Vladimir Putin is a bad dude. He is "bad" in a sense that romantacists like the Neo-Cons (stress on the "Con") cannot understand. He is bad in a way which is not necessarily good, but which is necessarily necessary. Putin is the leader of one of the world's great nations and, for better or for worse, he acts accordingly.
It has been fascinating to witness Russia's incursion into Georgia, but it has been far more interesting to study the responses from America's public "intellectuals", which have been disconcertingly colored by reductionist drivel and pedantic doggerel that would make Puff Daddy blush.
As soon as Russian tanks moved into Georgia, the critical mass of American "journalists" colored it as an act of agression, and the right-wing"intelligent"-sia couched it, of course, as pure good versus pure evil.
"Conservatives", whose current foreign policy is far more romantic and interventionist and naive that the "Liberal" foreign policy of the 1960's, have insisted on treating the equivalent of an American intervention into Nicaragua, of which there have been many, as the fodder for apocolypse, as the precursor for Armagedeon.
The recent forum with Senators McCain and Obama also illustrated this dynamic, which has paralyzed our politics for my entire adult life. There are slivers of truths to all canards, and human history itself has been shifted on its axis due to to the sliver of truth in the assertion that "Liberals" refuse to acknowledge the distinction between right and wrong.
While Liberalism can occasionally drift into the amoral morass of moral relatvisim and situational ethics, this flaw is (hopefully) more than countered by Liberalism's utility in stressing "nuance", that insidious, slightly French, slightly faggy word that separates people from primates.
And while nuance is often employed to rationalize inexcusable behavior, it also serves to avoid disproporionate escalations by mediating and tempering the communication between adversaries.
By looking at Russia's actions in Georgia as holding some great moral weight, or representing some great moral test, the "Conservatives" are tying their feeble mare to a wagon that's without wheels.
The Conservatives' cling to Manichean truths is commendable to a certain extent; a society that is incapable of making any universal moral declarations is not worth maintaining. Certain transgressions such as rape, murder, or unprovoked war must be recognized as wholly illegitmate regardless of who commits the act in question.
What Russia has done in Georgia, however, is surprisingly sober and limited by any reasonable standard. Let us consider how America would react if Russia sold sophisticated weaponry to Mexico, sent military advisors to train the Mexican army, and offered a full and formal military alliance with Mexico. What would we do?
Well, in short, we would bomb the shit out of Mexico. Georgia is not some random bystander whom Russia crushed for its own sake. It is the birthplace of Stalin, it borders present-day Russia, and it is an open military ally of Russia's primary antagonist which, sad to say, is still the royal US, the U.S.
While Conservatives rail about the assault on the "peace-loving" people of Georgia, one has occassion to wonder what makes a people "peace-loving" other than a willingness to buy American weapons.
I have written often, but I fear insufficiently eloquently, about the debt that the world owes Russia. Russia peaceably surrendered the largest land empire in history to its constitutent peoples. The United States responded by treaching this great nation, this nuclear bomb-bristling collusus, this smasher of Hitlerism, as a conquered foe.
America rapidly expanded its military alliance, NATO, to the borders of Russia. Again, would we allow ANY foreign power anything remotely comparable to this in our backyard? Much of the "moral" outrage evinced by the Conservatives hinges on the unspoken but clearly implicit assertion that the United States has the right to treat Russia like....como se va?...like its bitch.
I am not particularly enamored of Mr. Putin, but he has not done anything in Georgia that sundry American governments have not done throughout Central America and the Carribean.
The trap into which the Conservatives consistently run headlong is their obsession with their own "morality". Since they justly and rightly cling fast to the idea that there ARE moral abolutes, which I agree with entirely, they fall prey to the fallacy that every situation must therefore have two sides: pure good and pure evil.
This blanket approach is rather childish, of course, and much more insipid than the liberal lionization of "nuance", for while the Conservatives rightly acknowledge the existence of good and evil, they show no indication that they understand the NATURE of their favored rhetorical paramours.
Good and evil exists within every nation and within every heart. There were good Germans once, and there are bad Georgians now. To project universal good or evil onto individual actors is naive in the extreme. Since motives are always mixed, only actions can be purely right or wrong.
Rape is purely wrong, even if the rapist is not purely evil (which he never is). If invading sovereign nations is purely wrong, as the Conservatives now hold, how is it that my peers were sent 6,000 miles to do just that in 2003?
I assume few of us were truly shocked by the recent revelations of the millworker son's scumbaggery, but it occurs to me that Mr. Edwards' indiscretions were even more pathological than Mr. Clinton's, and that his sins are analogous to our nation's conduct internationally.
