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Surprise – influential neocons seldom fail to push for military action against somebody, somewhere:

Georgia, a nation of about 4.6 million, has had the third-largest military presence — about 2,000 troops — fighting along with U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq. For this reason alone, we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of — and perhaps destabilizes all of — a friendly democratic nation that we were sponsoring for NATO membership a few months ago.

Well, I’m just shocked that Kristol the Younger favors military action. Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that he fails to see the pattern I noted in my column today, entitled “Georgia and the Democracy Debacle, despite the obvious historical antecedent.

It’s striking that dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes — whatever their differences — seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies. So Russia helps Iran. Iran and North Korea help Syria. Russia and China block Security Council sanctions against Zimbabwe. China props up the regimes in Burma and North Korea.

It’s not striking at all, it’s completely obvious and in complete accordance with the historical behavior shown by Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. Perhaps as importantly, the Peloponnesians were the side favored by neutrals… and based on the size of that Georgian contingency, today’s nominally democratic “allies” are far less useful to America than they were to Athens in its unsuccessful attempt to maintain its maritime domination of Greece 2,500 years ago.

This is Debka’s conclusion, by the way, and I don’t disagree with their analysis:

This is Moscow’s payback for the US-NATO success in detaching Kosovo from Serbia and approving its independence. It is also a warning to Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia against joining up with the United States and the NATO bloc in areas which Moscow deems part of its strategic sphere of influence

After seizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, four follow-up Russian steps may be postulated:

1. The two separatist provinces will proclaim their independence, just like Kosovo.

2. Russia will continue to exercise its overwhelming military and air might to force the pro-American Saakashvili’s capitulation.

3. The Georgian president will not survive in office long after losing two regions of his country and national humiliation. Moscow aims to make Washington swallow a pro-Russian successor.

4. Moscow’s trampling of Georgia will serve as an object lesson for Russia’s own secessionist provinces such as Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushettia not to risk defying Russian armed might.

Another important lesson: Vladimir Putin has a long memory and is very patient. Never underestimate a man who can wait silently for years and then strike like lightning when the oppportunity presents itself.

The Onion has some suggestions. Personally, I prefer the head-on approach of telling the insistent voter that I wouldn’t vote for anyone on the ballot in 2008 if voting was mandatory and punished by a jail sentence. To vote for the lesser of two evils is to serve evil; there is no such thing as a vote “against” in American presidential politics.

The great man identified the soullessness of Western secularism long before it became so readily apparent:

Solzhenitsyn was nothing like anyone had thought, and he went from being the heroic intellectual to a tiresome crank in no time. Solzhenitsyn attacked the idea that the alternative to communism had to be secular, individualist humanism. He had a much different alternative in mind.

Solzhenitsyn saw the basic problem that humanity faced as being rooted in the French Enlightenment and modern science. Both identify the world with nature, and nature with matter. If humans are part of nature, they themselves are material. If humans are material, then what is the realm of God and of spirit? And if there is no room for God and spirituality, then what keeps humans from sinking into bestiality? For Solzhenitsyn, Stalin was impossible without Lenin’s praise of materialism, and Lenin was impossible without the Enlightenment.

Secularists and atheists will deny this, of course, just as their secular liberal predecessors denied the reality of the Soviet horrors. But their denials are transparent and there’s little reason to doubt that when they’re eventually shown to have been completely wrong, they’ll be disavowed as unscientific and No True Atheists by their successors just as they disavow their predecessors.

The inability of the secularist, the liberal, the atheist, and the science fetishist to learn from history is one of the true marvels of humanity. It should come as no surprise that they have so little regard for both tradition and historical evidence alike, as they tend to neither know nor care about history. The neocons, being former Trotskyites, are alarmingly similar in this regard.

This is the annual VPFL call for fantasy football league coaches. Each player will inherit a team from last year except the returning stalwarts, namely myself aka Mounds View Meerkats aka the Piranha of the Serengeti, the White Buffalo aka Greenfield Grizzlies, the returning champion Masonville Marauders, and, of course, because every team needs a gimme, Nate aka Burns ICU.

The sole caveat is that if you’re not going to actively manage your team, don’t join. Last year, we had a few teams that were a bit shaky; if you suspect you might have issues then I’d encourage you to solicit an assistant manager from the blog. Preference will be given to those who wanted to play last year but couldn’t.

For those who have managed a VPFL team in the past, Huck and Sean have started a VPFL alumni team. If you’re interested, note it here. I’ll post the results for both teams every week so long as Sean keeps me updated on the results of the VP-AFL.

The Georgian Foreign Ministry reported that Russian aircrafts have completely destroyed the harbor of Poti, in the immediate vicinity of Supsa, a vital oil terminal.

It’s interesting to consider these developments in light of both Pat Buchanan’s recent WND column and VDH’s A War Like No Other. Both of these stand in harsh contrast to the Fukuyama/Neocon position that seeding democracy is likely to be a successful means of expanding foreign influence in the long term.

I woudn’t pretend to know. I tend to suspect they don’t either. But shockingly, it has been discovered that normal women really don’t want men to be women:

I will tell you about the main article that caught my eye–the one on men acting like women in Scandinavia. The author, Elizabeth Debold, sets out to Scandinavia to find out how “gender equality” is playing itself out in that culture…. A guy named Bo states, “We end up relating to women in a way that is more like woman to woman, not man to woman. We are feminized in our relationships, and they don’t last.”

