Won't be hard to tell the diff. (UPDATE with link below)
Below we quoted Billy-Boy Kristol and paraphrased his afternoon RadioMouth sycophant.
Now James Poulos:
As Russian columns advance into Georgia proper, columns in the American press fill with dire warnings and withering contempt for anyone so puerile as to ever trust a Russian...National Review's Jonah Goldberg cries that "this is what happens" when the west takes its eye off the Russians to enjoy the Olympics.
"This", of course, is the brutalisation of a hapless, innocent, fledgling democracy – a role played to the hilt by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who has spared no absurdity in his increasingly haggard efforts to trigger a western bailout of his hasty and ill-advised weekend invasion of long-autonomous South Ossetia.
But where the frustrated desperation that Saakashvili has brought upon himself seems to explain his descent into hyperbole, American commentators have no such excuse. The real wake-up call placed by the Russo-Georgian conflict is not a clarion to a new cold war, but a head check for pro-democracy ideologues – whose idealism has ratified a style of sloppy thinking and rote sloganeering that actually threatens the durability of representative government around the world.
Sloganeering, indeed.
But "sloppy thinking" will suffice, except for those who don't think at all.
I mean, the Afternoon RadioMouth didn't even know whether Georgia (or South Ossetia) is a Muslim area. Hint: they are not. Neither of them.
UPDATE: Plenty more here.
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6 comments:
How do you feel about, "These guys were with us in Iraq all along, and have let us use their country to train for and stage our operations in Afghanistan -- we owe them more than a shrug when tanks roll into their own country?"
Slogan, or reason?
I'm OK with doing this with diplomacy and 'soft power,' if that works; and I'm OK with taking our time and getting it right. That said, the fact that Jonah Goldberg said something dumb doesn't color the real arguments for defending an ally against invasion.
I suspect that the deal will get done along these lines:
1) Russkis halt their advance, having scared the *&^% out of Shaak'li;
2) Shaak'li agrees to step down;
3) A new election is held, after the US and Russia agree on an interim government of some sort.
4) South Ossetia becomes independent of Georgia, but perhaps a territory (like Puerto Rico) of the Russian state.
I think Putin knows where to stop, too. He's not stupid--or he'd have been dead long ago.
If he does that he has more sense than I have. I'd finish taking the whole nation -- he has set up his forces in play, and we can't deploy even if we would for a time. He could close it off in three more days, and then negotiate. It'd be an enviable position to begin negotiations from.
Ahem.
Read today's early AM headlines.
As you say. Many people have more sense than I have about these things: Gen. Braxton Bragg made the same decision after Chickamagua.
The expedition was guided by Putin's objective: to rattle Shaak'li's cage.
One wonders, by the way, where in Hell State was; seems to me that any sentient diplomat would have been yelling "cut it out" at Shaak'li a long time ago.
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