Could you imagine what’d happen if George W. Bush had not only muffed the name of the president of another nation, but of France?

Well, you’d have to imagine it; it was the Obamessiah:

Obama sent a letter to the French president, and called him Jacques Chirac.Maybe Barack Obama was too busy running for the next-higher-office (which is his his one strength) to bother reading a newspaper or a magazine or even a book to discover that they held an election a couple of years ago and elected L’Americain, Nicolas Sarkozy, as president.

But it is Obama, and not Bush, so…:

The American media has ignored this faux pas. But the French have not. One does not need to read French to understand the point of the Le Monde cartoon as shown [in Don Surber’s piece; go check it out].

Not just any nation, mind you, but a big, important one that is almost alone in Europe in upping its commitments to international security. The one that The One was supposed to help us in reaching out to.

UPDATE: Brian Jones tweets “Sarkozy oughtta respond with a letter addressed to “President Carter.”

UPDATE 2:  Of course there’s  an explanation.  And it works. 

Of course Obama will take more care with the French than with, say, all of us gun-clinging Jeebus freaks. 

…telling management “Um…about those bronze windows…”

Still, if you work in technology these days, this bit is pretty familiar stuff.

Here’s some change for you; Obama has appointed Chaz Freeman, noted CAIR/HAMAS/House of Saud/Fatah upsucker, to head the National Intelligence Council.

Melanie Phillips in the UK Spectator breaks down Freeman’s history, and concludes:

If he is appointed to this new intelligence role, Freeman will shape the intelligence assessments that will tell America, among other things, what threats are posed to America and the free world by the Iranian regime. We already saw, with the misleading and manipulatively spun NIE two years ago which facilitated the demonstrably false conclusion that Iran had stopped working on the bomb – a conclusion almost immediately disproved by further intelligence but which was used to head off action against Iran – how such politicised intel can be used to thwart attempts to stop the Iranian bomb.

With such viciously prejudiced views and such an intimate association with the principal force behind the Sunni division of the Islamic jihad, can anyone apart from the west’s gloating Jew-haters doubt that the appointment by America’s 44^th President of Chas W Freeman as chairman of the NIC would be a stunning coup as a weapon in the armoury of the enemies of the Jewish people and the free world?

This will give moral relativism a bad name.

Now that the US has officially joined the ranks of Socialist nations, France wants to make sure that we play by the rules.

The European Union made noises last year about having the WTO verify that the U.S. auto industry assistance package doesn’t violate any international trade rules. Now French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said he will ask the World Trade Organization to stick their hands into the matter.

Critics suggest that this could be a diversionary tactic – Sarkozy himself was accused of violating trade rules with his proposed assistance to Renault and PSA Peugeot/Citroen. Or it could be a way to see if both the proposed French and U.S. proposals will pass the WTO test. Either way, Sarkozy and other European heads of state will meet to plan a Europe-wide response to the auto industry situation, as the E.U. continues to mull whether to bring a formal appeal to the WTO regarding the United States’ bailout package.

If another socialist nation thinks the Big Three Bailout was without merit, you know it was a bad idea. Gee, I hope they don’t call on the UN to come over here and enforce the rules.

Australians have always been there to help others.

In recent memory?  Australia led the world in helping with the crises in East Timor and after the Indonesian tsunami.  And they were and are first, longest-lasting. and among the best in their help in the war on terror. Australians even sent money to the US after Katrina.

Well, the bushfires in Victoria are a grievous disaster in such a relatively small nation.  I asked “how can Americans help”, and got an answer; the Red Cross is seeking donations.

And if you’re one of my small, elite group of readers from Oz, an Australian blogger has collected some links for how Australians not affected by the blazes can help out.

Two survivors of the Victorian bushfires:

For those who aren’t already – prayers, karmic attaboys or curses at remorseless fate on behalf of the Australians.

And if there’s any more tangible, temporal way to help, I’ll find it and pass it on.

For most of human history, humans have had to reproduce as fast as they could; children were the only 401K, and infant/child mortality was harder on that retirement plan than the recession is on your Roth IRA today.
Capitalism and the generalized prosperity that’s attended it in the past 150-odd years has changed that dynamic. In a sense relative to the rest of the world throughout history, capitalism and general prosperity has taken human  life from “nasty, brutish and short” to “relatively civilized, at least modestly comfortable, and where obesity is the biggest health problem among the poor“.