Before you begin relating to women like her girlfriend, it may serve you well to stop and consider the fate of her historical friendships. In general, most women tend to place their romantic relationships well ahead of their friendships, regardless of the message the Spice Girls and Sex in the City tried to portray. In real life, Samantha would have seduced Mr. Big, thus ending her relationship with Carrie, Charlotte would have disappeared for weeks at a time whenever she began dating someone regularly, and Miranda would have been acting distant and weird for months before showing up one day with a female life partner who resembled Pete Rose and vanishing, never to be seen again. Within seven years, Carrie would be completely out of contact with all three of them except for the annual Christmas card from Charlotte.

The problem is that very few individuals of either sex truly know what they want; if they say they do, they’re probably wrong. Women in particular will swear up and down that they want X, but what that actually means is that right at that particular moment, they THINK they want X. Chasing X is a fool’s game; no man can MAKE a woman happy. A woman can only choose to be happy or unhappy on her own and trying to make her happy by rushing to comply with her every demand and quaking with fear over her least displeasure is one sure way to drive her away, full of contempt for you.

I don’t pretend to know what women want. I truly don’t care. It’s simply irrelevant to me, as completely and utterly irrelevant as what I want is to women. This is why it’s important for a man’s inclinations to be in some sort of natural and general alignment with his wife’s, so that neither one of them have to spend much time thinking about the matter. Now, this doesn’t mean that one can’t bestir oneself from one’s general indifference to help one’s wife achieve what she wants just as one would help out a good friend, but seriously, how many guys sit around and worry about whether their best friend is happy or not 24 hours a day?

If somebody’s willing to kill for you, die for you, and help you bury a dead body without asking questions first, that’s all you can possibly hope to find in a friend or a spouse. No rational creature can possibly demand slavish devotion to anticipating its momentary whims; stay very far away from any man or woman who does.

Precisely no one is shocked as John Edwards finally admits the affair that the mainstream media couldn’t bring itself to report back when it actually mattered:

Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Friday admitted to an extramarital affair while his wife was battling cancer. He denied fathering the woman’s daughter. Edwards told ABC News that he lied repeatedly about the affair with 42-year-old Rielle Hunter but said that he didn’t love her.

Clearly he lied about love, which is no crime. Or, not-love, I suppose. Whatever, won’t people stop harassing this poor man? He’s not an important public figure like Joel Osteen’s wife, Christie Brinkley, or Britney Spears, he gave up being a major Democratic Party candidate for President MONTHS ago! You’d think a man whose wife was dying would get some respect for his privacy.

1. John Edwards admits an affair with Rielle Hunter. CHECK
2. John Edwards confesses to fathering Rielle Hunter’s child.
3. John Edwards changes his name to Jeanette, co-adopts Rielle Hunter’s child with Razor Ramon HG.

Now, what was that about the reliability of the National Enquirer versus the mainstream media again? It seems to me the evidence suggests we may need to rethink our dismissal of all those bizarre reports about bat children and aliens. And I wonder how long after the election it will take for all the true stories about Obama to find their way out to the public… assuming Hillary doesn’t find a way to put them out there first.

Since there’s so little else going on elsewhere in the world:

Russia sent troops and dozens of tanks and armoured vehicles into the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia today, vowing to protect its citizens in a move described by Tbilisi’s pro-Western government as an act of war. A South Ossetian rebel minister said that more than 1,000 people had been killed in overnight shelling of the city of Tskhinvali, the separatist capital which Georgia claimed today to have captured.

Looks like the Russian reboot process may be coming to an end. I know there were some Soviet defectors who claimed that the end of the Soviet Union was little more than a KGB-run operation to shuffle things around and free itself from the shackles of Communist ideology while convincing the West that the totalitarian beast was dead.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, given the declining demographics, but perhaps Putin and company have a plan to address that too. You know what I’m thinking: clone army!

Byron York postulates a scenario:

[L]ook at it this way: Hillary Clinton speaks to the convention on Women’s Equality Day, amid a big celebration of the role of women in the Democratic Party, and everyone is feeling good about how inclusive they are — and then, just hours after celebrating the right of women to vote, the convention denies a vote to the millions of women who supported Hillary Clinton? How’s that gonna work? Might it be that the fortuitous occasion of Women’s Equality Day will actually create pressure for a floor vote?

I had no idea there was a Women’s Equality Day, my impression was that every day was supposed to be Women’s Equality Day. Of course, one wonders what the purpose is, now that women have achieved the equality of a) being able to have a man stripped of his possessions and kicked out of his house on the mere basis of her accusation of domestic violence, and, b) being permitted to shoot dead a sleeping man without lasting legal consequences.

But this makes Hillary’s path to the Presidency clear. She can pull this thing out even more easily than York suggests by arranging for a private conference with Obama at his house, then calling the police, telling them that she’s his wife and accusing him of hitting her. Obama gets hauled off to jail in handcuffs before the real story gets straightened out, the flash bulbs go off and his race is ended before reaching Denver. How could America possibly vote for the man who hit Hillary?

Alternatively, she can just wait until it’s confirmed that he’s not eligible for the presidency due to his fake Certificate of a Consular Birth Abroad. That would work too.

Krauthammer sums it up very well indeed: “The Italian Communist party could win this election. The American Democratic party is trying its best to lose it.“

If I were a Democratic strategist, I’d be thinking very, very hard about out how to get Obama off the ballot at or before the convention. If he’s this close to McCain in the polls after 18 months of nothing but favorable press, I think he’s in very serious trouble. Remember, at this point, Michael Dukakis was 16 points ahead. Moreover, the idea that Obama would crush McCain in the debates has pretty much vanished thanks to more idiotic off-the-cuff remarks in the last six weeks than Dan Quayle made in his entire political career.