I Love How You Think My Interference In Your Elections Could Make Anything Worse

By Vladimir Putin, President, Russian Federation

Moscow, January 10 – You Israelis never cease to amuse me. You’re so self-absorbed, so politically-minded, that you think I would direct my intelligence operatives to sow discord and dysfunction ahead of your parliamentary elections this April. I couldn’t possibly improve on what you’ve got already.

Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate the image you have of me and my regime as meddlesome, underhanded schemers. That perception enhances my image as a leader not to be trifled with. But let’s be honest: there’s nothing I could do to make your politics any more toxic, dishonest, or bitter.

Not even my vaunted experts could come up with what you’ve accomplished on your own. For crying out loud, you’ve got four parties with more or less explicit platforms calling for the dismantlement of Israel as a Jewish state, plus one or two more who are only a hop, skip, and jump away from there, ideologically. You allow opposition to the entire raison d’être of your country to be legitimized and given political power. I can’t do better than that. I would know – we’ve been trying for decades, even since before I was a KGB agent.

Then you’ve got your various flavors of former-general-who-will-be-savior-of-the-moment, every last one of whom can’t accomplish a meaningful thing, and somehow manages to make an awful situation worse. It’s a rarity that any of them leaves office with their areas of responsibility in better shape than they way they inherited them. I’d love to believe we’ve infiltrated the IDF and control all those senior officers, causing them to run the country into the ground, but even I’m not that powerful. Besides, I don’t need to lift a finger to get the same result.

Thank you, by the way, for maintaining such a divisive, toxic political culture, because your doing so independent of my efforts saves Russia a ton of money, and as you know, American sanctions and stagnant crude oil prices have put quite the damper on my intelligence and defense spending. The ongoing fiasco in Syria is bad enough, so I must at least express some gratitude that you’ve spared my people the expense and trouble of coming up with and implementing a whole political manipulation strategy.

So you just keep at it. Blame me if you must, because in the end that contributes to the outcome I want anyway: political factions suspicious of one another, denying one another’s legitimacy, and asserting that the others have something other than Israel’s welfare in mind. Keep up the good work, comrades!

Please support our work through Patreon.