Pajamas Media

32 Comments

1. poul:

Let me see if I understand here. An independent country such as Ossetia, such as Tibet, such as say, Taiwan, has no right to autonomy. Because of their proximity to abusive bullies intent on owning them, they must shun freedom, shun democracy and be a virtual puppet.
…
The principles are simple: Ossetia is an independent nation and deserves the right to self-determination no matter her neighbor.

Georgia does not have the right to invade a sovereign nation because it desires power and control in the region.

Oh wait…

Aug 13, 2008 - 1:48 am 2. dan:

any idiot who believes russia acts on anyone but it’s own behalf, or could give a shit about anyone else except where such concern can be used as a pretext for extending its direct control, is an IDIOT. russia cares about 100,000 Ossetes? right. more like the “former” KGB in charge has laced the entire post-Soviet space with “national liberation” groups and espionage agents, and worked to undermine and reverse all sovereign autonomous states in what Russia considers its “near abroad.” That’s all. This move is just an opportune moment chosen to make an example of Georgia. It has not a goddamn thing to do with Ossetes; that’s just to fool local morons and Western useful idiots. The ultimate target is NATO. Contrary to popular punditry, Europe does not consider Georgia to be its own kind any more than it considered Serbia and Bosnia to be but a “Slav problem.” “Europe” is not, and probably never really was, motivated by principles such as these, largely because they actually boarder these states. That’s why the USA is so useful in every way. The Russian strategy envisions pushing this concern for such things as “security structures” back, back, back out of Europe entirely, ultimately destroying NATO. Surely one major purpose of pushing through Georgia is to demonstrate that NATO will not respond to its applicants’ travails – that NATO in fact cannot rival Russian energy dominance, and that NATO is effectively dead and Russia left up to its own cunning devices.

It is said that the major purpose of glasnost and perestroika was to “deprive the enemy of the image of an enemy” – that is, if Russian leadership displays a happy liberal face people will be content to be done with the Cold War and will in fact start to get angry if anyone tries to bring it up again. He who sounds the warning that Russian aggression, as of old, continues, will suddenly be in the minority, like one of that first maligned generation of prophets against Bolshevism.

Well folks, I’m afraid this is exactly what is happening today – although it happens very slow, in places called Georgia, over ostensibly local ethnic politics concerning people called “Ossetes.”

Has anyone else noticed that the Taliban in NWFP just declared “open war” against the Pakistani state? Interesting timing, no? Wanna bet this and that are related?

Aug 13, 2008 - 5:18 am 3. Valerie:

Let me get this straight: Russia confers “citizenship” on citizens of another country. Russian agents pick a fight in a neighboring country so that Russia quite naturally is “forced” to protect its “citizens” when the neighbor dares to try to take care of the problem. They just happen to have a massive force all ready to act in the space of a day. And we are supposed to believe the Georgians are criminals.

Their propaganda is almost as clumsy as their military.

Aug 13, 2008 - 5:52 am 4. mjk:

Ossetia deserves independence? Sure, why not. Does Georgia then deserve to have Russia and its thuggish government come in and obliterate it? Nope. Russia has acted unilaterally and is probably going to act unilaterally against other former Soviet provinces with some lame-o excuse.

Aug 13, 2008 - 7:27 am 5. Jarhead:

There’s a lot of oil in the Canadian Yukon maybe we should start granting U.S. citizenship to people there. In few years we intervene to protect them… Think the BBC will blame it on the Canadians?

Aug 13, 2008 - 7:32 am 6. Joe Buzz:

There is absolutely no reason to research issues when you can easily bBf* and have your readership gobble it up, hook line and sinker.

*blame Bush first

Aug 13, 2008 - 7:44 am 7. New York City:

Ossetia was attacked and invaded by Georgia after declaring independence from them twice. Yet somehow Georgia is the victim…

Aug 13, 2008 - 8:24 am 8. Susan Katz Keating:

I love, love, love this analogy. To play it out yet further… when abused spouse Georgia begs the courts for help, the judges offer only ineffective mediation, but do nothing while aggressor Russia plunders at will.

