Considering Bush's enduring puppy love of Putin, I don't think this invasion was of any surprise to the current administration.

I read somewhere that it takes a thousand years to get the peasant out of a man; Pat Moynihan, the most intelligent senator of the last half century, said that the essential belief of the left is that policy makes culture and the right believes the other way. Alan Greenspan, who worshipped at the feet of Ayn Rand, said that the Russian economic meltdown opened his eyes that policy does not make culture.

The Russians have always been, wait for it, totalitarian. 150 years ago the serf belonged not to the lord but to the land. Think about that. Turgenev has stories about their essential belief that people are property.

This wondrous belief that people matter because they are people is a conceit of the west, of the Anglo-American west. I love it, I shout for it, I defend it, but I also know that it is very possibly a bubble in the parade of bastards who impose their nasty selves on the world.

Not a good time to be a Ukrainian, either. Very depressing to see free people in young democracies falling back under the yoke of Russian tyranny.

Bush told the Russian Ambassador, "Please pass on my very best wishes to President Vladimir Putin, a man who I admire." And we all remember the day George "looked into Putin's eyes." If George is such a bad judge of character, can we expect him to do right now in this conflict?

Still going on with the first person plural?

Whatever he may have said of Putin, it didn't stop him from sending US forces into Georgia today, which are already on the ground and headed into the Black Sea. I would bet that there is already a bunch of reinforcement headed to Ukraine.

Really, what has been said and done doesn't matter now, it's what you do now that matters. I bet Obama is glad this isn't happening on his watch. He probably also has about 40 advisers figuring out what the most popular response will be.

South Ossetia is a tad smaller than Tom Green County. I just thought that this was a somewhat interesting though useless factoid.

Maybe Bush had 40 advisors deciding what the most popular response would be. I saw on the news last night that we're backing away from a conflict with the Russians and all we're sending is humanitarian supplies. Sort of like, "Ooops! Didn't mean to step on your toes, Russia! We'll be going now."

Warmonger?

I hope we're avoiding military conflict with the Russians, and I think this can be resolved without initiating WWIII. We are sending aid, and that aid is being delivered by US forces. If Russia were to attack US forces delivering aid this would for sure escalate things, so I see this could be a round about way of confronting Russian aggression, without telling the Russians we are coming to fight you. On one hand I think we should have acted sooner, on the other in our delay perhaps we allowed Russia to overplay their hand. Poland agreed to installing US missile defense yesterday, no doubt spurred on by Russia's aggression. The particularity sad thing is that the EU and Sarkozy were not able to handle things in their own back yard all that well.

As for Bush acting because something is popular, you really think so? The notion rails against most of these last 8 years and his current popularity. Neither Bush nor anyone in his administration is running for office, they have no need to subject themselves to popular opinion, I doubt they will or have. Surge, immigration reform, Olympic attendance, none of these were popular.