There are some members of the US Congress and the political media that seem to think if the United States President just makes enough threatening noises with military muscle the rest of the world will roll over and play nicely.

I question their powers of observation. Where has that assumption failed? Iraq is Exhibit One. Syria is Exhibit Two. I see no reason to believe that Ukraine would be any different.

Nonetheless we have idiots like Senator Lindsey Graham, who’s screeching “We have a weak and indecisive president that invites aggression. President Obama needs to do something.” We have another idiot, Representative Mike Rogers: “Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles, and I don’t think it’s even close,” Rogers said on Fox News Sunday. We have yet another idiot in Senator Marco Rubio, writing in an op-ed “If Putin’s illegal actions are allowed to stand unpunished, it will usher in a dark and dangerous era in world affairs.”

But what do these three and their colleagues propose to do? Drop a nuclear weapon on Moscow? Send NATO troops to the eastern Ukrainian border with Russia? Drop the 82nd Airborne into Sevastopol?

What these latter-day heroes don’t seem to understand is that there’s not much we can do to keep Russia from doing what it wants to its neighbor. The Europeans get most of their natural gas from Russia. When push comes to shove they aren’t going to want to sacrifice their citizens’ comfort as well as their soldiers’ blood for Ukraine. That would mean the United States would be alone in trying to do anything military, and I don’t think the US armed forces are very gung-ho about trying to defend a country at Russia’s edge.

Once upon a time politics stopped when foreign policy events occurred. Not anymore, particularly when the Republican Party is out of the White House.