Aug 13, 2008 - 9:30 am 9. Sandra M:

Yesterday, an oped by Max Boot in the LAT suggested supplying the Georgians with stinger missiles to bring down aircraft and with javelin missiles to disable all those armored personnel carriers rolling into Georgia. Disable the ones in front and the ones in back and you get chaos and gridlock.

Stinger missiles were the weapon that basically turned around the war in Afghanistan.

Also, frustrated with the paucity of news on Fox and CNN, I turned to C-Span this morning and heard Ralph Peters telling an AEI seminar that it seems Putin has lost 10-12 planes so far and is very pissed off about it. (We lost 0% planes statistically in the 12 years of our overflights over Iraq). Russian pilots don’t get much flight time and hence are missing their targets. One Georgian town turned off its lights at night and the Russian bombs landed in the sea. If the Russian soldiers don’t have night vision goggles, the night will belong to Georgians special forces.

I think we have to seek NATO membership for all the Eastern European nations immediately and provide them with defensive weapons which the Russians will howl about, but why would they oppose defensive weapons unless they mean to act aggressively? What an excuse they’ve given the west to install defensive weapons in the Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, et al.

The weapons genius of CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR Mike Vickers is now an Undersecretary of Defense in the Pentagon, and I hope he will be put in charge of arming our New Europe allies, who are real allies, unlike Old Europe which has been content to have us defend them. By the way, do they pay us anything for being their defenders? Gratitude and appreciation don’t seem to be forthcoming.

Thank God for C-Span. This morning I saw the Republican news conference. These guys are energized and are hearing from men who work with their hands in the middle of the country which produces the goods the two effete coasts take for granted. They get it about our need for oil and energy independence and they want the high-paying jobs these industries could provide. Lifelong Democrats among them will probably be voting Republican.

We need an emergency crash program seeking energy independence so as to starve Putin, Chavez and Adminjihad of oil money they’re putting to dangerous purposes. If we start off our shores and in Alaska and building refineries (for the first time in 30 years) the price of oil which has been kept high by speculators in oil FUTURES will fall like a stone.

There’s been a breakthrough on solar by MIT, I thik, which I just heard about this morning. Companies will be formed to make commercial use of this.

I support investing heavily in everything but wind power ( Nancy Pelosi has heavily invested in T. Boone Pickens’ company. Read Michelle Malkin’s column in Townhall today). The fragile ceramic propellers, manufactured in India, keep breaking apart. The Colorado wind farm the Dems invested in has yet to provide any energy and will have to be written off as a tax loss.

Aug 13, 2008 - 9:51 am 10. Steve Nelson:

Over at Little Green Footballs, they’re quoting “La Russophobe”, an anonymous troll that unfortunately, is published on Pajamas Media, as an authority on Discovery Institute’s Real Russia Project and its website, Russia Blog. Plenty of very popular bloggers, like the New York Times bestselling author and geostrategist Thomas P.M. Barnett, have permalinked to Russia Blog and have occasionally cited it on their websites.

The author of Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson, strongly dislikes the Discovery Institute for its position advocating “intelligent design theory”. Regardless of how one feels about these scientific and culture war issues, they have nothing, zilch, to do with Russia or the Real Russia Project, except that Mr. Mamchur happens to work in the same building as the ID folks and has the name of their think tank on his website. Nonetheless, one would search Russia Blog in vain for the slightest mention of intelligent design or its advocates. So much for the idea of Russia Blog as a conspiracy to promote ID in Russia!

