Quote:
Originally Posted by Mathgod
I think a very important point missed in all this is the difference between supporting the military action of a leader, and supporting the leader himself. The controversy here is Ovi's cozy relationship with Putin throught his life prior to the war, not the war itself. No one is sitting here accusing Ovi of supporting the war (at least, none that I've seen).
So when you make the comparable of Gretzky supporting the Iraq war, the question becomes did he know at the time what the fallout of the war would be? Did he know that Iraq wasn't on track to build WMDs in the near future? We will probably never know. But did he support Bush's 2000 election campaign, or his 2004 re-election campaign? If so, I think that's better grounds for comparing him to Ovi.
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Yet Ovi's friendship with Putin only became a vocal problem for people once the war happened.
This thread has existed for about 34 months. "Putin" was mentioned zero times until 9 months ago, and he's been mentioned in 58 posts since (based on a simple search). And certainly many people had quieter misgivings about it before that, but apparently it just wasn't rant worthy for them at that point?
So it's weird to say that Gretzky has a valid excuse for being fed lies by his media/gov't and being ignorant of the eventualities, while not extending those same considerations to Ovechkin.