Putin puttin' foot in mouth

Here's Vladimir Putin today:

"Even if dictatorship is packaged in beautiful pseudo-democratic phraseology, it will not be able to solve systemic problems," Putin said. "It may even make them worse."

The unavoidable assumption here is that he was referring to the United States.

Let's get one thing straight, Vladdy. If the U.S. was really a dictatorship, old glory would be flying from every edifice in the Kremlin. Make no mistake about that. And just for the record, Vladdy, who was supplying Iraq's dictator with weapons and taking bribes from him to keep him and his reign of terror in place and who pulled him from a spider hole and put him in shackles?

Here's Colin Powell's response to a similar implication that was volleyed at him from the former Archbishop of Canterbury last year:

...Our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear. And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world. We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we’ve done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in...

It can't be said better than that, so I'll say no more.