Putin envy

If you listen to Rudy Guiliani or Sarah Palin, you would trade our own Kenyan Muslim Socialist usurper for that Decisive Bear Wrestling Man of the People, Vladimir Putin.   While simultaneously slamming the President as an overbearing tyrant and a weak vacillator, the republicans let slip their secret desire for the strong decisive leader of foreign policy who will whisk us into another righteous war that these keyboard commandos can fight with other people's children's blood and sacrifice.  Do something, Mr. Obama is urged.  But of course, no matter what he does, he will be pilloried by the right wing.  Meanwhile, the naked aggression of the Russians looks more and more like the invasion of Iraq.  At least Putin has the fig leaf of real Russians who may or may not be worried by Ukrainian nationalists.  All the US had when we invaded Iraq was a cache of non-existent WMD.  So, there is very little moral authority behind any of our protestations against Putin.  These idiots on the right seem to recall a period when US military might and our democratic history combined to give us ultimate world authority.  That was probably true for a few years during and after WW2.  We quickly squandered whatever good will we had with a series of CIA sponsored coups around the world, culminating in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the quagmire of Vietnam.  The glory of the Marshall Plan devolved into the spread of an American Empire.  With this history behind us, Obama has very little wiggle room on Ukraine, Syria, Iran and many other intractable political problems around the world.  All of a sudden, avoiding another World War is the number one priority.  The yapping of the likes of Palin, Graham and McCain is mindless at best and mendacious and dangerous in an interdependent world which cannot afford to indulge in saber rattling fantasies.