How I Learned to Stop Worrying

. . . and love lying in bed with a sports-bottle full of mango-pineapple juice.

Ace debates the merits of Rice's tough talk, toggling back and forth between concern about whether Rice has gone too far and high delight at the Russian accents on display. (I always suspected Ace of having a secret fondness for Eastern European dialects.)

He thinks the Administration is employing a "tripwire" strategy, among other things. That's probably right.

As for the idea that Rice is pushing the Russians too far, I don't know about that. There aren't a lot of Westerners in existence who know more about Russia/the Soviet Union than Condi Rice does. This is where she concentrated most of her academic study, and she speaks fluent Russian.

She's been playing catch-up for years in studying the Islamic threat: Soviet studies are her home turf.

Putin will blink. He has to.

As for AllahP's contention that sending Lieberman and Graham to the country of Georgia sounds "a sour note," I'm not sure. Certainly there's a cheap side to it, inasmuch as it links his campaign strongly to the Russian-Georgian crisis, which is a bit like putting the Hillary "3:00 a.m. in the White House" ad on a continuous loop in people's minds.

On the other hand, the idea of having Obama at the helm while there's a showdown of this magnitude going on scares me enough that cheap tricks bother me less than they otherwise might.

And in fact, the ploy might be justified in this regard: I think one of the reasons the Russians are feeling, um, empowered right now is that the U.S. is in the middle of a Presidential election, which makes the body politic over here a good deal more fractured and distracted than it usually is. (The other is that the Russians have plenty of oil, and we do not, because we prefer to keep our coastlines pretty, every square inch of Alaska pure and virginal, and the Gulf uninfected by oil wells. Even oil facilities we cannot see from our beaches—those located beyond the horizon on the Atlantic and the Pacific—bother us. Never mind if we cannot see them; we know that they are there. It's, like icky and stuff.)

Whereas if there's a nuclear war, lots of people will die, and the overpopulation problem will be solved. The entire species' carbon footprint will lessen considerably.

But a presence of some on the Armed Services Committee who coincidentally happen to be associated with John McCain may simply be a way of assuring the Russians that, if anything, the heat might turn up in several months, and that they may not want to do anything too stupid right now.

That is, it might be a good time for the Russians to glance at their watches, say "would you look at the time!" and mosey on back. Or at least to keep a lower profile and cut down on the trash-talkin'.