Who's the "Useful Idiot" now?

Oh, that a Republican gets thoroughly owned by a former commie.

Jonathan S. Landay wrote for McClatchy Newspapers in October that the current "U.S.-Russian tensions are a far cry from June 2001, when Bush declared after his first meeting with Putin in Slovenia that he'd looked in the Russian leader's eyes, found him 'trustworthy' and 'was able to get a sense of his soul.'

"Bush and his aides 'grossly misjudged Putin,' considering him 'a good guy and one of us,' said Michael McFaul of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

"The former KGB officer created that illusion partly by appearing to share Bush's political and religious convictions, standard tradecraft employed by intelligence officers to recruit spies, he said.

"'Putin . . . is a brilliant case officer,' said Carlos Pasqual, a former senior State Department official now at The Brookings Institution, a center-left policy organization in Washington."

Many experts regard the real Putin as "a hard-line, derisive Russian nationalist," Landay writes.

When he isn't turning things to shit, Bush is constantly forming ill-begotten man-crushes.