Georgia shows ruskies don't change

Those in the foreign policy establishment that have naively believed that ex-KGB nabob Vladimir Putin had changed his spots, have led us down the primrose path once more. The hardline old Red has used his bombs and troops to club a neighbor into submission again, this time in Georgia.

Putin has been moving the post-Soviet government away from democracy and back toward its Marxist ways for some years, just as the foreign policy establishiment in the U.S. was pooh-poohing it. These are the same folks who naively believed that Putin taking the number two spot in the last election meant he'd actually be the number two. Ha.

With the media focused on the sanitizing of another hardline Communist regime, with the Olympics in Red China, Putin thought he could take the occasion to square away the democrats in Georgia, who, unlike Putin, were actually trying to run a democracy. Mostly likely, Putin has gotton away with it, with less damage in the court of world opinion than he would have suffered otherwise.

The point is, the temporizers and hand-wringers at Old Foggy Bottom (the U.S. State Department) were wrong about their new-found friend Putin, and the hardliners who thought very little had changed in Russia, were right.