Following up on my piece from last night about Putin’s epic goof, here’s an amazing little nugget from David Remnick’s post about the Malaysian Air shoot down.

The reference is to the puffed up separatist ‘warlord’ who leads the group that apparently shot down the Malaysian jet and who, apparently, at first took public responsibility for the shoot down, thinking it was a Ukrainian military cargo jet.

“Strelkov is well known for leading historical reënactments of Russian military battles, like you have in the States with the Civil War reënactors,” Pavlovsky said. “It used to be a fantasy world for people like him, but now they have a realm for their imaginations.”

So that’s who you’re dealing with: some mix of civil war reenactor or Tea Partier decked out in revolutionary garb, with a mix of reckless aggression and comical incompetence. Here we have them break into nursing homes to photographs senator’s comatose wives; there Putin gives them heavy armaments designed for full scale land war in Europe.