One of the blessings that’s attended these changes is the existence, throughout the world, of “cheap food”.  When I say “cheap”, I’m not talking about supermarket shelf price, by the way; 500 years ago, over 95% of the world’s population worked from dawn to dusk six or seven days a week trying to subsist.  Do you work two shifts seven days a week just to feed your family and live in a hovel?  Who does?  No – food is incomparably cheap these days, historically speaking, even if the price of eggs is getting kinda out of hand.

“Cheap food” has enabled the parts of the world still governed by dictators, petty overlords and warlords to sustain populations that would have been mathematically and logistically impossible 100 years ago.  Of course, the lack of actual personal prosperity, and the attendant uncertainty of life, has kept the birthrates in these places high (albeit lower than when I was a kid).  The presence of global media, communications and markets have also made life safer in the parts of the world run by despots, warlords, and amok bureaucrats; it’s a truism that no famine can take place in a nation with a free market and a free media (every famine in the past 100 years has taken place in places with neither); the globalization of communications and markets has made it possible for weathy nations (with their epic surpluses of food) to ameliorate the worst ravages of famines, the great population-leveler of days gone by.

So on the one hand, a tide that has been rising since the birth of the modern world has been lifting all boats.
On the other, this has led the world into two basic demographic paths:

1. “First World” countries, with safe, practically-boundless supplies of food and historically-unprecedented prosperity, find it unneccessary to reproduce as much – even, in the case of Western Europe, to fall below replacement level, leading in just a few generations (from the end of WWII to today)  to the specter of being demographically “upside down”, with average ages creeping up into the forties and retirees outnumbering working citizens, and thus having to choose between economic shrinkage (with its attendant ravages on taxes to support  “service”-heavy governments – but let’s not digress) or importing working-age labor from…
2. “Third World” countries, for whom the relative affordability of food (historically speaking) but the relative scarcity of economic freedom has led to populations that are booming, young (average age less than twenty in many countries) and, since they live in despotic, anarchic or socialist countries, underemployed and poor.

This might lead to a vicious cycle – as we’re starting to see in Western Europe, where ageing populations, which for almost two generations have been at zero or negative native population growth are having to import labor from other younger, poorer countries.  Who are changing the political face of these countries – sometimes against immense resistance from the natives, and all of the attendant strife.

(There are actually two vicious cycles:  overpopulation in the world’s current context happens when populations in un-free nations continue pre-prosperity growth rates; there’s a reason that Paul Ehrlich, overpopulation alarmist of the sixties and seventies, is largely a risible figure these days; widening prosperity (in a historical context) obsoleted his theory in many countries that he’d used as case studies.  Remember when people expected India to become a famine-ridden wasteland?).
The US’ average age is still relatively low – partly due to immigration, partly because our national birth rate is above replacement levels (and even moreso outside the “blue” states – which could reflect anything from lower standards of living or greater optimism in the red states, depending on your point of view, and it’s a digression we won’t follow in any case), but we have a “baby boom” moving through the pipeline that’ll drag things upward a bit in short order.  Still, the US is faring better than most, controversies over illegal immigration notwithstanding.

But here’s the question:  how does the “First” world react to the demographic fact that prosperity itself renders its populations older and less capable of continued economic growth?

1. The French model – work to pound immigrants into line behind a national set of standards set by the dominant culture (which, culturally, resists assimilation of immigrants)
2. The Dutch model – try (at least in theory) to carefully regulate and balance immigration to provide needed labor and skills without overly diluting the national culture (which is marginally less resistant to assimilation than France)
3. The American model – work to assimilate immigrants into a cultural system comprising a set of ideals rather than ethnic cultural norms
4. The Japanese model – actively reject all but the most desperately needed immigrants, and aggressively marginalize the few that do get in.
5. The Russian model – wallow in cultural depression and drink oneself into a stupor, and let your nation’s underworld fleece, terrorize, brutalize and co-opt the immigrants into a permanent, but distracted, underclass.
6. The Finnish model – watch your national median age skyrocket – but live in a place to which nobody actually wants to migrate.
7. The (ahem koff koff) model – subsidize fecundity.  Give tax breaks and/or other rewards to families that reproduce above the replacement rate, promoting measured growth and helping to keep the nation’s median age down to a reasonable level, to ensure future economic growth and national viability in everything from defense to beach scenery.

