There is a non-story making the rounds that the Russian military might base bombers in Venezuela and Cuba, provided that the Kremlin wanted to do this. In the same story that is being circulated, the Kremlin ruled out the idea as hypothetical speculation. Naturally, this had no effect whatever on wild accusations of Obama’s foreign policy failure. I give you Ed Morrissey:

It took John Kennedy more than a year to precipitate a military standoff with the Soviet Union over Cuba in the 1962 missile crisis. It’s taken the Obama Amateur Hour less than two months.

Mind you, there is no military standoff, Russia isn’t doing what Morrissey fears it will do, and Obama had nothing to do with this, but other than that Morrissey is on fire. Oh, wait, that’s not right. He continues to make a fool of himself:

Can you imagine Russia trying this with George Bush? For that matter, can you imagine Bush losing Kyrgyzstan — and a vital military route — to Putin?

Well, since Russia went to war with Georgia, resumed long-range bomber flights and sent a warship to Venezuela during the years of the mighty Bush, yes, I can imagine it. Since the lease for Manas airbase was set to expire anyway, had Bush somehow still been in office during the last two months he would have “lost Kyrgyzstan” just the same, so I can imagine this, too. This is because the decision not to renew the lease was made by the Kyrgyz government in response to public discontent over the U.S. presence that had been building up throughout the Bush administration’s tenure. As with so many other things in foreign policy, Bush “lost Kyrgyzstan,” if we must speak of things this way, and Obama is stuck with the consequences. I don’t say this particularly to defend Obama, whose handling of foreign policy (particularly with respect to India and Britain) has been mixed at best, but to correct painfully ignorant statements on matters that are of great importance to the United States.

P.S. The AP report included this item:

Russia has nothing to gain strategically from basing long-range craft within relatively short range of U.S. shores, independent military analyst Alexander Golts said, calling the military statement a retaliatory gesture aimed at hitting back after U.S. ships patrolled Black Sea waters near Georgia.

In other words, a decision made by the former administration in its ill-considered response to the war in Georgia apparently provoked this statement, so in the extremely unlikely event that Moscow pursued this basing idea it would be a response to Bush-era blunders. In reality, though, the statement is just bluster and has no significance.