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.

Both Kevin Drum and Spencer Ackerman point out that various ninnies on the Right are attacking Obama for noting that many of the positive developments now attributed to teh Surge by McCain and other Iraq War enthusiasts in fact appear to have occurred not only separately and independently from the Surge, but also months before the Surge strategy was announced and even longer before it was embarked upon. Responding to NRO Obersttwit Andy McCarthy’s comment:

Does Obama think the Sunni Awakening and the Shia militia stand-down are somehow separate developments from the surge and the brilliant performance of American forces? If he really thinks that, it’s dumb.

Drum answers:

* February 2006: Muqtada al-Sadr orders an end to execution-style killings by Mahdi Army death squads.

* August 2006: Sadr announces a broad ceasefire, which he has maintained ever since.

* September 2006: The Sunni Awakening begins. Tribal leaders, first in Anbar and later in other provinces, start fighting back against al-Qaeda insurgents.

* March 2007: The surge begins.

Say what you will about the surge, which does indeed deserve a share of the credit for reducing violence and increasing security in Baghdad. But it pretty obviously wasn’t related to either the Shia militia stand-down or the Sunni Awakening, since both those things began before Petraeus took over in Iraq and before the surge was even a gleam in George Bush’s eye.

Responding to Presumptive Republican Nominee and non-geographer John McCain’s fatuous attack on Obama claiming that:

I don’t know how you respond to something that is as– such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane [phonetic] was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.

Ackerman points out that Colonel McFarland himself was explaining the success of the Anbar Awakening to Pam Hess of the UPI in September of 2006, several months before teh Surge was announced by Bush:

I think al Qaeda has been pushed up against the ropes by this, and now they’re finding themselves trapped between the coalition and ISF on the one side, and the people on the other.

Leading Ackerman to conclude:

For McCain to say that the Anbar Awakening is the product of the surge is either a lie or professional malpractice for a presidential candidate who is staking his election on his allegedly superior Iraq judgment.

I’m voting for the fuck up rather than the lie, personally.

Unless it can be demonstrated that teh Surge is so magic it can go back in time and cause the Anbar Sheiks to shift their allegiances, coerce Sadr to reign his militias, and then declare a ceasefire.

In which case I want teh Surge to go back in time again and put $100,000 on the Giants to win the Super Bowl, before the season started.

or a “Time Horizon” or a “Aspirational Goal.”

Bush, Maliki Agree on ‘Time Horizon’ for U.S. Troop Withdrawals

President Bush and Iraq’s prime minister have agreed to set a “time horizon” for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq as security conditions in the war-ravaged nation continue to improve, White House officials said here Friday.

The agreement, reached during a video conference Thursday between Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, marks a dramatic shift for the Bush administration, which for years has condemned any talk of timetables for withdrawal.

But Maliki and other Iraqi leaders in recent weeks have begun demanding firm withdrawal deadlines from the United States. Bush said earlier this week that he opposes “arbitrary” timetables but was open to setting an “aspirational goal” for moving U.S. troops to a support role.

Call it whatever mealy-mouthed crap you want to, W. You can even pretend it’s not a reversal of 5 years of “no timetable” policy.

Here’s the White House Press Release, which appears in parts to have been translated from English into gobbledegook:

In the area of security cooperation, the President and the Prime Minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals — such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.

Got that? It is so NOT a timeline — it’s a “general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals.”

As provided by Mark Halperin of Time Magazine:

“I’m not an economist, but I do believe that we’re growing… It’s not growing the way it should, and I’m sorry people are paying as high gas prices as they are.”

Says government should not bail out private firms, and denied the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac support package is a bailout, just “temporary assistance.”

Jokes: “I’m 62, I’m having trouble remembering things.”

“The president doesn’t have a magic wand. I can’t just say, ‘low gas.’”

And my personal faves:

Wants to let the first economic stimulus package “runs its course” before considering a second.

Declines to ask Americans to conserve energy, says it would be “presumptuous” to tell people what decisions to make.

Blame the Supreme Court, not the epic incompetence of me and my fucked-up-stupid posse.

Fred Kaplan of Slate has delved into the comments of General Wesley Clark about the qualifications of John McCain to be president. (Alex discussed the issue here).

Slate’s take has been that the remarks Clark made were not particularly beneficial to Barack Obama and Kaplan opines that we’ve seen the last of Clark as a national security adviser to Obama.

There are two explanations for Gen. Wesley Clark’s politically tin-eared remark about Sen. John McCain last Sunday.

First, Clark is politically tin-eared. Remember his 2004 presidential campaign?

Here, as a reminder, is what Clark said when asked about the Republican presidential candidate on the June 29 episode of CBS’s Face the Nation:

I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war.

That was where Clark should have zipped his lips. But, as if he couldn’t hold back some raging impulse, he went on:

He hasn’t held executive responsibility. … I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

In a sense, of course, Clark is right. There’s nothing about flying a plane—or, for that matter, driving a tank or shooting a rifle—that indicates a talent for high office. But if the retired general wanted to be on the team and possibly in the Cabinet of Sen. Barack Obama—who also has never held an executive position and was, on that very day, fending off accusations of insufficient patriotism—he should have known that it’s best not to wander this turf.

But Kaplan’s second argument is more interesting. He believes that the remarks were motivated by the fact that Clark was an Army infantryman in Vietnam, while McCain was a Navy airman. Kaplan details the rivalry between the two service branches in ‘Nam (for example, the Navy — and the Air Force — refused to provide air cover to Army soldiers on the ground, instead returning to dine in the officer’s club after their missions while soldiers ate scraps in the jungle) and believes that Clark’s remarks were a manifestation of old rivalries.

The article then describes how the competition between branches has diminished over time, in part due to legislation and in part due to the fact that there is so much money in the military budget now, there is less reason for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force to compete — they all already just about get whatever they want.

But the rivalries haven’t altogether disappeared. I found this paragraph and the accompanying chart particularly interesting, prompting the entry you are reading:

Still, tensions persist. Some soldiers and Marines resent the Air Force and Navy for shouldering so light a burden in Iraq, bearing only 4 percent of the fatalities and 2 percent of the injuries in this war. (See chart below.)

That’s a large imbalance. Close to 4,000 of the 4,105 military deaths U.S. forces have suffered in Iraq have been taken by the Army and the Marines. Only about 150 were suffered by the Air Force or the Navy. Only about 1,000 of the 48,000 injured were Air Force or Navy personnel. The resentment by those in the Army and the Marines is understandable.

Kaplan concludes by summing up the Clark-McCain personal rivalry:

And that may explain what was going on in the mind of Clark on Sunday morning. In his case, the institutional resentments may have been stiffened by personal ones. McCain, as he noted, has never held a position of command. Clark, on the other hand, has held many—not just as a company commander in Vietnam and at Ft. Knox but also as the supreme allied commander in Europe and, in that capacity, as the commander of the air war in Kosovo. And yet in his bid for the presidency, Clark barely made it past the New Hampshire primaries, while McCain—this fighter pilot and war prisoner—is one of the two finalists to become the ultimate commander, the commander in chief.

Life, the Army man might have been thinking, just isn’t fair.