What’s a hypothetical, ageing society to do?

(more…)

…that even before he’s inaugurated, President-Elect Obama is having such a great affect on world opinion of the US among those that have hated us for so long.

…the “War on Terror” would involve flying planes into Afghan skyscrapers.
…The “American Revolution” would have been restricted to raising illegal taxes on the Brits in 1775.

…The Union would have had to stick with bombarding Confederate forts.

…We’d have had to have just retaken Kuwait and leave Hussein in power to be deposed over a decade later (oops)

…We’d have had to have to restrict ourselves to torpedoing German ships throughout the World War II.

..We’d have had to have to bomb a Japanese harbor and go home.

John Candy (God rest his soul) probably couldn’t have anticipated that world events would transform his 1995 film Canadian Bacon into a docu-drama.

Among the most unthinkable scenarios for most Americans is the unthinkable idea that the United States could become the disunited or turn into divided states. Even though this union accumulated very slowly in the first place, and against all odds — in other words it was not inevitable — the fact that the USA will not always be as united, or at least united in the way it is now, is considered, well… unthinkable.

But as Juan Enriquez notes in his amazing PopTech talk, based on his book “The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future”, no US president has ever died under the same flag that he was born under. That is, the borders of the United States has constantly shifted even in modern times. The last state was added in 1959 (after I was born!) and more could be added still. Americans are comfortable ADDING states, but it might not take much to subtract one. The outcome of the US Civil War has biased Americans to disbelieving in subtraction, but that might change.

In these scenarios, Minnesota becomes part of Canada, which of course we Minnesotans have known all along.

Right? 

The upside: The Canadians will put an end to all this outdoor stadium foolishness.

HT Althouse

The French are so lame. Their stimulus package couldn’t even pay the postage on ours!

PARIS — France will spend $33 billion over the next two years to soften the blow of the global downturn and limit the effects of increasing unemployment, President Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday.

You call that at Stimulus Package?! $33 Billion! Is that the best you can do?! Ours is like $700 Billion! Ha! Losers!

Traditional Minnesota office potluck:  Lots of cold cuts, hot dish, chips and jello.

Office potluck in an IT department that is about 35% South, Southeast and East Asian:  A wonderland of gustatory adventures; paneer, Vietnamese egg rolls, H’mong spring rolls, endless varieties of masala, funky spicy cornmeal dumplings of indeterminate ethnicity but verified deliciosity, and things whose names I don’t know but whose flavors will haunt me forever…

…not to mention haunting my co-workers through the next two hours of meetings.

Our next Secretary of State will be someone with part of a term on a Senate committee, and eight years of watching the sausage get made?

Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.

Obama’s advisers have begun looking into Bill Clinton’s foundation, which distributes millions of dollars to Africa to help with development, to ensure that there is no conflict of interest. But Democrats do not believe that the vetting is likely to be a problem

No, I’m guessing it won’t be.

Let’s just say I’m underwhelmed.

On the odd Saturday night, I can be found sitting in on Marty Owings’ show, “Radio Free Nation, on BlogTalkRadio.  One of the occasional callers is a fellow from Detroit – also a BlogTalkRadio host – who usually hits two talking (or, more accurately, bellowing and slurring) points:

1. “I favor unity.  Americans need to be united!  I want to lead Americans to unity!”
2. “I’m not using any Republican ideas.  Republican ideas are all bool-shee-yut”.

In other words, “let’s have unity; everyone agree with me”. 

I was reminded of the caller when I read this bit – an interview with French lefty philosophe Bernard-Henri Lévy – last week. 

It’s a reminder of the big reason I bailed out on the left over 20 years ago – because so much of what The Left believes is just so utterly awful.

