Reflections From a Murky Pond

Mission Accomplished

Sadly, the biggest question isn’t how we managed to fail so badly; nor is it how anyone, even a shucking and jiving expert such as Obama, could spin it into an accomplished mission. No, the biggest and most maddening question is what mission?

When the boy acting as the POTUS sums up his own foreign policy as, “Don’t do stupid shit,” and seems to believe that almost anything that America might do – aside from semi- or mis- targeted airstrikes and drone strikes – is “stupid shit,” failures such as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Ossetria, and Ukraine are to be expected.

Tags: Afghanistan | America | Crimea | Failure | Foreign Policy | Geopolitics | Iran | Iraq | Obama | Ossetria | Politics | Ukraine | War

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2015 at 7:31 am and is filed under Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Ukrayina Maye Talant

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Women such as Alla Kushnir, Anastasia Sokolova, and Svetlana Tulasi are special and unusual in Ukraine, but only for their talents, not their beauty. Ukraine is a land well-known for beautiful women. Too well-known for them some quarters say, since Ukraine is one of the leaders in the fields of sexual tourism and international marriage brokering.

In the past, Ukraine has even, thanks to its women, brought beauty into the political process and protests. A fact that has titillated and confused the world in equal measures.

Now, however, the Ukrainian people have decided to develop a talent for stupidity – gross and self-destructive stupidity at that.  This is obvious since it can only be the rankest of stupidity to waste one’s time on a civil war when so very many beautiful, exotic, and erotic women abound in your country.  Choosing love or, at least, the carnal expression of it over internecine war should have been the no-brainer choice.

Tags: Alla Kushnir | Anastasia Sokolova | Civil War | Humor | Politics | Sarcasm | Society | Stupidity | Svetlana Tulasi | Ukraine | Women

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2014 at 11:18 am and is filed under Humor, Politics, Society. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

In almost every generation a leader emerges among the nations, quasi-nations, and pseudo-nations of the world. In our time that leader is Russia’s Vladimir Putin. As an American, this is both hard for me to admit and something that I cannot find to be a positive thing for my nation. That, however, doesn’t make it any less true and refusing to accept that truth would be even worse for America.

Vladimir Putin – The World’s Leader

The one thing that truly sets President Vladimir Putin apart from the rest of world’s, and especially America’s, politicians is that he is a leader of men and they, especially Obama, are merely politicians. Putin commands respect and gets it, they do neither.

Putin decides what he wants to do and he does it in half a day, right? He decided he had to go to their parliament. He went to their parliament. He got permission in 15 minutes … but he makes a decision and he executes it quickly. Then everybody reacts. That’s what you call a leader. President Obama, he’s got to think about it. He’s got to go over it again. He’s got to talk to more people about it.

— Rudy Giuliani

Mr. Giuliani is, quite sadly, completely correct. Of all the people on the world’s stage Putin is the man who is most the leader and who is most worthy of respect in that role. The key words in this are “Leader” and “Respect.” Those do not respectively equate to “Friend” or “Approval.”

Putin is neither friend nor ally to America and is, at a bare minimum, an adversary of Europe. There is little of his foreign policy that is not contrary to the West’s perceived best interests and even less of his domestic policies that the majority of the West’s peoples find acceptable.

Therein lies the problem. The greatest and most worthy of respect leader of this time is one that is not on our side. Nor do we have, singularly or collectively, such leaders as can effectively balk him with anything resembling ease. As the victors write the history books, this could well end up with us “on the wrong side of history.”

Tags: America | Foreign Policy | Geopolitics | Leadership | Obama | Politicians | Politics | Realpolitik | Respect | Russia | Ukraine | Vladimir Putin

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2014 at 10:08 am and is filed under Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There’s at lot hot air being blown about by politicians and their pet talking heads about Russia’s supposed invasion of Ukraine. All across the globe there’s a chorus complaints and threats set to the disharmonious twin beats of statecraft and sabre rattling.

But politically awkward reality is that Russian military forces have occupied only the peninsula of Crimea and have not imposed themselves upon mainland Ukraine. They’ve done this under the political pretext of protecting Russians and/or Russian speakers in Ukraine from violent reprisals from anti-Russian Ukrainian militants. Yet the best estimate at this time is that Putin is only really interested in maintaining control of- and providing security for Russia’s Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol, which is their Navy’s only access to the Mediterranean.

This is not to say that, given the right foreign impetus, this Crimean Not-War couldn’t turn into the next Crimean War. The Crimean Peninsula is more formally called the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and is only somewhat part of Ukraine – how a part much having been a point of contention for some time. It’s also more pro-Russia than pro-European, though there’s a strong antagonism between its two majority demographics, Muslim Tartars and Russian Christians. In other words, as it has always been, it’s ripe for conflict.

Tags: Crimea | Military | Politics | Russia | Ukraine | Vladimir Putin | War

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2014 at 11:12 am and is filed under Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

You just have to love European street protests – Muslim riots being the obvious exception; they can almost always be counted on to be colorful, entertaining, and likely to feature topless women.

Of course sometimes they’re nice but useless, a jaded European populous being uncaring of the message the women are trying to present along with their bodies.

Other times, however, the topless street protests seem completely misguided because what the young women are protesting would seem to actually be served by the women’s naked antics rather than opposed by them. The Ukrainian street protest group, FEMEN falls, in my opinion, into this latter category.

Tags: Babes | Breasts | Europe | FEMEN | Feminism | Feminists | Nudes | Politics | Sexism | Society | Ukraine | Women

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 5th, 2011 at 9:05 am and is filed under Politics, Society. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.