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John McCain: I’ll Reply to Putin’s NYT Op-Ed in Pravda

For the first time in history, one world leader will respond to another world leader via newspaper columns in their respective nations and languages. Vladimir Putin penned a NYT column last week that ...
John McCain: I’ll Reply to Putin’s NYT Op-Ed in Pravda
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  • For the first time in history, one world leader will respond to another world leader via newspaper columns in their respective nations and languages. Vladimir Putin penned a NYT column last week that discussed U.S. foreign policy with regard to a forthcoming attack on Syria. That column incensed many readers, and some Twitter reactions labeled Putin a “concern troll” who’s now “doing donuts in Obama’s front yard.”

    Following open criticism of the diplomatically-arranged plan by Russia and the United States to deprive Syria of its chemical weapons arsenal, John McCain now stands ready to toss his hat into the ring after he jokingly suggested to CNN that he’d “love to have a commentary in Pravda.”

    Things became interesting when the English language editor of Pravda, Dmitry Sudakov, told Josh Hudson at Foreign Policy’s The Cable that John McCain is more than welcome to write for the Russian paper, which has moved online: “Mr. McCain has been an active anti-Russian politician for many years already. We have been critical of his stance on Russia and international politics in our materials, but we would be only pleased to publish a story penned by such a prominent politician as John McCain.”

    At this point, Slate questioned whether or not McCain knew which Pravda he would be writing for: the Pravda that represented the official mouthpiece of the Soviet Russian government (which no longer exists), or the Pravda as it exists today, which Slate author Josh Keating describes as “a frequently updated and highly-entertaining tabloid, publishing in both English and Russian, whose content is a kind of cross between WorldNetDaily and the National Enquirer.”

    Slate collected a few interesting examples of the modern day Pravda, which included an op-ed about the 2012 presidential election that equated electing Mitt Romney with “appointing a serial paedophile as a kindergarten teacher, a rapist as a janitor at a girls’ dormitory or a psychopath with a fixation on knives as a kitchen hand.”

    As ridiculous as it sounds, when The Cable talked to McCain’s communications director Brian Rogers, he told them on the record that “Senator McCain would be glad to write something for Pravda, so we’ll be reaching out to Dmitry with a submission.” Sudakov was thrilled at the news, and intends to have McCain’s column “published in English and then translated into Russian so that all our Russian readers could read what Mr. McCain has to say.”

    [Image via a CNN video on YouTube about the political jousting between Russia and the United States]

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