Bragging Bad Guys

Now that I think of it, I haven't heard anybody brag about being bad for a long time, maybe since my army days. Before that, those hoodlum types in Gage Park H.S. used to brag about being bad too. I think it all started with that strange song:
"Bad, bad Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole damn town.
Badder than old King Kong, meaner than a junkyard dog."
Maybe it was just a figure of speech after all. Nevertheless, why would anybody want to use a figure of speech like that to describe himself? If he isn't truly bad, he must want people to think that he is. Is he trying to impress the other bad guys so that they will accept him socially? Why would anybody who isn't bad want to be accepted into a bad society? Unless..... it wasn't the bad guys he was trying to impress, it was the bad girls. Damn! Why didn't I think of that? Oh well, too late now.

I don't consider people to be bad just because they have different opinions than me. It's when they try to impose their opinions on others by force that they become bad. That's why the Commies were bad, and that's why the Islamic terrorists are bad. Crooks are bad too because they steal people's money, whether by force or by deception. Bullies are also bad because they pick on people and push them around. I suppose that vandals are bad too because they damage other people's property, or maybe they're just nuts. I'm not sure that gays are bad either, maybe they're just confused.

I can't speak for my ilk, but I never believed that Russian Communism crashed because of anything that our government did or didn't do. I like your "cheap suit" metaphor. Also, there was some famous guy who said, "Russia and the United States were in a race to see who could go bankrupt first, and Russia won.....just barely." As I remember it, the first crack in the wall came from Poland. They had tried to secede before and were brutally crushed but, this time, they got away with it for some reason. Once they got away with it, all the rest of the satellites fell like dominoes. Finally, Russia seceded from itself, and that was all she wrote. Afghanistan might have had something to do with it too. I don't think that Russia ever really had Afghanistan, but they liked to think that they did. I remember when the news about Afghanistan broke. I had not heard of it until I came in to work, where the guys were talking about it in the break area. Some of them didn't believe that Afghanistan was a real place, they thought it was mythological like Shangri La or Bumfuck, Egypt. As luck would have it, I had recently read a book about Afghanistan, and I said, "You know maybe the Russians have finally bit off more than they can chew. Afghanistan might turn out to be their Vietnam."

I wasn't aware that Russia is currently full of "mobsters and kleptocrats", but I'll take your word for it.
I have heard that Putin is kind of a prick, or should I say "scalawag"? He looks mean on camera, but that may be from living through all those Russian winters. That thing with the Ukraine is more complicated than it appears. I understand that lots of Russians have been living there for generations, so they might think of it as their country now, just like we of European descent think that the U.S. belongs to us and not the indigenous Native Americans. I'm not saying that they're right, but I can see how they might think that way.

We have talked before about closing the loopholes in the gun purchase laws. I said that I had no objection to it as long as it's all they want to do. I don't know why that was left out of the original legislation, but it seems that the problem should be corrected by additional legislation, not presidential edict. I understand that Obama is frustrated by the refusal of Congress to cooperate with his agenda, but that's politics in the good old U.S.A.