For the record, this troll “La Russophobe” has never provided the slightest evidence that they have travelled to Russia or speak Russian. By all evidence, this person or group of persons cannot look up the names of Russian institutions on yandex.ru or other websites, since he/she/they typically derides anyone not having a page on Wikipedia or getting any ENGLISH-language Google hits as “losers”. For her, if Yuri Mamchur of Discovery Institute claims to have a degree from the Russian Tax Academy of Law, and this university cannot be found using an ENGLISH language Google search, then Mr. Mamchur’s degree is presumably fake and this institution does not exist. Naturally, La Russophobe did not correct her false post about Mr. Mamchur upon being confronted with the Russian-language website of the Russian Tax Academy of Law by several commenters, a Moscow institution that has existed for many decades. For La Russophobe, only a mailed diploma and dozens of other pieces of evidence from someone’s personal life would suffice, but alas for her, Mr. Mamchur, values his privacy, and did not care to send documentation to an anonymous troll without so much as a P.O. box. Would you?

La Russophobe’s pattern, like that of any troll, is to always put the burden of proof on real people using their real names and always ask “have you stopped beating your wife lately” type questions. This was one reason why after two posts on Russia Blog in 2006, “Kim Zigfield” became the only person ever to be banned from Russia Blog. The editors of the website made an announcement at that time as to the reasons why. Kim Zigfield and her sock puppets were demanding that the editors of Russia Blog fact check and rebut every single comment made toward her or against her, as well as engaging in schoolyard insults of anyone who disagreed with her. This is akin to demanding that Tom Barnett, Richard Fernandez, or any other blogger who gets hundreds of comments a week read and respond personally to every single one, a physical impossibility for any sane person with a life outside of blogging (even for Charles Johnson!).

At the time that Kim Zigfield was banned, this person also claimed, that she could not find powdered cane sugar when she was in Russia (year and cities visited totally unspecified) and that it probably still did not exist in the country, along with many other basic consumer staples. When expats and Russia Blog readers from St. Petersburg to Sakhalin laughed at this, she declared that it was up to the editors of Russia Blog to produce bags of powdered sugar from the darkest corners of Siberia to disprove her statement. Typical troll behavior, the burden of prove is always on someone else.

Little Green Footballs’ “lizardoids” have cited La Russophobe’s claim that the Real Russia Project, the program of Discovery Institute which publishes Russia Blog, is somehow affiliated with Russia Today TV, a Moscow-based, Russian government funded English language news channel that was launched in 2006 to give Russia its own equivalent of Al-Jazeera. Russia Blog has occasionally reposted Russia Today’s videos, but otherwise there is no evidence for this claim, and in fact, there is no affiliation. Kim Zigfield also claimed, in a convoluted, conspiratorial paragraph worthy of a John Birch Society member, that Russia Blog is connected to Russia Profile, a tiny bimonthly magazine that publishes out of the same old Soviet RIA Novosti building that Russia Today occupies in Moscow. However, other than a rare crosspost, and Russia Profile republishing Russia Blog’s content, there is no relationship there either.

As for Russia Blog’s alleged connection with David Johnson, a Maryland-based Russophile who maintains a very large email listserv on Russia, like Tom Barnett, Mr. Johnson simply picks up Russia Blog content when he chooses to do so. There is no affiliation, and Mr. Johnson often posts articles harshly critical of Russia and its present leadership. Mr. Mamchur has done so as well, but like Time magazine, Mamchur has decided to give some credit where credit is due for the positive economic changes that have taken place in Russia these past few years.

La Russophobe implies that Russia Blog is part of a Kremlin-backed propaganda effort in the U.S., and Charles Johnson says its articles “read like a press release from the Kremlin”. But who backs La Russophobe? Obviously it someone’s fulltime job, and not just the hobby of someone living in New York City, a very expensive place to spend hours every day on a hobby. Charles Johnson isn’t interested in such questions, even when his own readers confront him with La Russophobe’s track record of making wild accusations against anyone with a different point of view about Russia – that is, anyone who doesn’t think that modern Russia is the Evil Empire reborn.

