Shooting Begins in Simferopol, Crimea; Ukrainian Soldier Killed by Russian Fire

Great.

Oh, by the way:

Sometimes I'm an idiot. You knew that. But lately I've been seeing "Simferopol" in the news and I've been assuming it's one of those "let's change a city's name to reflect actual pronunciation" things, like Peking becoming Beijing, or Bombay becoming Mumbai.

So I thought Simferopol was just Sevastapol.

It's not. They're near each other, but Simferopol is a different city, more inland than Sevastapol, and is the capital of the Crimean region.

Lately I might have written "Sevastapol" when news reports said "Simferopol."

Romney... has written an op-ed on all of this called "The Price of Failed Leadership."

Why, across the world, are America's hands so tied?

A large part of the answer is our leader's terrible timing. In virtually every foreign-affairs crisis we have faced these past five years, there was a point when America had good choices and good options. There was a juncture when America had the potential to influence events. But we failed to act at the propitious point; that moment having passed, we were left without acceptable options. In foreign affairs as in life, there is, as Shakespeare had it, "a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries."

...

Able leaders anticipate events, prepare for them, and act in time to shape them. My career in business and politics has exposed me to scores of people in leadership positions, only a few of whom actually have these qualities. Some simply cannot envision the future and are thus unpleasantly surprised when it arrives. Some simply hope for the best. Others succumb to analysis paralysis, weighing trends and forecasts and choices beyond the time of opportunity.

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton traveled the world in pursuit of their promise to reset relations and to build friendships across the globe. Their failure has been painfully evident: It is hard to name even a single country that has more respect and admiration for America today than when President Obama took office, and now Russia is in Ukraine. Part of their failure, I submit, is due to their failure to act when action was possible, and needed.

Eh. This is an easy analysis to make for anyone criticizing any president: You allege, vaguely, that things might have gone better had you been in charge. You're proclaiming your relative competency versus your opponent's relative incompetency, and as this is all counter-factual, it's impossible to disprove.

Obama, by the way, constantly did this to Bush (well, he did it to McCain, pretending that McCain was in fact George W. Bush), just saying "Hey, we're smarter, if we were in charge you wouldn't even have had to confront these difficult choices."

The argument is easy and a bit vague, so I don't put a lot of stock into it.

But given that Obama did the same thing, I do enjoy that the same tactic is being used against him.

posted by Ace at 02:52 PM

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