This is old British style geo-political politics opposing powerful countries that counter US global hegemony. The British built up Japans naval fleet to attack and weaken the then Russian empire and British lead war reparations imposed on Germany in WW1 destroyed the country.

Russia should just ditch Europe and the US which are hostile attitude and policies towards it and focus more in developing relations with Africa and Asia.

These days I, and millions of other conservatives across America, feel like a husband coming home to find his wife in bed screwing another man. Then the husband is handed the divorce papers by the en flagrante adulterers as they announce that she's taking half of everything and flying off to Tahiti to spend it all. This is the kind of stuff that normally pushes people over the edge, when the violators of some principal are not merely unpunished, but rewarded.

That is, in effect, what is happening here. The Democrats around Obama - Dodd, Frank, etc. - who did the most to create this mess by using Fannie and Freddie as their personal patronage banks and pushing them to lend to anyone with a pulse, are now benefitting politically from the very disaster they precipitated. Wall Street, of course, is not guiltless, it facilitated the whole thing with Rube Goldberg mechanisms for pretending that risk didn't exist and billions in bad loans could be bundled in with good loans and be graded AAA. The Republicans are also not guiltless as they proclaimed an "ownership society" and went along with the idea that buying a house is as much a God given right as breathing.

Now we see the deranged calls to "get" Barack Obama at McCain rallies - just as a cuckolded husband wants to get even at his wife's lover. The Right is looking the way today's smug Angry Left looked four years ago when the sky seemed to be falling for them and they were fantasizing on Daily Kos about someone "offing" President Bush.

Messiahs throughout the ages stir up irascible hatred, and we've had eight years of Clinton bashing and eight years of Bush Derangement Syndrome to prepare the ground. After all, Obama spokesmen tell us, Jesus Christ was also a community organizer, and they wanted to crucify him too. I don't recall any of Bush's supporters at their worst comparing Dubya to Jesus, though they certainly made it seem as if God must be a Republican. Obama cult followers, please enlighten me, and reassure me that there is no personality cult around your guy. The t-shirts, the ubiquitious Google ads, all paid for by Obama's huge fundraising advantage (tell me again how Republicans are the party of the rich?) make Obama about as ominpresent as Lenin was in the USSR. And I fear it will stay that way for the next four to eight years.

The truth is, we still have no real idea what Barack Obama actually stands for, just a Rorschach test and the sense that everyone with him is riding the irresistable wave of the future. Terrorist friends? "Bitter" people clinging to God and guns? Being no. 2 on Fannie/Freddie's contribution list and having convicted fraudsters from their board as your advisors? None of its sticks to the teflon Anointed One, who makes Reagan's faults look small time in comparison and Bill Clinton highly experienced in terms of actual governing.

Obama isn't Vladimir Lenin, as some conservatives are saying. Obama is Juan Peron reincarnate - there's the same mass rallies, cult of personality, celebrity worship, and "get on board with me or else message" to the nation's corporations. It's community organizing, shaking down companies, only now on a national scale. The same financial wizards on Wall Street who bundled those mortgages into CDOs have contributed dispaportionately to the Democrats since 1998, and the environs they favor - CT, the Hamptons, Hollywood Hills - are some of the wealthiest and bluest enclaves in the country. Nonetheless, if you polled the American people, 90% would tell you that Wall Street firms and hedge funds and private equity managers have given more to the Republicans than the Democrats. That's how bad the mainstream media propaganda is and how poorly educated we have become.

ACORN voter fraud exposed in multiple states, funded by Soros and co? Republicans in VA are keeping a handful of students from voting, the voter roll purges of the dead are sloppy, and besides, the GOP rigs the electronic voting machines and you can never prove a national conspiracy to steal votes, just arrest a few smalltimers handing out cigarettes and cash to homeless people voting 72 times. And I'm sure ACORN is active right outside Mr. Mamchur's office door in downtown Seattle doing the same things. Obama would win Washington State anyway but why not pad the national popular vote with a few thousand of the dead, illegal aliens and felons in Seattle?

There is always some way of denying reality even when it is staring you in the face. The GOPers denied it in foreign policy, to disastrous effect, and deserve to lose for this, but that doesn't mean Obama deserves to win or that Dems aren't also living in a fantasy world about the ability to fund nationalized health care or continued wealth distribution without killing the host they feed on.

Juan Peron took Argentina from being one of the wealthiest countries in the world to national socialist corporatism then to third world debtor status in one generation. You can blame it all on Bush, and millions around the world, including in Russia, misinformed by their compliant pro-Obama socialist-leaning medias will do so. But the irony remains - the folks that did the most to trigger this economic crisis will benefit tremendously from it. Some knew the damage they might do (mostly the financial wizzes) and didn't care, they took the money and ran, like the fellow who ran Washington Mutual for two weeks and made $20 million before getting fired.

Others, and I think Obama and the Clintons fit in this category, were so convinced of their own magnificence and that the world revolved around them that ego trumped intelligence. Bush may have gotten in over his head, and refused to show his own inner world or self doubts to the public, but he has never declared that the planet will literally be healed and the waters will recede if he is elected or reelected.

