In one of those eerie coincidences that leaves one looking around suspiciously while the music track from The Twilight Zone echoes in the brain at 2:00 am, I early this morning finished W.E.B. Griffin's novel, Covert Warriors.  What is so eerie is the premise of the storyline that Vladimir Putin is ingeniously attempting to destabilize America's place in the world order through infiltrating the American president's intimate inner circle and influencing his behavior as to make him look inept and possibly unbalanced.  Published in 2011 and apparently set a few years earlier, the book has a rather abrupt, unresolved, unsatisfactory ending, leading one to believe that there must be a Volume II in the works.

The machinations of the fictional Vlad couldn't more closely parallel current world political events.

While I'll stay away from the comparison of mental imbalance, although advanced narcissism is considered a psychiatric disorder, the events of the past few days show solid evidence that Putin has displayed almost Machiavellian skill in manipulating America's chief community organizer, Little Bo Sheep, into increasingly embarrassing diplomatic and geopolitical missteps that are indeed diminishing this once all-powerful nation in the eyes of the leaders and the peoples of the world.  The guy who once famously boasted of bringing a gun to a knife fight seems to have entered this mano-a-mano struggle armed with a flashy political putter while Bad Vlad brought a bear-sized battleaxe.  Guess who got cut down to size.

And if you happen to be one of those blindly loyal Obama worshipers who says, "So what?," you need to take a look at the real geopolitical consequences of a weak and incompetent American president served by equally weak and incompetent secretaries of state.  If you think even more daring and challenging moves of this sort aren't on that big chessboard the Russians view as the world, you're eminently qualified for low-information voter status.  And you can bet the farm that where the Russians boldly tread, the Chinese will inscrutably follow.

Admit it: as a nation, we're embarrassed.  We allowed this incompetent, unqualified pretender to greatness to usurp the seat of power because of a misplaced, loopy sense of hope, racial guilt, and racial healing, and now we are paying the easily predicted price.  The chilling truth is that we are locked into three more years of such losses before we can even begin to fight back and try to regain our previous preeminence.  As the expression goes, we have shown the world our a**, and they're not buying him.

Ronald Reagan battled the Soviet bear back through the forests of Eastern Europe and forced it into grumbling, resentful hibernation in its eastern lair.  With his ill-advised Russian reset, Obama has freed the bear, and the 21^st-century incarnation of that fearsome predator is the Ursus Putinus, who took our clueless ditz of a leader and left him lost in the woods of world power play.