On: Bosnians vote as pro-Russian politician looms large and ethnic tensions simmer

Saw the wire copy out of Bosnia this morning. “Ethnic tensions simmer.” Simmer. Like a pot somebody left on low. Who left it there? Thirty years since that war ended and the language still won’t say what the war was. Not “ethnic tensions.” Men with lists. Men who knew which door to knock on. “Tensions” is weather. Nobody’s guilty of weather.

Then the real item, buried one clause deep: the man dominating the campaign is banned from public office. Read that twice. Banned from office - and he’s the biggest name on the ballot. That’s not a ban, that’s a compliment. It’s a press release with a gavel attached. You want to punish a politician? Take his name out of the paper. Instead they took his job and left him the microphone, and now “banned” is just a word in his bio, right between “defiant” and “beloved.”

And notice what we call him. “Separatist Serb leader.” Separatist. Clean little Latinate word, four syllables, sounds like a botany term. What it replaces: a man who wants to carve a country out of a country that was carved out of a country. The Balkans have been partitioned so many times the borders there are basically scar tissue. Every new map gets a smoother name than the last. “Autonomy.” “Entity.” “Republika.” Each word one step further from the word that fits, and the word that fits is “amputation.”

Meanwhile Moscow doesn’t need an army anymore. It needs one loud man and a vacuum. Cheaper than tanks. You don’t invade a country these days, you sponsor its divorce.

The people voting Sunday - the actual Bosnians, the ones who buried people - they get one line at the end of the story. “Struggled to recover.” Struggled. Thirty years. That’s not struggling, that’s being told to wait.

The pot doesn’t simmer by itself. Somebody’s holding the flame.