No, you are not seeing things. That is really the then president of Russia Vladimir Putin lifting the shirt of a little boy in public, in broad daylight, and kissing his stomach. Note the reaction of the kid at the left. Just one of many head-scratching moments from Tsar Putin, and nothing compared to Georgia.
EDITORIAL
Vladimir Putin is Insane
In his defense, defeat this wide and deep, humiliation this brutal and complete, might drive anyone berserk.
We reported yesterday on one of the lowest moments in the history of Russian foreign policy, when Russian “president” Dmitry Medvedev went to Dushanbe with his begging bowl, pleading with the the last possible group of ragtag nations on the planet for their approval of his bloody conquest of Georgia.
But the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, led by China, would have none of it, and Medvedev was sent home with his tail between his legs, stunned, humiliated, and utterly alone. Heaping salt into his wounds, the European Union announced it was preparing economic sanctions. And it all comes at the hands of the two nations that Vladimir Putin despises most in the world, namely Georgia and its ally the United States of America.
And Putin’s reaction? He cracked like a rotten neo-Soviet egg, as he has often shown himself wont to do under any kind of real pressure. The New York Times reports Putin railing and flailing like a psychotic billy goat, and saying on national television: “The suspicion would arise that someone in the United States created this conflict on purpose to stir up the situation and to create an advantage for one of the candidates in the competitive race for the presidency in the United States. They needed a small victorious war.” So the U.S. told Georgia to attack Russia so that Russia would attack Georgia and John McCain could be elected president.
White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino responded: “To suggest that the United States orchestrated this on behalf of a political candidate just sounds not rational.” And it’s not rational on multiple levels, not only the superficial one of being totally insane to suggest that the Georgia conflict is about the U.S. election, but also the deeper one that it was Russia who attacked Georgia first, and Georgia who called unilaterally for a cease fire which was rejected by Russia. That’s to say nothing of Putin’s oblviousness of his apparent admission that there is a disastrous problem in Georgia that needs to be blamed on the Great Satan. Even the Kremlin’s staunchest advocates called the these statements “silly” when Putin’s underlings made them earlier in the war, and now Putin in his hour of pathetic desperation is repeating them himself! What will they say about Putin now?
This is scary-crazy stuff from Putin. It makes his prior episode complimenting the president of Israel on his prowess as a rapist seem quite normal by comparison. And scary-desperate. Shocked by the icy water of reality into which he’s dipped his hobnailed toe, Putin is acting just like the worst of the crazed Soviet rulers, spewing out nonsensical lies to cover up his failed policies and their horrific consequences. Only now does Putin finally see how utterly stupid his move into Georgia really was, only when his left tilting crazily at windmills.
We fully expect to shortly hear how Americans are poisoning Russian water with the AIDS virus (an infection the Kremlin hardly recognizes to exist), secretly driving down the Russian stock market (the one they’re not allowed to invest in) and building miltary bases on Venus to blind Russians with cosmic rays.
It would be hysterical, if the consquences for the people of Russia were not so dire.
Let’s review Putin’s “achievements” in this war one more time:
- He has panicked the nations of Eastern Europe, solidifying the U.S. missile defense plan he hates
- He has made John McCain, his arch nemesis, look like a soothsayer
- He has unified Democrats and Republicans against Russia in the U.S. In his acceptance speech yesterday, Barack Obama spoke of the need to “curb Russian aggression” and “stand up for Georgia”
- He has unified Europe and the United States
- He has made Georgia and its leader international martyrs
- He has set a precedent for emancipation of Russian regions like Chechnya
- He has vitiated the Commonwealth of Independent States
- He has alienated the Shanghai group and totally isolated his country from the world
- He has provoked a new cold war he cannot win
- He has encouraged the world to aggressively seek alternatives to Russian energy
- He has revealed the Medvedev “presidency” as an utter sham
- He has permanently destroyed Russia’s relations with Ukraine
- To cap it all, the White House presided over by the man who once looked into Putin’s eyes, glimpsed his soul and called him trustworthy now refers to him, in public on the record, as “not rational.”
And now, he has come undone, unraveled like a cheap neo-Soviet suit.
La Russophobe 
Putin will rue the day he opened his imperial power play with the “passports for territory gambit”. Soooooo “not rational”.
The verdict of ‘total failure’ has been proclaimed regarding Putin’s ever since 2000 but my impression is that he will leave his country richer, more unified , more stable and more influential than when he started. There are still plenty of things to criticise – not least the unnecessary curbs on democracy, but this is a country where ten years ago just to avoid political and economic meltdown would have been considered a major achievement.
Greedy , Putin