Soulmates

That was then. BBC (06.16.01):

"'I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue.

'I was able to get a sense of his soul."

Bush and Putin: Best of friends

This is now. McClatchy (10.12.07):

"The Bush administration's failure to win Russia's consent to install U.S. missile defenses in its European backyard and a growing list of other disputes suggest that President Bush and his aides have misread the man whose 'soul' Bush thought he'd divined when they first met six years ago."

Bush, aides 'grossly misjudged Putin'

Suggest? Ha! George got punked.

"Bush and his aides 'grossly misjudged Putin,' considering him 'a good guy and one of us,' said Michael McFaul of Stanford University's Hoover Institution."

"The former KGB officer created that illusion partly by appearing to share Bush's political and religious convictions, standard tradecraft employed by intelligence officers to recruit spies, he said."

"'Putin . . . is a brilliant case officer,' said Carlos Pasqual, a former senior State Department official now at The Brookings Institution, a center-left policy organization in Washington."

And he's been playing George and the crew like a cheap violin ever since.