After a few days of playing grabass with volleyball players and holding flags the wrong way at the Olympics, Bush pulls his head out and takes strong decisive action:

President Bush escalated the American response Wednesday to Russian military action in Georgia, ordering a humanitarian aid effort and dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the stricken region

That’s great — flap your gums a little*, then send the same incompetent diplomat who, just a few weeks ago, somehow failed to convey the message to Saakashvili that sending Georgia’s army into Ossetia was a very bad idea.

That’s gotta be reassuring as hell to Mikheil Saakashvili. I can hear it all now:

George Bush: You ain’t got no problem, Mikheil. I’m on the motherfucker. Go back in there and chill them niggers out and wait for the Rice, who should be coming directly.

Mikheil Saakashvili: You sendin’ the Rice?

George Bush: Oh, you feel better, motherfucker?

Mikheil Saakashvili: Shit, yeah, negro. That’s all you had to say.

Or maybe not.

*Yet Bush’s statement, along with the moderate measures that came with it, served to underscore the limited options available to the United States, which has neither the wherewithal nor the willingness to enter into a military conflict with Russia on its territorial border.

Powerline’s John Hinderaker, (aka “Assmissile”) who used to wax poetically about how George Bush was “man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius,” now seems disaffected with W and increasingly turgid for McCain.

