Moveon Sends New Message (Actually, the Same Old Message) to Members

From Copious Dissent (Hat tip to Valerie)

Peacekeeping, Russian Style

Via This is London

Proud to be Ineffectual

But there are lessons we can draw from this crisis. First, the European Union rose to the occasion. At the behest of the French presidency, Europe put itself on the front lines from the outset of hostilities to resolve this conflict -- the third on European soil since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Throughout the first phase of this latest crisis, Europe's commitment was decisive: It was the European Union, through France, that created a space for diplomacy by quickly proposing reasonable terms for a cease-fire and rendering the political cost of pursuing war exorbitant for both parties. If our efforts finally paid off, it is because Europe -- despite a few differences in tone -- did not limit itself to condemnation.

- Nicolas Sarkozy, from Le Figaro on
Sunday-17/Monday-18 August

Three is a consolidation of numbers, of course... That he means the US is obvious, and no, the US did not limit itself to condemnation. It made sure the door for talks remain while a limited demonstration of support for the Georgians could clearly be seen by the Russians, and in a manner that didn’t appear unrelated to Georgia in any way. THAT is how one doesn’t escalate but communicates an opinion.

Gyrating to come with any kind of fake cease-fire that the EU could show off for people, Super-Sarko announces a recovery from the previous hoodwink the Russian put him through. Monday (18-AUG) was supposed to let the world see Russians withdrawing from “Georgia proper” as it’s just been redefined through European acquiescence and clearly without the Euro-warm-fuzzy of “meditative” consent with the Georgians, but it seem that all we know by Wednesday that Russians troops are joyriding around, and Tbilisi is still cut off as if to be offer the Russians the option of turning it into another Sarajevo, and Georgian access to the sea has been effectively cut off.

If anything, this exercise has shown the world where the Russians stand – both on their plans to dismantle Georgia’s independence, and the lack of seriousness with which they take any sort of diplomacy that requires anything of them. Ah! But they AGREE to things. They’ll sign anything, and that seems to be good enough for Europe’s aging children.

What HAS slowed the Russians down was the unanimity the nations on its borders took. Much as the Russians have traditionally feared being surrounded by enemies, its’ done a nice job of ensuring that they remain enemies. Those states – the Ukraine, Poland, and others who have a fear of becoming Russian satellites again, and being battered around by others, were quite clear. The sent official to Georgia as the only sort of meaningful human shield there ever was, and demonstrated their desire to deny the Russians their prize of intimidating them. Ukraine reaffirmed its’ desire to join NATO, and Poland signed a missile deal. Even the BBC which was fond of being imprecise about who and how many in Poland supported the effort, said this morning that there was a longstanding majority for it.

It’s funny how statistics can change.

Back to Sarkozy and Kouchner, and what was actually a noble attempt to use what their power and office could let them – it was a classical diplomatic move that was actually quite effective at keeping the issue alive – give the aggressor a way to back off. Knowing that there are forces against a back-off, let them show themselves for who they are to clarify for the rest of the stakeholders what’s going on. Out of this, one historically found alliances and agreements of opinion if not some agreement on a course of actions.

The mystery with Europe is what it is they think a course of action is, and whether or not it’s just intended to prevent domestic criticism in the form of a nagging criticism over Scerbenica or Rwanda.

Think Progress

I wonder if the NYT's editorial board is reporting this with envy?

President Hugo Chávez is using his decree powers to enact a set of socialist-inspired measures that seem based on a package of constitutional changes that voters rejected last year.

Beyond the second year university student notions of land redistribution, elimination of cash money, fist-pumping “peace”, and other permanent population repressants, EU Rota is all over another under-reported feature of the budding poop-stain's exploits like white on rice: while railing at supposedly abusive and unaccountable corporations, he's nationalizing his way into making the state become one itself (and little else). It comes complete with the Communist obsession with materialism, and the usual inability to actually provide for that illusion of a people as a monolith. Good luck "people", you're building a bridge to the late 19th century.

Say it with Box-Cutters

Curious how some 'youths' will solve a parking problem.

"It's just a simple fight that broke out. It had to do with cars being double-parked and someone wanted to get out in a hurry ... it's just a simple thing that kind of got out of hand,"

It Actually DOES Translate into German, by the Way

- Hat-tip to Jörg

In Ethno-Class Warfare Obsessed EUtopia, this will Surely Cause Confusion

Through the Looking-glass

Putin has become a sort of new philosopher. An evil one, using a false front to stoke up private hackers days before the conflict started, recruiting irregular soldiers, and Europe's dimbulberati are eating it up, as readily noted in these comments, where the usual culprits are disembodied and unexplained citations of America and "zionists". Radio Liberty calls the attempts by any part of the Western Alliance to deal with this, a matter of having to operate on the terms of Putin's "parallel universe".

