>Yeah, that one kept bugging me too. I was pretty sure Rice got to talk to him in Russian and I know she'd been studying him for a long time so I would imagine

...she would try to get him into the old image on which she got her PhD (for "The Politics of Client Command: Party-Military Relations in Czechoslovakia"), or else she's soon not just out of job, but technically quite obsolete. What does a peeaitchdeed kremlinologist do nowadays for living? Warm up the cold war? Try to reapply the substance of her doctorate on relations in NATO?

>...whatever Bush said publicly there were probably other people telling him to count his fingers after he shook hands.

...just like the pals told Putin to take the suit with sewn-in pockets and to have a towel ready to wipe the slime. Such stories circulate around pretty much every meeting at that level. The general ease with which this kind of courtesy is extended to the Russians leaves me downright scared - there seems to be a political will to make the relations with Russia as bad as possible (just hearing what Brzezinski has allegedly said recently about taking Iran and aiming it against Russia or something such, is enough to make my skin not crawl, but run).

This will not be good.