Crimea River

Putin has put the moves on Crimea and it's his. All the blather about protecting Russian citizens is baloney, This was an “anschluss” right out of Hitler's playbook on Austria. I think every leader should get out his copy of “The Guns of August” and not go off half-cocked like the jingo Senator from Arizona or the blowhards on Fox News. Let Putin have his ego trip, the bills will come in soon enough. An interview with some old folks in Crimea said that they wanted to join Russia because “they had better pensions”. They also happen to be broke, so pony up Putin. There was a visual on the internet this week that showed how national borders changed in the past 1000 years. You've never seen such furious map-making. I've seen the Russian fleet mothballed in Vladivostok and it isn't pretty to see all that military waste in one place. It will surely come to Crimea in time and then what, “Russo-Disney”. Remember the playful plea from the Hitler in Mel Brooks' “The Producers”: “I want peace, peace...a little piece of Poland and a little piece of France!” Perchance?

Putin is poutin', Ukraine is floutin', everyone's shoutin'

Things are getting dicey in Ukraine or as Jimmy Fallon says, “maybe we should start calling it “Twokraine”. But what would you expect of a shirtless, narcissistic autocrat like Putin. He plays hardball and realpolitick and couldn't give a fig what Europe and the US think. Someone told Stalin that the Pope disapproved of his military exploits and Stalin said, with a sly smile: “how many divisions does the Pope have?” We get it. I've just finished a little book called “1913..the year before the storm” that's the storm called The Great War one hundred years ago. Everyone wonders how it started. It was mostly poor choices and the fact that the Kaiser and many others were delusional and had fantasies in their creative and let's stop listening to the jingo nonsense of John McCain who has Teddy Roosevelt's axiom backwards: “Speak loudly and carry a birch twig” It probably comes down to the only person Putin fears and listens to, his wife, the Russian recording star Dolly Putin.