Bashing Russia

For some reason Obama is going out of his way to be insulting and rude to Russia. After referring to it as a “regional power” which didn’t want to go to war with us because we have a bigger army a couple of weeks ago, he spoke to the issue again last weekend in an interview with the Economist.

"I do think it's important to keep perspective. Russia doesn't make anything," Obama said. "Immigrants aren't rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking."

The first thing that popped into mind when I read that is that we have been having to depend on Russia to carry our astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station for some years now because they still make space vessels and we do not. Something that fewer people know, but which I’m sure Obama does, is that when we want to launch satellites we have to buy rocket motors from Russia for our launch vehicles, because they make very good rocket motors and we don’t make them at all.

Russia is also second only to the US in the manufacture of weaponry. Add $8 billion in exports of machinery and $5 billion in electronic equipment exports, and it’s kind of hard to see that “Russia doesn’t make anything.”

According to Wikipedia, Russia has 300,000 legal immigrants each year and about four million illegal immigrants. Pretty small numbers compared to the United States, but it rather puts the lie to “Immigrants aren’t rushing…”

Life expectancy of the Russian male is 65.1 and rising faster than ours.

The population of Russia stopped shrinking in 2009, and has grown every year since then. The number of people living in poverty in Russia declined from 40% in 1999 to 13% in 2010, a 67% decrease, compared to a 44% increase in this country; from 32 million to 46 million.

I don’t know which would dismay me more greatly; that our president is that ignorant, or that he is that much of a liar, and such an unskilled liar to boot.