Stephen Colbert Isn't Having Your Putin-Lovin' Bullshit, Oliver Stone

Have you ever watched Vladimir Putin give an interview? The guy's got to have a good poker face, but he doesn't bother with it when Oliver Stone's around. "Unlike many partners of ours, we never interfere within the domestic affairs of other countries," Putin told Stone with open amusement. Seriously, watch the first few seconds of this clip. Dude could barely stop himself grinning.

"The Putin Interviews," Stone's new four-part doc, is getting a lot of attention! It seems many people think Stone was maybe a bit too nice to the brutal autocrat who's rumored to have poloniumed a guy to death. So he's doing the media rounds like you do when you're releasing something, and he went on Colbert and it went so poorly the audience laughed at him, and not in the ha-ha-funny way you want on a late night show. It was the "holy shit did Oliver Stone just say that Vladimir Putin has been insulted and abused?" kind of laugh, because he did in fact say that, which is flat-out fucking ridiculous.

It's not that it's untrue; anybody of any stature gets insulted and abused. There are people with five thousand followers on Twitter who are routinely shat on for no good reason. The trouble is that Putin is, well, Putin. There's a level of supervillainy that you can reach, beyond which people should not worry about your fee-fees -- and tranquilizing tigers for photo ops is a good sign you're there. The man had a photo op in a submersible for fuck's sake. He's an actual Bond villain.

ANYWAY! Stone also says that he had to be polite to Putin to get the access over two years, but it also seems likely that he meant to do a hard-hitting documentary until he got to Russia and then it occurred to him that he didn't want to be poloniumed to death himself, which is probably why he developed this rather obvious case of twitterpation for dear old Vlad. His torch burns so brightly that when Colbert asked if there was a single thing that wasn't awesome about Putin, Stone said everyone was obsessed with hating Trump and that's why nobody wants detente with Russia.

So now you know why you feel squicky at the idea of, say, women being jailed for making videos that are irreligious, or reporters being killed, or someone's political opposition being assassinated, or FUCKING IRRADIATING PEOPLE TO DEATH. It's because you're irrationally in full lusty hate for He Who Hath Blessed Reince Priebus.

Oliver Stone told you. Vladimir Putin is a "social conservative." Oh, and the evidence that he's ever killed anyone is kind of iffy.

It's a documentary, they say. Aren't facts fun?

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