My Vote, As A Resident Alien,

is for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. I mean, that instead of wasting my time pretending that there's a meaningful choice, for better or worse, among the candidates in the upcoming American presidential election, I've joined one of the official Vladimir Putin fan clubs on MySpace. There are things I don't like about the Liberator of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; namely, his roots in the KGB, his openly exemplary murder of journalists, his god-awful repression of Chechnya. But in Russia there's no other way to make omlets; you're lucky if the chef de cuisine doesn't decapitate all the chickens and burn down the chicken coop.  As Tsars go (and remember, "Near the Tsar, near death!") Putin is singularly unbloodthirsty and non-psychopathic. Ruthless?  Well, yes--but you have to like his way with kids and animals.   I do.  Moreover, due to Putin's astute management of the economy and state resources, Russia, for the first time in history, is no longer poor.   That is so huge a deal that it staggers the imagination--In its way, it's every bit as momentous as the collapse of the U.S.S.R., the sudden apparition of Mikhail and Raïsa Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroyka, human rights, and the Rule of Law.   Wow.  So--what is this envious and fearful reaction of the rest of the world--particularly Western Europe and the U.S.--to Russia's newfound strength and prosperity? Putin's witty sarcasm on the subject is telling.  And that's another reason I like the guy.  Witty sarcasm always wins my heart. "Look," he is plainly, tacitly, saying to Western Europe and the U.S., "The Russian Federation and our allies, Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan--together and severally--own by far the greater part of the world's petroleum and natural gas reserves.  If you want to have a cold war, not only will you lose it, you will get very, very cold."  Which makes the oil-piracy the U.S. is perpetrating in Iraq, dastardly and atrocious--and costly to the U.S. taxpayer--as it is, look like absurdly small potatos, and, of course, doomed to ignominious failure. Once the immediate horror and rapine is over, as eventually it must be, even Halliburton and Bechtel which own the operation of the Iraq "war," will have nothing to show for it.  That's as it should be, but damn them to bloody hell anyway.