With all due respect to Senators McCain and Obama for a slightly biased off the cuff remark or two. First: John McCain reminds one of Herman’s Wouk characters by the name of Captain Queeg. Second: Barak Obama reminds one that if elected President all 300 million Americans will whether they admit or not that, feel a little more prouder and confidant about calling themselves just Plain American. Un hyphenated or adjectivised.

The foreign policy [if you want to call it that] of the US has over the years become romanticised and made into a comic book version of zionist/trotskyite/neocon/chickenhawks living in some fantasyland where wars and plans are prepared promoted and played out in air conditioned offices subject to money pressures from lobbies one of whom is more dedicated to a partial loyalty to the USA.

Them days is over period. This is the 21st Century whether Queeg McCain said or not.

I don’t know why nobody has commented on the timing of the Georgian affair.  When 24/7 takes its attention off Iraq and Obama, giving the public *pan et circenses* in Beijing the better to distract our short attention span, Putin uses the real news vacuum to influence U.S. presidential politics.  Paranoid that I am, I smell a deal.  Perhaps Karl Rove was in Tbiblisi when he left the country to avoid Senate summons.  If Bush has a cozy relationship with Saakashvili, trouble in the demilitarized zone such as persecution of ethnic Russians, could make McShame look like a better leader in Cold War II.

As I put it in my blog, it’s “Let’s Trade ‘Wag the Dogs.’”  I suspect the GOPS are just that desperate to give Bush a third term.

Using Wiki huh?  Hell, the neocon bastards probably wrote up and contributed the piece in the first place.  Wiki is user supplied content you know.

I wouldn’t expect anything less from someone that is even below w’s ‘c’ grade which makes w appear to be a genuine einsteins. Or ole johnny is smarter because he completed the military school, who knows? So we definitely know what types the neocons want running on their ticket. Look for the box under ole johnny’s coat from now on until the election is over. I would think there will not be any debates until both conventions have to play through before the debates start.
Again, that would make it appear that obama would have an intellectual advantage but who knows?

This country’s foreign policy is nothing more than schoolyard bully tactics.

That is a good statement.  I can’t tell you how often the interrelations between countries reminds me of my school-yard days.  I feel like as nations we are just children.  We seem incapable of reaching a level of maturity that would be considered rudimentary in our personal day to day lives.  If individuals behaved like countries we would get into fights every time we left the house.  I would raid my neighbor’s house with a hot-tub, just to secure my “interests.”

McCain-the-Insane says in his posturing defense of Georgia : “one of the world’s first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion,”

Here you have it: A Medieval thinking Crusader who is the best that half-America (neocons/republicans) can find to become its second insane president in the twenty-first century!

Joe Conason is being the typical mainstream journalist who cannot get himself to call a spade a spade, opting instead to call McCain’s evil and Medieval thinking as “exhausted ideology.”

Thank you Russia for hastening the departure of the Georgian occupation Crusaders from Iraq!

I just finished trying to collect my thoughts at:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/08/dangerous-knowledge.html

Jackpine,
I too agree that our future foreign policy should be all about the preservation of good food. This may mean we have to preserve Italy and France, but toss down a couple of eclairs or a cannoli, and they will seem worth the sacrifice.

Georgian’s have learned a couple of valuable lessons in the prior week. First, Nuclear powers never confront each other directly (nukes have oddly enough kept Pakistan and India from all out war for years. They did the same for the US and old Soviet Union). Second, US based neocons will arm you and train you and drop you off at the beach. They will say “don’t worry, we’ll be right behind you!” Then when the bullet’s start flying you will find out the awful truth, that while your men are dying for their stilted ideaology, they will be holed up in a 4 star hotel in Montenegro, sipping champange and avoiding your desperate phone calls.(I realize that is a mixed Cuba/Georgia metaphor, but you get the point)
We are just begining to see why we are pushing for a new missle defense system in eastern Europe. Be it over oil or hegemony, we have begun poking a stick in the russian bears’ ass again. This may all be part of the master plan to revive the cold war. Step one, somehow prod the Russkies into spending some of their massive oil revenue on a massive military build-up. Just ask your average neocon, a strong russian military is good for America.

So perhaps it is germane to the issue that Jason and the Argonauts went to Georgia in search of the Golden Fleece as well.

Is the fact that Stalin, Beria and a few other all-stars of the Soviet Union were Georgian have any bearing on this?

The food is delicious (though the wine is terrible).  In my mind, the United States should vigorously defend any country that produces delicious food.

Perhaps unwittingly, Joe Conason reveals why both Democrats and Republicans are dead wrong in their approaches to foreign policy.

Observe a few key phrases: McCain “favors bellicose grandstanding over strategic thinking.” Now certainly, no one wants a president who favors “bellicose grandstanding.” But do we really want instead a president who favors “strategic thinking?”

As a libertarian, I don’t want a president doing either. “Strategic thinking” implies that it is the role of the US to play one nation against another, to take sides in other countries’ squabbles, to nudge international events one way or the other to put the US military in a better “strategic” position.

An ideal president would follow Washington’s advice to stay out of foreign quarrels, and Jefferson’s advice to have friendly trade relations with all nations, but entangling alliances with none.

A dispute between Georgia and Russia is entirely their own affair. The US, on the far side of the globe, should mind its own business.

It seems that the only difference between Dems and Reps in foreign policy is where we should intervene. The Dems want to intervene in places like Bosnia and Kosovo and Darfur. The Reps want to intervene in Iraq, Iran, and (probably) Georgia.

We don’t own the world, folks.