Chicago Tribune:

When the Bush administration dispatched two U.S. warships to the Black Sea to deliver humanitarian aid to war-stricken Georgia, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reacted with indignation and a warning.”There will be an answer,” Putin said during a visit to Uzbekistan.

Asked to elaborate, he replied, “You’ll see.”This month, the Kremlin has made it clear what Putin meant. It deployed two Russian strategic bombers to Venezuela to patrol Caribbean waters earlier this month, and on Monday it dispatched a navy squadron to Venezuela for military exercises.

The appearance of the Tu-160 bombers and the expected arrival of four Russian warships in a Latin American country run by one of the Bush administration’s most outspoken foes, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, marks Moscow’s clearest signal yet that it intends to ramp up its influence in Latin America if Washington persists in setting root in territory the Kremlin regards as its backyard.

“It may look unfriendly to Americans, but now you can have the same feeling as we had in Russia,” said Andrei Klimov, a Putin loyalist and deputy chairman of the foreign affairs committee for the Duma, Russia’s lower chamber of parliament.

My comment: We are involved in a major financial mess. We are overextended militarily in two never ending wars, we import 70% of our daily oil usage, and we need to beg for $2 billion per day just to cover our current account deficit. What possible profit can come from instigating trouble with the Russians. We should be cultivating a long term relationship with the largest oil exporter in the world instead of alienating them. And people ask me why have the audacity to call politicians morons and fools. Russia had no interest in the western hemisphere until we start sending Coast Guard cutters to the western Black Sea. The sooner the Bush administration leaves office the better it will be for all the world.

John Polomny
The Real Deal