Georgia, the whole day through ...

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PUTIN (old-european) ~ a thug, or gangster. Also the masculinised form of puta meaning whore, therefore a pimp, male prostitute or any testosterone-fuelled, hyper-nationalistic, neo-fascist narcissus. Also used to denote a cheap bully-boy drunk on dreams of Tsarist imperial grandeur, or 200 pounds of snot in a shiny suit.

.oOo.

With breath-taking cynicism Prime Minister/President/Grand High Poobah of the Russian Imperialist Federation of Opportunist Stalin-Worshipping Knee-Benders, Lick-Spittles and Bully-Pulpit Fascists has rushed back from an intense burst of world-stage strutting and smile-free peacockery at the Beijing Imperial Smog-Fest to personally lead the insane military adventure of his dreams. It’s one glorious holiday to the next, really, for the man who regards Russia as merely the footstool for his personal world prominence in the type of foul-smelling, toga-clad, orgiastic self-adoration not seen since the glory days of Hermann Goering.

His Excrescence V.I. ‘Just call me Vlad’ Putin, noted for his complete lack of irony and smile-free frozen face, totally serious in the way that mass murderers so often are, could barely sit through the opening ceremony in Beijing’s Rat’s Nest Stadium, so keen was he to spring into action, leap into a helicopter and rush off to the totally unexpected crisis. Which was timed to perfection to merge seamlessly with the Beijing festivities, an orgy of Sino-self-congratulation worthy of his own planet-sized ego.

High point of the interminable Olympic frenzy was not so much the Long March of the US Olympic Team as the beautiful goose-stepping of the Peoples Liberation Army’s crack robo-thugs, a detail of the vast, overblown farce last seen in Berlin’s Sportspalast in 1936. It’s the little things that say so much. One in particular being Australia’s own sports-cast-dwarf Bruce Macavaney, who’s comment: “They’re comfy shoes.” was a journalistic gem that‘ll not be bettered at these games I’ll wager. But I digress.

Yes, the Imperial Soviet trouser crawlers at the Kremlin timed the first air-strikes on Georgia to coincide perfectly with the exploding giants footprint fireworks over Beijing, like the leaden feet of Mao’s ghost, one too many Banquo’s at the banquet. Russia’s much fabled democracy, which has all the glorious unwashed stench of Rasputin, hides the hard truth that Stalinist authoritarian brutalism, with it’s attendant demons of place-seeking apparatchiks, knife-in-the-back careerist swine, and murderous, heavy-weaponed mass-grave making is still at the heart of Russia’s politics.

How lucky for the Georgians that they live close enough to be invaded first hand, rather than having to watch from a distance like the rest of us. They get tanks by the hundred and soldiers by the thousand poised on their borders, we get to see George ‘What the hell’s a Tiblisi doin’ in Georgia?’ Bush mouth empty-headed platitudes.

We get to see the fireworks in Beijing, the Georgians get Russian jets bombing their capital and strafing their highways. So much more colourful, and with so much more audience participation in a mass-casualties, houses burnt to the ground, mothers, fathers and kiddies lying dead in the streets fun-for-all jamboree.

What vile, slimy, cynical filth Prime Minister Putin is.

What a monstrous, puffed up confection of spittle, spite and second-hand shite.

Not content with continually having journalists murdered at will, notably even abroad with radioactive isotopes, or with having bent Russia’s constitution into a moebius strip that lets him run the joint from any position including swinging from the chandeliers in the Winter Palace.

Not even with having laid claim to the North Pole, nor even with giving away the country’s wealth to a bunch of handpicked servile toadies ruled with a whim of iron, he now demonstrates his total contempt for the rest of the world by farting katyusha rockets into a neighbouring country from the front row of the Beijing Olympic Glorious-Peoples Tienanmin Yum-Cha Knees-Up surrounded by the cream of the world’s leaders.

I mean, Mugabe they kept out, but him they let in? Is it a black thing, we wonder? It certainly can’t be on moral grounds. No, hang on, it comes to me know.. Mugabe rogered the economy to the point at which money became worthless..

In Putinland we can all make money. As long as we let him kill people: Russian journalists, Russians who step out of line or get in the way of money-making, or people we don’t give a toss about in Georgia. The list goes on, and on, and you’ll be on it soon enough.

Trust me, the nasty little man with the cardboard wife and nylon hair may look like just another Russian autocrat with boots deep enough to wade in blood to you, but his ego is big enough to get to us all eventually. And waiting for the next Slavic politi-git to come along and knock him off may take longer than you think. Good ol’Boris Yeltsin was so permanently drunk he was finished the minute his liver staged a coup on his last three remaining brain cells. Putin is different. Putin is sober. Putin believes in himself, and he has an army with a huge inferiority complex after they lost the Cold War to rust and bankruptcy. They need to feel adequate. They need to kill people, win a war of two, just like the Americans.

He has also discovered that no-one in the West is likely to do anything about it. You can thank George Dubya Loser for that. Having squandered his nations money, integrity, political capital and eligible youth in Iraq he has nothing left but a shit-eating grin and the intelligence and firm grip on reality of a toothless spaniel with Alzheimers. And he’s all we have.

What about the world’s press? On CNN Wolf Blitzer (that’s gotta be a joke name, I mean, really) has the Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, on live, by satellite, in front of a map pointing out where the Russian army is, where the hundreds of tanks are, where the highways are under air attack. The man is talking to a Nation’s leader as the rockets are flying and the capital’s airport is being cratered.

So what does he do? He goes for the hard-man interview technique, putting the tough questions. Only he can’t get any of the actual regions he’s talking about right. He demands that Georgia withdraw their troops from Abkhazia. President Saakashvili is bemused. There are no Georgian troops in Abkhazia, only Russian troops on the border waiting to invade. Wolf’s confused it with Ossetia. Then he takes the propagandist gibberish spouted by the Russian Foreign Ministry and fires it off straight at the man sitting in front of a map of his country pointing out where bits of it are exploding, or on fire, or … well, you get the picture:

“Extra! Extra! Journalist with inflated sense of self-importance sticks both feet down throat! Gets bronze medal for irony in Beijing! New personal best for rhythmic bombastics!”

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