It used to be that blam­ing Amer­ica for crisis abroad was largely the province of lib­er­als. That folk wis­dom ap­pears to be chan­ging — just ask Ron Paul. In the days after the down­ing of Malay­sia Air­lines Flight 17, the former House mem­ber has been quick to at­tack the West and Pres­id­ent Obama for point­ing any fin­gers in the dir­ec­tion of Rus­si­an Pres­id­ent Vladi­mir Putin.

“Just days after the tra­gic crash of a Malay­si­an Air­lines flight over east­ern Ukraine, West­ern politi­cians and me­dia joined to­geth­er to gain the max­im­um pro­pa­ganda value from the dis­aster. It had to be Rus­sia; it had to be Putin, they said,” Ron Paul wrote in an ed­it­or­i­al Sunday. “Pres­id­ent Obama held a press con­fer­ence to claim — even be­fore an in­vest­ig­a­tion — that it was pro-Rus­si­an rebels in the re­gion who were re­spons­ible. His am­bas­sad­or to the U.N., Sam­antha Power, did the same at the U.N. Se­cur­ity Coun­cil — just one day after the crash!”

Paul’s ar­gu­ment, which he first made in a Fri­day tele­vi­sion ap­pear­ance, was quickly picked up by the Krem­lin-fun­ded Eng­lish lan­guage out­let Rus­sia Today. And on Monday, the Per­man­ent Mis­sion of Rus­sia to NATO, a group tasked with fa­cil­it­at­ing co­oper­a­tion between Rus­sia and NATO, tweeted out his column.

Ron Paul: West­ern politi­cians and me­dia joined to­geth­er to gain the max­im­um pro­pa­ganda value from the dis­aster ht­tp://t.co/DjGLkp­kbFE — Rus­si­ans at NATO HQ (@na­to­mis­sion_ru) Ju­ly 21, 2014

It’s easy to see why they liked the piece. Polit­ic­ally, it’s a much sounder line of ar­gu­ment for pro­tect­ing Rus­sia from blame than what’s be­ing re­por­ted on Rus­si­an TV (much of which is fun­ded by the Krem­lin), where con­spir­acies the­or­ies abound. One re­port pro­motes the idea that the air­liner was already full of corpses when it took off from Am­s­ter­dam. An­oth­er claims the tragedy was some­how mys­ter­i­ously the res­ult of the Ukrain­i­an mil­it­ary con­fus­ing MH17 for Putin’s pres­id­en­tial plane.

“Watch­ing some of these Rus­si­an news­casts, one comes away with the im­pres­sion of a des­per­ate de­fense at­tor­ney scroun­ging for ex­perts and angles, or a bad kid caught red-handed by the prin­cip­al, try­ing to twist his way out of a situ­ation in which he has no chance,” Rus­sia ex­pert Ju­lia Ioffe wrote in The New Re­pub­lic.

Not that any of the out­land­ish cov­er­age is par­tic­u­larly use­ful to Putin. As Dav­id Rem­nick re­cently wrote, Putin has be­come something of a vic­tim of his own pro­pa­ganda ma­chine. The wild ex­ag­ger­a­tion on nightly broad­casts has “be­come a prob­lem for Putin, be­cause this sys­tem can­not be wholly man­aged,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Putin ad­viser, told Rem­nick of the Rus­si­an me­dia. “The news pro­grams have ‘over­heated’ pub­lic opin­ion and the col­lect­ive polit­ic­al ima­gin­a­tion.”