Peace Is Our Profession

Fred Hiatt's them-crazy-Ruskies bit in today's WaPo is full of the usual fatuities, none of which bear repeating, but there is a stand-out sentence that parts ways with the usual ruling-class scene-chewing and lands so squarely in the Nation of Utter Nonsense that I thought it merited a quotation:

As to NATO: On the one hand, you have, say, Estonia, a democracy of 1.3 million people, freely joining in 2004 an alliance of like-minded democracies.

Now I'm not opposed to a little rhetorical legerdemain when a point has got to be made, but from what faraway perch on what misty mountain do you gaze upon the thing that is NATO and call it "an alliance of like-minded democracies," wondering innocently as you do how anyone could imagine its expansion to one's borders as remotely threatening.

Somewhere Leon Brezhnev is giggling in his grave and wishing he'd dreamed up "An alliance of like-minded socialist republics."

Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia.