DJ: Recent comment on Johnson’s Russia List by a former State Department official

DJ: Recent comment on Johnson’s Russia List by a former State Department official:

“I have just returned from travel and started in on JRL #7, only to find the first ten percent or so of the issue taken up by a banal, boring, partisan regurgitation of Putin’s Bild interview. Why do you continue to inflict on your readers such tripe from Alexander Mercouris? You have already included in earlier issues of JRL a translation of the full text of the interview, so anyone who wished could read Putin’s own words, and not the paraphrases of an admirer. In general, I find Mercouris’s pieces to be unoriginal, with sophistry masquerading as analysis, and telling me nothing that I could not learn by reading the original source.

“Mr. Mercouris is entitled and welcome to his opinions, but his analysis strikes me as generally unoriginal, shallow, misleading, and tendentious. I believe JRL would serve its readers far better by including more comment and reporting from Russia itself, than by devoting so much space to “comment” or “analysis” such as this. If you include Mercouris because you desire an alternative to the mainstream U.S. media, then almost anything from Steve Cohen would far better serve your purpose.

“I don’t mind, in fact I welcome reading pieces with which I disagree, but I don’t need to waste my time on regurgitated pap.”