The Russians have invaded Georgia! Aunt Pittypat has refugeed to Macon and Rhett and Scarlett are loading Miss Melly into the buckboard as a wave of clanking T-34s lead lines of screaming infantry forward across the landscape. The scream of Stalin Organs and the earthquake-rumble of massed artillery echoes through the peach orchards. Have they gotten to Atlanta or Savannah yet? Well, no, they've gotten as far as Abkhazia and South Ossetia...wait a second, I can't find those places in my 'Georgia' triple A travel guide. What? Oh, that Georgia! Who cares about that Georgia? What's it got to do with me?
The answer is PLENTY! Why are the retread KGB agents running Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Putin engaged in a piece of bloody and vicious aggression against it's tiny neighbor?
It's not like they want a few million more angry Muslims to plant bombs in apartment buildings and movie theaters. Georgia isn't exactly a juicy plum holding out the prospect of rich loot and economic advantage so what's the deal?
The oil price has dropped. For dictators like Putin, Ahmadinejad, and Chavez that's really bad news. They can't compete with the advanced economies when it comes to producing heavy machinery or computer systems, they can't compete with and are even dependent on food grown by the three agri-business giants (The US, Canada, and Australia), they can't compete with Asia and especially China when it comes to consumer goods production and exporting; their moribund economies rise and fall in the price of one commodity, OIL! In the last couple of weeks the price of that commodity has fallen precipitously from $148 a barrel to around $116, with speculators still selling short and analysts talking about $60-80 being the support level.
Do you expect thugs like Putin to sit around and just let that happen while the economies of their countries sag like one of Obama's underinflated tires? Not in this universe. All of a sudden Russian airplanes are bombing civilians and Russian tanks are pouring across the border in an area which is crossed by a pipeline that carries 1% of the total world production of oil. Russian planes bombed the pipeline but 'missed'. In the age of JDAMs its impossible to imagine a relatively modern air force attacking an undefended target that they had plenty of time to assess and missing it completely. This isn't the Zimbabwean Air Force here. The Russians have had plenty of practice bombing apartment buildings in Chechnya to get any problems with their aiming technology worked out.
It's obvious what's going on. This is a blatant attempt to raise oil prices. It will work, too; just like the provocative actions by the Iranians in the Gulf raised the spot market price every time it started to slide. The Iranians are a bit inhibited because they don't want to provoke the cowardly democracies into pressing for a strike against their nuclear facilities so its the Russkies' turn. And when it gets right down to it, what do they have to lose? Nobody's going to do anything. Europe gets most of it's natural gas from Russia. Russia provides millions of barrels of oil to the world market every day. Their production has sagged since they expropriated the privately owned and foreign companies but they are still a major player.
The Demo-Obama solution, of course, is diplomacy. They think that talking to this bloodthirsty dictator, who has a veto in the UN, is going to make him betray the economic and political interests of his country. 'Persuasion is the tactic of the weak, but the weak are rarely persuasive,' said Gibbon in the ultimate refutation of the Power diplomacy of the degenerate socialists.
What would constitute strength in this case. Beyond a bit of sword-rattling it might be instructive to these dictators to know that the United States had just gone into high gear looking for oil and building nuclear power plants. A superpower that was exploiting it's vast energy sources would be a threat to the high prices these creeps have become hooked on and would have leverage in any negotiations that took place. With Putin and the boys threatening Georgia and the Ukraine the result of not stopping them now will create a monster that will certainly threaten the weak, degenerate, unarmed bunnies in the aging states of Europe. Our inability to act will compromise all sources of oil from the Eastern hemisphere; another pressing reason to start drilling NOW!
I've been hanging out at these supposedly right-wing blog sites where the policies of the Democrats are regularly castigated as unAmerican and serving to weaken our country. In many ways the people who are saying those things are right. But it's now becoming increasingly clear that every day, every hour, every minute we delay trying to become as petroleum-independent as we can threatens our national existence. The anti-drilling policies of the Democratic party have now become a threat to that continued existence. These tiny incidents are just a harbinger of the final showdown, the day the oil stops flowing. If we haven't done anything to stop this trainwreck from happening in the next few years we are going to be overwhelmed by a disaster unprecedented in our history.

