Eh, Putin and Bush may be alike in one way.  Bush may actually care about this country (a smidgen, granted), but since he caters to the whim of his powerful friends/staff, that nixes any sort of good feelings he may have.

As for propaganda, as my husband and his uncle have put it many times before:  at least when they're screwing you in Russia, they let you know about it beforehand.  Here in the US, you just get handed lube and get told to hang on for the ride.

This week's spoilers and releases are reeeaaaallly slow. (

Remember, Iraq is not a natural state. Prior to British rule the entire Tigris and Euphrates valleys had never been unified, existing as either separate states, or separate provinces under foreign rule. The other three big states are largely homogeneous, minorities are largely foreign workers. In these countries ethnic strife is not as large an issue as in Iraq, not large enough to lead to a civil war. Iran has localized ethnic strife, but not to the same degree.

Call me a pessimist, but I don't think it's a problem that outsiders can fix. It needs to come from within – but I'm not sure there's room on the inside for that change to happen. All I know is, society has survived through intense violence and oppression before, and doubtless we'll muddle our way through this, too, once the nuclear fallout clears.

This week has been a fun discussion, but next week I vote we talk about puppies and fluffy kittens. And ice cream, definitely ice cream.

The Afghanis feel forgotten, their country exists only in Kabul, and even there the government is tenuous at best. Outside the city limits Afghanistan is slowly being reclaimed by the Taliban, and it has no effective army to protect itself. The forces we devoted to freeing Afghanistan after Sept. 11th (Back when we were actually chasing the guy who bombed us.) have been diverted to Iraq. Thus, the bad guy got away, and the cancer is still growing.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have gone to war in either case. (Although Afghanistan was certainly more justifiable than Iraq. Iraq was based on Administration lies – If they'd just said "Hey, let's go take out a dictator because he's an asshole", then maybe I'd have been cool with it.) It's just that if we had focused on one country and then the other, then maybe we'd have been able to build two relatively stable countries. As it is, Bush and his cronies chose to leave one job unfinished in order to rush into another war. Our armed forces cannot support themselves in two separate theaters, the strain has forced cost-cutting that leaves them without body armor, without armor for their vehicles, and with substandard field medical support equipment. The government's ill-planning has left two nations in chaos and has endangered the lives of noble young men and women to whom we owe better than hand-me-down Kevlar body armor.