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Matthew Kaminski says the West forgets history while Putin repeats it.
Hapless in response to Vladimir Putin‘s wars, successive American leaders are left puzzling over the Russian’s place in time. “Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century,” said President George W. Bush in August 2008, after Russia’s invasion of Georgia. When the Russian force of “little green men” took Ukraine’s Crimea last February, Secretary of State John Kerry exclaimed, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.”
Mr. Putin has proved impervious to complaints about his outdated behavior. On Monday morning, Ukraine reported that a column of 10 Russian tanks and a couple of armored vehicles charged over Ukraine’s southeastern border into areas held by Russian rebels. Russian artillery now fire at Ukrainian military positions from inside Ukraine’s territory, NATO said on Friday. Ignoring objections from Kiev, Russia announced its intentions to send a second “humanitarian aid” convoy in a week of military trucks dressed in white, bringing and taking who knows what.
As the military pressure grows on the pro-Western government in Kiev, the Europeans are adding their own. Plainly anxious that these latest escalations risk a replay of 20th century wars, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday turned up in Kiev to push for an accommodation with Moscow. The chancellor pressed the Ukrainians to cease fire and ruled out new EU sanctions against Russia. So Mr. Putin comes into talks Tuesday in Minsk with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko with fresh leverage.
The crisis in Ukraine revives one of the oldest clashes in the heart of Europe—the “bloodlands,” to use Timothy Snyder’s phrase—between autocracy and liberalism. For centuries this region was shaped by “the Polish Question”—what should happen to the difficult, independent-minded people between Russia and Germany. With the end of communism, and EU and NATO membership, Poland was taken off the chessboard. Ukraine is now on it. …
… Distracted by the Middle East, Washington has outsourced the Ukrainian file to Germany. Whoever thinks that another German-Russian understanding will calm Europe’s bloodlands has a historical tin ear. …
And Streetwise Professor says Merkel has told Poroshenko to save Putin’s face while Putin moons Merkel by grabbing more of Ukraine.
If you just fell off the cabbage truck, you might be stunned to learn that a couple of days after Merkel visited Ukraine to deliver Poroshenko the message that Ukraine needed to back down from its attack on Russian forces in Donbas in order to save Putin’s face, that Putin opened a new front in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Time and again, the hand-wringers in the west, Obama, Cameron, and especially Merkel, have desperately offered Putin ways out of Donbas. And time and again, Putin has taken these offers as a sign of weakness, and an invitation to escalate. The more aggressive he is, the more assiduously the hand-wringers try to appease him. The equilibrium in this game isn’t hard to figure out. …
Before we get to more of our DC mess, David Bernstein of Volokh posts on Yale’s Episcopal chaplain who thinks the last war is Israel’s fault because they won’t agree to the “two state” solution.
… Next on Rev. Shipman’s bucket list: blaming women who dress provocatively for rape, blaming blacks for racism because of high crime rates, and blaming gays for homophobia for being “flamboyant.”
If Rev. Shipman had made analogous comments about any other “ism,” he’d be out of a job. And if it were any group but Jews, their student organization would be occupying his office and demanding it.
We get a look at some of the president’s spinners. First from Jennifer Rubin.
Bill Burton, former Obama aide and current spinner for the White House, is miffed that people are upset about President Obama’s vacations. Well, if Burton learned anything from Obama, it is how to make a straw-man argument.
Few people object to the president getting downtime. What they object to is three-fold:
First, Burton should know better than anyone that the visual juxtaposition of commenting (but doing nothing more than issuing empty platitudes) on the savage murder of James Foley and yet another round of golf is jarring. Actually, it’s in poor taste (like Bill Clinton laughing as he exited his longtime friend Ron Brown’s funeral, before realizing he was on camera). In case Burton is genuinely confused (as opposed to faking obliviousness), it demonstrates a lack of real remorse to be seen indulging in fun-loving activities directly after such a grave announcement. It suggests a lack of true empathy and unwillingness to forgo personal pleasures even in somber situations. But surely Burton knows this, right? …
Then from Peter Wehner who says the latest lying spin is that the president was not referring to ISIS as the “jayvee.”
One of the notable things about the Obama administration isn’t simply that its key figures often make misleading claims, but that they do so in ways that can be so easily disproven.
