GEORGIA ON ALL OUR MINDS

So, just when you thought the biggest current world crisis was the locked down, propaganda-driven Berlin, er, Beijing, that is, the Beijing Olympics, along comes Vladimir Putin upstaging the Chinese tyrants by going all Stalin on The Republic of Georgia. Sort of makes Beijing and their "chunky style" air and polite political bullies pale to insignificance by comparison, and shows them who's the biggest, baddest headline-grabbingest despot on the planet. Putin's claiming that this former Soviet Republic has been practicing genocide on two small provinces that are eager to be a part of Russia again, his Russia.

And so he sends in his troops and warplanes to save South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgian aggression that nobody but him noticed. He then proceeds to bomb the crap out of the civilian populations of those two unlucky provinces. Genocide to rescue them from genocide. Brilliant! Old Joe "The Butcher" Stalin would be proud of his current successor as boss-of-all-bosses in the Kremlin. And just like the stunning breakup of the Soviet Union, this one took the world by complete surprise, including those people working for our own government whose only job is to keep track of this sort of thing.

In a world where you or I can check out the real estate ten thousand miles away on Google, our strategic satellite minders were asleep at the switch when it came to tracking the major troop movements necessary to mount this invasion. Or were they? The same sleuths sat by clueless when Russia reached into England to fatally poison a maverick spy of theirs and reached into Ukraine during their presidential elections to poison their leading candidate. He survived the Dioxin poisoning and won the election but remains disfigured. Somehow our own professional spies saw none of these things coming, but that's another story altogether, probably one that will be exposed only after the Cheney Administration is history, if at all.

We had all thought Putin was gone, having served the maximum two terms as Russia's President, but no, this ex-KGB mover-and-shaker was slicker than that. He gets a puppet named Dmitiri Medvedev to run for president and then has himself installed as Prime Minister, with all the reins of power still firmly in his grasping fists, just like Dick Cheney and his mildly retarded puppet Bush The Younger. That's like the Corleone Family installing their bumbling brother Fredo as the nominal boss-of-all-bosses of the Mafia, The Clodfather, to distract everyone from the true power behind the throne. One wonders whether Putin lets Medvedev dress up in cowboy gear and pilot costumes too like our own Fredo likes to do from time to time.

He did, however, allow 'Lil Dmitri to announce that they would accept the terms of the ceasefire the Georgians proposed, but only after he had attained his military objectives and rained some more death down on Georgian civilians. Putin even allowed Medvedev to say that he had "punished" Georgia enough, as if he had any input on the decision. If he's anything like our puppet, he probably thought they were attacking the American state of Georgia to capture some of those famous peach trees. Anyway, nobody in the world outside of Moscow is happy about Russia flexing her military muscles again. We thought we were finished with the Cold War 17 years ago when the Soviet Union melted into all those Ikstans and spit back out the Ukraines and Georgias and Lithuanias and Beloruses and such.

Which still left Russia the largest nation on earth, just not everybody's terrifying bogey man anymore, to the relief of billions and the dismay of only the Kremlin leadership who really enjoyed that sort of thing. With only 140 million citizens remaining they really couldn't afford any more Stalin-style purges that killed twenty million of their own people so they were a frustrated bunch, none of them more so than Putin. Here he was, reaching his dream of being the boss-of-all-bosses, only to find that by that time it was a second-rate outfit. He still had all those nuclear warheads but the country was going broke and his army was greatly reduced and not getting paid, many former generals selling off military hardware to Third World countries to make ends meet while their remaining planes and ships sat idly aging and rusting away.

After the Soviet collapse, the Russian Mafia became the most powerful and efficient organization in the country, able to get things done and provide goods and services in the vacuum left by the loss of rigid governmental control over all aspects of life. Little by little the new Russia lurched towards a tentative democracy, but one tainted by the centuries old Tzarist and Communist traditions of widespread corruption and nepotism. Putin, an unrepentant Soviet Communist, rose to power and restored Russia to some semblance of discipline and productivity, all the while publicly bemoaning the loss of the Soviet Union as "a national catastrophe" and taking steps to reestablish one-man rule once again and wisely courting the military.

He did so through an unholy alliance with the Russian mafia and old line Soviet operatives and highly placed officials. The privatization of the country's assets was a feeding frenzy where multimillionaires were created overnight. Under the Soviet system, "the people," aka the government, owned almost everything. It was as if Exxon/Mobile, General Motors, Microsoft, U.S. Steel, AT&T, General Mills, Kraft, Sears, Macy's, Walmart, every supermarket chain, every farm, ranch, sawmill, factory, oil well, every mine and every skyscraper were all of a sudden divided up between the president and his cronies, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the 5 Families of the Mafia, with the rest of the nation getting nothing but the back of a hand and the heel of a boot. Nice work if you can steal it.

Rumor has it that Putin helped himself to around 40 billion dollars with shady gas and oil deals and stashed it in Swiss banks just in case he got ousted in the middle of the night like many of his predecessors. But thanks to stooges like Medvedev and the centuries-old Russian tolerance of brutal autocratic rule, that hasn't happened, at least not yet. He's not giving back the alleged money either way and having himself a high old time killing thousands of people who had no reason to think they'd be dead a week ago, always a source of enduring joy to people like him. And now the whole world has Georgia on its mind, and a new Cold War too, cursing this turn of fortune and wondering what's next. The Bitch is back.