Putin Attempting Oil Blackmail on US? Moynihan's Law at Work?

Vlad the Empoisoner has been juking and feinting about the Baku/Ceyhan pipeline ever since he became President of what he wants to reconstitute as a new USSR.

I was present at many of the events leading to the inception of the pipeline in the mid-90s and even then, the Russians opposed the Amoco-sponsored [along with BP] project which would serve as an alternative artery of crude oil to the West.

I have written several times on this blog about the Russians' steadfast opposition to alternative energy sources from the Caspian. Now with his visit to Tehran, Putin, whose subtlety matches the brutal political culture of his Motherland, openly claims some sort of primus-inter-pares role for Russia and Iran on the Caspian littoral. This has been a debate of more than a decade, and at one point Russia claimed that any offshore resources should be shared equally by all littoral states, even if they were only a few miles offshore from Baku, for example.

Putin and Ahmadodojihad are trying to pull a power play on Gaidar Aliyev, the Azeri President [whom I had the privilege of escorting to a Chicago Bulls game over a decade ago] who must depend almost entirely on American and Turkish geostrategic support to maintain a balance of power in his beleaguered republic.

The Caucasus is becoming a hotbox cockpit of contention as Armenia struggles with Georgia & Azerbaijan for premier influence in DC. And of course, Turkey is vexed that Congress has selected this moment, as Turkish troops are poised to make an incursion into northern Kurdistan to chase PPK insurgents, to declare that the slaughter of Armenians in 1915 was "genocide."

The overarching strategy of the Russian/Iranian entente is to diminish American influence in the Caucasus and eventually in the Middle East, a goal toward which the US Congress appears willing to lend a helping hand.

At the same time, Putin poisons his enemies overseas and has journalists shot in Moscow, incidents which the cowardly American MSM barely reports about---since the NYT or WaPo wouldn't want their Moscow offices under threat of retaliation for articles unfavorable to the prancing dwarf Tsarevitch.

Which finally brings us to "Moynihan's Law." A tendency to over-report allegations of human rights abuse in nations that are comparatively lesser violators of human rights has been called "Moynihan's Law," after the late U.S. Senator and former Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is said to have stated that at the United Nations, the number of complaints about a nation’s violation of human rights is inversely proportional to their actual violation of human rights. An Iranian journalist explaining in the late 1940s, when asked why he condemned America but never the USSR, that the Russians killed people who criticized them.

Craven cowardice reigns supreme among journalists and UN diplomats, who exemplify much of the wrongheaded degeneracy of what is left of Western values.