The world’s most famously pretend tough guys, foremost champions of the white race and defenders of heterosexual exclusivity have now endorsed the world’s whitest, straightest, most famously pretend great man of history. This is a marriage made in heaven or perhaps elsewhere.

If Vladimir Putin can do for Crimea what George Bush did for Iraq, happy days are here again, you lucky Crimeans you.

Leonid Brezhnev, something of a mentor to George Bush in the foreign policy domain of eating your hat in Afghanistan, is now poised for political rehabilitation by a Republican Party loopy on Reagan-era nostalgia, preferably without Reagan, who currently is deemed much too liberal for Republican tolerance. Brezhnev is your man.

If you haven’t heard, every Republican worth her weight in demagoguery has rushed on stage to bat her lashes at Vladimir.

Sarah Palin, who until yesterday thought Ukraine was a division of U-Haul and Crimea a gentle dishwashing detergent slavered, “People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans.”  Well, Vlad, you aren’t going to get a better offer than that. She’s as oleaginous as they come, and close enough to see you when you rear your head. So get to drilling.

Rudy Giuliani, whose projection of toughness so memorably prevented New York City from being attacked lo those many years ago (oh well, it’s the pose that counts) praised Vladimir thusly: “Putin decides what he wants to do, and he does it in half a day, Then everybody reacts. That’s what you call a leader.President Obama, he’s got to think about it. He’s got to go over it again. He’s got to talk to more people about it” I imagine it’s shocking to many, as it is to me, that with such virility emanating in 2001 from Bush’s White House and Giuliani’s New York, that Al-Qaeda didn’t surrender preemptively, nor Russia and Syria, not to mention  North Korea and Iran beg us to annex them at our earliest convenience.

That Bush’s machismo neither forestalled Putin’s 2008 invasion of South Ossetia in Georgia, nor intimidated Putin into later tearfully apologizing for the error of his ways may for decades be to foreign policy mavens the conundrum Ulysses has been for English Departments.

Republican House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers, whose comment more closely evinced the thoughtfulness of a chair than it did an intelligence, said, “I think Putin is playing chess and I think we’re playing marbles.” I think he shouldn’t think so much.

The ugly (not-so) secret of Republicans during the Cold War was how counter-productive to freedom their politically expedient anti-Soviet ravings were, how conspicuously vacant their concern for the people of Russia, or freedom itself.

Beyond the favor the Pinochets, Francos, Marcoses and Latin American death squad regimes held in Republican hearts, seldom did their eyes light up more than when condemning/envying Soviets for quashing dissenters in their midst. The freedom-lovers betrayed their admiration for iron rule, and lust to lock up every hippy protestor from sea to shining sea every time they shilled in front of a camera for more military industrial complex pork.

Republicans always want to do more somehow in these situations, even if they never have any idea at all what, or the one they have is terrible (Aloha, John McCain). But they can’t resist their pathological urge to bluster like buffoons. This, and their traitorous regard for Barack Obama make their current yelping at Luna somewhat ordinary for them but more despicable too.

So sit back once again and amuse yourselves as our ineffectual Republican dears do their regularly scheduled impersonation of tough, all the while remembering George W. Bush fighting the North Vietnamese Army in the skies of Alabama and Richard Cheney with his five deferments.

Some may proclaim these baying hounds need to be emasculated. But what’s to remove?