I think you misread the context.

One word: Chechnya.

The Bush administration has said a few negative things about Russia's handling of Chechnya, but has expended little real political resources in trying to paint the Russians as the bad guys.

I think Putin views a Kerry administration as potentially hostile to his Chechnya policy.

Bush, at least, has some sympathy with Russia as he probably views that conflict as part of the larger civilizational conflict/war on terror. Kerry has been hostile to the broader war on terror, and while he uses the words 'WoT' what he means is 'War on Al Qaeda', not any broader war against jihadis as Bush uses the words.

So again: Chechnya. In Russia, Chechnya is a BIG DEAL.

re: The left has portrayed Saddam Hussein as utterly peaceable and without any malign intentions, but they never seem to acknowledge that Saddam attempted to murder a former US President using terrorist assassins as revenge for his military defeat.

A-fucking-men.

Apparently this story isn't news.

Thanks, RD. You've just earned yourself the very first instance of an ironic double-drudge siren.

Yessss! The first and soon to be coveted double-drudge siren!

Trying to assassinate our president doesn't count if he's a Bush; from what I've seen it's merely a cause for snarkiness and derision.

Not that I'm questioning their patriotism or anything.

More than Chechnya, I do not forget that Bush and Putin had enough of a good relationship that GWB could persuade Putin to agree to the scrapping of the ABM and to say so even as Bush told him that the Democrats would go along with it because they trusted Putin more than they did Bush.

I think that the same play is being run here. GWB likes to repeat his plays on the libs because they very stupidly believe that he is not smart enough to outsmart them.

I'm not denying the truth of Putin's statement, but I think that the significance of the words coming from Putin himself, rather than from Bush, has to do with the leftist anti-Bush audience in this country.

That Putin went along with Bush again tells me that there is much we don't know about the Bush-Putin relationship. Over the past year, Putin has established that he's not Bush's lackey; now he seems to be signalling that, contrary to popular expectation, he and GWB may have retained a good enough links that GWB could personally thank the Russian agent who passed him the info.

Finally, it may be that Putin is doing his bit to ensure GWB will win re-election. He may well think that, apart from Chechnya, GWB rather than Kerry will -- in the face of MidEast oil problems -- act to establish closer ties with Russia whereas Kerry might go the Jimmy Carter conservationist route. In the end, Putin may be backing GWB for business reasons; he may have realized that the Franco-German alliance is not good for Russia economically, but one with the world's fastest growing economy is.