Nearly all of the rhetoric used by Moscow to justify its actions in the war with Georgia is derived from Western historical thinking and practice -- only put "through the looking-glass," to borrow a phrase from Lewis Carroll. An EU official stationed in Tbilisi throughout the conflict observed at one point that Putin appeared to be creating a "parallel universe, a mockery of the West" when he spoke of the Russian mission to end the "genocide" in South Ossetia and administer international justice on the "perpetrators" in Tbilisi.

But Putin appears to have a more serious objective than simply mocking the West. Not for the first time, he has usurped the pantheon of Western values and infused it with a very different theology. What emerges is a mirror image of the West, containing the same historical narrative with its high and low points, but strangely distorted for most Western eyes.

As do what seem to be thousands of seemingly independant commentators from Russia leaving comments on blogs and message boards which a chilling uniformity of thought with virtually no straying from the Government-driven message. They may be compelled to engage in wild hyperboly about the dignity of the Russian nation, changing reasons and rationalizations wildly, but it's origin in in the near absolute tacit editorial control of the electronic media in Russia by the state, or by those dependant and closely tied to it.

That thee public's ignorance and lack of curiosity is being used so well reminds us of just what kind of government the world is dealing with - a neo-Soviet one.

Soviet Quality Construction for the Supreme Soviet

Generation sneer: American Architects always have to listen to it travelling in Europe. It’s the stock lecture about shabby this and that, blah, blah, blah... how European tradesmen are just better and just plain superhuman. Until their shabby meal-ticket work falls down.

- Qwayassss! to Are you sure

And to top it off you see crap like this pictured on the left. A building construction site (not road, utility, or bridge work) in Belgium where trucks are tracking mud out onto a public road - not once but permanently. In the US, the county eviro-pinkertons would shut your ass down, charge you to remediate it, and possibly make you resubmit your permit with a watershed impact study. But as we all know, the Europeans are just better at you name it - which is to say whatever subject at hand happens to be.

Merde in France

1 out of 4 restaurants in France break hygiene rules or serve up food unfit for human consumption. So that's why I never stop throwing up.

Declarations, Always Positive, Never Flawed. No Reflection Ever Required.

Never has been being told to mind your own business been so beautifully stretched.

Handshakes and congratulations were offered all around. But by the time the sun was up, Russian tanks were advancing again, this time taking positions around the strategically important city of Gori, in central Georgia.

It soon became clear that the six-point deal not only failed to slow the Russian advance, but it also allowed Russia to claim that it could push deeper into Georgia as part of so-called additional security measures it was granted in the agreement. Mr. Sarkozy, according to a senior Georgian official who witnessed the negotiations, also failed to persuade the Russians to agree to any time limit on their military action.

And always declared a success, and promptly forgotten. Sarkozy’s rapprochement to Putin/Medvedyev was brushed off on one level, and employed against it’s own purpose on another one. In Europe, the need to prove something about their culture and flaccid incapacity to effect action is so great, that it’s declared a success.

As the current holders of the EU presidency, the French were always going to be at the forefront of the EU's efforts to mediate between Russia and Georgia.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has shown a flair for the high-profile diplomatic intervention.

His latest success comes on the back of much-heralded diplomatic triumphs –

- Thx to OMMAG

Why Did They Do It?

Because in spite of anything they say, most Europeans are actually stupid bigots with the sense of humor of 10 year olds, that’s why.



Caught out, they had no choice other than to defend the ‘national pride’.

"We felt it was something appropriate, and that it would be interpreted as an affectionate gesture,"

Sadder still, one Canadian commenting on the story (which is big because team member Jose Calderon plays professionally for the Toronto Raptors,) tries salving their embarrassment:

Why is it assumed that the Spanish basketball team was making fun of the Chinese?

Now Spanish official are calling foul for fear of cutting into a meal-ticket they’re cooking up - an Olympic bi of their own. Samantha Chang wisely asks to that point:

[<---Excuse me, b*tches, but do my eyes look like that?]

Tellingly, the Spanish Basketball Federation declined to comment Wednesday. "The players explained what happened," said Juan Antonio Villanueva, the flak for Madrid's 2016 Olympic bid. "We think that's enough."

