Go-to Guy for Georgia

For my money, the go-to-guy on Georgia right now is Mark Kleiman at Reality-Based Community. Start here and work back or (if you are reading this tomorrow) work forward. Everybody else seems to be struggling to get on the right foot here; Kleiman seems to have had it figured out for the start.

Afterthought: Well, I did also enjoy Richard Holbrooke with Margaret Warner on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer--not least his willingness to call Dimitri Simes a liar to his face (link). Here's Holbrook:

The Russians spent two years provoking Russia -- provoking Georgia. Maybe they sucker-punched Georgia; we're not sure. But the timing, the action, the unbelievable brutality of it, reminiscent of Prague '68, Budapest '56, is heartbreaking.

And I want to stress, closing this. I'm not a warmonger, and I don'twant a new Cold War any more than Dimitri does. We've worked togetherin the past. We both share a vision of Russia as an important part of the world, seeking solutions to climate change, energy, and stability.

But this is a chilling effect. The Russians wish to re-establish a historic area of hegemony that includes Ukraine. And it is no accident that the other former Soviet republics are watching this andextraordinarily upset, as Putin progresses with an attempt to re-create a kind of a hegemonic space.

Field Guide to Republicans

Pinched from RBC: I don't necessarily buy this guy's main point about McCain (not quoted here), but this is as good an account of the Republican party as I've seen:

The VWRC is a conspiracy, composed of several factions, most of whom hate each others' guts. The economic predators sneer at the Taliban, as their lawful prey. The Taliban correctly view the predators as godless ghouls. The ultranationalists correctly view the predators as having no loyalty to the US. The neocons think that the whole pack is ni kultyurni. The ultranationalists and predators correctly view the neocons as mutant Trotskyites, useful only for propaganda. (Nobody trusts the neocons or libertarians; they are too tainted by Enlightenment ideas.)

But the VRWC still coheres as a conspiracy, because they are all willing to cede what the other faction most wants, in return for getting what they most want. The predators get economic predation: on the middle class and on other countries. The ultranationalists and neocons get their belligerency and wars, as long as it doesn't hurt the predators' balance sheets. The Taliban get their courts, as long as the predators' daughters can fly to Sweden when necessary. And so on. (The predators are more equal than the other factions.) The racists and nativists and other unpleasant sorts are not really part of this conspiracy, but the conspiracy is happy to feed them raw meat in exchange for their votes.

It perhaps remains only to be recalled that the Democratic Party in its heyday was i.e., when it harbored Theodore Bilbo and Eleanor Roosevelt, was no more coherent.