Joe Lieberman and John McCain

Glen Greenwald points out that the foreign policy advisers closest to John McCain are of the most rabid strain of bloodthirsty neoconservative ilk. In an editorial in the WSJ, Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham talk tough on Russia's recent border skirmish with Georgia.

The idea that we are going to somehow assert ourselves militarily against Russia, while at the same time fighting two wars and after having made ourselves an international pariah would be laughable if it weren't so utterly scary. Lieberman, in particular, who yearns dearly for war in Iran and Syria, represents the most extreme vision of neoconservatism, a view shared by a rogue's gallery of discredited fools, such as Bill Kristol, John Bolton, and Paul Wolfowitz.

The foreign policy team exerting chief influence over John McCain is truly more extremist -- in a purer and more deranged form -- than the foreign policy team of the Bush administration. They're not only the most extremist faction in American political life, but also the most delusional. These aren't just the people who led the U.S. to war in Iraq -- though they are that -- but they're also the ones who actually believe that the Bush administration has been far too meek in its assertion of U.S. military force and too passive in its interference in the affairs of other countries. They want to accelerate -- massively intensify -- virtually every one of the polices that has brought the U.S. to such disgrace and near ruination over the past eight years.

This is McCain's worldview as well. It is jingoistic and dangerous and tinged with unreality, even a bit of madness. This is what the election is about, for me. An Obama presidency is going to be a difficult one, as the damage that has been done to this country is substantial. A huge amount of any political capital that Obama will bring to the White House will be spent trying to reestablish ourselves as an honest broker and true beacon of democracy. The international audience that he will face will be a tough one, and the enmity will be real and intense.

The fact that McCain chooses to be associated with the Lieberman/Graham camp (and actually to be a proud member of that camp) is more damning than anything else about that man.

man o' the people...

It's officially stupid season. The next two months are going to be painful. Just keep two things in mind: Obama is a muslim, and McCain was a POW.

TBogg has a great rundown of the wingnut's response to the McCain house kerfluffle here. My personal favorite is this one...

My third reaction was, hey, how many houses do I own? The answer, it turns out, is pretty complicated, what with property held in trust for my benefit and controlling interests in investments and such. It is either two -- the house in Princeton that we live in and the house we are trying to sell -- or some larger number up to six, including three houses in the Adirondacks held in a trust among all the descendants of my grandparents and a dual residential/commercial property that we rent.

So, if you put that question to me and I were unprepared for it, I'd probably have to get back to you too. And if I really did not want to be wrong and had a staff with an official position, I would refer you to it. Neither diminishes one iota my love of eating at Applebee's, the joy I feel walking a boardwalk "down the shore," or my identification, such as it is, with the average Joe.

HEH: A reader emails, "I just want to know if Obama has 'experimented' with more illegal substances than McCain owns houses... Then we'll decide."

Careful....getting into dangerous territory when we start making innuendos about illicit drug use....

The Real McCain

Kevin Drum is absolutely correct that the idea that the American public will sour on John McCain because he is rich and white and a belligerent warmonger is fantasy. America has shown time and again that they are just fine with rich white playboy warmongers.

The far more powerful approach is to focus on McCain's demonstrable flaws, which he lists thusly:

McCain is old and gets confused occasionally.

McCain is running an ugly, smear-based campaign.

McCain has a legendarily short fuse.

McCain is annoyingly self-righteous.

McCain's straight talk has evaporated in the face of his need to win evangelical votes.

McCain, who says that he is hesitant to speak about his time in the Hanoi Hilton, or his war service in general, demonstrated this sanctimonious streak last week:

On Thursday, Walter Isaacson was the latest pundit to publicly call out the Mama Mia-loving presumptive Republican presidential nominee during an interview at the Aspen Institute in Colorado.

"If there is anything I am lacking in, I've got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life," McCain said in his own defense. "I've got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again."

and it bleeds over to his staff, who drop the POW card any time McCain is questioned, for anything:

Interviewed Sunday on CNN, Mr. Warren seemed surprised to learn that Mr. McCain was not in the building during the Obama interview. A spokeswoman for Mr. McCain said he was en route to the church.

Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions. “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.