Jan 20, 2009. The New Age dawns, the Ancien Regime departs. The Obamessiah arrives, surfing the wave of national enthusiasm which gave him a forty-three state victory, a sixty two Senate seat Democratic caucus, and an eighty vote majority in Congress. America's four hundred year journey to justice has arrived at its goal. The Left's century of agitation, propaganda and gutter politics has at last triumphed. Che Guevara told a group of young radicals in the 1960s that they lived "in the belly of the Beast". Now the Beast has been overwhelmed. The world can like us again. Now that the New Era Of Friendship has arrived we can take all that money we were wasting on overseas alliances and bring it home to make life better for the people of these 58 states, who have oppressed others for so long and to such evil purpose.
And in the Middle East they are dancing in the streets! Under the newly-expressed Farrakhan Doctrine President Obama has given a six-month timetable for the total withdrawal of all US forces west of Honolulu, south of Puerto Rico and east of Maine. Even that territory will be difficult for the twelve-ship US Navy to cover.
But some in the Middle East arent dancing. Israel is emptying like a leaking balloon as the New Age Trojans flee their executioners. As the last Jews depart to their refugee camps on Cyprus and Crete a long bloody war begins between Hamas and Hezbollah for control of the ruins of the former Zionist Entity. The departing Israeli Secret Service, as a present to the world which has betrayed them yet again, has left a few stray nukes laying around for these terrorists to find in the hope that they will end up exterminating each other. They do.
The people who supported us in Iraq wont be dancing very hard, either. The Kurds will be trapped between their traditional enemies the Turks and the Iranians with nowhere to run.
As the Iranians move in for the kill in a now defenseless Iraq the Sunni tribes will tremble with fear.
Other Sunni's will have reason to worry. The corrupt and depraved Saudi Royal family will be murdered like dogs in their ultra-modern palaces by savage radical Islamo-fascists eager to erase this un-Islamic luxury. Insane mobs will destroy and loot the shopping malls chanting suras from the Koran as they sack Victoria's Secret. Whorehouses like Abu Dhabi will be pillaged and turned into smoldering wreckage and the inhabitants driven into the burning desert to perish from thirst.
Egypt, Pakistan and Morocco will have some trouble getting into the jolly dance mode as heavily-subsidized US food imports stop. After all, with no more interest in the Middle East what rationale is there for food aid to people halfway around the world? Also, skyrocketing oil prices, due to the increasing chaos and piracy in the Persian Gulf and administrative incompetence by the radicals who have taken over and almost completely shut off oil exports will make things like food aid prohibitively expensive. What would the population of Egypt be without food imports? Half? One quarter? In the old days it was ten million instead of the seventy million it is today.
Iran, already driven to poverty and economic stagnation by its oppressive government will finally succumb to chaos as high food prices and the cessation of gasoline imports push the angry population over the edge. In the end the Indian-Chinese moves to restore order and take charge of the energy supplies will grab the oilfields and leave the rest of the country to dissolve into anarchy and poverty.
A giant food deficit appears all over the world. The largest exporters (The US and Canada) no longer export because of bio-fuel production and disastrous socialist farm policies enacted to prevent Global Warming. Chaotic energy prices and distribution have crippled the transportation systems of the countries who still produce their own food but NO country in the Middle East even comes close to producing what their populations require. From the Indus river to Mauritania a giant, anarchic, corpse-filled, Somalia-like wasteland emerges with a few well-fortified cities surviving and the oil lands split between the Chinese and the Indians, who move into the power vacuum created by the US disappearance from the scene and seize the vital oil fields after brushing the few remaining aborigines back to their primitive Bedouin existences in the desert. Islam will, in fifty years be the religion of a few wandering nomads in the deserts of the Middle East and in the freezing ruins of what was once called 'Europe'.