Putin routinely dismisses Saakashvili's boasts about his manhood
Hey: remember when Vladimir Putin supposedly told Nicolas Sarkozy that he was “going to hang [Georgian President Mikheil] Saakashvili by the balls.”?
And how this was all just reported and alleged and no one could confirm it until Putin himself sorta maybe seemed to do so after a Russian journalist asked him on some weird media call-in event whether he really said he’d hang Saakashvili “by one part.”?
And then Putin said, “But why only one part?”
But the best part is Saakashvili’s response to the reputed threat: “He would not have enough rope!”
While I took this to be amusing to no end, my sweetheart Alissa, who does not automatically see the humor in conflict, armed or otherwise, took it as confirmation that the movers and shakers of international politics are little more than schoolyard toughs with huge but fragile egos and a collective unhealthy fixation on their own genitalia.
Maybe so.
In any case, Saakashvili’s testes may be as impressive as he claims; you do know, right, that he led the peaceful democratization of Georgia. This is how he did it: After losing two bogus elections to ex-Soviet honcho and enduring autocrat Eduard Shevardnadze, Saakashvili got together with a bunch of his buddies, who were many and had popular support, and they spent the night bitching how fucked everything was before just marching their indignant asses over to the parliament and busting down the doors while Shevardnadze was giving a speech. Saakashvili held up a rose and shouted, “Resign immediately!” Shevardnadze resigned two days later. They call this the Rose Revolution.
I learned all this from “Marching through Georgia,” Wendell Steavenson’s multi-entendre-ed recent profile of Saakashvili for a certain left-leaning elitist magazine of migrating disciplines. I also learned that Mikheil Saakashvili is endowed with a big funny mouth if not with big other things. Aside from the “not enough rope” comment, there were two other choice remarks.
On his experience at the most recent opening session of the United Nations:
First they don’t feed you well at this thing. . . and then they sit you next to Mugabe.
And on his expectations for the American reaction to Russia’s recent incursion into his homeland, two weeks after Sarah Palin became John McCain’s running mate:
They are going to bomb! From Alaska! Or they are going to shoot their mooses!
On this last point, of course, Saakashvili sorely miscalculated. With two quagmires of its own, the U.S. could muster little more than empty condemnation, which is more or less the crux of the article (and its title, with its hints of regional conquest and lingering afternotes of Sherman) — that the American-educated, democratically-inclined caucasian darling of the West had shown the limits of Western power by perhaps explicitly provoking Russian aggression and finding himself humiliated when his allies could not come through.
The President, however, does not personally buy into this interpretation:
Saakashvili didn’t think, really, that he had been the loser of that summer’s war. “If we thought winning was taking over Tskhinvali — well, it didn’t mean much for me anyway. To get another hundred Georgian towns to administer?” He dismissed the loss of territory that had fallen under separatist control: “So what? These are two districts of Georgia. It’s not a setback. We are in a fight, and this is the position of fighting.” The larger point was “to get rid of Russian influence,” he said. “And the Russians overreacted.”
Maybe so.
