The United States’ response to Russia’s aggression against Georgia seems weak at best. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made more than 50 phone calls over the weekend, and President Bush said (between Olympics events) that when he spoke with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Putin’s puppet president, he expressed “grave concern about the disproportionate response of Russia and that we strongly condemn the bombing outside of South Ossetia.” But Putin seems undeterred by either foreign criticism or Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili’s signing of a cease-fire pledge.
The United States could use some of the credibility it squandered by invading Iraq about now. Lacking that, the Group of Seven, NATO, the United Nations and the European Union need to be tough and unified.
As John McCain urged today, Rice should go to Europe “to establish a common Euro-Atlantic position aimed at ending the war and supporting the independence of Georgia.”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Saakashvili says that “if Georgia falls, this will also mean the fall of the West in the entire former Soviet Union and beyond. Leaders in neighboring states — whether in Ukraine, in other Caucasian states or in Central Asia — will have to consider whether the price of freedom and independence is indeed too high.”
“Even in confessing to preening, Edwards was preening,” Maureen Dowd wrote about John Edwards’ admission of having an affair. “His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic?” Dowd said the creepiest part of the confession was when he stressed that he cheated on his wife when her cancer was in remission. In other words, Dowd wrote, “his infidelity was oncologically correct.”
Thomas Frank (“What’s the Matter With Kansas?”) has a new book on conservatism called “The Wrecking Crew,” which details how conservatives have actually governed in the Bush years. Bottom line: It’s not about incompetence, it’s about ideology. An excerpt:
“Yes, today’s conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish ‘golf weekend’; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns — in short, when they treat government with contempt — they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition. . . .
“Conservatism, as we know it, is a movement that is about greed, about the ‘virtue of selfishness’ when it acts in the marketplace. In right-wing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time.”
With two sitting senators trying to become president, Kansas Sen. Bob Dole’s decision in May 1996 to leave the Senate after 27 years to focus full time on his presidential run seems more laudable by the day. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has missed 404 votes, or 63.6 percent of Senate votes during the current Congress. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has missed 45.2 percent, or 287 votes.
Gerald F. Seib, a native Kansan and executive Washington editor of the Wall Street Journal, notes the Kansas connections of Barack Obama and potential running mates Kathleen Sebelius and Tim Kaine, and sees lessons for Obama in the state’s history and capital politics: “As it happens, Kansas has been through an extreme version of national political trends: a rise of social conservatives; a searing internal Republican debate; and a bit of a Democratic resurgence. It isn’t mere happenstance that it has emerged as a state that is still reliably Republican yet with a highly popular Democratic governor.” He concludes: “The partisan minefields of Topeka, the state capital, aren’t all that different from those of the nation’s capital. The Sebelius experience in navigating them may be the example of Kansas values Sen. Obama finds most useful.”
The United States’ response to Russia’s aggression against Georgia seems weak at best. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made more than 50 phone calls over the weekend, and President Bush said (between Olympics events) that when he spoke with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Putin’s puppet president, he expressed “grave concern about the disproportionate response of Russia and that we strongly condemn the bombing outside of South Ossetia.” But Putin seems undeterred by either foreign criticism or Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili’s signing of a cease-fire pledge.