Lévy

Why Obama should be chosen, in my opinion: No. 1, because it would mean really the end — and the complete victory of the battle begun in the ’60s. No. 2, because it will mean the end of a new American evil, which is the dividing, the Balkanization of American society. This is another counter-effect of a great idea, which was tolerance. You so much tolerate that you tolerate the American society to be in separate bubbles having their own peculiarities, and so on.

Obama must stamp out “peculiarities”? 

The first time I read this, I thought perhaps it was an artifact of the translation from French to German (the piece originally appeared in Spiegel) and thence to English.

No such luck:

Obama as president will mean all these bubbles submitted to a real ideal of citizenship.

The “real ideal of citizenship?”

Lévy is part of the intelligentsia – which seems to be a union gig in France – but to me the “real ideals of citizenship” in America are:

• To exist as part of a free association of equals – not a cog in a “unified” machine.
• To pull like hell for what I believe until the election is over, and then support – at least as a matter of principle – the results, as a member of a representative Republic. 

Not, might  I point out, falling in mutely line behind an elected leader’s idea of “unity” just for the sake of stomping out Lévy’s “bubbles”.  Especially when that elected leader’s ideas are so patently awful.

And I think I was right to begin with; there is a loss in translation.  Not so much between languages, but between worldviews.  Lévy – and Obama – seems to believe that “unity”, a lack of “bubbles”, is a useful end in and of itself. 

Indeed, the more of the piece you read, the less it seems Lévy understands of America, or the small-l liberal ideals that this country has, in its better moments, always espoused:

And No. 3, you have another ideal in the America of today, which I call the competition of victims. Competition of memories. If you are in favor of the Jews, you cannot be in favor of the blacks. If you remember the suffering of slavery, you cannot remember too much the suffering of the Holocaust, and so on and so on. The human heart has not space enough for all the sufferings. This is what some people say. Obama says the contrary. It will mean the end of this stupid topic, which is competition of victimhood.

And to believe otherwise is apparently racist. 

Read the whole depressing thing.

Conservatism – of sorts – wins in Canada, increasing its lead over the melange of other parties:

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Wednesday he will reach out to all parties during the global financial meltdown after his Conservative Party won in national elections but fell short of a parliamentary majority.

Harper had called Tuesday’s elections early in hopes of getting his party a majority, and in doing so he became the first major world leader to face voters since the financial crisis…Harper sought to put a good face on the results Wednesday, pointing to an increased number of seats and pledging cooperation.

Canada’s parliamentary system is a little more byzantine than ours – but at the end of the day, votes count – and it was a good day, albeit not a slam-dunk, for Conservatives:

With nearly all the returns in, Canada’s election agency reported on its Web site that the Conservatives had won or was leading in races for 143 of Parliament’s 308 seats, an improvement over the 127 seats the party had in the previous Parliament.

The Conservative Party needed to win 155 seats to govern on its own.

Maybe that’s why we’ve had fewer celebs promising to move to Canada if Mac and Sarah win; their government may actually develop more common sense than ours.

So your 401K is a mess.  Join the club; it sucks.

Imagine how much worse it’d be if, instead of a messed-up 401K, you were dealing with not being able to get water that wouldn’t give you or your kids cholera.

A friend of mine has been involved in starting a charity to help people in Ethiopia and Malawi to drill water wells.  Clean water isn’t only essential for mixing a great cocktail – it’s essential for the rest of your life, as well. 

So by all means, pitch in if you can. 

Over and over we hear the refrain: “the world wants Obama”

The world, however, is mostly pretty stupid – or at least, that’s the tale of the poll:

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, there is no consensus outside the United States that Islamist militants from al Qaeda were responsible, according to an international poll published Wednesday.

The survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe al Qaeda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001.

U.S. officials squarely blame al Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden has boasted of organizing the suicide attacks by his followers using hijacked commercial airliners.

On average, 46 percent of those surveyed said al Qaeda was responsible, 15 percent said the U.S. government, 7 percent said Israel and 7 percent said some other perpetrator. One in four people said they did not know who was behind the attacks.

A few years back, a poll showed a third of American Democrats thought as former “governor” Jesse Ventura does – that 9/11 was an inside job.  Perhaps the world shouldn’t feel so bad.

Not.

Respondents in the Middle East were especially likely to name a perpetrator other than al Qaeda, the poll found.

Israel was behind the attacks, said 43 percent of people in Egypt, 31 percent in Jordan and 19 percent in the Palestinian Territories. The U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians.

In Mexico, 30 percent cited the U.S. government and 33 percent named al Qaeda.

Oddly, it was in the least “developed” parts of the world that Al Quaeda was most-blamed.  Could it be because in places like Nigeria, Al Quaeda isn’t an abstraction?

Or is it because they aren’t exposed to the western news media? 

I’ll take “all of the above”. 

(Via Gary @ TVM)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/09/2360240.htm?section=world

I’m thinking that I’m going to declare myself bound by ancient Viking law. I think a Holmgang to solve disputes would be a lot more productive than a lawsuit, for example.

No, really. And given this story, it’s probably only a matter time before Justice Antnony “Let’s See What Foreign Courts Have To Say” Kennedy makes this truly awful story a reality here:

Civil and criminal verdicts by Islamic sharia courts are now legally binding under UK law.

A new network of courts in five major cities is hearing cases where Muslims involved agree to be bound by traditional Sharia law, and under the 1996 Arbitration Act the court’s decisions can then be enforced by the county courts or the High Court.Officials behind the new system claim to have dealt with more than 100 cases since last summer, including six involving domestic violence which is a criminal rather than civil offence, and said they hoped to take over growing numbers of ‘smaller’ criminal cases in future.

The revelations sparked uproar yesterday, with warnings that the fundamental principle of equal treatment for all – the bedrock of British justice – was being gravely undermined.

No kidding, Sherlock. Either there is equal treatment under the law or there is sharia. You can’t have it both ways. Under sharia, women are considered to be less equal than men.

Hey, the Vikings didn’t stone gays to death! (He says, after finding no references on Google to, y’know, Vikings stoning gays).

(Via Miss O’Hara)

This looks impressive: five former Secretaries of State speak out on US/Iranian relations:

Five former secretaries of state, gathering to give their best advice to the next president, agreed Monday that the United States should talk to Iran.

Well, that sounds like an august, authoritative body!

Which SecStates are we talking about, here?

The wide-ranging, 90-minute session in a packed auditorium at The George Washington University, produced exceptional unity among Madeleine Albright,

SCREECH.

Albright?

The worst SecState since Warren Christopher, was a failed diplomat in two administrations?

Colin Powell,

An extreme disappointment.

Warren Christopher,

With Albright, the mixed doubles team at the “Most Impotent Hamsters Ever To Represent This Country Overseas” tournament.

Henry A. Kissinger

Er,yeah.  Successful, yes, largely, but is his legacy of morally-compromised realpolitik something we want to suck up to?

and James A. Baker III.

Er…yeah.  One out of five ain’t bad.

Whew.

In the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, we American Exceptionalists were on quite a roll; that roll was about “the wave of expanding Democracy”.

With the fall of the Second World – the commies – the First World would be strengthened to spread the one-person-one-vote, choose-your-path gospel to the “Third World”.

Bob Collins at MPR’s NewsCut notes that it doesn’t seem to be working out at the moment:

So what happened?

The Boston Globe’s Joshua Kurlantzick today uses Thailand as an example of a receding wave. The streets of Thailand have been crammed with protesters wearing the color of the former monarchy, demanding an end to the reign of the democratically elected prime minister. Last week, they got their wish.

The events unfolding in Thailand are part of a gathering global revolt against democracy. In 2007, the number of countries with declining freedoms exceeded those with advancing freedoms by nearly four to one, according to a recent report by Freedom House, an organization that monitors global democracy trends.

How could this be? Blame the middle class, Kurlantzick says.

As a country develops a true middle class, these urban, educated citizens insist on more rights in order to protect their economic and social interests. Eventually, as the size of the middle class grows, those demands become so overwhelming that democracy is inevitable. But now, it appears, the middle class in some nations has turned into an antidemocratic force. Young democracy, with weak institutions, often brings to power, at first, elected leaders who actually don’t care that much about upholding democracy. As these demagogues tear down the very reforms the middle classes built, those same middle classes turn against the leaders, and then against the system itself, bringing democracy to collapse.

