Thread: Time/CNN's Person of the Year is ...

VLADIMIR PUTIN

It's official. Time and CNN's staff is completely insane.

No one is born with a stare like Vladimir Putin's. The Russian President's pale blue eyes are so cool, so devoid of emotion that the stare must have begun as an affect, the gesture of someone who understood that power might be achieved by the suppression of ordinary needs, like blinking. The affect is now seamless, which makes talking to the Russian President not just exhausting but often chilling. It's a gaze that says, I'm in charge.

This may explain why there is so little visible security at Putin's dacha, Novo-Ogarevo, the grand Russian presidential retreat set inside a birch- and fir-forested compound west of Moscow. To get there from the capital requires a 25-minute drive through the soul of modern Russia, past decrepit Soviet-era apartment blocks, the mashed-up French Tudor-villa McMansions of the new oligarchs and a shopping mall that boasts not just the routine spoils of affluence like Prada and Gucci but Lamborghinis and Ferraris too.

When you arrive at the dacha's faux-neoclassical gate, you have to leave your car and hop into one of the Kremlin's vehicles that slowly wind their way through a silent forest of snow-tipped firs. Aides warn you not to stray, lest you tempt the snipers positioned in the shadows around the compound. This is where Putin, 55, works. (He lives with his wife and two twentysomething daughters in another mansion deeper in the woods.) The rooms feel vast, newly redone and mostly empty. As we prepare to enter his spacious but spartan office, out walk some of Russia's most powerful men: Putin's chief of staff, his ideologist, the speaker of parliament—all of them wearing expensive bespoke suits and carrying sleek black briefcases. Putin, who rarely meets with the foreign press, then gives us 3 1â

It's official. Time and CNN's staff is completely insane.

Agreed but at least it wasn't Hillary or Huckabee.

Whew! For a moment there I thought the Time Man of the Year would be

The Illegal Alien.

You guys (and gals) are funny!

Originally Posted by MinutemanCDC_SC

Whew! For a moment there I thought the Time Man of the Year would be

The Illegal Alien.

How sexistly xenophobic of you!

Don't you mean "undocumented person(s) of the year?!"

:P

Originally Posted by Shapka

Originally Posted by MinutemanCDC_SC

Whew! For a moment there I thought the Time Man of the Year would be

The Illegal Alien.

How sexistly xenophobic of you!

Don't you mean "undocumented person(s) of the year?!"

:P

Shapka, beginning your comment with the word (?) "sexistly" outs you as a repressed female, obviously, or even a closet feminist.

But after being called a "vigilante", a "racist", a "right-wing-nut", a "nativist", an "uncompassionate conservative," and a "hate criminal,"
I wear "xenophobic" with pride. The only thing I haven't been called yet is a "gun show redneck." But when it happens, I'll wear it too, and welcome it.

Perhaps I should have suggested . . .



The Future American Majority.