The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...such as the re-assembly of the Russian Empire and the defeat of a pro-Western country.

//Make no mistake about this. The settlement is a deeply damaging blow to our values, to our prestige and to our geopolitical interests. The foolish and distracted Western policies that encouraged Ukraine into a confrontation with Russia in which the West was unwilling to back it; the shameful and feckless mix of triumphalist rhetoric and minimalist action; the cluelessness in the face of Putin’s skillful mastery of Western psychology and divisions; the miserable consequences of all this for the Ukrainian state: every country, every leader in the world has been paying close attention.

Historians, by the way, will also pay attention; the Obama legacy has been permanently tarnished. Unless some real changes take place, neither this President nor his close associates will cut an impressive figure when the accounts are drawn up.

The West may yet get its act together and come up with a coherent response to a war of naked aggression by an ugly despotism on its doorstep, but it would take more determination and imagination than is currently on display.

In the meantime, the Ukrainians are doing the only thing they can; like Hitler’s victims in the 1930s they are signing away territory and rights that they cannot defend and reflecting on the value of all those inspiring promises of support they received from their Western friends back when times were good and the bear was far away.//

But, you know, apres 2016, le deluge.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

Russia invades Ukraine; Obama expresses concern.

Hey...isn't this like ....you know...bad news?

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...such as war in Europe.


Russia and Ukraine are in something of a shooting war.

Shouldn't this be a matter of come concern to us?

How many failures of the Obama administration get to be labeled "unexpected"...

...before we realize that we're governed by delusional incompetents.

A Politico report calls it “a crisis that no one anticipated.” The Daily Beast, reporting on Friday’s US intelligence assessment that “Vladimir Putin’s military would not invade Ukraine,” quotes a Senate aide claiming that “no one really saw this kind of thing coming.”

Op-eds from all over the legacy press this week helped explained why. Through the rose tinted lenses of a media community deeply convinced that President Obama and his dovish team are the masters of foreign relations, nothing poor Putin did could possibly derail the stately progress of our genius president. There were, we were told, lots of reasons not to worry about Ukraine. War is too costly for Russia’s weak economy. Trade would suffer, the ruble would take a hit. The 2008 war with Georgia is a bad historical comparison, as Ukraine’s territory, population and military are much larger. Invasion would harm Russia’s international standing. Putin doesn’t want to spoil his upcoming G8 summit, or his good press from Sochi. Putin would rather let the new government in Kiev humiliate itself with incompetence than give it an enemy to rally against. Crimea’s Tartars and other anti-Russian ethnic minorities wouldn’t stand for it. Headlines like “Why Russia Won’t Invade Ukraine,” “No, Russia Will Not Intervene in Ukraine,” and “5 Reasons for Everyone to Calm Down About Crimea” weren’t hard to find in our most eminent publications.

Ukraine looks to be set up for a Serbian-style division/ethnic cleansing.

Balkans write larger.

On Friday afternoon, the regular flight from Moscow touched down in the Crimean capital of Simferopol, in the south of Ukraine, carrying the leader of a Russian motorcycle gang known as the Night Wolves. Alexander Zaldostanov, an old friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was wearing his usual get-up – a flaming wolf’s head stenciled onto his black leather vest – but for once he was not the most intimidating figure on the scene. Since the morning, dozens of masked troops had been sauntering around Crimea’s main airport, armed to the teeth but refusing to identify themselves. In some ways, they seemed to have the same goal as Zaldostanov, who goes by the nickname The Surgeon. They were sending a signal to the revolutionary government in Ukraine that it was no longer in charge on this peninsula.

Who exactly was in charge remained a mystery throughout the day, and a source of international alarm, as the United Nations Security Council prepared to convene an emergency meeting to discuss the tensions in Crimea. That morning, the new Crimean Parliament convened, still occupied by the masked and heavily armed men who had seized the building before dawn the previous day. Those men, also brandishing assault rifles, had at least identified themselves: They said they were the self-defense forces of the ethnic Russian majority in the Crimea. Under their watch on Friday, the parliament voted in a new Crimean government, one that was stacked to the hilt with pro-Russian hardliners intent on breaking their region away from Ukraine. But they, too, were not in charge.

Remember when Americans cared about this kind of thing?

Russia invades Ukraine - Obama declares Happy Hour.

The Obama administration has responded, so far, in a manner that is pathetic even by its own standards. After issuing stern warnings to Russia not to invade Crimea, the administration, confronted with the actual presence of Russian troops on the ground, philosophized about whether it was really an invasion, suggesting that a more apt term might be an “uncontested arrival.” Former chess champion Garry Kasparov reacted with stunned indignation:

//Garry Kasparov        ✔ @Kasparov63

Follow

US calls Crimea "uncontested arrival", not invasion. Obama will win semantic fights in the air while Putin wins with troops on the ground.//

President Obama himself, having delivered a limp warning to Vladimir Putin, decamped for a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where he told a cheering crowd: “Well, it’s Friday, it’s after 5:00. So this is officially happy hour with the Democratic Party.”

Ukraine ...

...What if a local dispute over a local trade deal by the duly elected president following the rules of his constitution has been inflated by ignorant and inept Western foreign policy into a killing field? 

As a consequence of three months of intense Western meddling, a scrap over trade came to be intensely internationalised, transformed from a pretty straightforward disagreement between political leaders and a section of their population into a stand-off over political legitimacy itself, over who rules Ukraine, where the protesters derived their moral authority almost entirely from Western leaders rather from the Ukrainian masses while the newly made pariah Yanukovich was forced ever closer into the arms of Russia. Compromise was possible on the practical question of trade; it was not possible on the more existential question of who is in charge of Ukraine. Authorised by the West, the protesters chanced their hand and seized government buildings or communicated their determination to stay put in their camps pretty much forever; delegitimised by the West, Yanukovich felt a powerful need to assert his political authority over Ukraine. The predictable end result was bloodshed, executed by Ukrainian riot police, authored by the EU and Washington.

I don't know the full story but you can bet on the part about "ignorant and inept."