“Elected dictators” are not just a problem in Thailand, but Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Indonesia, and — the big one — Russia, the poster child for tension between pro- and anti-democracy forces.

Both pieces bring up some interesting questions, with by-no-means simple answers.

For starters, I question the validity of Kurlantzick’s  numbers;  using the raw number of nations as a metric can be misleading; if Andorra, Luxembourg and Montenegro (hypothetically) adopt dictatorships, and  India is democratic , do you count the nations (3:1 for dictators) or by population (hundreds to one for democracy)?

And for all of the alarmism of the conclusion, it’s worth remembering that it’s been worse;  in the Thirties, the intellectual current was to assume socialism, even authoritarianism, was going to win out in the end; in the Sixties and Seventies, people assumed Communism was here to stay, and the red wave engulfed much of the Third World.

Still – nations like Russia and Thailand are hardly small potatoes; there would seem to be a problem here.
Reading Paul Johnson’s classic “The Birth Of The Modern”, it’s interesting to note that so much of what we recognize as the “Modern World” today – from direct democracy to abolition of slavery to the asphalt road, steam engines and pants – got its start between 1815 and 1840 or so.

Among the more subtle and yet wide-sweeping changes was the notion on the part of people in the “liberal” (with a small “l”) west that Democracy was the way things should be.  It’s not always been a given, even in the West; it took many sweeping intellectual changes – the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment – to set the philosophical stage for the notion that Man can rule himself.

Huge swathes of the world never had a Renaissance or an Enlightenment (and as to the Reformation, many of the world’s major religions are not nearly as tolerant of dissent and uppitiness on the part of the peasants as Judeo-Christianity have been).  Russian society in particular never had any of the benefits of the change in Western intellectual tradition; authority (especially the authority to protect one from rampaging Huns, Tartars or Nazis) is government’s most important attribute to great swathes of Russian society.

The real question isn’t whether nations with long, illiberal histories – Bolivia, Thailand, Russia, Indonesia, Mexico – have a hard time adopting democracy.  The real, important question is how  any nation with a long, illiberal history – India, Colombia, Mali, Senegal – adopt it at all, and how we can help similar nations with similiar traditiosn – Iraq, Afghanistan – do better in much, much less time.

Which leads us to the obvious question: How does the U.S. respond to this?

That, on the other hand, is easy.  We do what we did in 1983; we remain the best, healthiest democracy in the world; we provide a strong contrast with the alternatives; we remain the place on this planet where everyone wants to go (and, since they can’t, we provide a model for them to copy in their own countries).  And we do what we did in 1948; stand up for fledgeling democracies against totalitarians – diplomatically, materially, and if necessary (heaven forfend) militarily, with all the moral and material strength we have.

Which necessitates having a government that believes in American exceptionalism – that this is the kind of place and system worth defending and exporting.

Glad you asked.

…the “whole world” would elect Obama.

On the other hand, they’re all truthers.

Thus, in other words, paying attention to “the whole world’s” views on this election is like listening to your crazy John Bircher neighbor.

That is all.

It would appear Barack Obama’s candidacy for President has a popular edge over John McCain’s outside the US among those queried. Probably because John McCain didn’t go on a whirlwind rock star tour. McCain is probably more concerned with what Americans think of their government than what the rest of the world thinks.

Democrat Mr Obama was favoured by a four-to-one margin across the 22,500 people polled in 22 countries.

It is interesting to note however, when you stack the electoral votes allocated to each of the countries whose citizens were polled, Obama and McCain are dead even.

Here’s a complete list of the countries included in the poll, along with the number of electoral votes in each:

Australia (0)
Brazil (0) 
Canada (0) 
China (0) 
Egypt (0) 
France (0) 
Germany (0) 
India (0) 
Indonesia (0) 
Italy (0) 
Kenya (0) 
Lebanon (0) 
Mexico (0) 
Nigeria (0) 
Panama (0) 
Philippines (0) 
Poland (0) 
Russia (0) 
Singapore (0) 
Turkey (0) 
United Arab Emirates (0) 
United Kingdom (0)

Q:  What do you call Dan Quayle if he’s black?

