I brought this up on Discord yesterday, but I realized it predates TCS, plus it is interesting in hindsight. In 2011, Luke McKinney, my third-least-favorite columnist in the dying days of Cracked, wrote "7 Reasons Vladimir Putin Is the World's Craziest Badass."
At the time, I was furious, and doubly furious that the comments section took up the meme whole-heartedly. People were using the meme on other articles, and I would downvote them, but I wanted to downvote almost everyone in that comment thread. I thought about posting something to the effect of "being bad and an ass does not make someone a a badass" but also knew I would get downvoted heavily. I actually went through all of the comments to see if I decided to post it regardless, but it appears my fear of downvotes prevailed and I noped out of there.
Going through, I only noticed the postings of two TCS members, and I am happy to say that they both went against the grain of the comments. When the article was published, Nathan Loiselle correctly noted that Putin is more like Blofeld than James Bond. (Sorry for not upvoting you when upvotes were free Nathan, I clearly noped out of the comments rather quickly.)
Three years later, Kleiner Killer came back after the annexation of Crimea to note that the article was horrifying in hindsight. He got a lot of downvotes, while the pro-Putin comments maintaining the meme got none.
I have opposed Putin since W. "saw into his soul" and I googled Vladimir Putin. I have thought he was a serious danger to US interests, global freedom, and world peace since the 2008 invasion of Georgia. So this article infuriated me in 2011. In 2014, it was horrifying in hindsight. In 2018, it is kind of funny in hindsight. But I am still annoyed at how many people refused to see Putin as a threat or even a bad hombre right up until he (possibly) gave us the gift of Trump.