One of the most striking features of the crisis in Georgia has been the role played by John McCain. While President Bush was enjoying the Olympics and Barack Obama was on vacation in Hawaii, McCain became the leading international spokesman on behalf of Georgia. . . .

~~~~

It has been an extraordinary moment, in which John McCain has seemed almost more the leader of the free world than the President. You can be sure that in November, Saakashvili and Vladimir Putin will be following our election results with equal attention.

Yes, it seems that Assmissile was truly impressed with McCain’s frightful threat to unleash NATO’s very own Army Group Steiner against the Russian hordes invading Georgia, almost as much as he was impressed with Brownie’s mastery of disaster management.

By War Nerd, via Obsidian Wings, captures the inanity of Bush and the fecklessness of Georgia’s decision to attack Ossetia, all wrapped into one:

Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn’t react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock’n’awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then…uh, they’d be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he’d help. And I just saw the little creep on TV, sitting in the stands watching the US-China basketball game. (Weird game—the Chinese were taller, muscled the boards inside but couldn’t shoot from outside. Not what you expect from foreign b-ball teams at all.) I didn’t even recognize Bush at first, just wondered why they kept doing close-ups of this guy who looked like Hank Hill’s legless dad up in the stands. Then they said it was the Prez. They talk about people “growing in office”; well, he shrunk.

. . . . this guy who looked like Hank Hill’s legless dad [!!!!]

Also this handy little summary of the Ossetian war:

There are three basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin’ little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.
2. They lost.
3. What a beautiful little war!

Well, forget number three. He’s a War Nerd, after all.

By GOP political operatives attempting to seize the US Department of Justice, who are not going to be prosecuted:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Tuesday rejected the idea of criminally prosecuting former Justice Department employees who improperly used political litmus tests in hiring decisions, saying he had already taken strong internal steps in response to a “painful” episode.

Two recent reports from the Justice Department inspector general and its internal ethics office have found that about a half-dozen officials at the Justice Department — all but one now gone — systematically rejected candidates with perceived “liberal” backgrounds for what were supposed to be non-political jobs and sought out conservative Republicans.

Meanwhile, the ground seized by this illegal invasion is being gifted to the invaders:

Mr. Mukasey also said it would be unfair, and possibly illegal, for the department to go back and reassign or dismiss those lawyers and other employees who were hired in part because they were seen as trusted conservatives. “Two wrongs do not make a right,” he said.

Got that? Mukasey is not going to prosecute the political hacks who violated the law and hired less qualified political cronies selected for their political views and loyalty to the GOP cause — sort of a retarded Fuhrer principle. And he’s going to protect the illegally-hired underqualified cronies and GOP loyalists, thereby insuring that the original objectives of the illegal scheme are enduring achievements, because they are now protected by the same Civil Service laws which their very hiring violated.

“Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.”

“That’s some catch, that catch-22,” he observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

– Joseph Heller, Catch-22

(via Sadly, No!)

THE SOLUTION! (from Phoenician in comments):

“Don’t fire them. Reassign them to the Green Zone.”

Somebody write Mukasey. . .

Froomkin is being a little harsh when he takes Bush to task for playing grabass with volleyball players while Russia launches a furious assault on Georgia:

So where was Bush as Russia launched a major military attack against Georgia? Monkeying around with the U.S. women’s volleyball players — and otherwise amusing himself at the Beijing Olympics.

This is not to suggest that Bush should have sent in the Marines. But his impotence in the face of such a gravely destabilizing move highlights not only his personal loss of stature, but how deeply he has diminished American authority on the world stage generally and, particularly, in the eyes of Russia.

While I on the other hand, after nearly 8 years of this shit, am just grateful that Bush isn’t looking like a total fuckstick playing air guitar:

Or like an imbecilic total douchebag heavily into Cosplay with his good friend, Vlad Putin.

At this point we have to take our blessings where we find them.

I mean if we can’t expect him to pay attention and act serious when one of our nation’s largest cities is literally underwater and several states are devastated, why should we expect him to even pretend he gives a flying fuck when some former Soviet republic gets squished like a bug?

I wonder if all the Rightwingers who give sole credit to Ronald Reagan with winning the Cold War, which was the culmination of 40 years of policies of containment originated by Truman and Marshall, and a decade of detente initiated by Nixon and continued by Carter, are going to be so quick, in light of the former Soviet Union’s reemergence as a aggressivie, hegemonic militaristic power, to blame Bush and his epic failure of leadership for losing the post-Cold War? After all, by fracturing the Western Alliance, and squandering US military and diplomatic capital on Iraq, while reifying the legitimacy of using unilateral military force against non-threat nations for the furtherance of national interest, he has certainly made Putin’s decision to attack the Georgian Republic a far easier one. With America’s political capital in the world depleted, and it’s military stretched to continue a 5+ year war in Iraq, Bush has eliminated potential obstacles to Putin’s policies.

Not if Neocon-warmonger and Iraq War cheerleader Bill Kristol is any indication. Kristol, whose predilection for fatuous prediction was epitomized by his assurances that warnings of sectarian strife between Sunni and Shia Iraqis was mere “pop sociology” not only fails to mention the contribution of Bush’s successive failures in Iraq as placing the US at any disadvantage vis-a-vis the Russian invasion, he vapidly claims that Iraq has strengthened America’s ability to project power and succor democracy:

The further good news is that 2008 has been, in one respect, an auspicious year for freedom and democracy. In Iraq, we and our Iraqi allies are on the verge of a strategic victory over the jihadists in what they have called the central front of their struggle.

Of course he neglects to mention that there were no jihadists in Iraq prior to our invasion, save those hiding in the North outside the control of Saddam’s regime, or those hiding from Saddam’s brutal but sectarian Baathist secret police — not when he can claim another Mission Accomplished moment.

Rather than assign any blame to Bush’s witless and counterproductive policies — which of course he and his PNAC cronies urged upon the administration — Kristol is quick to assign blame to the next country he wants President McBushII to invade — Iran:

Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.”

Kristol mendaciously ignores the other elephant in the Cooper article — the role which Iraq has played in dissipating US influence and resources:

Russia’s emerging aggressiveness is now also timed with America’s preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan, and the looming confrontation with Iran. These counterbalancing considerations mean that Moscow is in the driver’s seat, administration officials acknowledged.

“We’ve placed ourselves in a position that globally we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything,” Mr. Friedman of Stratfor said. “One would think under those circumstances, we’d shut up.”

Of course the “We” here who placed the US in a position where “we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything” is George Bush and feckless neocons like Bill Kristol, who insisted we’d be greeted as liberators, that the Iraq war would pay for itself, and that centuries-old sectarian, ethnic and tribal divisions which still threaten to tear Iraq asunder were mere pop sociology.

So it’s this for Reagan, and that for Bush. Reagan won the Cold War, but then Iran lost it.

MORE: Kristol, of course, trotted out the standard Munich analogy, or rather mis-analogy, and fellow PNAC-traveller Robert Kagan does the same in the WaPo, only with a bizarre twist — he can’t recall the details of Nazi Germany’s pretextual accusations against Czechoslovakia which precipitated the Sudetenland crisis, ostensibly because Nazi Germany’s contrived dispute with the Czechs was “morally ambiguous.”

The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.

I recall the details of the Sudeten Crisis — and they weren’t morally ambiguous in the slightest. Nazi agents organized a minority of ethnic Germans with the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia into bands of thugs who simultaneously terrorized politically opponents and Slavic neighbors, while lodging false reports of political oppression and physical brutality by Czech police and groups against Czech citizens of German descent, which were sensationalized and amplified by the Nazi propaganda machine in papers like Der Sturmer. The ostensible leader of the Czech Sudeten Germans, Konrad Heinlein, was taking orders directly from the Nazis with an eye towards the Nazis’ ultimate goal of stripping Czechoslovakia of its formidable border fortresses in the mountains, and thus facilitating its ultimate dismemberment and absorption into the Reich. As Rob points out, the situation with respect to South Ossetia actually is beset with considerable ambiguity.

The fact that Kagan views Hitler’s contrived accusations against the Czechs and the dispute largely manufactured by Nazi agent provocateurs which precipitated Munich as “morally ambiguous” could have enormous explanative potential, given the moral vacuousness of neoconservative policies.

Shorter Verbatim Bill Kristol:

Life may be full of disappointments. But it’s also full of surprises.

Kristol engages is a classic logical fallacy: False Dilemma.

A false dilemma occurs when a limited number of options (usually two) is given, while in reality there are more options.

Here, Kristol implicitly postulates between the options of disappointment or surprises. With characteristic obtuseness, our neocon twit fails to account for a third obvious possiblity — an outcome that is both a surprise and a disappointment.

Like, say, finding out that the notion that Shia may have difficulty coexisting Sunnis in Iraq and violent sectarian struggle could break out in that country is not merely “pop sociology.” Presumably, even to an immoral asshole like Kristol that would be both a disappointment and a surprise — even if the disappointment, from Kristol’s standpoint, stems more from the fact he was made to look like a fucking imbecile than the tens of thousands of lives wiped out by his and his fellow neoconservatives’ miscalculation.

Especially poignant because deconstructing Kristol, he’s referring to an Obama victory as the “disappointment” and a McCain win as a “surprise.”

Even as John McCain makes lowers himself to an elevated level of scumbaggery by falsely accusing Obama of putting politics above national security, it is now manifestly clear that John’s asshole buddy, President Bush, whose campaign tactics McCain is apparently emulating, purposefully put Republican gain over National Security interests by appointing less experienced, less qualified, and less competent lawyers in charge of prosecuting terrorist crimes — because the more experienced, qualified, and competent prosecutors may have had ties to *gasp* Democrats.

And this, mind you, is not in the opinion of the campaign staff of an aged, desperate and mealy-mouthed politico with anger management issues, but according to the inspector general assigned to investigate the whole mess:

Former Justice Department counselor Monica M. Goodling and former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson routinely broke the law by conducting political litmus tests on candidates for jobs as immigration judges and line prosecutors, according to an inspector general’s report released today.

Goodling passed over hundreds of qualified applicants and squashed the promotions of others after deeming candidates insufficiently loyal to the Republican party, said investigators, who interviewed 85 people and received information from 300 other job seekers at Justice. Sampson developed a system to screen immigration judge candidates based on improper political considerations and routinely took recommendations from the White House Office of Political Affairs and Presidential Personnel, the report said.

And this:

And in another case cited by the inspector general, Ms. Goodling blocked the hiring of an experienced prosecutor for a senior counter-terrorism position because his wife was active in Democratic politics. The candidate was regarded as “head and shoulders above the other candidates” in the view of officials in the executive office of United States attorneys, but they were forced to take a candidate with much less experience because he was deemed acceptable to Ms. Goodling.

Bear this in mind the next time some sanctimonious, angry, white-haired, lying son of a bitch approves of an ad which accuses your Democratic candidate of playing politics with our nation’s security, and point out who really fails to take law enforcement and prosecuting terrorists seriously.

From Ben Smith. While the Bush Administration hurriedly pushed out a statement through Centcom claiming that Maliki’s endorsement of Obama’s 16-month timeline for withdrawal which appeared in Der Spiegel was the result of a “mistranslation,” there’s one wee little problem: Der Spiegel has a policy of issuing transcripts to interviewees, like al Maliki, and allowing them to correct any mistakes prior to publication.

BushCo’s attempt to brush al Maliki’s statement under the rug reminds me of the indignant declaration of the title character in Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy:

Ah, you’ll have to learn to tell a lie properly. What’s the good of a lie if it’s seen through? When I tell a lie, no one can tell it from the gospel truth.

And that’s in English, so no translation needed.