Instead of a “crisis-induced reassessment with America's ties to Russia” (Editorial titled, “The New Chill, published in The New York Times Aug. 16), the Bush administration and Sen. John McCain are undoubtedly breaking out the champagne to toast Russian President Vladimir Putin.

For the first time in years, the media's attention has been diverted from Bush's foreign policy disasters, the complete collapse of our financial system and the ongoing ineptitude and corruption within the Bush administration to the mystical reemergence of the “evil empire.”

While Russia's incursion in Georgia is no small matter, the media's response has been unsophisticated and has unwittingly abetted those Rovian wizards who wish to silence the critics of the Bush administration and Mr. McCain's geopolitical hallucinations.

The other supercilious twaddle, which you notice from the Beltway boondogglers, is not empathy for the poor souls in Georgia, but the miraculous resurrection and utter jubilation of unrepentant neocons, paranoid militarists, parasitic arms merchants and other warmongers whose well-being thrives on undefined fear, exaggerated foreign threats and duplicitous patriotism.

America has cataclysmic problems with dire economic and social implications, but their rectification has nothing to do with foreign devils or other contrived apparition from aboard.

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