The latest effort is in the White House’s attempt to have us believe that the president, in his now infamous “jayvee” analogy, didn’t have ISIS in mind. Here’s an exchange between NBC’s Peter Alexander and White House press secretary Josh Earnest that took place on Monday: …
… That claim–“the president was not singling out ISIL”–is simply not true. And it’s demonstrably untrue. To prove this assertion, it’s helpful to cite the relevant portion of the January 27, 2014 story by David Remnick in the New Yorker:
At the core of Obama’s thinking is that American military involvement cannot be the primary instrument to achieve the new equilibrium that the region so desperately needs. And yet thoughts of a pacific equilibrium are far from anyone’s mind in the real, existing Middle East. In the 2012 campaign, Obama spoke not only of killing Osama bin Laden; he also said that Al Qaeda had been “decimated.” I [Remnick] pointed out that the flag of Al Qaeda is now flying in Falluja, in Iraq, and among various rebel factions in Syria; Al Qaeda has asserted a presence in parts of Africa, too.
“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama said, resorting to an uncharacteristically flip analogy. “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.” …
Wehner also covers our success in Libya.
Think back with me, if you will, to a time not all that long ago when the American intervention in Libya was held up as a model by President Obama.
“Forty-two years of tyranny was ended in six months. From Tripoli to Misurata to Benghazi — today, Libya is free,” Mr. Obama told the United Nations on September 21, 2011. “Yesterday, the leaders of a new Libya took their rightful place beside us, and this week, the United States is reopening our embassy in Tripoli. This is how the international community is supposed to work — nations standing together for the sake of peace and security, and individuals claiming their rights.”
So Libya is how it’s supposed to work, is it? That is the example the president likes to hold up when he referred to “smart diplomacy” and the virtues of America “leading from behind”?
So how are things going in Libya?
For one thing, the United States shut down its embassy in Libya earlier this summer and evacuated its diplomats to neighboring Tunisia under U.S. military escort amid a significant deterioration in security in Tripoli. “Due to the ongoing violence resulting from clashes between Libyan militias in the immediate vicinity of the US embassy in Tripoli, we have temporarily relocated all of our personnel out of Libya,” a State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said‘ …
Larry Sabato looks at the Senate races.
So where’s the wave? This is President Obama’s sixth-year-itch election. The map of states with contested Senate seats could hardly be better from the Republicans’ vantage point. And the breaks this year—strong candidates, avoidance of damaging gaffes, issues such as Obamacare and immigration that stir the party base—have mainly gone the GOP’s way, very unlike 2012.
Nonetheless, the midterms are far from over. In every single one of the Crystal Ball’s toss-up states, (Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana and North Carolina), the Republican Senate candidate has not yet opened up a real polling lead in any of them. Democratic nominees have been running hard and staying slightly ahead, or close to, their Republican foes.
Earlier this year, we published a “wave chart” giving the range of Senate election outcomes, from ripple to tsunami. Sometimes tidal waves, such as the 2006 Democratic swell that gave the party control of both houses of Congress, develop in late September or October. That’s certainly still a possibility for the GOP in 2014. However, the summer is waning, and as Labor Day approaches our estimate remains a Republican gain of four to eight seats, with the probability greatest for six or seven seats—just enough to put Republicans in charge of Congress’ upper chamber. The lowest GOP advance would fall two seats short of outright control; the largest would produce a 53-47 Republican Senate. …
Here’s a feel good story. It’s a NY Times book review covering the failed attempt to impose the metric system on our country.
In the 1970s, children across America were learning the metric system at school, gas stations were charging by the liter, freeway signs in some states gave distances in kilometers, and American metrication seemed all but inevitable. But Dean Krakel, director of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma, saw things differently: “Metric is definitely Communist,” he solemnly said. “One monetary system, one language, one weight and measurement system, one world — all Communist.” Bob Greene, syndicated columnist and founder of the WAM! (We Ain’t Metric) organization, agreed. It was all an Arab plot “with some Frenchies and Limeys thrown in,” he wrote.
Krakel and Greene might sound to us like forerunners of the Tea Party, but in the 1970s meter-bashing was not limited to right-wing conservatives. Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, advised that the proper response to the meter was to “bitch, boycott and foment,” and New York’s cultural elite danced at the anti-metric “Foot Ball.” Assailed from both right and left, the United States Metric Board gave up the fight and died a quiet death in 1982.
In his entertaining and enormously informative new book, “Whatever Happened to the Metric System?,” John Bemelmans Marciano tells the story of the rise and fall of metric America. …