Putin's Blairite Moment
He sees the futility in a McGovernite foreign policy; why can't John Forbes Kerry?:
"The moment we give in to their blackmail and succumb to panic, we will plunge millions of people into an endless chain of bloodletting conflicts.... One cannot but see that this is obvious.
“What we have on our hands is not the scattered acts of intimidation or odd terrorist sorties. This is direct intervention on the part of international terrorism in Russia. It is a total and full-blown war that keeps claiming the lives of our compatriots.
“But world experience proves that such wars do not end quickly. Given this situation, we cannot afford complacent treatment of it anymore."
No mention of first getting Russia's "important and historic allies" on board first. Why, you'd almost think that Putin might take action alone if necessary, and furthermore even against the counsel and criticism of Jacques Chirac, if you can imagine such a thing.
Children Shot in the Back, Babies Knifed, Fifteen Year Old Girls Raped: Inhuman. By their own actions and conscious choice, they have removed themselves from the family of humanity, and they ought to be treated as such.
They butcher and rape children, and no one on the left will say boo about it without being directly challenged to condemn it. And then they only do so half-heartedly and by rote.
But if the animals at Guantanamo don't have praying-mats of a certain thickness and comfort level, they scream "fascism."
Ilyka may have a Russkie-sounding subversive-type name, but she (?-- not sure) puts it well:
Bush didn't remove 'em [from the family of humanity]; Putin didn't remove 'em; failing to ratify Kyoto didn't remove 'em; they took themselves off the team roster.
Yeahp. They're on the morally-disabled list, all right. And the sooner we can cull them from the league, the better.
Correction: Well, here I was thinking this crime had been committed by (who could have guessed?) Arab/Muslim monsters who have decided that non-Arabs and non-Muslims are not human and therefore can be violated or butchered at will.
But I was wrong.
Turns out it was the Jews. Again!
Blow me over with a feather. I swear, those cunning Israelis are like Lucy holding the football, except instead of pulling the football away at the last moment, they fill it with screws and nails and C-4 explosives and detonate it amidst a mass of children maiming, blinding, and killing them and then blame poor innocent Muslims for the crime.
Jews
You'll like their craftiness.
But you'll love their insidiousness.
It's Funny How Acts of Terrorism Keep Being Committed by Non-Terrorists Department: Random Birkel on the "insurgents," "rebels," and, I'm guessing, "charismatic agrarian reformers" who cut the throats of babies and raped children.
[The agrarian reformers line is swiped from Ann Coulter.]
"Armed captors?" Armed fucking captors?
The Indispensible Mr. Steyn is also slicing like an outraged fucking hammer:
Row upon row of dead children, more than a hundred of them, 150, more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.
Flee from whom? Let's take three representative responses: "Guerillas", said The New York Times. "Chechen separatists", ventured the BBC, eventually settling for "hostage-takers". "Insurgents", said The Guardian's Isabel Hilton, hyper-rational to a fault: "Today's hostage-taking," she explained, "is more savage, born of the spread of asymmetrical warfare that pits small, weak and irregular forces against powerful military machines. No insurgent lives long if he fights such overwhelming force directly . . . If insurgent bullets cannot penetrate military armour, it makes little sense to shoot in that direction. Soft targets – the unprotected, the innocent, the uninvolved – become targets because they are available."
And then there was Adam Nicolson in London's Daily Telegraph, who filed one of those ornately anguished columns full of elevated, overwritten allusions – each child was "a Pieta, the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V" – and yet in a thousand words he's too busy honing his limpid imagery to confront the fact that this foul deed had perpetrators, never mind the identity of those perpetrators.
Sorry, it won't do. I remember a couple of days after September 11 writing in some column or other that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, that's still the difference. We can all get upset about dead children, but unless you're giving honest thought to what was responsible for the slaughter your tasteful elegies are no use. Nor are the hyper-rationalist theories about "asymmetrical warfare".
Update: Dianna throws cold water on my hopes of a partnership with Russia in the War on Terror, reminding me that Putin is 1, a former KGB spymaster, 2, a onetime communist, and 3, a current tyrannical strongman.
Allah twists the knife by telling me that Putin is not my friend.