Jay Kersting's Blog

The situation in Georgia is getting worse.  Who is looking most Presidential here in the USA?  I'll give you a hint, not George W. Bush.  Not yet.

Not Barack Obama.  Acting way too passively.

So far, I have to give credit to John McCain.  Especially with his referencing of history.  Who heard of Sarajevo back on 27 June 1914?  Who heard of Pearl Harbor on 6 December 1941?  I could go on, but those examples show that the perspective McCain has on the significance, or potential significance, of these events is probably on the mark.  Add that to his continued concern over what Vladimir Putin is trying to do.  And the fears he has about this man.

South Ossetia is a place that I heard of, in passing.  I remember that Eduard Sheverdnadze canceling his visit to Los Angeles in 1992 (where he was to speak at my brother's college graduation from USC) due to civil unrest.  I thought, at the time, this was due to the riots in Los Angeles following the Rodney King cop trial.  I was wrong, it was due to unrest in the newly independent Republic of Georgia.  And that unrest dated back to 1989.  And an elected predecessor of Sheverdnadze was killed in a bloody coup d'etat shortly after gaining independence from the Soviet Union.

Say what you will about Vlad Putin, he is not stupid.  Very calculating, to say the least.  The world was distracted with the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games.  Including the aforementioned George W. Bush.  (To be fair, we do not know what he was doing that we did not see.  Appearances, like during Katrina, were poor.)  We know that Putin had been planning the attack and invasion of Georgia for sometime.  Putin was using the media, which he controls, to ratchet up support for his attack.  Russians believe that the Georgians were committing genocide in South Ossetia.

Here is where is may get complicated and how the United States has some obligation here.  In 2005, President Bush assured the Georgians, when speaking in Tblisi AND having a hand grenade thrown at him, that the United States would stand beside the Georgians.  

Overnight, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had the troops stop their advances.  What will happen next?  Good question that I can only answer with another question.  Does Vlad Putin want to go down in history along side other names from the last 200 years like Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin?  Right now, he has yet to hit the level of Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe. 

Will he be held there?  Or will be he be the Devil who went down to Georgia?

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Something a little lighter for your enjoyment.  Amazing what you can do with a lot of time on your hands. Good thing that it only takes a minute and a half to watch it.

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Mark Spitz got snubbed. 

I think he should be in Beijing to support Michael Phelps.  He has said repeatedly that he supports Phelps in his quest to break his 36 year old record of seven gold medals in a single Olympic Games. 

How cool would it be to have Spitz present the seventh or eighth gold medal to Phelps?

Won't happen.  Too bad.

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I had a much better entry written earlier....but the software crashed AS I was saving it.  So, this is the second and inferior run.  Sorry. 

Have a GREAT Tuesday.