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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charlie_R who wrote (90523)	3/2/2014 2:37:32 PM
From: greatplains_guy	1 Recommendation Recommended By Wayners Respond to of 90947

Obama’s abdication Saturday, March 1, 2014 By: Herald Staff This is what happens when you draw red lines that mean nothing. This is what happens when the man who should be Leader of the Free World abdicates that position. This is what happens when thugs like Vladimir Putin are allowed free rein to bully in territory he still considers part of Mother Russia. After days of doing little more than watching from afar, the president walked into the White House briefing room yesterday to declare that he was “deeply concerned” about yesterday’s developments in Ukraine. Those developments included the landing of possibly a dozen Russian transport planes and helicopters and reports that Russian forces had seized Crimea’s main airport even as a new government struggles in Kiev. Obama warned — quite possibly too late as usual — that “any violation of Ukrainian sovereignty would be deeply destabilizing. “It would present a profound interference in matters that must be decided by the Ukrainian people,” he said. Our naive and ineffectual president has a way of capturing the essence of the problem even as the wily Putin steals his lunch money. “The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine,” Obama said. That ought to have Putin trembling in his boots. bostonherald.com

To: Charlie_R who wrote (90523)	3/2/2014 2:47:12 PM
From: greatplains_guy	1 Recommendation Recommended By Wayners Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Putin Smashes Washington’s Cocoon A Politico report calls it “a crisis that no one anticipated.” (Except Sarah Palin) The Daily Beast, reporting on Friday’s US intelligence assessment that “Vladimir Putin’s military would not invade Ukraine,” quotes a Senate aide claiming that “no one really saw this kind of thing coming.” Op-eds from all over the legacy press this week helped explained why. Through the rose tinted lenses of a media community deeply convinced that President Obama and his dovish team are the masters of foreign relations, nothing poor Putin did could possibly derail the stately progress of our genius president. There were, we were told, lots of reasons not to worry about Ukraine. War is too costly for Russia’s weak economy. Trade would suffer, the ruble would take a hit. The 2008 war with Georgia is a bad historical comparison, as Ukraine’s territory, population and military are much larger. Invasion would harm Russia’s international standing. Putin doesn’t want to spoil his upcoming G8 summit, or his good press from Sochi. Putin would rather let the new government in Kiev humiliate itself with incompetence than give it an enemy to rally against. Crimea’s Tartars and other anti-Russian ethnic minorities wouldn’t stand for it. Headlines like “Why Russia Won’t Invade Ukraine,” “No, Russia Will Not Intervene in Ukraine,” and “5 Reasons for Everyone to Calm Down About Crimea” weren’t hard to find in our most eminent publications. Nobody, including us, is infallible about the future. Giving the public your best thoughts about where things are headed is all a poor pundit (or government analyst) can do. But this massive intellectual breakdown has a lot to do with a common American mindset that is especially built into our intellectual and chattering classes. Well educated, successful and reasonably liberal minded Americans find it very hard to believe that other people actually see the world in different ways. They can see that Vladimir Putin is not a stupid man and that many of his Russian officials are sophisticated and seasoned observers of the world scene. American experts and academics assume that smart people everywhere must want the same things and reach the same conclusions about the way the world works. How many times did foolishly confident American experts and officials come out with some variant of the phrase “We all share a common interest in a stable and prosperous Ukraine.” We may think that’s true, but Putin doesn’t. We blame this in part on the absence of true intellectual and ideological diversity in so much of the academy, the policy world and the mainstream media. Most college kids at good schools today know many more people from different races and cultural groups than their grandparents did, but they are much less exposed to people who think outside the left-liberal box. How many faithful New York Times readers have no idea what American conservatives think, much less how Russian oligarchs do? Well bred and well read Americans live in an ideological and cultural cocoon and this makes them fatally slow to understand the very different motivations that animate actors ranging from the Tea Party to the Kremlin to, dare we say it, the Supreme Leader and Guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran. As far as we can tell, the default assumption guiding our political leadership these days is that the people on the other side of the bargaining table (unless they are mindless Tea Party Republicans) are fundamentally reasonable people who see the world as we do, and are motivated by the same things that motivate us. Many people are, of course, guided by an outlook not all that dissimilar from the standard upper middle class gentry American set of progressive ideas. But some aren’t, and when worlds collide, trouble comes. Too much of the Washington policy establishment looks around the world and sees only reflections of its own enlightened self. That’s natural and perhaps inevitable to some degree. The people who rise through the competitive bureaucracies of American academic, media and think tank life tend to be those who’ve most thoroughly absorbed and internalized the set of beliefs and behavioral norms that those institutions embody and respect. On the whole, those beliefs and norms have a lot going for them. It would not be an improvement if America’s elite institutions started to look more like their counterparts in Russia or Zimbabwe. But while those ideas and beliefs help people rise through the machinery of the American power system, they can get in the way when it comes to understanding the motives and calculations of people like President Putin. The best of the journalists, think tankers and officials will profit from the Crimean policy fiasco and will never again be as smug or as blind as so much of Washington was last week. The mediocre majority will go on as before. The big question of course, is what President Obama will take away from this experience. Has he lost confidence in the self-described (and self-deceived) ‘realists’ who led him down the primrose path with their empty happy talk and their beguiling but treacherous illusions? Has he rethought his conviction that geopolitics and strategy are relics of a barbarous past with no further relevance in our own happy day? Is he tired of being humiliated on the international stage? Is it dawning on him that he has actual enemies rather than difficult partners out there, and that they wish him ill and seek to harm him? (Again, we are not talking about the GOP in Congress.) Let’s hope so. There are almost three years left in this presidential term, and they could be very long ones if President Obama chooses to stick with the ideas and approaches he’s been using so far. Published on March 1, 2014 5:55 pm the-american-interest.com