Thanks to Pajamas Media’s editor for allowing someone to finally set the record straight. I do not wish to engage the “Lizardoids” over on their turf at LGF or register with Mr. Charles Johnson, as he clearly has his mind made up even when confronted by his own readers with contrary facts about the credibility of “La Russophobe” and others.

Anything further I could say to him, as with “Kim Zigfield”, would get distorted and twisted beyond recognition before being reposted. And when “Kim Zigfield”, who is probably not a woman but a man, gets called to account for his/her slanders of anyone who disagrees with her, she plays the victim, saying “you slander La Russophobe”. That’s like saying someone is slandering Superman or Mickey Mouse – not a real person using their real name, or even a genuine dissident. New York City isn’t Teheran, Baghdad, or Beijing.

Over at LGF, Robert Spencer, the bestselling author of the book “Defeating Jihad”, which is what LGF is supposed to be all about, is also accused of being a religious fanatic, and has clearly had it with the fever swamps. Just because LGF is a right wing libertarian fever swamp instead of a leftwing one like the Daily Kos doesn’t make it any better (i.e. if Dinesh D’Souza and Spencer have the same publisher, ergo, Spencer must endorse D’Souza’s views, ergo, if Russia Blog has Discovery Institute on its masthead, everyone who contributes to it must endorse intelligent design, even when they say otherwise, if Kim Zigfield says Russia Profile is the same thing as Russia Blog or that they are connected just because the names sound the same and there has been some crossposting, ergo, it must be true). Most of the time, Russia Profile’s editors, like the editors of another website called iPutin, simply repost Russia Blog content without requesting permission, perhaps because they use a webcrawler to pick it up.

This is stupid, mindless, pack behavior from people that pride themselves on being smarter and more mature than the Kos Kidz and other denizens of websites they call the sewers of the Internet.

Aug 13, 2008 - 9:57 am 11. Susan Katz Keating:

FYI, I linked to your essay on today’s blog.
http://susankatzkeating.blogspot.com/2008/08/clouthier-gets-it-right-on-spousal.html

Aug 13, 2008 - 10:15 am 12. Jim:

“Ossetia was attacked and invaded by Georgia after declaring independence from them twice. Yet somehow Georgia is the victim…”

Yes, just as Virgina was justified when it declared independence.

“Ossetia is an independent nation and deserves the right to self-determination no matter her neighbor.”

Independent nation? The land that the Ossetians live on has been part of Georgia for at least 1,000 years. And that just the Ossetians. Then there is Tsvinkhali, which is full of Russians, citizens of Russia, who are therefore aliens in Georgia, residing there at the pleasure of the Georgian government and can be expelled at any time without any further justification necessary.

Aug 13, 2008 - 11:20 am 13. poul:

jim, everything you say about georgia can be said about ossetia, and everything you say about russia can be said about georgia. that much should be pretty obvious to any thinking individual.

the truth is, russian government is a bunch of fascist thugs, and georgian government is a bunch of fascist thugs – but they are “our” thugs so we support them? what a horrible approach…

Aug 13, 2008 - 11:55 am 14. Jarhead:

South Ossetia is a piss-ant town of 70 thousand people. It’s like Jersey City declaring independence – except three times more people live in Jersey City.

The Russians and their “peacekeepers” kept Georgia out of there for one reason – the Roki Tunnel. It is the only route through the Greater Caucasus Mountains in the region. It is also the supply line for most of the Russian troops in Georgia. If the Georgian government controlled the tunnel, they could prevent an invasion at any time by collapsing the tunnel.

If we were to fight the Russians there, the first step would be to collapse the tunnel with deep penetrating bombs, effectively isolating the Russian troops.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roki_Tunnel

Aug 13, 2008 - 12:07 pm 15. Jarhead:

poul – You like to throw around the “fascist” label. Georgia was a real democracy. Russia is the biggest criminal enterprise in history.

