Look to Bush and Iraq, Not Obama and Syria, If You Think the U.S. Has Lost Influence in the World

Look to Bush and Iraq, Not Obama and Syria, If You Think the U.S. Has Lost Influence in the World:
The Rude Pundit woke up this morning, still trying to figure out what Matthew McConaughey's koans on the Oscars meant. He realized that, like every good practitioner of bloggery, like every so-called pundit on every so-called news show on every so-called news network, he was required to say something about Russia's invasion of the Crimea part of the Ukraine. "Well, fuck me," the Rude Pundit thought, "what the fuck do I know?" In general, sure, he thinks it's a bad idea to invade other countries just because you don't like how they're lookin' at you.

So he did a bunch of readin', lookin' shit up, learnin', checkin' out what people had to say about the situation, what they thought about President Obama's reaction, what the hell the whole thing's about. And, after an hour or so, the Rude Pundit sat back with his mug of coffee and thought, "I know enough to say some stupid shit that will make it sound like I know what the fuck I'm talkin' about." But he'd be lying if he pretended to understand much beyond "it's a bad idea to invade other countries..." He's no scholar of the 600 years of history behind the conflict between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. He knows that his Russian students hate it when someone thinks they're Ukrainian and vice-versa.

The best things he read, to his mind, found the whole situation more or less a clusterfuck of ego, economic empire building, and nose-thumbing. Otherwise, the Rude Pundit concluded that he would be a fool to think that he had anything useful to say about any of it. Except this:

One consistent theme throughout the coverage of Ukrainegate (why not?) is that President Barack Obama is a big, wet pussy getting roughly fucked by the manly man Vladimir Putin. Obama drew a red line over Syria that he had to back down from, they say, because Putin stepped in to help get rid of Syria's chemical weapons, so Russia felt free to ignore Obama's red line on the Ukraine last week. Obama is naive or inexperienced or dumb or incompetent or some combination of those, others bitch. "Weak" and "indecisive," as Senator Lindsey Graham said, essentially repeating what he tells the young South Carolina twinks he picks up who are unsure if they wanna fuck an old man's ass.

There's one thing the Rude Pundit knows for sure about President Obama. He never came out of a meeting with Vladimir Putin and said, "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul." That is what the last president of the United States, one George W. Bush, said in June 2001 at a press conference with the ex-KGB spy standing next to him. Democrats criticized Bush at the time (as did some conservatives), but they didn't go bugnuts condemning him as a throbbing vagina. They just thought it was weird. And anyone could see that Putin was conning the rube. As Joe Biden said then, "I don't trust Putin; hopefully the president was being stylistic rather than substantive." But what does Biden know?

The other thing that the Rude Pundit knows is that President Bush started a war in Iraq by lying not just to the American people, but to the leaders of nations around the world about weapons of mass destruction. Remember the "Coalition of the Willing," the countries that were led by credulous fools or easily cowed wimps or the bribe-able who agreed to help in some way with the completely worthless attack on a sovereign nation? This ain't "Blame Bush" only. It's geopolitical history, motherfuckers. The shame of it all is that the people who helped engineer our slow demise in world influence, like Graham and John McCain, are still allowed to act as if they know what's best for the nation.

Now, the Iraq War may seem a distant memory for most of us in America because we've got the attention span of a gerbil on meth. But the rest of the world might think the United States is full of shit and approach things a great deal more cautiously, even if it's Obama in the White House (who has got to be seen as failing on that whole Nobel Peace Prize legacy).

(By the way you know who opposed the Iraq War? Yeah, soul-eyed boy Vladimir Putin. He reamed out Bush repeatedly over it. No matter what the motivation behind the opposition was, who was right? Bush or Putin? The United States or Russia?)

Whatever happens in the Ukraine will be dictated primarily by how much of a power play Putin is after (or, you know, so the Rude Pundit thinks after his one-hour of research). Obama's limited in how he can respond, not only because we're not fuckin' going to war with Russia, but because the rest of the goddamn planet thinks we're a bunch of assholes who need to pay a goddamn price for dicking everyone over.