A: Barack Obama.  From Hinderaker:

Barack Obama without a teleprompter is an accident waiting to happen. Sometimes he reveals his ignorance of history, sometimes he stumbles incoherently, and sometimes he blurts out what he really believes. That’s what happened today when Obama tried to talk about Georgia, a topic that has embarrassed him more than once already, beginning when, in the first hours after the invasion, he parroted the Russian line.

Today Obama equated Russia’s invasion of Georgia with our toppling of Saddam Hussein:

Democrat Barack Obama scolded Russia again on Wednesday for invading another country’s sovereign territory while adding a new twist: the United States, he said, should set a better example on that front, too…

So our “charging into” Iraq–with dozens of allies, supported by a U.N. resolution, as a last resort after six months of build-up and negotiations, to unseat one of the cruelest dictators of modern times who had twice invaded neighboring states, was in violation of more than a dozen U.N. resolutions and was responsible for the deaths of something like two million people, who was shooting at American aircraft and had tried to assassinate a former President of the United States, in Obama’s childish mind, was just like Russia’s “charging into” Georgia, which resembles Saddam’s Iraq in no respect. And, of course, we invaded a horrifying charnel-house so as to establish a democracy, whereas Russia invaded a peaceful democracy that it wants to re-incorporate into its empire.

Four years ago, I said I  could never vote for a Democrat because they were so very unready to lead a nation in a complex world.

I feel today that I may have been almost too hard on Kerry, by comparison.

How badly are the Russians behaving in Georgia?

Oh, yes – it’s much worse than the Mainstream Media would tell you even if they did a proper job of covering this war.

Ralph Peters in the NYPost:

Amid photos of the horrors of war, grateful South Ossetians and triumphant Russian troops, one series leapt out at me as a former intel officer: Bearded irregulars riding atop Russian-built armored vehicles (old BMPs, for the military-hardware buffs). The vehicles had been splashed with white lettering.

What did the scrawls announce to the world? These thugs proudly proclaimed that they’re Chechens serving in the Vostok (“East”) Battalion commanded by Badrudin Yamadaev – who shares a reputation for gangland violence with his brother, Ruslan.

Read the piece for the background on this “unit”. Summary: It’s as if the Mafia or the Crips or Los Reyes were given machine guns and tanks (or BMP MICVs, for the equipment buffs).

Even in Russia, people have demanded this “unit” be disbanded. Yet it never happened. Why? (emphasis added by me):

Two reasons: First, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wants the Georgians to suffer – to really suffer. And Chechens are the world’s subject-matter experts in atrocities.

Second, this gives the Russian army itself a veil of deniability: When Putin’s spokesmen insist that the Russian military isn’t involved in the worst savagery in Georgia, they’re technically telling the truth (if we don’t count air attacks and artillery bombardments), since the Chechen thugs on their payroll are on the job.

Talk of getting Georgia into NATO was far-fetched; they were “a nation too far” for NATO. But we obviously need a new approach to dealing with Russia. Because Morris is right:

And there’s plenty else to be outraged about – not all of it Russia’s fault. Images of dead and disfigured Georgian soldiers show them wearing US-surplus canteens, boots and helmets, or equipped with antique US anti-tank weapons. After the Georgians did all their tiny country could to support us in Iraq, all we gave them was cast-off junk – thanks to Congress and the State Department.

Our military was only allowed to train the Georgians for peacekeeping, anti-terrorism and small-unit tactics. The Georgians gave us all they had, and we gave them crap. The Bush administration should hang its wobbly head in shame.

Perhaps the west, should it intend to get serious about containing Russian aggression, needs a new organization, formed from nations who are less than a generation removed from Russian domination. Call it the Eastern Europe Treaty Organization, or the Borscht Bloc for all I care. Get the Baltics, Poland, the Czechs and Slovaks and Ukrainians and Romanians and Bulgarians and whatever’s left of Georgia when this is over. Nations that, unlike the (West) Germans and Dutch and Spanish remember what they’re fighting against.

Rhetorically, in most cases.

