NEWS FROM THE NEAR FUTURE: Putin Wins Election in a Landslide!

Voting in the Russian presidential election began this morning and will end Sunday. At that point, Putin’s victory will be announced and he will start his 5th term as president. The vote tally doesn’t really matter. It will be whatever the Kremlin decides it should be. Having killed off his only two real opponents in the past year, Navalny and Prigozhin, he probably feels like he earned it.

The presidential vote in Russia, which began Friday and lasts through Sunday, features the trappings of a horse race but is more of a predetermined, Soviet-style referendum.

President Vladimir V. Putin, 71, will undoubtedly win a fifth term, with none of the three other candidates who are permitted on the ballot presenting a real challenge. The main opposition figure who worked to spoil the vote, Aleksei A. Navalny, a harsh critic of Mr. Putin and the Ukraine war, died in an Arctic prison last month…

Two candidates opposed to the war were disqualified. A veteran politician, Boris Nadezhdin, alarmed the Putin administration when tens of thousands of people across Russia lined up to sign petitions required for him to run. The Kremlin invalidated enough signatures to bar him.

No word yet if the western media will be a bit more skeptical of Putin’s victory than they were another, err, champion of democracy: Saddam Hussein. Nets, Especially ABC & NBC, Deliver Upbeat View of Iraqi Election.