Rice signs missle deal with Poland...what now?

The Democrats should be hammering the point home about McCain, but they do nothing. They better start getting down-and-dirty in this campaign or it will be lost. Nice isn't going to win it.

 

It's tough to make anything stick.

Talking tough about the big Bear just resonates with a certain (high) percentage of voters.

Talk about negotiating, being friends, working through our differences . . . just gets shouted down as "APPEASEMENT!"

 

Russo-American relationship is damaged, and what scares me is the impact that has in the Middle East and Asia. If China starts to get itchy with any of its neighbors, that relationship was a big deterrent for them going north. A unifier US-Russian reaction was also a big stick on Chinese thought eastward. We also need Russia's influence in some ME states, and NKorea. It all adds up to foreign relations calculus that I shiver to think of. If it gets much worse -- any one of those areas is a fucking dog's breakfast, especially with our troops engaged elsewhere and dwindling military resources.

EDIT: While we're at it, let's give props to PBS's Frontline, which reported on Putin's czarist-leaning and the surge of Russian near-fanatical nationalism late last year/early this year. Some of the best reporting out there is coming from this program these days. Hope they rebroadcast that soon just to illustrate how far ahead of the curve they were.

 

I'm waiting for Deferment Dick to make another anti-Russia statement.

 

Am I the only one who thought this header had something to do with a crappy Conference USA football team adding a fast player?

 

Hmmmm ... reading these posts, you'd think the Russians were pure as the driven snow.

Do some of you despise Bush/the GOP so much that you'd say the sky was red with orange stripes if they said it was blue?

 

Is there anyone here who thinks any American president would go to war for Poland? I'm sorry. I just don't buy it.

We're not talking about confronting an overmatched Iraqi army, we're talking about Russia. A country that's our equal militarily and one that actually has weapons of mass destruction.

All Putin has to do is drive a few tanks through Warsaw and it's dasvidanya to democracy in eastern Europe.

 

So we should go the Neville Chamberlain route?

 

Hardly. But when any country other than the USA seeks to protect its own interests, they are automatically lumped as evil.

How the fuck would the USA react if Russia installed a "defense system" in Cuba? Want to play that game again? But having one 115 miles from Russia's border is fine and dandy. And how DARE those evil Russians get upset about it!

And MY Russian is as pure as the driven snow.

That's EXACTLY what you expect every other country to do. "We'll install missiles right on your doorstep, and you better not do anything about it!"

Can't you see the bleeping double-standard?

 

Is defending Warsaw and Krakow worth a nuked New York and DC?

 

Russia and China don't have to fire a shot. They can crush us economically as we spend billions in Iraq.

 

"Democracy in Eastern Europe" is a misnomer anyway.

Look at Georgia. They detain and jail dissenters and protesters, and their last election was rigged.

But they are our "friend", so we approve of their (wink, wink) democracy. Even though the elections of Hamas and Ahmadinejad were more legitimate than the one in Georgia.