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With a hat tip to Andrew Sullivan, the coolest art exhibit, ever.

Putting all of McCain’s pro-Georgia bluster aside, one can see that Saakasvili set out to what looks like ethincally targeted violence when he launched his military escapade against South Ossetia. It is only through McCain’s revisionist history that one can forget that Georgia started it:

Georgian troops arrived Khetagurovo on August 8 in a storm of steel and bullets, killing eight people and badly damaging the village of ethnic South Ossetians.

When they left two days later, harried by the Russian forces that crushed Tbilisi’s bid to restore control over its breakaway region, locals say their took four prisoners with them and forfeited any chance of reconciliation.

Belarus, once part of the Soviet Union, lies between Poland, which just signed a missile defense treaty with the U.S., and Russia.  Thus, I am sure that this and this are pure coincidences.

I’ve been thinking this all along. Today’s article in Reuters, that the State Department repeatedly warned the Republic of Georgia to not get into a military tangle with Russia, has only made me believe that Robert Scheer is on to something - that the whole Randy Scheunemann/John McCain/Saakashvili is just too coincidental. The choices are three-fold: (a) the State Department is lying and did not try to dissuade Saakashvili; (b) Saakashvili is completely reckless or (c) as Scheer suggests, someone else outside the executive branch had Georgia’s ear and was whispering sweet nothings.

A long overdue piece in the Washington Post suggesting that Georgia’s president, Saakashvili, is not really that awesome. Readers of The Belgravia Dispatch will note themes that Gregory Djerejian was onto days ago. Elsewhere the isolationist, Pat Buchanan, puts the lashes to the neo-cons and gets in a few more licks on Saakisvili:

American charges of Russian aggression ring hollow. Georgia started this fight — Russia finished it. People who start wars don’t get to decide how and when they end.

Russia’s response was “disproportionate” and “brutal,” wailed Bush.

True. But did we not authorize Israel to bomb Lebanon for 35 days in response to a border skirmish where several Israel soldiers were killed and two captured? Was that not many times more “disproportionate”?

Russia has invaded a sovereign country, railed Bush. But did not the United States bomb Serbia for 78 days and invade to force it to surrender a province, Kosovo, to which Serbia had a far greater historic claim than Georgia had to Abkhazia or South Ossetia, both of which prefer Moscow to Tbilisi?

Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing?