What more can the "sage" Putin teach us?

What a bad idea it was to get rid of the Czar, maybe? After all, look how that turned out, John McCain.

Phoning in from infinity and beyond somewhere from within his fortress of solitude in the verdant suburbs of St. Francisville, LA,



Rod Dreher turns a question from Ishaan Tharoor (formerly of Barsoom, now writing at the Washington Post) into a statement of fact:

Putin Told Us So

while with trademark Dreher fecklessness retaining Tharoor as his mouthpiece to avoid direct attribution.

So, what more can the "sage" Putin teach us? Well, for one thing, if you want the nicest spot for your Benedict Option in Ukraine or wherever, you should just take it. That's how a strong, pre-Enlightenment Slavic leader runs a masculine organization with a masculine church, right? Well, not directly, of course, no more than using your own words in a blog post. You need a cut-out, either a Tharoor from Barsoom or patriotic separatists you can arm with BUK surface-to-air missiles to make your point at 30,000 feet.

Or am I missing something from today's lesson?

Let's dig a little deeper.

Commenter Chris 1 writes  

According to Tharoor, this is exactly what Vladimir Putin warned about in his New York Times op-ed last September advising the West not to engage in airstrikes against Syria to help the rebels.

Did I miss something? When and where did the West engage in airstrikes to help the Syrian rebels?

Dreher responds:

[NFR: On September 10, 2013, Obama went on national television and said the United States would conduct a "military strike" against Syria to punish it for using chemical weapons. He got significant pushback from the public and from some in Congress over this, and stood down. Click the link and read the speech; Obama plainly wanted to bomb Syria, and asked the public to support him. -- RD]

I think I see now. Obama wanted to draw a red line in the sand as CINC, but then demurred and didn't, and now Putin has told us so about what would happen if he had, but actually didn't.

Even Rachel Maddow-loving commenter Jack Shifflett throws up in his mouth a little bit at Dreher's reflexive prevarication:

I’ll also note that President Obama, for whatever reason(s), did in fact call off last year’s proposed airstrikes, and that he has all along resisted arming the Syrian rebels; and yet here ISIS is anyway. I think the president made the right call–that is, he followed Mr. Putin’s (and Rachel Maddow’s) advice–but in what way did that make the slightest difference about this particular threat?

If you go back and read the entire Putin editorial in question, you’ll see that, as a paean to international law, it’s an astonishing exercise in hypocrisy and disingenuousness. I concede that even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then, but why are you so determined to laud this particular blind pig’s vision?

So, in the end, what was the correct decision?

Leaving the raising of the children almost entirely in the hands of Mrs. Dreher while Rod splits his time reading Dante, chasing the latest food morsel, and sleeping off the effects of Ambien, depression, fanboi worship of strong, masculine, dominating men, mono, or whatever this week's story happens to be, of course.