Pas De Deus Ex Machina

Whoa boy!

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile on Tuesday was in response to U.S. steps that have sparked an arms race and undermined world security, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

"Our American partners have left the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty. We have warned them then that we will come out with a response to maintain the strategic balance in the world," Putin told a news conference.

"We conducted a test of a new strategic ballistic missile with multiple warheads, and of a new cruise missile, and will continue to improve our resources."

"We are not the initiators of this new round of the arms race," said Putin. "(Our partners) are stuffing eastern Europe with new weapons. A new base in Bulgaria, another in Romania, a site in Poland, radar in the Czech Republic . . . what are we supposed to do? We cannot just observe all this."

Russia test-fired a new intercontinental ballistic missile on Tuesday featuring multiple warheads that senior officials said could pierce any missile defense system, including the planned U.S. shield in Europe.

I'm sorry....the world's not scary enough????

Not that we didn't see this coming. Even regular readers of this blog had to know:

“The Cold War left us ‘unexploded bombs’ – double standards and templates of bloc-centered thinking,” Putin said at a security conference in Munich on Saturday.

“A single-polar world has never come around. No latter(sic) how much this term is adorned, it means only one thing – one centre of power, one centre of force, the world of one master, one sovereign. This is pernicious for the system itself and for the sovereign, too, because destroys it from within,” the president said.

Remarkable in this short excerpt from the speech (deliberately posted by the Russian government on the Tass website) is the veiled threat that Putin makes in the guise of a prediction: that the US will destroy itself. This hearkens back to Kruschev's "We will bury you" 1960 speech at the United Nations, which is often deliberately misquoted to mean that the Soviet Union, through its aggression and actions, would overtly destroy the US, when what he said could also be construed as "we will outlast you and see you at your funeral."

So it's not really fair to call today's story a deus ex machina, although it certainly comes as a surprise...and a shock to the storm troopers of the right who probably believed Putin was as cowed by Bush as Bush was by Putin.

You heard me..."cowed". Despite the braggadoccio of this administration, the clear pattern of Bush's dealings with Putin have always been an attempt to impress upon Vladi his strength and his seriousness.

The problem for Bush is, Putin reads the newspaper. And his intelligence reports. Hell, he probably watches CNN International!

Bush has become the laughingstock of the world, and the US is paying a dear price for his idiocy. An immature, spoiled little brat, who clowns around at the drop of a hat with people who have earned the respect of being treated with dignity.

One can understand that the buffoon himself is uncomfortable with the trappings of office: since he never really had to work hard at anything, having "people" handle things for him (like getting him out of the draft, like bailing his businesses out, like paying for a new stadium for his team, like stealing elections for him), he never felt he deserved the majesty of office.

Fine. But people like Angela Merkel deserve better than to be molested in a G8 meeting. She worked hard for her money.

And Vladimir Putin rose up through the ranks of a notoriously vicious and shark-infested agency, the KGB. To think that he's going to take Bush seriously at all was a joke, and that's before you take into account his clowning.

It's hard to imagine this comparison, but the poor kid from Hope, Arkansas, who had a hardscrabble existence, born of a poor family, who sweated and worked hard to make something of himself, had more polish and class and elegance than the guy born with the silver tea set in his mouth, third generation scion of a political dynasty, who attended Exeter and Andover and Yale and Harvard, all on his family's name.

God help us if we ever elect another Bush.