can't accuse him of acting from emotion or impulse. Everything he does is calculating and for his benefit and does not come from crazy. Bill needs to rethink this.

Russia to maintain his control. Surely, you don't believe that a person, who probably has murder on his resume going back to his KGB days, is a god fearing believer?

I will tend to go with Clinton. Most geopolitical strategy folks may agree there's not a lot the west can do right away about the current moves he has made, but they mostly agree that Putin is not being wise and is showing weakness and desperation with such a move.

And starving the children of Iraq then having his secretary say killing children is a small price to pay.

Wait!!! That's what Clinton's foreign policy was... awww, shit, the double talk is too damn much.....

And along with China, Russia is deadly to our empire and all those speaking fees.

and Economic Development Ministries. Some even set up their own agencies with one agenda - Deregulate, Divest (as in privatize), Devalue and loot - and fuck the 99% wherever.

Been there felt that.

It is now a fugging business

I give up. Way too many pots moralizing to kettles these days.

you believe that?

Try to stay with the flow here. You look much more intelligent that way.

and it is a little odd that neither of you mentioned the fact that prior to NATO dropping bombs, there was indeed ethnic cleansing going on.

Wouldn't want to point out that inconvenient fact now would we?

The thread is about Clinton saying "Do as I say, not as I did"

Playing semantics will not save one innocent person. Clinton launched bombs on a place in Europe and he was the first person as president to do so since the end of WW11. They even bombed the Chinese consulate. Whoops! I wonder how many other innocents they bombed? You forgot all that did you?

Bush declined to bomb Serbia. Just as he declined to invade Iraq. You think that was a mistake Bush made?

the guy absolutely did try annexing Kuwait, shot SCUD missiles into Israel, and was continuing to defy U.N. sanctions and agreements after the first Gulf War. So short of pulling a Bush, what was the U.N. and the U.S. supposed to do?

What we should have done was hang the bushes by their balls in the middle of DC so the kids would see what we should be doing to fucked up politicians like the bushes.

would have been a satisfactory response to the climate Clinton inherited in January 1993?

Just let them hang there until they were crying uncle.

And then take them down and give them a heart transplant, for free, like we did Cheney. Yep, the one dude who was most responsible for having Rumsfeld go shake the shit with Saddam back in the 80's: Cheney.

There's your bad guy, that Cheney dude. None of the Iraq problem would have gotten as bad if the Bush name was never heard of except on the can of beans. Instead, we have thousands dead thanks to people who went after the wrong guy.

to both the site comment and the Bushes.

Not a dude - female

a more capable statesman, he could have engineered a better outcome of the Yanukovich collapse to benefit Russia's interests. Instead, he kicked over the game board because he wasn't winning, and now he's got to keep going with the invasion business or he looks like a loser. Proving he's a bad neighbor, not to be trusted, costing Russia money, and making NATO dig in with more military activity.

has no interest in what's good for the Russian people.

White House leaked that Merkel said Putin was out of touch and the "Putin is crazy" memo has been making its rounds.

Putin is crazy....so we can't negotiate with him and just going to let him have Crimea. Can't negotiate with someone crazy.

That's why Kerry is blowing off the Moscow invitation. They could come up with a proposal that might make the EU warm to.

He's been toting the acting PM from Ukraine everywhere in the hopes that Russia actually meets him and give him the talking point "Ukraine and Russia talked"....thereby implying Russia recognizes the current government....again, he won't be able to bring him to Moscow.

That's whats this is all about, get Putin to inadvertently recognize the government via implication which makes Putin's hold on Crimea harder to keep.

But if Crimea votes to move to Russia and Russia still recognizes the old government...which gives approval of the move...any inadvertent recognition won't matter.

Great post and insight by the way.

Vladimir Putin has enjoyed a stunning variety of incarnations in the American imagination in his nearly 15 years as Russia's leader. He started out as an economic reformer and a budding democrat, held those misapplied titles for years — aided by President George W. Bush, who "looked the man in the eye" and "was able to get a sense of his soul" — before the U.S. media and its consumers noticed his authoritarian tendencies.

His graduation to dictator took years. In that time, he dismantled Russia's electoral system, took over its media, saw many of his opponents killed, jailed or forced into exile, created one of the most ruthlessly corrupt government systems in history, made peaceful protest punishable by jail time, waged a long and brutal war on his own country's territory and a short one against a neighboring country, Georgia, a piece of which Russia bit off in 2008.

But it was only after he invaded Ukraine last month that Americans' image of him took another drastic turn. German Chancellor Angela Merkel ostensibly told President Obama that Putin was out of touch with reality. And then former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton compared him to Adolf Hitler.

So is Putin insane, is he Hitler, or is he both? He is none of those things. In fact, he may be unlike any politician the world has known.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gessen-putin-russia-ukraine-20140311,0,1433770.story

Will it be Greek-style austerity? Will it be eastern-style corruption? And most importantly, whose missiles will be in Ukraine, and toward whom will they be pointed?

Clinton's just another actor in this kabuki.

Russia is a superpower.

Heh, they just flew some US astronauts back to earth.

And they still have the nuke missiles.

Sure, we are the world's empire. Isn't this what you meant to say? Russia is not the world's empire, we are.

Don't like being told you are wrong, do you?

You are wrong about Russia not being a superpower.

But just for giggles, define superpower and the day Russia quit being a superpower. Because they were a superpower the day you were born, eh?

EU. Even the U.S. isn't quite the superpower that it was and that is by design (Hey, it was Cheney who reduced and modernized the U.S. military footprint as a end of the Cold War peace dividend). Cheney wouldn't want to admit to that today. Or if he did, he would still have some fuckwit reasoning on why we shouldn't continue to modernize and reduce troop footprint in 21st century.

Man this shit gets tiresome.

There can only be one superpower, says anonymous poster on internet, so it must be truew!!

Spy agencies, economic wealth. And yet most would admit UK is not a super power.