Sarah Palin Wishes Manly Vladimir Putin Could Be Our President Instead

America, it turns out that in addition to knowing the mind of Vladimir Putin so well that she can predict his next move and only be off by five or six years, Sarah Palin also thinks that the big Russian dictator is packing a real wallop in his pants. Especially when compared to the President of the United States, who is a wimpy little 97-pound weakling. Talking with fellow foreign policy wunderkind Sean Hannity on Fox Monday, Palin explained that it'll take more than Barack Obama's Low-T feminine wiles to contain that wonderful beast Putin:

“Look, the perception of Obama, of him and his potency across the world is one of such weakness ... People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates.”

It is believed that, immediately following the interview, Lloyd's of London declared the half-term governor's panties to be a total loss.

We're not 100% sure we buy this "Git Tough Be Manly" stuff is particularly good foreign policy, but it sure goes over well on Fox News. Palin has to be delighted that in 2008 some McCain speechwriter loaded a line about Ukraine onto her teleprompter at that campaign event, because now she can point to her prescience in noting that Obama was a big weakling (and a tyrannical dictator, too) in response to Putin's 2008 invasion of Georgia. Of course, there's only one teensy problem with her contention that Obama was weak in 2008 -- as the News Corpse blog notes, there wasn't a lot of difference between what then-Senator Obama said about that invasion and what Palin's running mate John McCain said about it. See if you can guess which of these statements came from which candidate! And just to make things fun, let's throw in a line from Tough Guy George W. Bush's reaction to the invasion of Georgia:

Tough-Guy Statement A: "Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory."

Tough-Guy Statement B: With its actions in recent days, Russia has damaged its credibility and its relations with the nations of the free world. Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century ... To begin to repair its relations with the United States and Europe and other nations and to begin restoring its place in the world, Russia must respect the freedom of its neighbors.

Tough-Guy Statement C: "There is no possible justification for these attacks. I reiterate my call for Russia to stop its bombing campaign, to stop flights of Russian aircraft in Georgian airspace, and to withdraw its ground forces from Georgia."

So which of these statements came from the mom-jeans-wearing wimp, and encouraged Putin to invade the Crimea 5 years later, and which ones were from Republicans who stood firm against Putin's tyranny? Should be pretty obvious -- unless of course maybe Palin now thinks that all three were equally wimpy statements that encouraged aggression. We don't know, exactly, since Sarah Palin hasn't actually said what manly actions she thinks would be testosteroney enough to have scared Putin away from rearing his head.

OK, do you give up? Did you guess who the limp-wristed weakling was? Trick question! It was all of them, since Russia never left the two Georgian "republics" of South Ossetia and Abkhazia! Oh, and if you really need to know, Tough Guy A was John McCain, Tough Guy B was George W. Bush, and Tough Guy C was Barack Hussein Obama. You can tell he encouraged the invasion of Ukraine from the pixels, we think.

Also, remember the good old days when criticizing the President during a foreign crisis was treasonous?

Anyway, the main thing to take away from this is that if Barack Obama would just be a bit more willing to take off his shirt and wrestle carnivores, Putin would respect and fear him. And Sarah just might wink his way.

[ TPM / WaPo / NewsCorpse  (hat tip to astute commenter AntiDerpomeme) / Daily Kos ]