Aug 13, 2008 - 12:11 pm 16. Toride Kogusoku:

1. SOUTH Ossetia? How did that happen? Simple. Stalin took a contiguous territory – Ossetia – comprising, mostly, a single ethnic group. They have been historically close to Russia for several hundred years, because the Russians saved them from the Muslims.
He deliberately tacked on a part of Ingushtia to the north, to foment strife. He made the north part of Russia, and the south part of Georgia. The north Ossetians relatively recently did ethnic cleansing on the Ingustians. The south as tried to reunite with the North. Georgia has, on three occasions, tried to use force to keep them in their own fold. Here, in the third time, Georgia attacks, and kills a lot of people. Seems quite similar to Serbia and Kosovo, doesn’t it? And in the latter case, against Russia’s protests, we enabled Kosovo to be a new independent country. Aside from Russia’s imperialistic aims, and further intent to control the last non-Russian pipeline of oil from central Asia, the Ossetians are doing exactly what the Kosovar’s did, and Russia is doing what America did.
If Georgia had not launched their killing attacks, Russia would not have had a pretext for invading. This is not, therefore, analogous to the abused spouse metaphor that the writer offers. Perhaps better is this:
You have a brute of a husband, and a harpy of a wife. He does and has beaten her. And she puts ground glass in his soup. One day, she begins to beat their child (a nasty brat, who has poked out the eye of HIS younger brother named Ingush), and she just broke his arm. So husband begins to beat her. And social services personnel, who encouraged the wife to be “free,” now wring their hands.

Aug 13, 2008 - 12:14 pm 17. ANNOUNCEMENT: My First Pajama’s Media Article « Blog Entry « Dr. Melissa Clouthier:

[...] wanted to inform you that my first official article for Pajama’s Media is up today. Please go check it out so they’ll hire me again. Also, comment and get involved [...]

Aug 13, 2008 - 12:17 pm 18. Jarhead:

South Ossetia is a worthless town of 70 thousand people. It’s like Jersey City declaring independence – except three times more people live in Jersey City.

The Russians and their “peacekeepers” kept Georgia out of there for one reason – the Roki Tunnel. It is the only route through the Greater Caucasus Mountains in the region. It is also the supply line for most of the Russian troops in Georgia. If the Georgian government controlled the tunnel, they could prevent an invasion at any time by collapsing the tunnel.

If we were to fight the Russians there, the first step would be to collapse the tunnel with deep penetrating bombs, effectively isolating the Russian troops.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roki_Tunnel

Aug 13, 2008 - 12:25 pm 19. Cletus:

I love Poul and NYC, who seem to think putting down a violent uprising and enforcing their laws is outside the rights of a sovereign nation.

Aug 13, 2008 - 12:40 pm 20. pch1013:

@Steve: “By all evidence, this person or group of persons cannot look up the names of Russian institutions on yandex.ru or other websites”

Pity, because if she had, La Russophobe would have found out some interesting stuff about Yuri Mamchur, or should I say Colonel Yuri Mamchur, formerly of the Russian Ministry of Defense press office.

(I won’t provide a link, because you can presumably look it up for yourself.)

I also note that your director, Bruce Chapman, is quoted at the end of a Mamchur study in which he lists 10 foreign “misconceptions” about Russia. Chapman is very much involved in the ID issue as well. Not that this proves any link between the two issues within the DI, but to suggest that the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing is a bit of a stretch.

Aug 13, 2008 - 3:27 pm 21. Steve Nelson:

@pch1013

You didn’t need to read that in Russian, it’s on Mr. Mamchur’s public bio. Again, not a shocking secret hidden from the world. Any other accusations you want to make? Maybe Mr. Mamchur gets secret messages in his piano? I’m fed up with this sort of defamation. La Russophobe is not a guy who produces music, not a real person with a real name getting his reputation trashed by malicious trolls, who want to stamp out any disagreement and enforce a party line on Russia.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=207&isFellow=true

Again, if you want to know who supports the Real Russia Project, why don’t you just Google the YouTube video they made with one of their supporters from Seattle-Tacoma, Bob Lindal, an American who builds cedar homes for a living, or look at their fellows/advisors page, with the Bush 41 advisors Ellison and Pietro? It’s all there. But far better to cast innuendo and conspiracy theories, no?

