Within moments of Vladimir Putin launching his campaign website today, calls for him to resign and drop his bid for Russian Presidency were so large that officials had to limit public access and continued to live in denial blame hackers. If we were better at Russian (luckily many sites are adept) or if the Putin campaign hadn't limited public access, we'd be able to tell you more about the messages and less about the website's majestic aesthetic. Radio Free Europe has more on the messages which flooded the site. They ranged from "Please leave politics," to "I'm tired of you. I've already tolerated you for 12 years and it's still the same" before the Putin campaign culled the comments. "All this fuss with calls for resignation is a kind of computer game that children are playing at. It has nothing to do with constructive dialogue," Putin's spokesman said in a Reuters report. He also mentioned that most of the anti-Putin messages were a result of email spam (cue that Russian/.ru email spam joke). Of course Putin's hacker attack excuse is just more proof of a government feigning denial or knowledge of massive anti-Putin sentiment in the country, which has been pretty hard for anyone to ignore. 

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Alexander Abad-Santos