Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I'm back from my almost eight-week refrigerium -- two weeks sailing to Maine, three weeks there, two weeks and change sailing back. Anyone interested in the travelogue can read about it -- incrementally -- on a different blog.

Now we turn again to the high seriousness of SMBIVA....

It ain't easy. I got strangely disconnected, during these weeks, from all the stuff I normally love to fume about. The vileness of the Democrats, the silliness of the Republicans, the sour comedy of health-care "reform" -- it all looked very tiny and far away, like a marionette theater seen through the wrong end of a telescope. No doubt this phase will pass and underlying character will reassert itself. But for the moment, some easing-in seems to be needed.

My main source of news out on the water, especially on a long offshore passage at night, was the radio -- and specifically NPR, when I couldn't find a good Christian station with one of those wonderful pulpit orators who can hold you spellbound for hours on end.

Shallow stuff, I know, NPR. The hours they spent handwringing about that yahoo from South Carolina -- Wilson? -- who called Obie a liar! You'd think the firmament was falling, and the rock-ribbed earth turned to jelly.

Needless to say, I'm with Wilson. Not because I think he's anything more than a rabid howling baboon, or because Obie was lying -- at least, no more than usual -- but because I really approve of disrespect: disrespect to the man, disrespect to the office, disrespect for the hallowed halls of Congress and its Royal Nonesuch pinky-in-the-air politesse. The sooner the whole sorry pompous gasbag spectacle turns back into the Jerry Springer show -- as it was back in the vigorous youth of the Republic, with canings and duels and whatnot -- the happier I'll be.

The only story that really caught my ear, with the sound of a second shoe dropping, was the news that those ridiculous anti-missile missiles would not be placed in Poland after all. Score one for Bearzilla!

I saw it coming a week or two before, in a radio interview with the Polish foreign minister, a fey puckish fellow whose name I didn't quite catch. This humorous chap was asked about the missiles -- remember, this is before Obie has eaten crow and taken them back -- and the droll Pole observed that "we didn't really want them. Our longtime ally the United States wanted to deploy them, and of course, we're old friends, we said yes."

Oho, sez I to myself -- or maybe even out loud, with no one around to hear except the gulls. Those missiles will never go in. And for once I was right.

It's a fool's game to speculate about what was said in meetings you weren't invited to, but sometimes it's hard to resist. I will go out on a limb here and say this was the quid-pro-quo for keeping the Manas air force base open in Kyrgyzstan -- so we can keep bleeding ourselves in Afghanistan, the way Zbig Brzezinski bird-dogged the Sovs into doing back in the day.

How the Russkis must be chortling. We've got ourselves now where we had them thirty years ago. We're having to pay top dollar to their boyos in Bishkek, and crawl away from our forward policy in Eastern Europe in order to keep paying, and keep bleeding.

Of course this climb-down enables Obie to look like a more reasonable person -- to his easily-fooled domestic base -- than the half-witted chimp who preceded him. Obie, the libs will reason, understood that this was a senseless provocative move, and because he's a sensible person, he took the sensible course.

I don't think so. I think Putin & Co. had him over a barrel -- and a good thing, too -- and McCain would have had to do the very same thing, if he wanted to stay in Afghanistan.

As Obie clearly does.