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.

“Which is it going to be, that’s all? The conspiracy or the fuck-up?” - Le Carre, The Honourable Schoolboy.

The New York Times has an article on Condi Rice’s visit to Georgia, just a month before that country made the unfortunate decision to roll its forces into South Ossetia.

During a private dinner on July 9, Ms. Rice’s aides say, she warned President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia not to get into a military conflict with Russia that Georgia could not win. “She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to put a non-use of force pledge on the table,” according to a senior administration official who accompanied Ms. Rice to the Georgian capital.

~~~~

In the five days since the simmering conflict between Russia and Georgia erupted into war, Bush administration officials have been adamant in asserting that they warned the government in Tbilisi not to let Moscow provoke it into a fight — and that they were surprised when their advice went unheeded. Right up until the hours before Georgia launched its attack late last week in South Ossetia, Washington’s top envoy for the region, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, and other administration officials were warning the Georgians not to allow the conflict to escalate.

But as Ms. Rice’s two-pronged visit to Tbilisi demonstrates, the accumulation of years of mixed messages may have made the American warnings fall on deaf ears.

So Condi’s flunkies are insisting she warned Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili not to use force in Ossetia and provoke the Russians — not during any formal meeting but at a “private dinner.” How does that work? “This wine is lovely — but be careful if you roll your spetsnatz into Ossetia.”

And when signs appeared that a Georgian military move into Ossetia was in the offing, of course Rice immediately took personal action to prevent a catastrophic clash between Georgia and its massive neighbor, right? Well, um, no — not personally.

Ms. Rice did not get on the phone with her Georgian counterpart on Thursday, but left it to Mr. Fried to deliver the “don’t go in” message, a senior administration official said. “I don’t think it would have made any difference if she had,” the official said. “They knew the message was coming from the top.”

Well, fuck me. They “knew the message was from the top,” and yet Rice was too busy (was she shopping for shoes again?) to pick up a phone and call Saakashvili, who in just a day or so was on television delivering an impassioned plea for Western intervention against the Russians. You think the actual Secretary of State engaging in an actual discussion might have made a difference?

Maybe so, maybe not. But Georgia’s action shortly upon the heels of Madame Secretary’s visit has all the markings of yet another Rice fuck up.

Duncan writes:

What did that say again? Oh yes.

Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.

While actually, it was closer to:

Bin Ladin Determined To Strike In US

While it might just as well have said:

bin ladin determined to strike in us

For all the attention that President Dumbshit and his incompetent NSA, Condi “I thought it was historical” Rice paid to the Bold, Capitalized Warning, just because it said bin Ladin wanted to “follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramsi Yousef” and warned “bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft.”

When I read this headline in Tuesday’s edition of the Daily Breeze, I assumed it was ironic, or tongue in cheek.

Chuck Norris - The GOP’s Oprah

But the headline is completely serious.

I realize that the Breeze leans to the right. And I realize that the Breeze loves to focus on South Bay success stories and that Norris was raised in Torrance, graduating from North High in 1958.

But, really, the star of Good Guys Wear Black is a political player?

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, has stunned the Republican establishment by jumping out to a wide lead in the Iowa presidential caucus - now little more than two weeks away.

Huckabee has a small organization, not much money, and scant support from prominent conservatives. Even in the evangelical community, which forms the former Baptist minister’s base of support, most of the big names have backed other candidates.

So what explains his meteoric rise?

Two words: Chuck Norris.

“The Norris endorsement may be a bigger factor in Iowa than evangelical support for Huckabee,” conservative commentator Robert Novak wrote Saturday in a piece titled “Huckabee’s Oprah.”

“Norris may be no big deal in New York and Washington, but he is a folk hero with ordinary Iowans.”

I grew up a fan of Norris’ old, post-Bruce-Lee kung fu flicks. I worked at the Northridge Four Cinemas when we played The Octagon and I saw it like 100 times.

But I had no idea he was a player in the game.

Though Norris got to know Ronald and Nancy Reagan through a charity tennis tournament, he did not become politically active until 1988, when George H.W. Bush ran for president.

Norris was asked by Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign manager to introduce Bush at a rally.

“People were calling Bush a wimp,” Norris said. “So I went out to emcee the rally, and 20,000 people showed up. Next thing I know I’m on the campaign trail.”

Before that election, Norris had never voted. Perhaps as a result, his political loyalties today are much more the result of personal connections than of a particular ideology.

Norris’ endorsement of Huckabee should be taken with a grain of salt:

Norris came to Huckabee after reading about him on a Christian Web site, TheRebelution.com. He researched his positions, and liked what he saw, but found a deeper affinity in Huckabee’s life story.

“Mike hasn’t lived an isolated, out-of-touch life like so many politicians,” Norris wrote in a column on the conservative site WorldNetDaily.com, in late October. “Mike and his sister grew up poor, not privileged.”

Norris also cited Huckabee’s values, which are rooted in his faith, and compared him to King David.

Though he had not met Huckabee, Norris felt compelled to endorse him.

Huckabee had shown some dark-horse potential at the time, but he was still an obscure candidate. After the Norris endorsement, Huckabee said in an online video, “Everything in my campaign changed.”

“Our Web traffic went completely nuts,” Huckabee said. “There were people who suddenly said, `He’s a serious candidate.”‘

Well, Secretary Rice promised a “full and complete review” of Blackwater’s security practices in Iraq, and here’s the first report:

The initial U.S. Embassy report on a Sept. 16 shooting incident in Baghdad involving Blackwater USA, a private security firm, depicts an afternoon of mayhem that included a car bomb, a shootout in a crowded traffic circle and an armed standoff between Blackwater guards and Iraqi security forces before the U.S. military intervened.

The two-page report, described by a State Department official as a “first blush” account from the scene, raises new questions about what transpired in the intersection. According to the report, the events that led to the shooting involved three Blackwater units. One of them was ambushed near the traffic circle and returned fire before fleeing the scene, the report said. Another unit that went to the intersection was then surrounded by Iraqis and had to be extricated by the U.S. military, it added.

~~~

Witnesses and the Iraqi government have insisted that the shooting by the private guards was unprovoked. Blackwater has claimed that its guards returned fire only after they were shot at. The document makes no reference to civilian casualties. Eleven Iraqi civilians were killed and 12 wounded in the incident. The report said Blackwater sustained no casualties.

Thus far, we’re talking about a “full and complete review” which ignores eleven civilians gunned down by Blackwater mercs.

Heckuva review, Condi. Nice jacket, though.