Yesterday morning's "Russia is not going to attack" post has not caught fire. :(
The analogies are coming...like a tsunami. We've gone back, back, back, back, back. The Cold War analogy is so, like, yesterday; today we've gone back to 1938 and...1914! Holy Molio. Today was Hitler Day. Roger Cohen (New York Times guy), Hillary Clinton, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, John McCain--all mentioned Hits in the same breath with Poot-poot. There is an analogy to be made there, both used the will of an ethnic minority to...invade...See, that's the problem with analogies; for the sake of this post, I will concede that Putin has invaded Ukrainian Crimea, but you can argue he hasn't! but that's as far as that analogy will take us. So far! Hitler, like, conquered and annexed the Sudetenland on that pretext. Putin has said (I know, he's Russian) he has no such intent. I believe him (I know, I'm an idiot blogger.). However that may be, it is a fact that Putin has not conquered, annexed, and "liberated" the long-suffering ethnic Rooskis in Ukrainian Crimea. "Yet!," say the statesmen...and woman! above. Right. So...what should we do statespeople? If we continue with your analogy, we should use military power to thwart Poot-poot or else we'll all be Neville Chamberlains! Not one of the states proposes that-there military thing. Ha-ha! Five Amigos, you're Neville Chamberlains, ha-ha. They are such cockroaches.
But, hell, analogies are fun and they're the play of the day, let's play. I have one. A dictator of a totalitarian country meets with a new, young leader of a democracy and sizes up the democrat as callow and weak. Both the dictator and the democrat know the former bullied and beat the latter at the meeting. A year later the dictator tries to pull a fast one in another country right under the nose of snot-nose. Snot-nose...reacts, he later admits that the dictator's fast one, if successful, would not have altered the strategic balance of power between the dictatorship and the democracy, but would have continued the tip in the political balance of power between the two men that began at the meeting when snot-nose became bloody-nose. The two countries almost ("about a one in three chance," Snot-nose was to say later) went to war over a bloody nose!
The year was 1962. The dictator/bully was Nikita Khrushchev, the democrat/snot-cum-bloody nose was John F. Kennedy. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the world came within a one-in-three chance of going up in a nuclear fireball. Careful with that stuff, you can burn your hands.