Jiri Dolezal's Hunger Strike: The Type of News That the MSM Doesn't Make Waves About

You have been told about opposition to Bush's policies, and to the Iraq war, and to the anti-ballistic missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland, have you not? And should any protesters engage in a hunger strike, you would expect that to be front-page news too, right?

Well, it so happens, that there has been a hunger strike, but the reason that you haven't heard about it (or that it has been hidden at the bottom of an article, one single mainstream media article) is that Jiří X. Doležal is holding his strike in favor of the missile plans, stating that

installing a radar base in his country would buttress national security and was an important expression of assertiveness after decades of Czech passivity under communist occupation.

He called opponents of the plans a fringe of leftist radicals who were succumbing "to traditional Czech cowardice."

European Moral Weight: Good for About 36 Hours of Appeasement

It seems that as long as you keep repeating the word “peacekeeper” and make it so that their governments don’t have to do anything, Europeans will quietly fall into line.

Troops waved at journalists and one soldier shouted to a photographer: "Come with us, beauty, we're going to Tbilisi!"

After doing a nice job of buying the Russian narrative, and ignoring the state-sponsored propagandized uniformity of thought that it came out of Russia with, critic tried to make hay of the EU “brokering a peace” between Russia and Georgia immediately, as though the Russians’ behavior could be programmed or their motives trusted. It was broken within hours.

Buffoons. The Russians permitted the Europeans to show up and seem like statesmen because it bought them more time, and gave them a way to sanitize their image. Since then they broke the deal and rolled deeper into Georgia, within one hour’s drive of Tbilisi.

People ratting on about how this was intended as a slap against the US have lost their marbles. The thrust of the opposition to Georgia taking part in the NATO Membership Action Plan were Germany and France. THAT is what gave the Russians the sense that a disagreement on the issue within the NATO states would give them enough time to take a bigger bite out of Georgia, a nation they’ve been chipping away at since they moment they both got their freedom from the Soviet Union.

What can the US do about it, knowing that Europe see no problem with these modern-day echoes of the invasion of Sudetenland?:

South Ossetia is not, as some have suggested, tit-for-tat payback for American and European recognition, over Russian objections, of Kosovo's independence from Serbia. Russia has been "at war" with democratic Georgia for some time. Driven to distraction by Mr. Saakashvili's assertiveness and Georgia's desire to join NATO, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin first tried to bring the country to its knees through economic warfare beginning in 2005. He cut off access to Russian markets, expelled Georgians from Russia, quadrupled the price of Russian energy to Georgia, and severed transport links.

Georgia failed to collapse. To the contrary, it has flourished: After the Rose Revolution of 2003 ended the corrupt reign of Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, Georgia instituted far-reaching reforms to its governing structures, cleaned up the endemic corruption that infected every facet of pre-Rose Revolution life, and found new markets for its products in Turkey and Europe. It persevered with some of the most profound and thorough economic and pro-business reforms ever undertaken by a developing country -- slashing taxes and government regulations, and privatizing state-owned enterprises. All of which is reflected in Georgia's meteoric rise on the World Bank's Doing Business indicators. The irrelevance of Russian economic sanctions to Georgia made the ideological challenge that the Rose Revolution posed to Putin's vision of Russia even more profound.

[snip]

The real payback for Moscow's decision to invade Georgia should be the sweet revenge of a strong, prosperous and fully independent Georgia. Building on the strides Georgia has already made, Brussels and Washington should give Tbilisi a clear road to NATO and EU membership.

The question put to the US by the same Euro-natters that would find any sort of action by America “frighteningly aggressive” is that America HASN’T acted boldly. Well – where IS Georgia anyway? On America’s immediate neighborhood? If not, why the childish demands and goading from critics in Europe about what others should/shouldn’t/are/aren’t doing?

The Russians could just as easily toy with the sovereignty of EU member states and potential ones too. So what exactly are they going to do about it?

Soft Power exposed

VDH on Georgia:

Indeed, tired of European lectures, the Russians are now telling the world that soft power is, well, soft. Moscow doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, the European Union, the World Court at the Hague, or any finger-pointing moralist from Geneva or London. Did anyone in Paris miss any sleep over the rubble of Grozny?

Those wacky and whimsical French youths

A down market clothing shop in Paris' 19th arrondissement is being investigated by police for selling womens' tops with the inscription "No Jews allowed".

