Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have a lot in common.
Both are professional politicians who will seek re-election in 2024.
Biden, 80, will be seeking a second four-year term. Putin, 71, is seeking to remain president of Russia as long as he wants.
Both have used their positions to get rich, although judging from their summer vacation homes, Vlad has left Joe on the beach.
Putin has a fabulous, if garish, Versailles-like vacation home in Sochi, overlooking the Black Sea.
Biden has a much more modest vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
But what really makes them political soulmates is how they treat their opponents. They want to shut them up. And the best way to do that is to gag them and send them to prison.
Putin, who operates as a dictator, raids their homes, has them arrested and then sent to prison. It is what he did to political opponent and major dissident Alexei Navalny.
Biden raids his opponents’ homes (Mar-a-Lago), has them arrested, and prays they will be sent to prison. It is what he is doing to Donald Trump.
But each time Putin jails Navalny, Navalny becomes more popular, the way Trump becomes stronger each time Biden uses the justice system to indict him. The former president, beaten by Biden in 2020, could defeat him in 2024
Last week Putin had the already jailed Navalny, who ran against Putin in 2018 (or tried to), imprisoned for another 19 years on phony “extremism” charges at the same time Trump, who is running against Biden, was arraigned in federal court in Washington for allegedly tampering with the results of the 2020 election.
And while Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. strongly condemned Navalny’s jailing “on politically motivated charges,” Biden supporters applauded the politically motivated charges against Trump.
The latest Navalny sentence is on top of the nine-year sentence he is already serving on fraud charges. He still faces another 10-year sentence on fake “terrorism” charges stemming from his opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Trump’s latest indictment was his second on the federal level. The first was for allegedly storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home upon leaving the White House in 2021. Biden did the same thing, but nothing has come from it.
Trump was also indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for allegedly falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016.
He also faces potential state charges in Georgia for allegedly seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 election results when he lost to Biden in 2020.
Biden and his supporters accuse Trump and his followers as “a threat to our democracy.” When they say that they are talking about their Democratic Party democracy, not yours.
Putin’s Stalin-like actions in the Russian communist police state are not surprising. It is what Russian dictators do.
What is shocking is that what is happening in Russia, Pakistan and in other third world countries is now happening in the United States.
Last week Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, was arrested after a court handed him a three-year jail sentence for corruption.
The Associated Press report from Islamabad read: “Efforts to put the divisive politician behind bars have stepped up ahead of general elections this year because his popularity and large support base, combined with his ability to mobilize massive crowds, pose a threat to the ruling coalition.”
Does that ring a bell?
Sincliar Lewis once wrote a dystopian novel about the authoritarian takeover of the United States. It was called, “It Can’t Happen Here.”
Yes, it can.
Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.