Things Americans Should Have Expected

From the columnist Andrew Borene:

Americans should be appalled at the lack of attention paid to the major international security crisis in Georgia by the media, by our government and by the world community. We should have expected that the broadcast media would interrupt Olympic coverage and that cable news would begin a series of stories on the background and analysis of the Georgian war, not place Olympic biographies and stories about the John Edwards affair as lead news items. We should have expected that any major political party’s presidential candidate would return from vacation to Washington in order to jointly denounce the Russians’ actions in Georgia, not issue spineless statements on the moral equivalency of the Russian and Georgian positions from a Hawaiian golf course. We should have expected that through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, we would begin a major initiative to deter any further Russian military aggression by working publicly and jointly to add what remains of Georgia and Ukraine fully into the treaty, not continue a now-moot academic debate on whether publicly backing Ukraine and Georgia might “provoke” Russian bullying.