Remember When Republicans Slammed Obama For Being Too Weak On Russia?

Obama-Putin meeting in Mexico, 2012 (official White House photo by Pete Souza)

On August 5 conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham criticized people who are obsessed with Russia.

"As we obsess about Russia," she wrote in a Tweet, "China rising: Our greatest rival and a growing threat."

As we obsess abt Russia—> China Rising: Our greatest rival and a growing threat https://t.co/ZLeoDlbuS9

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) August 5, 2018

Though Ingraham is right about the growing China threat, both economically and militarily, her criticism of those who want to protect the United States and the West from Russian election interference sounds hypocritical.

Only a few years ago, Laura Ingraham and Fox and Friends hosts criticized Obama's foreign policy for being too weak on Russia. And they slammed former Secretary of State John Kerry, who in a televised interview had stated: "I think that candidate Romney has been breathtakingly off target, and naive, and in fact wrong in his judgment about Russia when he said Russia is our number one foe."

In a Fox and Friends segment aired in 2013, Laura Ingraham compared Putin to the fictional Russian boxer Ivan Drago in the film Rocky IV. "For Russia to survive, he [Putin] believes, it has to stave off the encroachment of the West into what were, in his mind, traditionally Russian territories," Ingraham said. She went on describing John Kerry's comments as "naive" and "ridiculous".

Ingraham criticized Obama for being too weak and accommodating towards Russia. "He [Obama] doesn't seem to have the mindset to keep America strong vis-a-vis our traditional adversaries around the world," she commented.

Referring to a 2012 meeting between Obama and Russian President Dimitrij Medvedev, during which the former was overheard saying that he would have "more flexibility" to negotiate with Putin after the election, Ingraham said: "I don't know how you could say that to the Russians, knowing what Medvedev was, which is basically a poodle of Vladimir Putin, and knowing what the Russians had been doing to the cause of freedom."

But after Donald Trump was elected, the Republican President's embarrassing subservience to Vladimir Putin, which is much more humiliating to the US than Obama's attempts at dealing with Moscow diplomatically, doesn't seem to bother Laura Ingraham.

Now Russia is no longer such a big threat. "President Trump prefers to turn on the charm in person while using the hammer and sickle behind the scenes," Ingraham said on her show on Fox News after the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki. The hypocrisy of right-wingers is simply stunning.

Will Laura Ingraham cozy up to China if Beijing decides to support the GOP in future elections? Then we may sell the US government to the highest bidder.

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