In a Friday-morning post, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall likened the Tea Party to pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine who apparently are responsible for the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Marshall wrote, “Here we have them break into nursing homes to photographs [sic] senator's comatose wives; there Putin gives them heavy armaments designed for full scale land war in Europe.”
Marshall’s post in its entirety (emphasis added):
Following up on my piece from last night about Putin's epic goof, here's an amazing little nugget from David Remnick's [New Yorker] post about the Malaysian Air shoot down.
“[Igor] Strelkov is well known for leading historical reënactments of Russian military battles, like you have in the States with the Civil War reënactors,” [former Yeltsin and Putin advisor Gleb] Pavlovsky said. “It used to be a fantasy world for people like him, but now they have a realm for their imaginations.”
So that's who you're dealing with: some mix of civil war reenactor or Tea Partier decked out in revolutionary garb, with a mix of reckless aggression and comical incompetence. Here we have them break into nursing homes to photographs [sic] senator's comatose wives; there Putin gives them heavy armaments designed for full scale land war in Europe.
Here’s more background on Strelkov from Remnick’s piece:
Like the radical nationalists and neo-imperialists in Moscow, who have easy access to the airwaves these days, Strelkov has a singular point of disagreement with Putin: the Russian President hasn’t gone nearly far enough; he has failed to invade and annex “Novorossiya,” the separatist term for eastern Ukraine. Pavlovsky said that people like Strelkov and his Moscow allies are as delusional as they are dangerous, somehow believing that they are taking part in grand historical dramas, like the Battle of Borodino, in 1812, or “the novels of Tolkien.”
