The wearing of the Orange

Sullywatch takes a minor detour to contemplate the somewhat surprising position of longtime reactionary Pat Buchanan on the Ukraine election standoff. As Sullywatch explains, Pat could always be relied upon to take the western Ukrainian/Catholic line, to the point where he was not only pushing the envelope on sympathy for Nazi collaborators, he was sending it postage due (we've been waiting for years to use that line from some long-forgotten sitcom). Yet this time, Pat is taking a solid Russian "near abroad" approach, backing the eastern Ukrainians and Pootie-Poot's position, which SW rationalises as follows:

Is it perhaps because the orange-clad in Kyiv/Kiev look to him like the sort of people he and his ilk most despise about the United States, whereas the Russophones demonstrating in Donetsk, who drink heavily, wear camo and talk about how they’d like to bop the other side up the head one are, he recognizes, his people?

While agreeing with all this, we wonder if Pat is being helped along in his evolution by an adverse reaction to the preferred colour scheme of the opposition protestors. There's probably still enough old style Irish Catholicism in him to react badly to orange.

Indeed, we decided to go in search of evidence that eastern Ukrainians prefer green as their symbol, which (bringing our European perspective to the task) quickly brought us to the site of Shakhtar Donetsk, the region's pretty decent football club. The team's identity is so tied to mining that they were once named Stakhanovets, and this evening they got a fine result versus Barcelona, in the process knocking Glasgow Celtic out of the UEFA Cup -- all going to show the rivalry with the Roman church is alive and well on the football field, if not in Pat Buchanan's head.

But they do like the colour green -- from the club's fight song:

Refrain:
Beauty of green fields, that's for you, Shakhtar.
My fate is in your hands, you are the best, Shakhtar.