{"id":47308,"date":"2013-09-13T00:57:10","date_gmt":"2013-09-13T07:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=47308"},"modified":"2014-12-29T21:16:39","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T04:16:39","slug":"a-reader-puzzles-about-putin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2013\/09\/a-reader-puzzles-about-putin.html","title":{"rendered":"A reader puzzles about Putin"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>He writes<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>So I read Putin\u2019s Op Ed piece.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/09\/12\/opinion\/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html?_r=0\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">You can read it in full here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This guy may well be a super villain.  It wouldn\u2019t surprise me to learn that he vacations (shirtless) in his volcanic lair, feeding his sharks with laser beams on their heads.  But the only point in his entire piece that I disagreed with is that I thought he should have capitalized \u201cPope\u201d out of respect.  He\u2019s calling for diplomacy and pointing out that adding violence to the violence will only breed more violence.  He\u2019s being \u2014 dare I say it? \u2014 sensible.  He\u2019s behaving like a leader.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, Obama and Kerry and several prominent members of Congress are making complete buffoons of themselves.<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s going on????<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well, there are two perspectives.  1) The prayer of a righteous man availeth much and an awful lot of people prayed last Saturday.  That\u2019s the heavenly perspective.  It includes the proposition that God frequently writes straight with crooked lines and uses all sorts of knotty timber to build his House.<\/p>\n<p>2) When your political enemy is destroying himself, don\u2019t interfere.  Putin can be the Voice of Sweet Reasonableness and let Obama and the crazy neocons bay for war while the whole world opposes them because, hey!, it makes him look great!  Why wouldn\u2019t he?  That\u2019s the earthly perspective.<\/p>\n<p>My sole interest is in our not launching this stupid stupid war and killing a bunch of innocents while helping the monsters.  I could not possibly care less which rich and powerful twit in our Ruling Class loses face, nor that Putin gains some political advantage from this.  If he\u2019s using his clout to back an agenda that coincides with the Holy Father\u2019s here (for the moment) that\u2019s good enough for me.  The real people I care about are the innocents on the ground in Syria, not the geopolitical Planners (who should all be strapped to Tomahawks and fired into Antarctica).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>He writes So I read Putin\u2019s Op Ed piece. You can read it in full here. This guy may well be a super villain. It wouldn\u2019t surprise me to learn that he vacations (shirtless) in his volcanic lair, feeding his sharks with laser beams on their heads. But the only point in his entire piece [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-47308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-war-without-end-amen"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>A reader puzzles about Putin<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"He writes So I read Putin&#039;s Op Ed piece. You can read it in full here. This guy may well be a super villain. 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