Robert Mayer declares that, in Ukraine, the Orange Revolution "is officially over." On whose authority? Last December, Robert made strident claims — in error — of throughgoing Shiite theft of Iraq's parliamentary elections. Now Moscow-backed reactionaries win a round and the struggle over Kiev is finished?
Setting those evanescent, if resplendent, days in Independence Square against the drudgery of redeeming a post-Soviet bureaucracy is an illustration of the maxim "Democracy is a process, not an event." Ukraine will vacillate, good fortunes and bad fortunes, for years. Democratists — especially bloggers — aren't doing their cause or foreign hopefuls a favor by divesting themselves when an elysian monument is not immediately erected on the site of the victory won by an otherwise granitic popular movement. Constantly publishing photographs of "protest babes" is fun, yes. But there is levity in that, the stuff of fair-weather allies.