Boris Yeltsin stands atop that tank, and then what?
Granted, the funniest thing about this is the deadpan delivery of the translator (which is the way any comment by Hugo Chavez works), but, the preceeding transcript is thus:
President Yeltsin. Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear journalists: I want to say, first of all, that when I came here to the United States for this visit at the invitation of the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, I did not at that time have the degree of optimism with which I now am departing.
And this is all due to you because, coming from my statement yesterday in the United Nations, and if you looked at the press reports, one could see that what you were writing was that today’s meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. [Laughter] Well, now for the first time, I can tell you that you’re a disaster. [Laughter]
President Clinton. Be sure you get the right attribution there. [Laughter]
I remember watching the news reports of his re-election which tied him as “The Comeback Kid”, what with him having overcome an approval rating of, reportedly, seven percentage points to win an easy re-election victory in the run-off. I called shenanigans, the shenanigans being merely in the realm of what was termed “Authoritarian Democracy”, which came in the control that the government exerted over the media. It seems kind of inevitable that Yeltsin would fall away, giving a tearful and apologetic farewell address, and his self-picked successor, a former KGB head, would carry the day forward — with ever more “Authoritarian Kleptomancy”.
An interesting game is to name all of Russia’s leaders, starting with Lenin. The glitch comes in after Brezhnev. Name the two Soviet premiers between him and Gorbachev. I dare you to.
Yeltsin’s Dance Machine. A model of perfect health, I tells you.
……………….
In 1989, Yeltsin had to account to the Supreme Soviet how he had ended up at a police post outside Moscow dripping wet and wearing only his underwear.
He said he had been attacked, his head covered in a sack and dumped off a bridge into a river. Top communists said he had been drunk while on his way to a tryst with a lover.
In 1992, he played the spoons, a popular musical instrument in Russia, on the head of Askar Akayev, the president of ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.
In 1994, Yeltsin shocked officials during a picnic on a boat steaming down the Volga by suddenly ordering his border guards to toss his spokesman Vyacheslav Kostikov into the cold river.
Officials marking the departure of the last Russian troops from Germany the same year looked on aghast as he stumbled after a champagne lunch, seized the baton from the leader of a military band and insisted on doing the conducting himself.
Later the same day, he grabbed a microphone at a reception and sang tunelessly.
In perhaps the most celebrated incident, Yeltsin failed to emerge from his plane for talks with Ireland’s prime minister during a stopover at Shannon airport in 1994, leaving his hosts stunned on the tarmac.
An aide said he was exhausted, not drunk, after a US visit.
Fatigue was used to explain a 1997 gaffe when Yeltsin startled listeners in Sweden with a dramatic pledge to cut Russia’s nuclear arsenal and seek a total world ban.
A Kremlin spokesman said Yeltsin had made the comment after a long day of meetings.
Never the one to respect political or gender correctness, television cameras caught him at a 1995 meeting with foreign correspondents playfully tweaking the backside of a secretary.
April 24th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Yeltsin was Bush’s dad’s toy. He did the revolution and fell apart like he was supposed to. He destroyed Russia and did not try to put it together, which is what was planned.
Boris dies while Gates is seeing Putin. Gates x CIA and now DoD. The Director of the CIA died(fell out of his canoe) while Boris was visiting Bill, so I guess this makes sense in a dem/lucifer sort of way.