Vladimir Putin’s tactics in both Crimea and now Eastern Ukraine seem transparent to the western media. Using tactics designed to “protect” its citizens, Russia annexed Crimea. Georgia fell to a similar fate when George Bush was president. Now “protests” are being fomented in eastern Ukraine while troops mass at the border. The Russians advertise this as “defensive measures.”

Hitler used similar tactics when he invaded the ethnically German Sudetenland in the lead-up to World War II. In Putin’s case, the tactics involve trumped up protests by Russian loyalists apparently shipped in to protest for this very purpose, troops massed at the borders, media blackouts and in Crimea’s case, ultimately an invasion. There are lots of outcries for America to do something.

But what the media will never acknowledge is that many of these same tactics are currently being employed by the American left and the Obama administration, minus the military invasions, of course. In fact, this is precisely the campaign strategy of the Obama administration. With the president’s approval rating in the tank and Obamacare very unpopular, how will the Democrats hold onto the Senate? Apparently the answer is Putinesque. Trump up phony “wars on women,” with accompanying drum beats on “paycheck protection” and slogans such as “Republicans want to take away your birth-control” and voila, you will have no choice but to endorse the coming totalitarianism. “It’s us against those evil people who refuse to embrace the fierce urgency of silencing conservatives.”  What’s that you say? Yes, I said totalitarianism.

It all starts in the brain and that is where the left wants to own us. They want Putin-like agreement. They desire no other way to think and a permanent rule of continuous change with them in charge. To leftists, there is no other future possible. Enormous, wasteful spending? Bumbling government healthcare? Withdrawing from the world because we are “sick of war?” Income inequality in Washington’s hands to fix? There simply is no alternative, no other way to think. As President Obama said recently, “You know, in the end, history is not kind to those who would deny Americans their basic economic security.”  Republicans are not just wrong. They are “deniers.”  All who disagree are enemies of progress.

Gay marriage is the latest example. What the left is telling us is something so shocking and so un-American that many seem unable to respond to it. What the left believes is this: There is simply is no other way to think about gay marriage than what we think. And if you do not think that way, you will be ostracized, lose your job and removed from any public role, ever. This is what they believe, even though their own president thought about it another way until recently.  ( Wink wink)  Even though states like California voted to uphold traditional marriage. The message of Mr. Eich’s firing at Mozilla is that in the future, no one with any leadership responsibility in America will be able to think otherwise. Is Andrew Sullivan the only liberal who thinks this is bad for their cause? The lack of protest is chilling, but it follows the leftist pattern, which is change followed by diminishing freedom and ultimately totalitarianism ( See Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin and Castro).

This is nothing new here. Protesters have long been the darlings of the left, because they give cover to the left’s totalitarianism by appearing to be for the underdog. In Russia and in America today, they are aiding and abetting the powerful. In an economic crisis not to be “wasted.,” there is a new alliance between the deprived and the powerful. They are forming an alliance against the rest of us. Government hand-outs, Washington-based solutions to everything, gay marriage group-thinkers, Occupy Wall-Streeters, racial and gender politics, all are massing at the border of E Pluribus Unum and telling the rest of us to shut up and get with their program or else. The phony rationale for this is to protect the people from being victimized by the powerful. But the result is that the powerful feel justified in demonizing those with whom they disagree. Minus the troops at the border, all this is positively Putinesque. It’s long past time that liberals give their leftist pals a slap-down. Or have they been assimilated?

Jay Haug is a freelance writer living in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. You may contact him at cjcwguy@gmail.com