![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nortonspeaks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/vladimir-putin-150x150.jpg?resize=150%2C150\")
<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a disjointing sensation, awakening one morning and seeing a building I was in just two scant nights before (and actually possess keys to) featured on the international news. It\u2019s a sobering reminder of what a small world it can occasionally be, particularly when the world is shared with Vladimir Putin.<\/h4>\n
<\/p>\n
The building in question, that houses a group I meet with once a week, was also home to an early summer \u201cfun day\u201d attended by the late Dawn Sturgess in June of 2018. Ms. Sturgess was a hapless nobody who died at the hand of Putin. I didn\u2019t know her personally but I mourn her passing as any concerned neighbor would. She was a victim of the impersonal machinery of political murder casually practiced all-too-frequently by the Putins of the world. She lived in a house near where I live, now boarded up and abandoned.<\/h4>\n
<\/p>\n
I doubt Dawn Sturgess has ever been in Putin\u2019s thoughts for more than a moment, if that. Putin\u2019s aim, to employ a binary nerve agent called novichok to murder a former Russian military officer and double agent named Sergei Skripal, failed to kill him and killed her instead. It is a tragedy that sometimes plunges me into sadness. Dawn Sturgess is the forgotten little person who represents us all.<\/h4>\n<\/h4>\nIt didn\u2019t take this incident to cause me to hate Vladimir Putin \u2013 I already hated him for years, and I still do \u2013 but it gave my hatred sharper direction and laser focus. It transformed my hatred from vague to active. It reminds me that Putin is a murderer. That is all I see when I look at him. His wealth and his power do not engender awe, they instill contempt. I hate him the way I would hate anything repellant, malignant and obscene.<\/h4>\n
It didn\u2019t take this incident to cause me to hate Vladimir Putin \u2013 I already hated him for years, and I still do \u2013 but it gave my hatred sharper direction and laser focus. It transformed my hatred from vague to active. It reminds me that Putin is a murderer. That is all I see when I look at him. His wealth and his power do not engender awe, they instill contempt. I hate him the way I would hate anything repellant, malignant and obscene.<\/h4>\n
<\/p>\n
And I know he\u2019s not finished with us. Soon his malignancies will be parroted on every street in every American city. Soon the chambers of America\u2019s very own Capitol building will reverberate with Putin\u2019s talking points, his conspiracy theories, his lies. Vladimir Putin is alive and he\u2019s coming for you personally. His goal is to deprive you of your certainty, to confound and obliterate your reality, to make the very rational act of knowing seem unattainable, lost in a sea of equivocation. To make America weak again.<\/h4>\n
<\/p>\n
For Putin\u2019s next trick, during the trial of Donald Trump (a criminal, a traitor, a child rapist, a thief) in the Senate, Republicans will derail justice and pollute the process with Putin\u2019s claim that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election. They will distract from Trump\u2019s criminal behavior by alleging that then Vice President Joe Biden corruptly protected his son Hunter, who served on the board of the Ukrainian company Burisma, by getting the venal and compromised Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, fired. They will insist that the man or woman who first brought Trump\u2019s crimes to national attention, the whistleblower, be put on trial himself, or herself, instead of the criminal, the traitor, the child rapist, the thief. They will insist on their own quid pro quo, that for every relevant witness called by Democrats, they be allowed to call an irrelevant witness to reinforce the lies and talking points of Vladimir Putin.<\/h4>\n
<\/p>\n