Miranda Devine: Vladimir Putin passive-aggressive in praise for Joe Biden
We’ve been saying all along that Joe Biden is a senile old fool but it took no less than Russian President Vladimir Putin to bring it into the open last week, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Russian disinformation is so yesterday. Vladimir Putin speaks the gospel truth, now that he’s declared Joe Biden is not the senile old fool he’s been painted as by a hostile media, especially in Russia.
Biden is a “professional” who is “completely knowledgeable on all issues”, the former KGB case officer told an audience of college graduates last week after his meeting in Geneva with the 78-year-old US President.
“You need to be very careful when working with him so as not to miss something. He himself does not miss a thing, I assure you, and this was absolutely clear to me.
“He is focused, he knows what he wants to achieve and does it very skilfully, and you can instantly sense it,” Putin said.
In China there is an expression for this sort of shameless puffery: “peng sha,” praising someone in order to destroy them.
In most cultures, flattery is viewed with suspicion as a potential prelude to hubris, particularly in Russia and China. But US media outlets like CNN took Putin’s praise at face value because it is precisely what they wanted to hear.
It reflected the White House narrative they themselves were pushing when they gushed sincerely about Biden’s “seasoned air of confidence” in Europe, his “reputation as a foreign policy wise man” and his “fluidity on the world stage”, while papering over his obvious weakness and frequent befuddlement on tour.
Putin did not once crack a smile as he waxed lyrical about Biden’s cognitive skills last week but he was having a lot of fun all the same, as became clear when he made what at first appeared to be a baffling reference to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who was not present at talks between the two leaders and was irrelevant to proceedings.
“So what that [Biden] sometimes confuses things,” Putin said. “His press secretary is a young, educated, beautiful woman — she herself constantly confuses things.
“It is not because she is poorly educated or has a bad memory, it’s just that when people think that some things are secondary, they don’t focus too much attention on them.
“Americans think that nothing is more important than themselves,” he added, with a typically arrogant flourish.
The reference to Psaki was a dead giveaway that Putin was taking the mickey because Psaki is a comic legend in Russia, especially among Putin’s nationalist base, and not in a good way.
When she was John Kerry’s spokeswoman during the Obama administration, she made a number of glaring gaffes that made her the favourite punching bag of Russia’s internet trolls.
For instance, in a 2014 press conference, she mixed up her directions when she said natural gas flowed from Western Europe to Russia.
“There are flows of gas … that go through from Western Europe through Ukraine to Russia, and we – or I’m sorry, the other way – from Russia through Ukraine to Western Europe,” she said.
She had corrected herself but the Russian internet took only the first part of the quote to portray her as an ignorant dummkopf.
Another favourite flub was Psaki listing a series of State Department objections to an election in Ukraine that she said included “carousel voting” – a form of multiple voting.
When asked by an Associated Press reporter what that meant, she had no clue.
Psaki lit up the Russki internet again when she defended a Ukrainian Foreign Minister, who called Putin a “f--ker” on camera, by saying he was “encouraging calm”.
Video mashes and photoshopped images of Psaki started going viral after her press conferences. Russians couldn’t get enough of her.
There even was a new verb coined in her honour: to “Psaki”, defined by the Russian blogosphere as “when someone makes a dogmatic statement about something they don’t understand, mixes facts up, and then doesn’t apologise.”
Of course, the propaganda motive was to undermine American efforts to defend Ukraine from Russian aggression.
During the feeble foreign policy era of the late Obama administration, Psaki and her hapless boss Kerry were trolled mercilessly by Russia’s urbane and tricky Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was by Putin’s side inside last week’s summit in Geneva, sizing up Biden and his neophyte counterpart Anthony Blinken, and no doubt advising the Russian President how best to outsmart them. It’s case of deja vu for the Russians.
Back in January 2014, during meetings with Kerry in Paris, Lavrov presented Psaki with a pink Russian fur hat adorned with the Communist red star and hammer-and-sickle, and then got her and Kerry to pose with him for a photo, which was promptly posted on Twitter by Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the bland caption: “Hat gifted to [Psaki] to stay warm and fancy”.
Here’s Jen Psaki hugging Russia's Foreign Minister and Russia’s chief foreign affairs propagandist while wearing a pink hammer and sickle hat pic.twitter.com/WMJytaxd7J
— Matt Wolking (@MattWolking) November 30, 2020
But if there were any doubts about the propaganda intent, Lavrov’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who was also in the photo, would repost the image in 2018, with the caption: “Today this photo is exactly four years old. Masterpiece in every sense. Soldiers of the information war.”
All very funny, just not for us.
Putin’s excessive praise last week for Biden, choosing compliments the exact opposite of the reality which is clear for all to see – but which reflect the White House’s fervent in-house narrative – was a sign of trouble.
He was winking at America’s enemies and signalling they should make hay while the sun shines.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
More Coverage
Join the conversation
Runaway train: Who’s in control of this strike action?
ANALYSIS: The strike action crippling Sydney’s rail network has become a runaway freight train that rail union boss Toby Warnes is unwilling, or unable, to stop, writes James O’Doherty.
Read more
Anti-Semitic nurses are victims of hateful ideology
The Bankstown nurses, victims of a culture fuelled by extremist propaganda that dehumanises all Jews, are not the originators of this disease – merely the symptom, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Read more