An American Lion

Yulia Tymoshenko is the one with the crown of braided hair on her head

Don’t get me wrong—I love corrupt politicians. I love the little tricks they play. Yulia Tymoshenko knows more tricks than anyone in Europe…

The global swine flu outbreak has become something of a political football in every country where the pandemic has spread, but Ukraine’s response to the virus has achieved a new level of blatant politicization. According to a campaign advisor to Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian prime minister and presidential candidate purposely inflated fears of an ongoing swine-flu epidemic to aid her presidential run.

“We had to create a phantom and then have a white knight riding in to save the day,” Taras Berezovets, a senior campaign advisor for Tymoshenko’s BYuT bloc, told me in a Kiev restaurant, confirming widespread suspicions among Ukrainian journalists.

Since October, Ukraine has been in the grips of a full-blown panic over swine flu, complete with quarantines, school closures, runs on pharmacies. The Ukrainian health system, already badly dilapidated, was caught off guard and almost 400 people died of the flu in just three weeks.

Tymoshenko flew into action, organizing a delivery of the antiviral drug Tamiflu — and the requisite press conference — at the Kiev airport in the early morning hours of Nov. 2. She quarantined nine regions of the country, closed all schools and univeristies, and petitioned the president for $125 million in emergency funds to fight what seemed to be “the plague of the 21st-century plague,” as one Ukrainian put it. Incidentally, she also banned all mass gatherings and political rallies — after she had already had hers.

Bless her heart. I hope Yulia rules over the kingdom of the Ukraine for another thirty years. Sometimes, when I close my eyes and dream, I imagine that she’s the only politician in the world who would use a crisis, or a war, or an outbreak of illness to stage a political event with a captive audience and a backdrop suited to demonstrating his or her command of…of…

President Barack Obama will announce his plan to bolster the war in Afghanistan in a speech Tuesday night from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, his spokesman said, a surge that military officials say could top 30,000 troops.

The president promised this week to “finish the job” begun eight years ago, and press secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday the announcement would include an exit strategy. But the surge in troops would be Obama’s second since taking office, and liberal Democrats already are lining up against it, in part because of the also-surging cost — up to $75 billion a year.

Never mind, Yulia. You keep on keeping on…