Neocon, n. L.20, Fr. dial. n'econnez? meaning "Don't you ever get tired of being wrong?"

William Kristol,"Will Russia Get Away With It?" August 11

One of several excess Kagans, "Putin Makes His Move". August 11

John Maverick McCain, International gibberish from the campaign trail (but I repeat myself!) August 11

THE good news, Reader, is that, even deprived of most of the modern communication inconveniences this weekend, save the fuzzy blue flickering of the video crystal set, one could almost feel, smell, even taste the bullshit on this one, suggesting that it's not the mere volume of the stuff on the internets that makes this virtually possible.

Okay, okay, so it's remarkably easy; all you have to do is note when television "journalists" start shamming gravitas, and you know The Steer of State has a bad case of the squirts. By the evening "news" all three nets were predicting the possibility of World War VII, or wherever we are now (keeping tabs on this being the one theoretical, though not compelling, reason we need a single Kagan). This practically guaranteed the crisis would be over by breakfast, and that the Sovi Russians would likely stop somewhere east of the Fulda Gap. And that the Kagans would not. Virtually, of course.

(The historically astute Reader may recall, if dimly, that these were the selfsame teleprompter maestri who, five-and-one-half years ago, treated a US invasion into the heart of the Middle East with Huzzahs! Off to teach the Hun a lesson he won't soon forget! Home before the leaves fall! Half a decade later, a world power acting regionally against its actual provocateur, not the most-easily plucked (!) target of  sham surrogacy, baldly risks rapid expansion into Global conflict. In pursuit of its economic and territorial expansionist aims! This, I suppose, is progress of a sort. It's too bad Putin didn't claim Saakashvili once tried to kill his father. I would have enjoyed seeing Charlie Gibson laughing that one off.)

Regardless, it's nice to be home, even if your freeloading uncle is lying on the couch, drinking your beer and yelling at the Libruls on the teevee:

The details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.

Thus Kagan, who, simply put, can't keep it in his pants anymore because he refuses to wear any. The details are not very important?  Was that for people who aren't familiar with your work?  The precise details of the Sudeten Crisis? Hell, I'll settle for the Post, and/or the Times, requiring some small recognition of the proportions of history before they kill any more trees for this shit.

Kristol, meanwhile, ever the stylist, coyly takes four paragraphs to get around to the Hitler analogy (Q: What do you call ninety seconds of neocon foreplay? A: Unprecedented selflessness.):

The good news is that today we don’t face threats of the magnitude of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Each of those regimes combined ruthless internal control, a willingness to engage in external aggression, and fervent adherence to an extreme ideology. Today these elements don’t coexist in one place. Russia is aggressive, China despotic and Iran messianic — but none is as dangerous as the 20th-century totalitarian states.

Look, Bill, we all realize the loss of the Soviet Union hit you hard. Not like the loss of a beloved pet, maybe; more like the guy with the dog that barked constantly moving out of the neighborhood, so that now you're no longer the leader of a gated community action committee, you're just the guy who's in the street every morning in his bathrobe, yelling about the power lines being too low. I understand, Bill. (Maybe too much.) It's time to let it go. It's time to enter the 21st century, and start making shit up about that. We're concluding--should we live that long, and no thanks to you--eight years of an administration which might has well have been photocopied from your image. Yes, yes, Bill, I know you were a relentless fucking Bush critic on the rare occasions you didn't get precisely what you wanted, and on the far, far less rare occasions when you did and it turned to shit and you needed an out, which, inevitably, was "they didn't do it my way enough." Now that Iraq is a roaring success maybe you could spend your twilight years in quiet reflection instead of eliminating all your perceived international enemies with the power of  your tiniest cerebral event.  

Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.”

You and whose Army, bub? Tell you what, if Grenada invades some bird-shit island we'll give you a call.

We really can't let this one go without the insights of the man who would be Commander-in-Chief of this game of Virtual Stratego™:

"Georgia is an ancient country, at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion. After a brief period of independence following the Russian revolution, the Red Army forced Georgia to join the Soviet Union in 1922."

One of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion! Anybody else smell Children's Crusade? At least we'd have the troops.