Russia and Georgia

This invasion of Georgia by Russia is pretty scary to me. I'd be less nervous if our president had half a fucking clue. Alas, such is not our fate right now. David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, has a nice comment piece on the situation. Here's a quote that sums up how I think: "The press, the parliament, the judiciary, the business élite are all in his pocket—and there is no opposition. But Putin also knows that Russia cannot bear the cost of reconstituting empire or the gulag. It depends on the West as a market. One lesson of the Soviet experience is that isolation ends in poverty. Putin’s is a new and subtler game: he is the autocrat who calls on the widow of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. To deal with him will require statecraft of a kind that has proved well beyond the capacities of our current practitioners."