Russia’s Putin Says Skirmish in Georgia Devised by Bush to Benefit McCain

OhioNewsBureau Opinion Editorial

COLUMBUS, OHIO: Is the story run by the BBC Thursday about Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s speculation that the shooting conflict in Georgia is part of the grand plan of President Bush and his strategists to benefit Republican presidential nominee John S. McCain this fall by creating an international security incident that favors his candidate over Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama a response designed to deflect criticism about why the Russian military did what it did, or is Mr. Putin conveying a message that few if any members of the American mainstream media will look into, for fear that Bush, who is still Commander-in-Chief until Inauguration Day next January, will do anything, including starting another war, to keep McCain in control of the White House and the many secrets it holds that can explain the history of the last eight years?

Putin told CNN that he thinks the US “orchestrated the conflict in Georgia, possibly for domestic election purposes,” according to the BBC, which reported Russian defense officials saying they spotted US citizens in the area and concluded they were “taking direct orders from their leaders.” Putin said the “American side in effect armed and trained the Georgian army” because it was easier to start a shooting conflict in the hopes of killing the other side than doing the hard legwork of finding a compromise solution.

Russia’s prime minister, who worked his way through the Russian KGB, the communist equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency, before he was elected president in 1990 following the emergence of Western-style elections, said the “suspicion arises that someone in the United States especially created this conflict with the aim of making the situation more tense and creating a competitive advantage for one of the candidates (presumably Mr. McCain) fighting for the post of US president.”

White House spokesman quoted by the BBC dismissed the Russian allegations as patently false, saying, “To suggest that the United States orchestrated this on behalf of a political candidate - it sounds not rational." Dana Perino, President Bush’s chief White House spokesman, added, “Those claims first and foremost are patently false, but it also sounds like his defense officials who said they believed this to be true are giving him really bad advice."

But as we now know, numerous Bush campaign operatives from Karl Rove, Bush White House political adviser who devised various strategies to conquer and divide that won Mr. Bush two terms as Governor of Texas and two terms as US president, to other like-minded, battle-tested and hardened political operatives (like Steve Schmidt, a graduate of Rove University who is now McCain's senior campaign adviser) collaborated to develop the political attack strategy of turning an opponent’s strength into his weakness are now whacking for Mr. McCain, hoping to maintain control of the executive branch to avoid any efforts by Congressional or other agencies to shine a light on the work they’ve done of the past eight years involving the real reasons for invading Iraq, pursuing illegal wire taps, the torturing of innocents who are deemed enemy combatants despite little or no proof to indefinitely detain them and information related to claims that the executive branch can do anything the president directs it to do, even if that is in violation of the US Constitution or international laws or treaties.

The incentive to continue to control the White House by creating an incident between now and Election Day in early November that will make security and defense a commanding issue, one voters say Mr. McCain is better suited to deal with than his young, untested opponent who has no military record to point to, is great indeed. Knowing the investment over eight or more years Republicans, directed by Rove and graduates of his school of smear and fear, have made to destabilize opponents by creating false bogeymen that only their candidates can vanquish, it should not be out of the realm of possibility that Mr. Bush will contrive a way to foment incidents that play to Mr. McCain’s strengths as someone “tough enough” to stand up to our enemies like Iran or now Russia.

Even though Mr. Rove, Harriet Miers, a Bush loyalist and White House counsel who was nominated to fill a seat on the US Supreme Court but who withdrew before her hearings started and William Kelley, deputy White House counsel have eluded for the time being complying with Congressional subpoenas to testify based on their claim that executive privilege trumps the subpoena powers of Congress, it should be understood that for them to continue to operate in the shadows, control of the White House and the US Justice Department are absolutely essential. And as such, there is no strategy to wild or bizarre or unconstitutional to use to turn the tide for Mr. McCain, whose campaign is now as full of Bush loyalists as Black Beard’s pirate ship was full of thieves, scoundrels and fugitives from the law.

The evidence pointing to Mr. Rove’s clandestine involvement in the political imprisonment of a former Democratic Governor of Alabama to his furtive role in the politicization of the US Justice Department, as revealed by Monica Goodling’s testimony before Congress last year, is substantial and makes speculation that the Bush administration, in collaboration with the vast matrix of Republican-spawned ideological hit squads, will stop at nothing to keep the White House under Republican control and keep the power of executive privilege alive and well.

In the wake of the short but hot war in Georgia, came the announcement that the US and Poland reached agreement on placing anti-ballistic missiles in Poland, a move that has riled up Putin and Russian leaders, who see the placement of missiles so close to their border as a modern day replay of Nakita Khrushchev placing nuclear-tipped missiles on Cuban soil, a short 90 miles from US territory. The juicy irony here is that the US is playing the role of the former Soviet Union under Khrushchev, with Poland being Russia’s Cuba and Russia, the equivalent of the US, as concerned now about the situation as the US was in the 1960s standoff that ended with US naval ships blockading Cuba. Nuclear war was avoided when Khrushchev backed off and the US withdrew missiles placed within a short trajectory of Moscow.

This agreement also seems, in large part, a payoff to Poland for agreeing to host secret US torture facilities, where suspects of terrorism were renditioned to for harsh treatment.

So while American media news sources won’t delve into the story behind this story for fear that it will lead them to ask follow up questions of Mr. McCain and Mr. Bush and the Republican superstructure that they don’t want to have to answer in any manner other than to claim it’s unimaginable to think they would do such a political stunt to win an election, those questions need to be asked nonetheless, just so the American electorate is woken up to the reality that such cavalier decisions, made for purely partisan political reasons, are not out of bounds given the history of Mr. Rove and his acolytes to do whatever is necessary to maintain control of the executive branch, and its power to appoint judges.

Is it beyond Bush to make such a move? Given he's been able to start two wars and violate the US Constitution and international laws and treaties with impugnity, knowing the Democratic-controlled Congress has no stomach for pursuing impeachment despite the blatant misuse of his powers as president, who would hold him accountable, and by what means? As the mainstream media revels in its prognosticating capabilities, despite its track record of being pretty much wrong on all its previous predictions of what would happen during the the primaries, and millionaire cable-news pundits who obsess over fabricating issues that only it raises and finds interesting, like its fascination with a candiate's "authenticity" or their "likability" or "inevitability" or other contrived, divisive talking points that fan the flames of confrontation and play into each party's skewed definition of the other candidate, which are not the important issues confronting voters who more than not find themselves fearful of lossing their job, house, access to health care or loved one fighting in a foreign lands, is it too much to ask of them to indulge in banter about whether Bush is so ideologically driven that he and his cohorts would sacrifice our nation's resources and the lives of its soldiers to create an international incident weeks before the election? Such an incident would showcase Mr. McCain's warrior features, such that voters would become so fearful that Mr. Obama, whose waring credentials are non existent compared to those of his Hanoi Hilton opponent, that they would default to voting for McCain as the person they want in the White House to safeguard them from the fear that only he can deliver the US from the designs of terrorists and others like Putin who have clearly shown they no longer fear the policeman of the world? 

Since they engage 24/7 is other silly or useless banter, maybe they spend a little time discussing this harebrained hypothesis, too.  

Discuss this article.

John Michael Spinelli is a former Ohio Statehouse government and political reporter and business columnist. He now serves as the OhioNews Bureau Chief for ePluribus Media Journal. Find ONB archives here.
Photo credits: (c) 2008 AnHarris, istockphoto

To send a tip or story idea to this correspon