A Second Hand Conjecture

Filipino writer Benjamin Pimentel is surprised to discover that his countrymen were among the very few foreign populations to prefer John McCain to Barack Obama in a Gallup international survey. A happy place for Republicans in a lonely world apparently, as in the Philippines the outgoing Bush administration enjoys a 66% approval (more than twice its abysmally low domestic support).

Pimentel then speculated somewhat interestingly that had the Philippines ever applied for US statehood or multi-statehood (the most recent proposals call for the country to be broken into three states: Luzón, Visayas, and Mindanao), McCain would handily win the general election. The Philippines 91 million plus population would easily dwarf the combined advantage of Democratic California and New York in the electoral college.

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A couple of days into Russian-declared, universally unrecognized independence (excluding Hamas and Belarus), South Ossetian officials have expressed their desire to be annexed by Russia. The brave new defenders of Russian imperialism on the American Left have thus suddenly found their arguments for fake Ossetian self-determination on Georgian soil dealt a sudden blow.

Apologizing for Russian foreign policy ventures is historically always a tricky business. The sensibility of which is perhaps now restricted to the brief thaw of Yeltsin’s dream of a benign commonwealth of trade and friendship. A dream now sustaining an excruciatingly painful death on the world stage.

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Joshua hasn’t disappeared, he just isn’t gracing us with his opinions on the conflict in the Caucasus, but you can find them at Registan.net, here and here.

Heh, Insty links to him, but describes it as peevish (Josh? Peevish? Also, by linking to him kind of undercuts Josh’s complaint.) Great surprise, but Joshua makes a few good points about Russia having pushed the action using mischief in Ossetia to set off Georgia.

Outside of being unfairly peevish about people searching for information, and providing some links of use (as has Lee) I would caution Josh on this:

the plain old wrong (Russia wants to annex Georgia)

Maybe not, but I am not so sure given the behavior of Russia since Josh wrote his last post on this.

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