orbis quintus

After watching Bush being like a petulant child at the Olympics last night (including what seemed to be a terse exchange with Putin, who looked comfortable,) and seeing how severe the Russian action is in South Ossetia (and it spilling into more of Georgia, including the region of Abkhazia,) i’m even more convinced that this was to be a distraction leading to a U.S. strike on Iran. The change in my thinking is that the gambit has already failed.

If we are to have learned anything in the past eight years, unless it’s about conning the American people, every plan that the Bush administration undertakes turns to shit. Even though every news report i read now casts Russia as the aggressor, the first ones had Georgian peacekeepers inexplicably begin firing on their Russian counterparts. Russia has responded with overwhelming force. I can imagine that in Beijing, Putin coolly brushed off Bush’s words, dropping hints that Russia is well aware of the carriers enroute to the Persian Gulf.

So we get this:¹

Now Bush is going to have to slink back to Big Daddy Cheney to explain that once again, Putin spanked his ass. The Iran strike is probably off, but South Ossetia is fucked.

1. I loathe Bush far more than the average citizen, but his public behavior is usually caused by something. Simple boredom is possible, but almost certainly there was more on his pea brain than the Olympic opening ceremonies. Mock him for being a failure as much as possible, but with a potentially major crisis unfolding, as the president of the United States, he had other duties to attend to, even if it was just sniveling back to Cheney that Putin stole his lunch money and gave him a wedgie. [↩]