Lack of Posting
Sorry about the lack of posting friends. I normally don’t write that much on summer weekends anyway, but lately I’ve felt a distinct ennui, especially about politics and world events. Like this bit about how the Russians took prisoners in Georgia today and appropriated some US Humvees:
POTI, Georgia - Russian soldiers took about 20 Georgians in military uniform prisoner at a key Black Sea port in western Georgia on Tuesday, blindfolding them and holding them at gunpoint, and commandeered American Humvees awaiting shipment back to the United States.
The move came as a small column of Russian tanks and armored vehicles left the strategic city of Gori in the first sign of a Russian pullback of troops from Georgia after a cease-fire intended to end fighting that reignited Cold War tensions.
The two countries on Tuesday also exchanged prisoners. However, Russian soldiers also seized Georgians in Poti — the country’s key oil port city — and commandeered four U.S. Humvees that had been used in U.S.-Georgian military exercises.
Honestly, what else is there to say but “Duh! That’s what happens when you lose a war against a much larger neighboring foe. They tend to, ya know, take your stuff and refuse to leave.
Or this funny quote from Condoleeza Rice, which went largely unremarked in the so-called mainstream media:
“Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used whenever it wishes to deliver a message and that’s its military power,” Rice told reporters en route to an emergency meeting of NATO foreign ministers set for Tuesday. “That’s not the way to deal in the 21st century.”
I mean, yeah it’s laughable, but so what? These are the baboons we’re dealing with until January 2009. And you know what? That’s America policy in general, as Greenwald accurately points out:
Just during the time Rice has served in the Bush administration, we bombed, invaded and occupied Afghanistan; did the same to Iraq; repeatedly bombed Somalia, killing all sorts of civilians; fed bombs to Israel as they invaded and bombed Lebanon; top political officials (led by John McCain and Joe Lieberman) have repeatedly threatened, and advocated, that the same be done to a whole host of other countries, including Iran and Syria. That’s to say nothing of the virtually countless interventions and bombings in the pre-Bush, “peacetime” years — from the Balkans and Panama to Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and on and on and on.
The most enduring and predominant rule of American politics is that every national politician must demonstrate their willingness, even eagerness, to start wars. On the day in 1989 that the first George Bush ordered the deadly U.S. invasion of Panama, The New York Times’ R.W. Apple approvingly wrote on the front page that starting wars like that was “a Presidential initiation rite,” and that “most American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood to protect or advance what they construe as the national interest.” Thus, proclaimed Apple, Bush’s attack on Panama was an example of his “showing his steel” and “has shown him as a man capable of bold action.”
And this is all true, but it’s always been true and it will always BE true, which is why everyone ignores it, including me.
Meanwhile, I managed to get a bit of the stomach virus that knocked out my girlfriend last week, I’m probably not going to a bluegrass festival I’ve looked forward to all year because of gas prices (girlfriend forgot to take Thursday off from work, and I have no one to split gas with), my bank account is overdrawn, Capital One keeps calling (what part of “I’m not going to pay you” is so hard to understand?), and I’m beginning to have some dark premonitions about what’s going to go down once Sam starts elementary school. As my shrink said yesterday, “I do not envy you any of the choices you are going to have to make very soon. I work in family court as well as private practice, and I have never seen anyone who has to deal with the shit you deal with, in terms of distance and borders.”
there’s a lot more, but like I said I haven’t been inspired to post lately. Hopefully something interesting will come up soon…
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