Quote:
Originally Posted by Calgary4LIfe
If you are going to criticize Ovie for showing public support for Putin, then you should also criticize any professional athlete that has publicly supported any US president as well. I fail to see how someone makes the distinction between good and evil here. Both sides are responsible for a lot of heinous acts in this world. It is hypocritical not to do so, in my opinion. I think that athletes should not support any political figure, but instead use their popularity to draw attention for noteworthy causes.
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You're completely missing the point. People are criticizing Ovechkin for supporting Vladimir Putin, not for being patriotic. You can be a patriotic Russian without being a vocal supporter of a guy who subverted whatever shaky democracy and liberalism post-Soviet Russia mustered to rule today as an iron-fisted autocrat.
If Putin were the leader of the United States, Anderson Cooper, Ariana Huffington, and George Soros would be dead, Stephen Colbert, Keith Olberman, and Mark Zuckerberg would be in jail, and the rest of the media and business opposition to the president would be cowed into silence out of fear for their lives. Black and gay activists would be fired from their jobs and threatened with prison, not subjected to obnoxious tweets.
Putin is a murderous, anti-democratic tyrant who uses violence and the threat of violence to suppress any opposition to his rule. It's absurd to equate the regime he heads to the U.S. government today.