(Via Fingers)

From the fifties through the early nineties, NATO deterred Soviet aggression by very publicly treating an attack on any NATO member as an attack on all of them.

To enforce that, we stationed hundreds of thousands of American troops – the largest peacetime overseas deployment in US history, and one of the biggest ever – overseas; mostly in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and Italy, but also South Korea and Okinawa (to deter a different bunch of communists). They were joined by troops from all that NATO partners – the Germans and Spaniards back when they were serious about defense; the Brits, Italians, Greeks, Turks, Dutch, Belgians, Norwegians, even Letzenburgish, along with de facto partners in France, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland and eventually Finland. For forty years, the various countries stayed at what seems to kids today an absurd degree of readiness (or might, if any of them learned about it); the US military in 1988 was almost twice as large as today, with a national population considerably smaller than it is in 2008. Many European nations went further; they maintained military conscription well into the nineties, and some nations (Norway, Sweden, Finland) maintained Swiss-style national-service armies, where virtually every male serves in the military, the reserves or the home guard from their twenties through their fifties, keeping their uniforms and rifles at home to be ready to fight the moment they walked out the door (hypothetically).

The whole point? To deter Soviet aggression.

HEavy Handed POlitics links to a piece by Dick Morris with some perspective sorely lacking from a major media that is fairly illiterate on the subject.  He wants to accelerate the admission of Ukraine to NATO:

The clear implication of the invasion of Georgia is that Russia cannot be trusted to live in peace with its neighbors. The impetus to imperial conquest predated and has outlasted communism. As Henry Kissinger argues, Russia must either be expanding or contracting. With so many divergent and often hostile nationalities inside and around Russia, the momentum of conquest is the only way to avoid an inertia which leads to decomposition.

Ukraine wants to enter NATO but our European allies, led by Germany, are so dependent on Russian gas that they are reluctant to antagonize the bear. Until now, the case of expanding NATO’s protection to Ukraine has been hypothetical, based on fear of Russian intentions. But by breaking the civilized rules of national conduct, Russia has demonstrated the folly of leaving smaller democracies exposed on its border.

Some – initially including Barack Obama – treated the Russian invasion as a border war for which both sides were responsible. The Democratic candidate called for mutual restraint and, only after two days had elapsed, did he label the Russian actions as “aggression”. Others have sought to blame Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili for the war because he sent troops into South Ossetia, long a part of Georgia which the Russians have egged on to seek its independence. The breakaway province is an example of Moscow’s oft-used strategy of encouraging emigration to other countries so as to use the new demographics to justify a takeover.

That’s been almost funny – the notion that Georgia, with a population smaller than Minnesota and a military maybe twice the size of the Minnesota National guard, would seek a military showdown with Russia

Of course NATO cannot extend its protection to every nation in Europe. It is, in the final analysis, a military alliance and it must be certain that it can back its guarantees with adequate might. The location of Georgia makes this difficult to assure. But Ukraine, located right next to NATO members Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania, can and must be defended by NATO.

And there’s the rub.  We talked about this on the show on Saturday.  For forty years, NATO kept immense garrisons in (West) Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and other western European nations.

And while the garrisons are smaller today, that’s where they still are.  While the “front” between the West and newly-imperialistic Russia has moved hundreds of miles to the east, the US military still maintains a big clutch of bases in Germany – in exactly the same area that the US VII Corps occupied from the end of WWII through the Cold War.  But in the countries that actually face potential Russian aggression?  Poland, the Baltic Republics, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Bulgaria?

Nichevo.

Why does it matter?

Russia is rapidly losing its population. It has the lowest birth rate in Europe and loses half a million people every year. Its GDP is only $1.7 trillion, a tenth of the Euro Zone’s. It is only through energy reserves that Russia is able to project its influence. And Russia must realize that the West’s likely movement away from oil and toward alternative fuels may make the energy card obsolete in the future. It is only through blunt, blatant military force that Russia can expand and trouble its neighbors. And if the U.S. and NATO stand up to it, Russia will back down. And Ukraine is where we must make a stand.

In other words, it is “Back to the Eighties”; the Russians once again realize, perhaps, they’re playing a short hand, and have nothing but force to make it work.

Fear and desperation make bad neighbors.