Yes, Virginia, it is all about oil
The president marched his men up the hill and down again and over the border and into a god-awful mess. The horrors of the resulting war have been well documented. The brutality of the invading soldiers is outdone only by the cruelty of the local "insurgents" as the terrorists are sometimes called by the sympathetic press. When it comes to slaughtering men, women and children, they show no mercy. In fact, they seem to relish the prospect of dying for Allah and taking as many innocents with them as they can slay.
The president we're talking about is George W... Right? Wrong? Actually, it's Vladimir Putin and he's had a grand old time of it in Germany these past two days. Putin doesn't tolerate cameras in Chechnya and he doesn't hold with a free press at home and he is busy divvying up the economy amongst his cronies, but no one in Berlin is too troubled by that. The thing is, Putin's got oil and that means it's perfectly okay to put out the red carpet for him. The German "street", famous for its ability to rouse itself on behalf of all those under the yoke of American imperialism, has taken to its collective bed since Monday. But don't worry, the Man is coming in February and you can bet the last of your declining dollars that he'll be greeted by the usual suspects, en masse. See, he's much, much worse that the freshly-embraced Putin and the recently-embraced Chinese dictators because he doesn't have any oil to offer and, what's worse, he uses the stuff in a way that does not please the environmental sensitivities of those who do so well by selling him all those expensive Mercs, BMWs and Porsches.
Rather tart, this bit from the BBC: "Mr Putin is one of the few world leaders who can chat with Mr Schroeder in fluent German. But for critics this is another reason to distrust him. He picked up his German as a KGB spy based in Leipzig." On Sunday, the long-suffering people of the Ukraine will have the opportunity to elect a leader who is determined to free them from Putin's clammy grip.