Is it not beyond serious debate that hypocrisy makes sins worse than they would otherwise be? The one and only positive spin that can be put on Mr. Clinton's behavior is that it didn't genuinely shock anyone.
Before Mr. Clinton was elected president, we all knew who he was. More importantly, Bill Clinton never castigated or moralized or condemned or evangelized regarding the personal behavior of others; when presidential candidate Gary Hart was caught cheating on his wife, nobody saw Bill Clinton going out of his way to express shock and rage at such conduct.
But where was Mr. Edwards when Slick Willie was impeached and the Constitution and the office of the presidency were being degraded in a way that Monica never was, both by Mr. Clinton's behavior and the behavior of the Republican-controlled Congress?
Mr. Edwards was one of those smarmy, self-righteous, ruthlessly ambitious, and constitutionally contemptuous blowhards than lined up behind the mic, salivating as they waited to castigate the president for something that many of them were guilty of themselves.
The Congress spent more time debating the proper classifications of fellatio (is it sex? is "is" is?) and whispering about the alleged curvature of the president's penis than they did debating the merits (or utter lack thereof) of invading Iraq. And Mr. Edwards was on the front line of both fiascoes.
So, we have the hypocrisy aspect. We also have the fact that Mr. Edwards' wife has cancer, but that is a private matter that is out-of-bounds in my opinion, just as the Clintons' marriage should have been, and just as all consensual sex would ideally be in a serious country.
The most dismaying aspect, however, is the timing. This affair took place before Mr. Edwards began his run for the presidency. He knew that, were the affair to be exposed, it would be fatal to his ambitions. Nonetheless, he ran for president.
In any other year, John Edwards of 2007 would have been the nominee in 2008. Barack and Hillary overshadowed him, but imagine the reckless contempt of a man who would mount a serious bid for the presidency knowing full well he had a skeleton that wasn't even in his closet yet; it was still in his pants.
What if he had won the nomination? What if Hillary and Barack hadn't run? What if Edwards was the nominee and this story broke as it has? That is a hypothetical that Edwards must surely have realized, but which he narcissisticaly justified ignoring.
How to relate this to our nation's behavior on a macro level? Well, since hypocrisy makes sins worse, the United States has dug a hole for itself similar to that which Mr. Edwards has dug for himself.
When a man or a nation insists on judging others, and then engages in the same behavior that he has condemned, that man or nation has less moral legitimacy than the man or nation who openly admitted its flaws and acknowledged its detached and cold-hearted self-interest.
Georgia is a small, defenseless country in Russia's traditional sphere of infleuence, indeed, on its very border. Russia is bombing Georgia as I write, which would the moral equivalent of the United States bombing....Panama?....wait....Grenada?....shit....never mind.
If Premier Bush had it his way, Georgia would be in NATO, which would mean that the United States would now be at war with Russia, a nightmare whose aversion kept the Cold war cold but which Mr. Bush would have gladly visited upon the world for the "cause" of South Ossetia.
Thankfully, we do not have a tripwire alliance with Georgia, and all Mr. Bush can do is condemn the Russian attacks. But, regardless of the morality or wisdom of what Russia is doing, is there anyone left on Earth who can listen to Mr. Bush condemn a strong country for bombing a weak one and recognize his words as holding an ounce of political or moral legitimacy?
The words of the American president has no moral legitimacy because the office of the presidency has been used to endorse and execute the most cold-blooded, unilateral, often illegal actions any country could take (invasion of sovereign nations, violations of treaties, kidnapping, torture, blah, blah, blah).
All powerful countries behave this way; rules are for the weak and sins are judged not by their actual manifestation but by who commits them. But what makes us worse than other historical and contemporary powers is that we insist on moralizing endlessly and insipidly with our mouth even as we sin with our hands, as if the rest of the world could not focus on both simultaneously.
This being Olympic season, it is worth noting that China is the nation of the future. One of the most interesting strategies which has allowed for the unprecedented explosion of Chinese influence is China's foreign policy, which Mr. Bush is castigating in China during the Olympics
(I'm not particularly enamored of the Chinese government, but Mr. Bush's behavior is distasteful in the extreme; the Olympics is about the dignity of the Chinese nation and the Chinese people. The Olympics are meant to be the anti-politics.)
China's foreign policy is based solely upon open and honest self-interest and respect for the right of other governments to pursue the same. China does business with shady regimes, just as the United States does, but it does not endlessly pontificate on the relative morals and ethics of the rest of humanity.
If the John Edwards and the United States actually behaved as if they were different from Bill Clinton and China, I would take the former over the latter ten times out of nine. But they don't, and personally I prefer the flaws to the fairy tales.
