Topics for this posting: Columnist George Will on Vladimir Putin; presidential debate #2; reactionary politics; George Will and Michael Gerson on Donald Trump.

Putin. George Will writes, "Undermining the West’s confident sense of itself is important to Putin’s implementation of his ideology of Eurasianism. It holds that Russia’s security and greatness depend on what [British journalist and author] Ben Judah calls a 'geographically ordained empire' that 'looks east to Tashkent, not west to Paris.' " Interestingly, Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan, one of the various eastern "-stans," peopled by non-Russians, people held in low esteem in the old USSR.
     Eurasianism, a new -ism to add to your 21st century vocabulary. Owen Matthews writes in The Spectator about Putin's new Russian exceptionalism and its war on western decadence, where Putin’s Russia is fast becoming a very puritan place, a moral fortress against western excesses.
     Owens notes, "The influence of the Russian Orthodox church on public life is growing fast, thanks to Kremlin patronage. In the very dark days of the Great Patriotic War (WW II), Stalin, too, called upon the church for its still ancient ties for the Russian people. The church’s preferred instrument of control is a draconian law criminalising [sic] offending the feeling of religious believers’." Puritans in the Kremlin? Who would have guessed.

Presidential Debate #2. For me, long-time CBS newsman and presidential debate monitor, Bob Schieffer, said it best: "How have we come to this?" Indeed! For those who follow the news, the evening was an amazing display of incredibly poor public behavior and uninformative, to boot.

Old, unworkable solutions. Columnist Robert Samuelson writes, "A reactionary is someone who wishes to return, usually unrealistically, to an earlier and more appealing era. We have two reactionaries running for president. Both peddle agendas that promise to re-create a reassuring past. We are being fed different varieties of nostalgia. Neither will work."
     Both candidates are trying to appeal to their diminishing constituent-pool, while ignoring today's economic and demographic realities. Could the problem be that both candidates are simply elderly, too tied to a bygone era? Is American democracy too mired in the past? Burdened with an aging population demanding more and more from a government that is willing to face its rapidly mounting public debt? Was there no JFK to whom to pass the torch?
     Lawrence Summers follows with an op-ed, "The global economy has entered unexplored, dangerous territory." He notes, "The specter of secular stagnation and inadequate economic growth on the one hand, and ascendant populism and global disintegration on the other, has caused widespread apprehension.

Trump. In their Tuesday columns,  Will and Gerson look at Trump as the "just desserts" for a failing Republican party.

Those Cubs. My dearly departed mother-in-law was born near Wrigley Field, roller skated on the ramps of the yet unfinished field, played with the daughter of the field's grounds keeper as the real life bear cub romped around in the outfield on away-days. Her spirit reminds me to end with "GO CUBS!" Hope springs eternal!

Thank you for reading. Take comfort, there are only 28 more days of this ongoing political non-sense. Vote your conscience, but do vote!