Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) loves to bring up his waterboy role in the Cold War-era Reagan White House, including his efforts to prop up the mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
And so, with former KGB officer Vladimir Putin going aggro on the Ukraine, you'd expect The Mouth That Rohrabachered to talk smack about the Russian president. But like with all things Dana, you just never know …
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Actually, as R. Scott Moxley previously wrote, Rohrabacher has spoken favorably about Putin before, to a local tea party group that was told Aug. 8 the Russian president is a better protector of American security from Islamic terrorists than Barack Obama.
Now, in an interview with Buzzfeed, Rohrabacher says that while he doesn't support Russia taking military action in Ukraine, “that doesn't mean Putin and pro-Russia forces in Ukraine are in the wrong.”
Rohrabacher explained Putin is just trying to protect Russian interests in the region and “has a right to be upset” with the ousting of the democratically elected government under pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych.
“We're acting as if it was the old Cold War days, and it was a communist overture to do something–to dominate the world,” Rohrabacher said. “Well, Putin has a right to watch out for the interests of the people there [Ukraine], just as the way we do in the United States, and just as the Ukrainian government should be doing watching out for the interests of the people of Ukraine.”
He also fed Buzzfeed his 1980s mythology, saying, “I was Vladimir Putin's worst nightmare.” Rohrabacher, who has no U.S. military experience at all ever, boasted of having fought the Soviets alongside the mujahideen.
“I was part of a team that shot a rocket onto a Russian position,” Rohrabacher said. “We received return fire.”
So some of Dana's stories never change.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.