In an early scene in Mel Brooks’s classic western farce Blazing Saddles, the new sheriff (a black man in an all-white town) pulls his pistol, points it at his own chin and threatens to shoot. “Isn’t anyone going to help that poor man?” a startled woman cries.
After hauling himself safely off to his own jailhouse, the new sheriff congratulates himself on his smarts. ”And they are so dumb,” he adds of the town-folk who fell for his stunt.
Russia’s prime minister Dmitry Medvedev is trying the same sort of trick, and seems to assume Moscow’s critics are just as clueless. If …read more
Source: National Post
