All Good Things…

The Alyona Show has ended. Say what you will (and by this I mean “make every entirely reasonable critique of RT”) about the sources of funding and oversight, Alyona was willing to have guests and tackle subjects that could be found nowhere else on television.  I can’t think of another show of its type that would do a short segment about the Zumwalt class destroyer.  Best wishes to Alyona and her producer in their next endeavor.

Speaking of Russia, see this Dan Nexon post on the origins of Romney’s anti-Russia rhetoric.  I’d place my bets on numbers 2 and 3; anti-Russia sentiment is convenient, low stakes rhetoric for Romney, and those surrounding him seem resoundingly committed to a (hysterical) anti-Moscow position.  I’m not sure I’d use the term “steeped,” because I don’t have a sense of what Romney actually thinks; the think tank network that effectively constitutes the modern Republican foreign policy establishment is in many ways structured to prevent candidates from straying from a very narrow strip of “hawkish” orthodoxy.