A reader puzzles about Putin

He writes

So I read Putin’s Op Ed piece. You can read it in full here.

This guy may well be a super villain. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he vacations (shirtless) in his volcanic lair, feeding his sharks with laser beams on their heads. But the only point in his entire piece that I disagreed with is that I thought he should have capitalized “Pope” out of respect. He’s calling for diplomacy and pointing out that adding violence to the violence will only breed more violence. He’s being — dare I say it? — sensible. He’s behaving like a leader.

Meanwhile, Obama and Kerry and several prominent members of Congress are making complete buffoons of themselves.

What’s going on????

Well, there are two perspectives. 1) The prayer of a righteous man availeth much and an awful lot of people prayed last Saturday. That’s the heavenly perspective. It includes the proposition that God frequently writes straight with crooked lines and uses all sorts of knotty timber to build his House.

2) When your political enemy is destroying himself, don’t interfere. Putin can be the Voice of Sweet Reasonableness and let Obama and the crazy neocons bay for war while the whole world opposes them because, hey!, it makes him look great! Why wouldn’t he? That’s the earthly perspective.

My sole interest is in our not launching this stupid stupid war and killing a bunch of innocents while helping the monsters. I could not possibly care less which rich and powerful twit in our Ruling Class loses face, nor that Putin gains some political advantage from this. If he’s using his clout to back an agenda that coincides with the Holy Father’s here (for the moment) that’s good enough for me. The real people I care about are the innocents on the ground in Syria, not the geopolitical Planners (who should all be strapped to Tomahawks and fired into Antarctica).