Note that the 19th arrondissement is where a Jewish kid was recently hunted down and beaten into a coma. French authorities have expressed doubts as to the anti-Semitic nature of the attack. The 19th arrondissement is also the hotbed of radical Islamic activity that spawned a contingent of French youths who made their way to Iraq.

The disturbing discoveries of Obama's connections don't make Obama less palatable among whites because of skin color, but for cultural reasons

In reply to Juan Williams' The Race Issue Isn't Going Away, Christopher Cook provides an answer to his contention that "there is a hidden racist vote among whites that threatens to undo Barack Obama's chances for the presidency."

The compelling poll numbers that Williams quotes in his Wall Street Journal article do seem, to some degree at least, to support Williams' contention, states Cook.

And yet...

What would the numbers have been on these same poll questions if asked BEFORE we started getting to know Barack Obama and his associations?

Remember, back at the beginning, how Obama seemed very "post-racial"? At first, the race issue didn't seem like it was a part of who he was or what he was saying. Whites saw this, and for a while, it seems that many more considered the possibility of voting for him, not as a black or a white man, but as a candidate sufficiently connected to the mainstream to be a president for all Americans.

…[The] disturbing discoveries [of his connections] don't make Obama less palatable among whites because of the color of his skin. They make him less palatable among whites because they put him out of the mainstream. Aggregated together, these various associations and statements aren't scary for racial reasons, they're scary for cultural reasons.

It is important at this juncture to point out that this is not "black culture." It does not represent all, or even a majority, of black Americans. Rather, it is a dysfunctional sub-culture—one that most Americans of all races finds disturbing and unfortunate. For the last half century, the left has attempted—with great success, unfortunately—to designate this sub-culture as being the only "authentic" black culture.

…And, to put the question bluntly to people like Juan Williams and others—what on earth makes you think that this is about his skin color?

Conjure up, if you will, a hypothetical candidate. The candidate is white, and thus he "looks like" the majority of Americans. His ethnic descent is from the hypothetical European country of Crovakia. His wife is a barely closeted Crovakian separatist. He's been attending an militant Crovakian church for 20 years, pastored by an racist, anti-American conspiracy theorist. The candidate is making baseless allegations that opposition by any non-Crovakian is actually a racist attack against all Crovakians. A veiled threat of violence by a small but dangerous subset of Crovakians hovers in the air.

Does anyone seriously think that white Americans would vote for this guy just because he shares their skin color?

Please.

…Imagine a counterfactual scenario: Let's say the first black candidate is Michael Steele…

Christopher Cook ends by pointing out that The Corner has the much funnier version of this article: Peter Kirsanow's 25 Reasons You May be a Racist. As for Star Parker, she has an article entitled Black Politics? You mean liberal politics:

It's not like black conservatives have nothing to say here. Hoover Institution scholar Shelby Steele wrote a book about Obama. Tom Sowell has regularly written about him, as have I. But black conservatives are not considered relevant to these discussions because race is not an issue of ethnicity but an issue of politics. Black politics means liberal politics and hence black conservatives are not black.

Le gène tricolore

The French must have more than one of these.

News from Georgia

Georgia's civil news service, which is still under DDOS attack, can be consulted at this Blogspot url.

Blinkered by their Phobic Hatred

The USA was Bleu Blanc Beur before you we born, Bernard.

Paging Superfrenchie: we’ve found your fellow trash-talking buffoons

The Americans' relay victory was all the more sweet considering the way France declared itself the favorite prior to the Olympics. The Frenchmen weren't shy about repeating it either. In a news conference prior to the start of the Games, Bernard, who boasts a tattoo of a shark on his abdomen, was asked what he thought about his country's chances against the United States.

"The Americans?" Bernard said. "We will smash them."

Several of Bernard's teammates followed his lead, even going to far as to suggest that the Americans were scared of the French.

"This morning, Bob (Bowman) had said the French was saying some stuff, talking a little bit of trash," Phelps said. "It fired me up more than anything else. I told Garret, and he said 'You know what?' We're going to let our swimming do the talking."

Indeed.

Phelps' hopes of breaking Mark Spitz's record of seven golds in a single games appeared doomed when the French took over the lead at the 250 mark. They were 4.03 seconds under world-record pace at 350 meters before Lezak, the oldest American male swimmer at 32, rallied over the closing strokes.

Note to SF, Fox is pleased to cover ALL the leading teams and players in the Olympics, not just their own and a few Europeans. While you’re at it, check out the usual cultural bigotry even in the fonts.

- Thanks a bunch to Shy Guy
and Gringo suave.