Eric Zuesse
Though I detest both Trump and Obama, because they're liars, I constantly investigate the propaganda about them (which includes most of the 'news' that's published about them in the the U.S. and allied countries), the propaganda for and against both of these American Presidents; and I came across the New York Times best-seller by two Washington Post reporters - extremely anti-Trump like their employer Jeff Bezos is - because that book turns out to have been the original source for a certain damning quotation by Trump (and not because that book is the best-selling anti-Trump book).
The book is titled: A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America.
I happened, right away when considering this book, to go straight to Chapter 15, "Congratulating Putin." On the second page of that Chapter (p. 226) is:
"Success awaits us!" Putin told reporters. Together, we will get to work on a great, massive scale, in the name of Russia."The boisterous crowd responded with chants of"Russia! Russia!"Unsaid was the fact that the Russian election was anything but fair. The most popular opposition leader challenging Putin, Alexei Navalny, had been barred from the ballot.
So, I looked online for documentation of that allegation. Right away, I came to the article in the English language version of Germany's national broadcaster Deutsche Welle headlined "Alexei Navalny: Most Russians don't care about his work, poll shows" and it reported that (and I quote here):
Only 9% of Russians have a positive view of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's work, Russian media reported on Tuesday. A poll conducted by the reputable Levada Center revealed that one in four Russians even have a negative view of Navalny's endeavors. The center quizzed over 1,600 Russian adults in both rural and urban environments in late October, according to the Interfax news agency.... Only 18% believe that the government is attempting to suppress independent anti-corruption scrutiny.... Last week, a Moscow court ordered him, his foundation and his ally Lyubov Sobol to pay 29 million rubles (€410,840, $457,000) each for libeling the Moscow Schoolchild company. Previously, Navalny's group claimed the catering company had provided subquality food to pupils.
People I know who live in Russia have told me that it's a Western lie that Navalny has ever had any significant political support inside the country, and that he is widely considered to be just a front for the U.S. and allied governments and their mainstream fake 'news'-media in order to stir a movement in Russia to overthrow Putin, who is widely respected by Russians. I don't know whether that's true, but certainly any 'journalists' who allege - without documentation - that"The most popular opposition leader challenging Putin, Alexei Navalny,"is an example of fake 'news'-media that are trying to stir support of their own population for action (sanctions, etc.) against Russia. In other words: they're propagandists.
So far as I have been able to determine, the idea that Russia still remains a dictatorship after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, is a propagandistic lie by fake 'news'-media, many of which are the mainstream ones in the United States, such as the Washington Post - the media that are owned or controlled by U.S. billionaires.
To allege, falsely, that Navalny was"The most popular opposition leader challenging Putin,"and to imply, while providing no evidence, that he had been removed from the ballot in that election for that reason, is just about as vicious a lie as can be imagined; and I doubt that this is the only lie in that book. I don't have the time to fact-check every allegation in the book, but I did fact-check that one, because I wanted to know more about Trump's"Congratulating Putin"and about whether or not any such"congratulation"was scandalous (as the writers of this trashy book allege).
So, I want to warn the readers here, that this book has at least that very severe false and undocumented allegation in it. To me, it disqualifies the book, because it proves the dishonesty of the persons who wrote it. Of course, each reader can make that determination for themselves, but my review here is simply that warning - a warning which comes with documentation, instead of (like I see in that book) undocumented false allegations.