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.

. . . . with the moronic Munich/Ossetia babble.

But World O’ Crap finds an even stoopiderer wingnut: some clown named Warner Todd Huston.

Huston’s Dissertation in Teh Stoopid — Georgia/Russian war: blame Obama.

Simply stunning.

While wingnut tools like Pantload and Assmissile had their hearts all aflutter following McCain’s bellicose-yet-viagra-deficient threat to, in the words of NRO’s John Derbyshire, “do such things, what they are, yet he knows not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth,” Georgia’s president is seemingly underwhelmed by McCain’s strident gum-flapping.

Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili on Wednesday called for John McCain and other American leaders to do more for Georgia in their response to the conflict in his country.

“Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, ‘We are all Georgians now,’” Saakashvili said on CNN’s American Morning. “Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it’s time to pass from this. From words to deeds.”

If there was anything McCain should have learned from watching Bush for eight years of Mission Accomplisheds and Bring ‘em ons! it was that a president or potential president has to be careful about blowing too much smoke out of his ass in public. Instead, McCain has been grandstanding, playing tough guy, making threats he can’t follow through on and promises he cannot keep.

Apparently, Johnny Mac wasn’t paying very close attention these last 8 years. But no doubt this will somehow be good news for McCain.

When we last checked with Ralph Peters, he was rubbing his hands together with glee, anticipating the drubbing Russia was going to receive at the hands of Georgia’s armed forces:

That said, the Russians may be surprised at how fiercely the Georgians defend their homeland. At least two, and possibly four, Russian jets have been shot down while attacking Georgian bases close to the capital city, Tbilisi.

As of last night, the Georgians had retaken Tskhinvali, South Ossetia’s capital. I’d bet American veterans helped Georgia with contingency planning for just such a situation (it worked in Bosnia)… This fighting is serious. And, unless Moscow pulls out all the stops, its forces just might take a surprise beating.

Shockingly, Peters prediction that the brave Georgian patriots would drub the Rooskie menace didn’t come true — but Peters has an explanation! It seems that Russia may actually have made their move into Ossetia with something resembling a plan, which included provisions for supply and reinforcement, rather than just willy-nilly sending their forces into Ossetia piecemeal to be defeated in detail! Oh, the perfidy:

For all that US commentators and diplomats are still chattering about Russia’s “response” to Georgia’s actions, the Kremlin spent months planning and preparing this operation. Any soldier above the grade of private can tell you that there’s absolutely no way Moscow could’ve launched this huge ground, air and sea offensive in an instantaneous “response” to alleged Georgian actions.

As I pointed out Saturday, even to get one armored brigade over the Caucasus Mountains required extensive preparations. Since then, Russia has sent in the equivalent of almost two divisions - not only in South Ossetia, the scene of the original fighting, but also in separatist Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast.

The Russians also managed to arrange the instant appearance of a squadron of warships to blockade Georgia. And they launched hundreds of air strikes against preplanned targets.

Every one of these things required careful preparations. In the words of one US officer, “Just to line up the airlift sorties would’ve taken weeks.”

You mean Russia actually had a plan to a long anticipated Georgian move into Ossetia?!?!? A move so obvious that Condi Rice supposedly warned the Georgians not to make it, over a month ago? And their plan included logistics, air power, combined forces, and everything?!? Inconceivable!! Peters wasn’t wrong because he grossly underestimated Russia’s putatively “wretched” state of military readiness, it was because the Russians actually had a plan. Peters needs no further proof that the Russians are 100% responsible for Georgia’s ill-considered decision to invade Ossetia and provide Russia with the casus belli it needed.

Of course any soldier above the grade of a private might have predicted that the Russians, given months of the brewing crisis, might actually have planned potential counters to Georgia’s moving troops into Ossetia in advance, even if an arrogant doofus like Peters is shocked by the concept.

Peters chumbles on to fit this debacle into the nutcase’s preferred framework which compares everything to Nazis and Munich:

This invasion recalls Hitler’s march into Czechoslovakia - to protect ethnic Germans, he claimed, just as Putin claims to be protecting Russian citizens - complete BS.

Yeah, it’s just like Munich except that the Czech Army didn’t descend onto the Sudetenland and start shelling its cities prior to the Wehrmacht crossing into Czechoslovakia. In fact, when Hitler’s armies finally did march into Czechoslovakia, there were no longer ethnic Germans within the country to protect, and the pretext was the cause of Slovakian independence (because, you know, Hitler was such a friend to the Slavs). And prior to Munich, the Czechs were extremely careful not to provide Germany with any pretext for war, treating its ethnic Germans with kid gloves.

But if ignorant fools like Peters can’t even get the vaguest outlines of their supposed historical analogies right, why should they be expected to have a clue as to the actual details? Stuff like history and facts are completely peripheral to viewing the world through a lens of moronic neoconservative fucktwittery.

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.

“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.

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.

Today’s Pantload spoor from the LATimes, in a stoopid nutshell:

John McCain’s ineffectual and bellicose rhetoric on Georgia* and impotent demand for NATO intervention puts him miles ahead of Obama’s considered, ineffectual rhetoric, which is really more like Bush playing grabass with volleyball players. And if you ignore David Letterman’s mockery of McCain, you can argue he agrees with me.

If you ignore the fact that McCain sounds delusional and has no fucking clue what he’s doing, he sounds really impressive.

*Even the parts lifted from Wikipedia