The Obama administration continues to appease dictator Vladimir Putin

"Now all that is in the past. The Moscow bureau no longer exists. But we have carried out our mission; for all these years we have talked about another Russia, about events that often passed the official media by, and we have occupied a human rights niche that would otherwise have been empty. We were different from everyone else and will be remembered for it."

Journalist Mumin Shakirov recounting the day she was fired after 18 years of working for Radio Liberty



No wonder de facto dictator Vladimir Putin has openly voiced his support for Barack Obama. In September the Obama administration announced that it will comply with Putin’s request that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) end operations in Russia effective Oct. 1. Now Obama has done another service to his "reset" partner Putin: Radio Free Europe's Radio Liberty is shutting down its Russian broadcasts after six successful decades:

The official excuse, as the Washington Free Beacon reported Monday, is a new law endorsed by Putin barring foreign media from the AM dial.

But there can be no hiding this as another component of President Obama's naive "Russian reset" — which has included Obama appeasing Putin less than eight months after taking office by going back on our commitment to include Poland and the Czech Republic in our anti-ballistic missile defense system. Obama also has allowed Moscow to dwarf the U.S. in its number of tactical nuclear weapons.

Just weeks after Obama became president in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart with a little red gimmick "reset" button for the two of them to press together. It turned out not say the Russian for "reset" but for "overload."

Earlier this year, Obama was caught on an open mike telling Putin's puppet, then-President Dmitri Medvedev, that "it's important for him to give me space" because "after my election I have more flexibility." To which Medvedev assured Obama, "I will transmit this information to Vladimir."

There is no doubt that Radio Liberty helped topple the USSR. Boris Yeltsin could not have survived climbing on that Red Army tank in Moscow in the summer of 1991 had the Russian people, including members of the military, not been told about freedom for so many years in their native tongue over the airwaves.

At the Democratic convention, Obama mocked Mitt Romney's hard stance against Putin. "After all," the president said, "you don't call Russia our No. 1 enemy — not al-Qaida; Russia — unless you're still stuck in a Cold War mind warp."