If you have not been reading my Canadian counterpart, perhaps you should. He’s been on a roll this week.
He’s got the situation in Georgia suit-cased, and more importantly makes it clear that it is not somehow the United States fault that they got themselves born in the Caucasus:
The darkest legacy of Stalinsm is the shifting of ethnic groups where they don’t belong. Saddam Hussein, a great student of Stalin, learned those lessons and moved great numbers of Shi’a and Sunni into each others terrory and large masses of both into Iraqi Kurdistan. That ensured that without a murderous authoritarian government, those ethnic conflicts would cleanse themselves. And they largely have.
Nowhere was that more prevelant than the former republics of the Soviet Union. Throughout Stalin’s reign, he shifted sufficient numbers of Russians into each of the republics that ensured that even if communsim fell, Russian nationalism never would. It was a self-created nightmare scenario, and that’s what we’re seeing now.
Of course, that has been greatly exacerbated by the reckless and phenominally irresposible NATO expansion policies of Presidents Clinton and Bush. If you’ve forgotten that NATO was created to combat Russian expansion, I can assure that they haven’t. Yes, the Russian Federation was invited to join, but that invitation was extended with the knowledge that they’d never accept……….
Then the current Bush administration took office. Not only did they almost immediately abrogate the ABM treaty (which no one can say that a president can unilaterially do under the Constitution,) they began to invite the former Soviet Republics themselves into NATO. It was a complete renunciation of 300 years of balance of power geoploitics and the Russians rightly saw it as deeply threatening. For the first time since 1945 a foreign power had extended within their sphere of influence.
It was only a matter of time before Stalin’s ethnic resttlement policy and NATO expansion collided. On Friday, they did.
At this year’s Bucharest Summit, NATO declared that both the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia “Will become” members of the alliance. And that’s when Georgian politics became completely unhinged.
And here is the money quote:
Presidents Clinton and Bush have spent fifteen years making promises that we not only can’t keep, we have no intention of keeping them. and people are now getting killed in part because of those flawed promises. NATO is not going to go to war with Russia over Georgia, Ukraine, the Baltic Republics or even most of the former Eastern European sattelites. As tough as certain elements of the American public like to talk, Russia has just shown us that they’re wrong and always have been.
Make no mistake, history has alligned this way before. It led to the First World War. Back then the great nations of Europe drew lines well beyond what they could defend, Now NATO is doing exactly the same thing.
If we were halfway smart, we’d draw back before we go to far. Please bring back the days of Chicken Kiev.
My Canadian Counterpart has also not left John Edwards alone either:
The stories about Edwards beating up on the cervix of Rielle Hunter, or Lisa Druck or whatever the fuck her name is, have been floating around for months. The National Enquirer has reported it repeated, as have a number of conservative blogs.
I stayed away from the story for a couple of reasons. First, I was reluctant to believe that even John Edwards was dumb enough to run for president or let his name be floated for vice-president or attorney general with a skeleton this big in his closet. As little respect as I have for his intelligence, I didn’t think it was medically possible for someone to be that fucking dumb.
Second, I wasn’t sure I could make it funny with the information I had them. If I’m going to do a story like that, I want to do it right…………
I’ve gotta be fair here. If you get passed over for vice-president by Al Gore in favour of a Jewish Republican and get your ass handed to you by a political dynamo like John Kerry and are beaten like a rented mule in a debate with a guy with two drunk driving arrests and a history of shooting septuagenarian lawyers in the face, yould be acting like David Lee Roth, too. That just stands to reason. Look, no one’s a bigger loser than I am and I’m practically beating the strange poontang off of me with a fucking baseball bat.
But how fucking dumb do you have to be to think that you can run for president without your love of new cunt becoming public? Maybe if he had lunch with Gary Hart that misconception could have been cleared up. For the love of god, Mark Foley can’t even teach a seventeen year old boy how to masturbate without it ending up on the AP wire. That isn’t narcissism, it’s stupidity.
Good stuff! Read his post about Iraq too. Its 100% on the mark, as usual.