To: Charlie_R who wrote (90523)	3/4/2014 10:27:17 PM
From: greatplains_guy	2 Recommendations Recommended By Bill Wayners Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Ukraine: Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney were right about Russia By Tim Stanley Last updated: March 4th, 2014 The Republicans have been warning us about Russia for years, and we've ignored them every time. They're the little boy who cried wolf. Except that it was a bear and, wouldn't ya know it, the damn thing was real. First, Sarah Palin. In 2008, the Alaskan conservative warned that Putin was on the prowl. Quote: "After the Russian army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of moral indecision and equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next." Wow. Mrs Palin not only got the country that Putin would threaten right, she also predicted the reason behind it. Obama's "indecision and equivalence" over Iran, Egypt and, most importantly, Syria, has probably encouraged Putin to believe that there would be next-to-no Western response to an attack on Ukraine. If Vlad expands his power anymore, Russia won't just be visible from Sarah Palin's house. It'll be visible from the White House, too. Okay, so that's a gross exaggeration – but you get the point. Mrs Palin certainly does, after all she was parodied for her Russophobia in 2008 and is now wallowing in the schadenfreude. "I'm usually not one to Told-Ya-So," she wrote on Facebook, "but I did!" Let her wallow. She's earned this one. Second, Mitt Romney. Romney's foreign policy approach was broadly mocked in 2012. The country was keen to withdraw from overseas conflict in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan and Mitt's vague neo-conservatism seemed out of step with the public mood. Sometimes, said the critics, it came off as something that his advisers were coaching him to say; a nod and a hint to AIPAC rather than a strongly held belief. Rachel Maddow concluded, "It’s not just that Romney is uninformed; it’s that he hasn’t figured out how to fake it." Romney confirmed the sceptics' worst fears when he described Russia as America's "number one geopolitical foe." Barack Obama lashed out with some adolescent sass: "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because … the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” Oh no he didn't! Obama might have added that the 1950s wanted their hairstyle back, too, girlfriend. But, again, Romney turned out to be right. He never denied that the biggest threat to American lives still came from al-Qaeda, he was simply stating – accurately – that the world power with the ambitions that most directly threatened American political and military predominance was Russia. It has taken the Ukrainian crisis to show he was correct. Of course, no one actually wants a new cold war with Russia. The point is that Obama's best hope of avoiding one was to be intelligently aware of Putin's ambitions and act appropriately. That response might either be to a) directly confront and check Russian hegemony or b) accept that a Russian sphere of influence exists, leave Putin to govern it and push him back whenever he tried to extend it. The worst thing to do is what Obama did when he blended those contradictory approaches: accept Russian dominance in some conflicts, resist it in others – without any clear rationale behind either action and all the while confusing everyone involved. Threatening to do something but never delivering, and so only encouraging risk taking by America's competitors. Obama has become the anti-Theodore Roosevelt. He speaks loudly and carries a small stick. blogs.telegraph.co.uk