Putin Cashes In

At Gleneagles, Russia's President Putin has spent the morning making political capital out of the London bombing tragedy, talking of "double standards" and "doing too little to unite our efforts in the most effective way in the battle against terrorism". Edward at A Fistful of Euros has some trenchant commentary:

Maybe there were questions about whether or not the US was sufficiently prepared for ’new style’ international terrorism before 09/11, certainly there are such questions about Spain and 03/11, but is anyone seriously suggesting that the UK police and security services haven’t been totally focused on trying to prevent this kind of tragedy. So, number one I resent the insinuation, and number two I resent any attempt to use this to drag the UK into the scandalous war Putin has been waging in Chechenia.

The dead are not only not yet cold, they are not even counted. Again chosing a voice I would not normally identify with, I can only re-iterate this point from Tim Worstall:

“May I just remind you of one of those little rules that we have in our civilised society? We bury the dead and console the bereaved before we start making asinine political points.”