THE LOW POST: Scum Season

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Touching scene in Vietnam this week. The leaders of the industrialized world dudded up in shiny traditional Vietnamese tunics, walking through elegant Asian landscapes, warmly shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries.

One particularly moving photo was of George W. Bush and Vladimir "Let's whack 'em in the outhouse" Putin, dressed in gentle pale blues and sauntering through a field on the outskirts of Hanoi. The two men would agree on a historic trade deal shortly afterward, with Bush welcoming Putin into the WTO. Bush would later call the deal "good for the United States and good for Russia."

I've never been sure what to make of the celebrated "close friendship" that is said to exist between Bush and Putin -- to laugh at it because it is so obviously a fraud and a transparent media concoction, or to be horrified by the very remote possibility that it might be real. On the surface, the two men could not be starker opposites: Bush the silver spoon-fed dunce who was all but handed the reins of the American empire, and Putin the ultra-cunning self-made criminal mastermind who clawed his way to the top through the ranks of the Petersburg underworld. Putin bested a thousand superior men in one of the world's most lethal political arenas to get to where he is today; if he made that journey just to buddy up to a lumbering fool like George Bush, the world is an even darker place than I thought it was.

The fact that Bush chose to do a public bear-hug with Russia now says everything you need to know about this administration. Not that Vladimir Putin was ever respectable, but the events of the last months ought to have been enough to scare away any Western politician with a shred of conscience. The same America that tirelessly agitated for anti-communist dissidents like Andrei Sakharov has apparently decided that the murder of modern Russian dissidents is a non-starter -- even if those "Russian dissidents" happen also to be American citizens, like the recently-assassinated American-born reporter Anna Politkovskaya. Or even if those dissidents were attacked on Western soil, like Federal Security Service defector Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned recently in England, who might very well be dead by the time this column goes online.

A little background on these two incidents. Politkovskaya, an investigative reporter for a muckraking newspaper called Novaya Gazeta, was shot to death in standard gangland fashion on October 7th -- two bullets in the podyezd (doorway) of her Moscow apartment building. Politkovskaya had numerous enemies and had particularly offended the Putin regime, the army and the administration of the Chechen province with reporting on, among other things, political corruption, abuse and torture in Chechnya, and the possible involvement of the Russian secret services in a series of apartment bombings in 1999.

Litvinenko, meanwhile, was a former lieutenant colonel in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, who defected to England six years ago. He was said to have been investigating Politkovskaya's death when he was poisoned, although there is some dispute about that as well -- more on that later. He survived a high dose of at least one kind of poison on November 1st and is currently in a British hospital in critical condition.