, was 15mph and my helmet saved my life. Dorky, but useful. I’m almost as clumsy as our host, and overconfident in my (non-existent) athleticism to the point that my planned tombstone etching is ‘It didn’t look that steep!’ But I wear a pink flowery helmet with a light, even so.
Putin is scary for reasons that escape Sarah Palin and our native 27%ers.
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne:
I like this helmet.
Origuy
@PhoenixRising: I had a bad bicycle accident when I was 16, before helmets were popular. Caught a wheel in a railroad track that crossed the road at an angle. Woke up in the hospital with a concussion and 13 stitches in my upper lip. That track wasn’t used much; fortunately someone stopped and pulled me and the bike to safety. I started wearing helmets as soon as they became available.
Chris
@Craig:
They thought communism was bad, but then they tried capitalism…
NonyNony
@KG:
QFT. Take a look at the male candidates in the 2012 GOP primary. Which of them would look good riding around without a shirt on?
And this is not a slam. Most men above a certain age do not actually look good without a shirt on. As always there are exceptions (many of them actors who pay good money to personal trainers and plastic surgeons to make sure that they can look good without a shirt on for decades after average folks would look terrible), but for most men the answer is just no, no, please no, keep your shirt on.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
YES! Full monty, with an erection, to show they are “ready for action” from day one as commander in chief.
Idiotocracy was really prophetic with the wrestler president.
debbie
Now that Russia’s engineering an “election” in Crimea to justify annexation, I want to see Republicans being more supportive of Ukrainians’ voting rights than they are of many Americans’.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@debbie: “One man, one vote” and that man happens to be Putin.
flukebucket
He just looks like a drunk escaping on a horse.
Matt McIrvin
The right-wing admiration of Putin, and the insistence that Obama do something idiotic to fight him, are all of a piece: it’s just the cult of the macho man and the identification of the willingness to send somebody else into war with being a macho man. That is, the same crap we’ve been dealing with since forever.
Matt McIrvin
…The funny thing, of course, is that everyone’s also seen shirtless photos of Barack Obama looking buff and manly. Which means that people trying to frame him as a wimp need to work extra-hard to compensate.
Craig
@jl: As a Russian boss used to tell me: “Everything they told us about communism was a lie, and everything they told us about capitalism was the truth.”
schrodinger's cat
The conservatives in this country love them some Vlad; And I will Always Love You.. It has a LOL comic I made and links to articles in the MSM about the love that dare not speak its name.
Raenelle
Ah. Dion. Always glad to be reminded of Dion DiMucci. He was my favorite as I entered my teens, and he’s kind of proof to myself that I had good taste, even back then.