Now tell me, who supports La Russophobe? Kind of hard to produce that much crap as a volunteer gig in NYC, don’t you think? You don’t think one of the exiled oligarchs would fund a black PR project in America?

Why is Georgia still paying someone on McCain’s payroll? And how much is Berezovsky or Khodorkovsky’s money buying in Washington and London (even Anne Applebaum, not exactly a big time Russophile, married to the now Polish Foreign Minister, asked these questions).

But you would rather smoke out some reds, eh?

Seriously, get a grip.

Aug 13, 2008 - 6:08 pm 22. kabud:

ARNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Steve Nelson: is an enemy agent

Aug 13, 2008 - 7:04 pm 23. fred:

kabud,

The most dispiriting, discouraging thing for me, as an American, is to see fellow Americans and people in Europe and Canada blaming Georgia for this and rooting for Russia. The Left has shown its face again and we should judge it by its actions. It has been continual perfidy from those people.

At the four weblogs I participate in, I am stunned by the number of people who have fallen for or are willingly credulous about the disinformation put out by Russia.

I will say this about the Left: one of the ways it betrays its stupidity in military matters is its inability to see that the kind of operation the Russians unleashed cannot have happened spontaneously. These people are clueless about military hardware, logistics, pre-positioning, the whole kit and kaboodle. They really think this was a spontaneous “cavalry to the rescue” of the Ossetians! Plus there is the complete denial – the WILLFUL refusal to take note of the facts of the attacks by Ossetian paramilitaries (and those people are well-known in the Caucasus for a long time as inbred criminals)into Georgia to bait, goad, and terrorize Georgia. The Russians were employing this because eventually the Georgians would throw up their hands and say “f*ck it!” and go inside Ossetia after the scum terrorists.

What a bunch of credulous, seditious dopes we have in the West. The old Soviet Union seeded the West well over the course of fifty years. And now it is bearing fruit.

Aug 13, 2008 - 8:45 pm 24. Steve Nelson:

Paranoia strikes deep:
Into your life it will creep.
It starts when you’re always afraid.
You step out of line, the man come and take you away.

Aug 13, 2008 - 10:03 pm 25. Russian Bear:

To: Jar-head You are a strategist! But do not rush to send your plan to the Pentagon! Your strategy is not quite good: The Roki Tunnel is not the only and the best entrance to Georgia. The best is along the Black Sea cost, through Abkahasia. There are Abkhasian sea-ports in Russian possession to land the troops, and there is a rail-road from Russia to Georgia (recently restored). The terrain of the Western Georgia is plane, and attacking from the West direction, Russia would be able to reach Tbilisi in a few hours. Also there are a few of other roads through the Great Caucasus range (Checnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan), and Russia also has her military bases and installation in Armenia, which can be used to attack from the South. The other access is through Azerbaijan. When Germans attacked France in WWII they just stroke through Holland and Belgium. So, you theory that Russia is keeping Ossetia “because she needs the Roki Tunnel” is kind of funny. But the opposite is true: Russia keeps the Roki tunnel because she needs South Ossetia.

So, If we were to fight the Russians there…
Yeah, you can fight. Just go here:
http://ghostrecon.us.ubi.com/product_gr.php

Aug 13, 2008 - 10:14 pm 26. poul:

Jarhead

“Georgia was a real democracy. ” – when?

read up something on the subject, will you?
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/conflicts/caucasus/georgia_after_revolution

Aug 13, 2008 - 11:24 pm 27. poul:

Cletus:

“I love Poul and NYC, who seem to think putting down a violent uprising and enforcing their laws is outside the rights of a sovereign nation.”

so in your world georgia deserves sovereignty and independence from russia, but ossetia does not deserves sovereignty and independence from georgia? based on which criteria?