Aside from that, he has confused Sunni with Shia, imagined the existence of Czechoslovakia, and relentlessly confused the geography of Western Asia, imagining a border between Pakistan and Iraq.

As dozens of articles have pointed out, McCain has flipped on just about all of his "maverick" positions in the past four years, including the use of torture, the Bush tax cuts, immigration reform, timetables for withdraw, wiretapping and FISA,gay marriage, affirmative action, ANWR, and so many more, that the mere notion of describing him as anything other than a Bush clone is absurd.

In many ways, he represents the worst of the last three Republican Presidents, he's as old and confused as Reagan, as dim and unimpressive as Bush I, and a vindictive and short tempered bully like W. This is where Obama should hit McCain, by calling him out on his "maverick" bologna, his age and mental acuity, and his general temperament.

UPDATE: As dday points out, another manifestation of the McCain character is a wee bit of a problem with telling the truth:

So Many Half-Truths, So Little Time

by dday

Just because I want to keep track of this stuff, here are some more stories providing strong evidence of John McCain's growing problem with telling the truth. Both relate to Saturday's Saddleback Forum but are also anecdotes and excerpts he habitually brings up on the trail.

In the first question of the forum, he was asked to name three people he would "rely heavily on" for advice and counsel. One of the three he named was the great civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA). McCain has no relationship with Lewis despite serving in Washington with him for 22 years.

Later, McCain told the story he often tells on the campaign trail, a little joke about how the federal government spent $3 million dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana. At the time, he never sought to remove the earmark appropriating money for the bear project, despite seeking to reduce funding for other projects in the same bill; and he voted for the final bill.

And, he claimed that he would never have nominated Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer, though he voted to confirm all three of them.

Quote of the Day....

One of the Russian commanders, Gen. Vyacheslav Nikolayevich of the Pskov Airborne Division, said Russian soldiers would remain on the outskirts of Gori but not enter the city. “People can get back to their lives,” he said.

Asked whether Mr. Bush’s relief mission made him nervous, he scoffed. “What can the Americans do to us?” he said. “A big country like Russia doesn’t fear America.”

Sad state of affairs

My guess is that the Russo-Georgian conflict is a situation fraught with intrigue that involves the highest level of the Bush administration, which is completely understandable. At this point, the key question seems to be around just how strongly we encouraged Georgia to push for the recovery of their breakaway republics. Clearly, we were playing a dangerous game, and it looks like we may have mishandled the situation badly.

The real issue, though, is the upshot of it all. Once again, we've been exposed as a toothless enforcer, threatening all sorts of actions that the Russians and the rest of the world know that we can't back up. McCain's highly inflammatory statement that "we are all Georgians now", is truly irresponsible, as Matt Yglesias points out, and President Saakashvili called him out on it:

“Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, ‘We are all Georgians now,’” Saakashvili said on CNN’s American Morning. “Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it’s time to pass from this. From words to deeds.”

There is no denying the fact that we have lost a great deal of leverage on the international stage. Leave aside the fact that we can no longer hold ourselves out as a beacon of morality, as the stain of Abu Ghraib hangs heavy on our mantle, the larger result of the eight years of the Bush fiasco is that we've been exposed as "all hat and no cattle", as they say in Crawford. Fredrick Kagan, Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney can rant and rave about Russia all they want, the world now knows that our words are hollow slogans, and that there is little that we can do to change events on our own. There was always wisdom in the notion that collective action is imperative in international affairs, and it will take an Obama administration to return this country to that sort of sanity.

Doug Feith Just Won't Go Away

The utterly loathsome Doug Feith, famously referred to as "the stupidest fucking guy on the face of the planet" by Tommy Franks, may have been Dick Cheney's go-to guy when he came up with the brilliant idea of forging a letter linking Saddam to 9/11:

The American Conservative’s Philip Giraldi argues today that “an extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community” told him Suskind’s overall claim “is correct,” but that it was Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans — not the CIA — that forged the letter:

feith.jpgMy source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. … It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq.

If five thousand kids weren't dead, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, this administration's shenanigans would almost be laughable. Unfortunately, the damage that these people visited on our country will never be a joke.