Not you, Gentle Reader, and not the good ol’ USA, of course.
I’m talking about our media and the good old blogosmear™ and blogosphere. What dominates the blogtalk is John Edwards — who is not a candidate — rank speculation on paternity tests, and navel-gazing on covering why the story wasn’t covered, etcetera. This has been the logjam on Memeorandum all day long.
Invasion: A Russian convoy outside the village of Dzhaba in South Ossetia. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia declared that "war has started." Photo: Dmitry Kostyukov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images (Click for larger image)
(click for New York Times slide show)
Georgia, ln the other hand, is relegated to second place, and the coverage is hottest about what Obama says and what McCain says, and what Obama’s campaign says about McCain’s statement (via our old fiend, Michael Goldfarb) and what McCain’s campaign says about Obama’s statement. Meantime, AP notes:
Georgia, a country about the size of South Carolina that borders the Black Sea between Turkey and Russia, was ruled by Moscow for most of the two centuries preceding the breakup of the Soviet Union. Today, Russia has approximately 30 times more people than Georgia and 240 times the area.
Or, to put it in more explicit terms (from the BBC, in an article entitled, charmingly, “Putin accuses Georgia of genocide“):
ARMED FORCES COMPAREDGEORGIATotal personnel: 26,900Main battle tanks (T-72): 82Armoured personnel carriers: 139Combat aircraft (Su-25): SevenHeavy artillery pieces (including Grad rocket launchers): 95RUSSIATotal personnel: 641,000Main battle tanks (various): 6,717Armoured personnel carriers: 6,388Combat aircraft (various): 1,206Heavy artillery pieces (various): 7,550Source: Jane’s Sentinel Country Risk Assessments
This is the sort of conflict that ignites world wars.
… The three Baltic presidents signed a joint declaration stating “we will use all means available to us as Presidents to ensure that aggression against a small country in Europe will not be passed over in silence or with meaningless statements equating the victims with the victimizers.”
And nobody in Russia or Georgia gives a damn about John Edwards’ sex life.
Fancy that.
But then, people are dying over there, but that isn’t really high on the list of homegrown Peeping Tom priorities, is it?
As Popeye used to say: Disgustipating.
Grigory Bushputin discusses the Sudetenland with Vladamir the Grate (Photo: Pool photo by Guang Niu )
Enlightened self-interest ought to trump Pecksniffian voyeurism.
Ought to.
(Oh, and The Surge ain’t working neither, irrespective of propaganda to the contrary.)
Courage.
==========
UPDATE – August 10, 1:17 AM, PDT: The Los Angeles Times is reporting:
Georgia, Russia move closer to full-blown war
Russian warplanes fly deeper into the neighboring nation, and Moscow prepares to move more troops into the conflict over South Ossetia.
By Megan Stack and Peter Spiegel,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
August 10, 2008 (1 hour ago)MOSCOW — Russia plowed closer to all-out war with Georgia on Saturday, sending warplanes to bomb deep inside the neighboring country and preparing to move more troops into the fray over a pro-Moscow separatist republic.
Moscow brushed aside calls from the Georgian government for a cease-fire, insisting that the troops’ mission was to restore calm to the breakaway republic, South Ossetia.
“We are enforcing peace,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who reported that the death toll was 1,500 and climbing. That figure could not be confirmed.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, meanwhile, declared a state of war, and Georgia’s parliament voted to impose martial law.
“We, on our own, cannot fight with Russia,” Saakashvili told the BBC. “We want immediate cease-fire . . . and international mediation.”
Lavrov called the truce appeal a “cynical” move, given that the fighting began when Georgian forces launched a surprise attack on South Ossetia late last week.
The fighting threatens to inflame the volatile Caucasus region, where Russia and the United States vie for influence among former Soviet states. Tensions between Moscow and the West have sharpened in recent years, with an increasingly wealthy Russia striving to restore the superpower status it lost with the Soviet collapse….
A senior U.S. official, speaking to reporters on the traditional diplomatic condition of anonymity, was more blunt, saying that Russia was attacking Georgian territory with ballistic missiles and large strategic bombers that can carry 54,000 pounds of bombs.
“I, for the life of me, can’t imagine how that could be a proportional response to allegations that Georgians had fired upon Russian peacekeepers,” the official said….
Ruh-roh.
3 Comments
11 August 2008 at 5:52 am
[...] of how weblogs and weighed the Edwards story versus the story about Russia attacking Georgia? Read this. A Pox On Both Your Foreign Policy Advisers: In a must read Guest Voice on Political Wire, Dan [...]
11 August 2008 at 3:12 pm
When reading the russian news channels, the impression is that the Russian army is there to fulfill a limited mission of protecting South Ossetia, which had been savagely attacked and destroyed, and does not need any peace negotiators because it will fulfill exactly this mission and nothing else. This may include occupying a few strategic front posts such as Gori and Sekina, that are a few miles into Georgia, so as to make sure the Georgian soldiers really get out and the ensuing peace is stable and favorable to Russian interests.
I hope I’m not wrong, but I must say so far I have more confidence in the Russian than in the western/georgian side. Maybe Putin and Medvedyev are also better at communicating a serious message than Sakashvili, who looks like a wreckless adventurist even in his own speeches. It seems clear that there was a massive assault from Georgia to take the breakaway provinces in a surprise attack and that, by the very standards set by the West in Kosovo and elsewhere, Russia can claim entitlement to do what it did. Russia’s rhetoric in fact is like a copy of western rhetoric, just still a little more moderate and credible. I hope it will stay that way. It’s sad for the US that it has come to this point. The Russians have progressed, the US has regressed in international matters. It now appears like an instigator of a wreckless surprise attack with genocidal elements, and all rhetoric of McCain and others sounds not only like outdated by 20 years, but even completely hollow in view of a record of recent interventionist adventures. A very nice example is the word “regime change”, advanced as an accusation by a US representative but rejected by Russia as “US vocabulary, a designation for a type of operation which is characteristic for US foreign policy, not for the more moderate Russian policy, which aims only at protecting a population from genocidal attacks and restoring order, nothing more.”
11 August 2008 at 10:17 pm
Well, that’s certainly what they SAY. Actions don’t seem to bear their rhetoric out, sadly.
Headline from 10 minutes ago:
Georgia ‘overrun’ by Russian troops as full-scale ground invasion begins
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