Mischa the Bear or Ivan Drago?

“Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow center, put it well in an insightful article in Foreign Affairs, published a year ago. ‘Until recently,’ he wrote, ‘Russia saw itself as Pluto in the Western solar system, very far from the center but still fundamentally a part of it. Now it has left that orbit entirely. Russia’s leaders have given up on becoming part of the West and have started creating their own Moscow-centered system.'” With Dubya on the road for the G8 summit, Slate‘s Fred Kaplan surveys the state of US-Russian relations, concluding that “something is happening…[but w]e’re not — or at least there’s nothing inevitable about our becoming — enemies.“

You like the rug?

“For whatever reason, Bush seems fixated on his rug. Virtually all visitors to the Oval Office find him regaling them about how it was chosen and what it represents. Turns out, he always says, the first decision any president makes is what carpet he wants in his office…Sometimes Bush describes it as a metaphor for leadership. Sometimes he relates how Russian President Vladimir Putin admired the carpet. Sometimes he seems most taken by the lighting qualities.” Ah, the glory days…I guess it was only after that tough second decision — the drapes, maybe? — that the job started getting to Dubya.