Millions of people like me voted for Bush in 2000 because we didn't trust Al Gore, we were tired of the Clintons' sleaze and bottomless sense of entitlement, and we believed Dubya's promises of a "more humble foreign policy" that would bring our troops home from Bosnia, Kosovo, Kazahkstan, Somalia and all the other places Clinton had sent them fighting numerous wars of choice (which were ok then, provided they involved no actual casulties, sacrifice, or political risk).

Eight years later Bush is burned out and can't wait to get back to Crawford and we are all left wondering what the hell happened. Small government conservatism seems dead and is allegedly discredited, as if it had ever been tried during Bush's term. Tax cuts are again blamed for deficits as if we haven't been on the biggest spending pinge in American history since LBJ introduced the Great Society at the height of the Vietnam War - and all of that before these bailouts.

Everything, and I mean everything, will be blamed on Bush just as the FDRites did to the hapless Hoover. It's a lie, one of the biggest lies in American history, but it persists because as Orwell observed before he died the Left is better than anyone at rewriting history. FDR did more to turn a severe downturn into the Great Depression than anyone else, but he gets credit for getting us out of it - just like so many in Russia credit Stalin with winning WWII, and nevermind the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact and him shooting all the generals. Or that the Red Army rode into Berlin on 300,000 American-supplied trucks.

Too bad Kim Zigfeld, aka La Russophobe, will be cheering the Russian stock market bottoming out at 10% of its previous value even as her friends in New York (if he or she actually does live in NY as claimed) stand nearby in unemployment lines. I think if Kim Zigfeld's own grandmother were a Russian babushka on fire she wouldn't piss on the old lady to put it out.

Bad times either bring out the best in people or you get to see them at their worst. The Batman movie this year - when the Joker set out to prove that "civilized people" would "eat eachother" when the chips were down, was eerily prescient.

Here's hoping decency between nations - the U.S. and Russia - and electorates will prevail. Russia is connected to America just as "Red" America and "Blue" America need eachother. The contempt and scorn for middle American people and their values expressed by unilateral judicial power grabs (there shall be gay marriage in this state, and we don't give a damn what the voters think) shouldn't be mirrored by Republicans nominating Sarah Palin to bash San Franciscans and write off the entire East Coast.

If Leftists continue to bugger eachother and have fewer children and not be allowed to indoctrinate other people's kids (the real key to this whole thing), than the church of secular liberalism, much like European welfare states, will find itself withering away as age and the refusal of the developing world (aka China, India, and Brazil) to subsidize such lifestyles takes its toll. Even in Seattle, conservative Somali Muslims and resurgent Catholics and Evangelicals will suddenly seem to be running the place forty years hence, when the youngest Baby Boomers are on their last legs.

As you can see at the attached link for Sean's Russki Blog, Randy Scheunemann is up to his old tricks of bringing home the U.S. taxpayer dollars for his boss - not John McCain, but Misha Saakashvili. At a time when the federal treasury is printing dollars like there's no tomorrow, the biggest welfare queens are in Tblisi.

http://seansrussiablog.org/2008/10/07/us-government-funds-for-georgia-hidden-in-hr-6911/

Sean's Russki Blog also has some funny commentary on the McCain-Obama let's get together and bipartisan bash Russia fest.

And there are some hilarious comments about Russia buying Iceland and Obama wanting to cut off oil money trickling down to Russian babushkas and orphans with his messianic alternative energy programs to get the world off that eeeeeeevil Russian crude.

I beleive that the Bush administrations chickens are coming home to roost. After making the dastardly mistake of invading Iraq, a nation with no involvement in 9/11, no ties to Bin Laden, and did not attack the US, diverting resources against the real threats in Afghanistan, and completely ignoring other potential security threats in the world. Bush was so arrogant and stupid he could not see the conflict in Georgia coming. Conservatives preach this tune of white flag of surrender, and patriotic moms-apple pie syndrom it is pathetic. The era is different, this is not the 1940's. The challenges today are much different then they were then. I hear some radical neo-cons on the radio say they want to invade and annex Cuba, and then build bases on Russia's border and cause new conflicts just to prove America is a country willing to destroy the world to hold its image as a superpower dominant of all peoples. This is insane. John McCain, though I respect is service and wisdom, is just as clueless, and Obama doesn't sound any better. McCain thinks that by simply kicking Russia out of the G8 and barring it from the WTO that somehow that will make Russia suck up to the US on its knees begging for forgiveness. Russia has never been anyone's puppet, and it will act in the world on its own terms, just as the United States does. Sure the United States will feel no direct impact from bad relations with Russia, but Europe will and that is what McCain and the Republicans are out of touch to. We feel little fro the hardships of others as long as it does not affect us. If Obama is preaching change, then the first should be his tume on Russia. Russia wants no hostility with the US, yet it wants to be respected and acknowledged it its backyard just as much as the US does in its. Yet the out of touch, trickle down economics, elite society, business as usual Republicans don't see that. And perhaps they never will.

McCain and Palin look, act and talk like amiable robots... both of them are the perfect combination to carry on the legacy of George W. Bush. the fact that anyone is praising McCain for his performance in the third debate proves that he and Palin have lowered people's expectations down to nothing (don't forget, the VP debates were a tie!)