Aug 13, 2008 - 11:27 pm 28. pch1013:

@fred: Just because you don’t agree with the pro-Russian agenda doesn’t mean that it is “leftist.”

The Huffington Post is largely pro-Georgia. So is the Guardian, along with most of the rest of the MSM, with the glaring exception of the BBC. As for the Discovery Institute, any claim that its pro-Russian agenda is also somehow “leftist” is utterly laughable.

Aug 14, 2008 - 9:21 am 29. No One of Importance:

Over at Little Green Footballs, within 48 hrs, it looks like La Russophobe is already wearing out her welcome. On the one hand, you can’t believe that anybody could produce that much garbage as just a hobby. On the other hand, you can’t believe a well-funded PR operation would stoop to denouncing any commenter who disagrees as an “ape” or “Kremlin stooge” at even the most obscure forum.

I haven’t noticed any difference between the Beeb’s coverage of Russia than other media outlets.

Here is the link to the Anne Applebaum story from 2005, about Khodorkovsky’s reception in D.C.:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/13/AR2005121301511.html

For his part, Berezovsky said he was willing to spend $1 billion of his own fortune to bring down Putin. Klebnikov wrote in Godfather of the Kremlin that Berezovsky had ordered contract killings, and he winds up dead a short time later. And then Litvinenko, a Berezovsky employee in London, dies a horrible, exotic death from polonium poisoning. But keep telling yourselves that only FSB could get ahold of a few grams of that stuff and that the British Secret Service has no motive to defend Berezovsky or see him never get extradited back to Russia.

Again, none of you ever answered my questions: are the Secretaries of Treasury and Deputy Treasury Secretary also Russian tools, since they were in Moscow just a few weeks ago assuring the Russian Central Bank that their dollar-denominated holdings were safe from the subprime crisis and that they should invest more of their sovereign wealth funds in the U.S.?(Kimmitt was in Moscow last year, as reported by RosBusinessConsulting, and Paulson was there just two months ago, unless you think they were their to sip tea) Am I on crazy pills for asking why the U.S. is asking Russia for more capital and help with Iran at the same time it is provoking Moscow in Georgia?

Is the Pentagon under Kremlin influence because they charter Russian Antonovs (Google An-124 on images and see a nice VolgaDnieper model loading up at a California Air Force Base) for Afghanistan and Iraq? There aren’t enough C-17s in the fleet as it is, that’s why they use them at $40-$70k an hour. And the source for the Fannie-Freddie story was Reuters.

Better to stick your heads in the sand and pretend that a sizeable chunk of Wall Street and the U.S. elite isn’t already involved with the Russians financially. I mean, I don’t see Frank Gaffney going on talk radio shows calling for China to be kicked out of the WTO, even though it is a far worse abuser of human rights and copyright protections. Maybe because Wal-Mart isn’t stocked with Russian goods?

What I’m sick and tired of is the hypocrisy. This war isn’t about democracy or oil but about sheer power, realpolitik. And the Georgians and South Ossetians are the pawns.

Aug 14, 2008 - 11:29 am 30. sergei:

all lies. Georgia starts it, Russia finishes it. America bent because the monopolar world is dead. Hand W a Kleenex.

Aug 14, 2008 - 1:06 pm 31. Valerie:

The more I think of it, the less I like the analogy above, because it implies true love, or at least consent, at some time in the past. Russia is really more like a pimp claiming to be an ex-husband, and arguing that he still retains a genuine husband’s rights.

Aug 16, 2008 - 5:31 am 32. Kim Zigfeld:

Brilliant! Bless you, Melissa, for expressing this reality so cogently!

It seems we are doomed to repeat history because so many of us cannot remember, but reading this essay gives one hope that our future is not already written.

Aug 16, 2008 - 10:20 am

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