Some shrewd analysis of the Georgia crisis from Greg Djerejian.

I would really recommend Greg’s post to everyone. This whole crisis, both in what has aptly been called the feckless policy-making that went into it and the aftermath, puts McCain’s shaky grasp of foreign policy in really sharp relief.

What pretty much everyone who’s paying attention can see is that the US casually made a bunch of promises and representations to the Georgians which we were obviously neither prepared to or interested in backing up. As Fred Kaplan noted in his piece in Slate yesterday, what’s both tragic and almost comical is that a lot of Georgians actually expected that we’d come to their defense militarily if got themselves into a real shooting war with the Russians. They’ve clearly paid a steep price for that cheap talk. Meanwhile, McCain’s response is to up the ante with more bluster and nonsense, apparently not getting what happened in the first place.

I’m not privy to any inside thinking. But I do wonder at this point whether there are any second thoughts in the Obama campaign about the decision to (de facto) close down those 527s. A lot of people now seem to be getting it about what McCain’s pushing in his ‘celeb’/Obama+white girls ad campaign. He’s has clearly decided to play on the race issue. But as rancid and dishonorable as McCain’s ads are, they are laying down a clear theme for his campaign. And I don’t sense a similar one from the Obama camp. The topline national numbers appear to have stabilized. So perhaps the thinking is that for all McCain’s sleaze it’s not working.

But the lethal message against McCain is that he’s four more years of Bush — on domestic and foreign policy, a lethal message that has the advantage of being undeniably true. I think things would be different right now if that message was being hammered home day in and day out in ads running across the country.

Free on bail while his appeal is pending, former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman was in Austin last month for Netroots Nation. I got a chance to ask him about the various investigations into allegations that his prosecution for public corruption was politically motivated — and Karl Rove’s alleged role:

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Last week I mentioned that the Times reporting earlier this year on the McCain/Paxson/Iseman story had missed the key element of McCain’s participation in the influence peddling. Remember that McCain denied that he’d asked for a decision one way or another in the case Paxson and his lobbyist Iseman had before the FCC. He’d only pressed them to decide the matter one way or another. That was McCain’s story.

FCC insiders knew different. In fact, McCain was squeezing one of the FCC commissioners — making okaying Paxson’s deal a condition of their reappointment.

What I hadn’t realized is that McCain’s quid pro quo had actually already been flagged, albeit circumspectly, in what was apparently a little noticed piece by Josh Green in The Atlantic Monthly.

Susan Ness, a Democratic commissioner, took the rare step of breaking with her fellow Democrats and voting with the Republican commissioners to approve the Paxson deal.

…

And while there is no evidence that McCain or anyone on his staff made an explicit quid pro quo demand, Ness’s vote is widely thought to have been a bid to win her reappointment to the FCC–a bid that happened to have stalled before McCain’s committee months earlier.

So here we have what Paxson and Iseman bought from McCain, which pulls the whole story together and gives a much better sense of just what went down.

I know there are others out there (beside those who’ve already been in touch) who know more about what happened and can shed more light on the favors McCain provided. So please drop me a line. As always, your anonymity is assured.

From the Journal …

John McCain’s top foreign-policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, is a leading expert on U.S.-allied Georgia — and was a paid lobbyist for the former Soviet republic until March, in the run-up to what has become a major battle between Georgia and Russia.

Democratic rival Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was quick to try to paint Mr. Scheunemann’s dual roles as a conflict of interest after Sen. McCain swiftly took Georgia’s side in the dispute, and cited it as evidence that Sen. McCain is “ensconced in a lobbyist culture,” as Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan told reporters over the weekend.

But given the rapid escalation of the fighting, and the fact that Georgia is being viewed as a victim of its neighbor’s aggression, Mr. Scheunemann’s ties to the small nation and its pro-Western Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili may look less like a weakness and more like a strength in the first foreign-policy crisis of the general election campaign.

It’s genuinely hard to know where to start with this sort of nonsense. To say that Randy has a conflict of interest misses the point. And I’d hope that’s not the argument the Obama campaign is trying to make. The point is that Randy was running point on what was clearly a deeply misguided policy — one advanced by the Bush administration and lobbied for aggressively by the neoconservative foreign policy community in Washington, for whom, as I said, Randy was essentially running point. Anybody who wants to understand this situation needs to read Fred Kaplan’s piece in Slate and Greg Djerejian’s blog post from this morning.

Scheunemann’s ‘policy’ was to get the Georgians ginned up on the idea that we were their close military allies and that we’d come to their rescue if their brinksmanship with the Russians went bad. Well, that didn’t work out very well. Any situation where you start the shooting and then find yourself begging for a ceasefire within 48 hours is a major blunder. He’s not an ‘expert’ on Georgia; he’s the lead guy on the policy that got us into this situation. And the fact that John McCain would make him his chief policy advisor after he’s been the conductor on so many trainwrecks should tell us all we need to know about Sen. McCain’s foreign policy judgment.

Another gem from Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN):

“[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said that she’s just trying to save the planet. We all know that someone did that over 2,000 years ago, they saved the planet — we didn’t need Nancy Pelosi to do that.”

McCain gets on the grandiosity bandwagon talking about the crisis in Georgia.

Notice too that McCain’s first talking point is that Georgia was one of the first countries to officially adopt Christianity. Beside pandering to the Christian right, what is the relevance of that exactly? This is one dangerous guy …

I know I’ve made this point in various ways in several posts over the last day or so. But watching John McCain speak about the Georgian crisis in the video below should deeply worry anyone interested in a sane US foreign policy — or the safety of their children. One arch joke from the earlier part of this decade was that the one good thing about the neocons obsession with getting into a war with Iraq was that it distracted them from their much bigger obsessions — ratcheting up Cold Wars with China and/or Russia.

The people that are pulling McCain’s strings are the people who want to push us into a new Cold War with the Russians — and ironically and a bit improbably with the Chinese too. But the Russians are probably more willing to oblige us since their power remains limited to oil reserves and military power. In other words, they’re people McCain’s folks can understand and vice versa.

McCain is going out of his way to cast this as a replay of 1938 and 1939. Is it really in our interest to get into a renewed Cold War with Russia right now? Do we have the military resources for a proxy/advisor war in the Caucasus at the moment? Should we find ourselves in the situation where the Russians want to reassert their sway in Eastern Europe, we would have some very serious and consequential decisions to make. But this just is not that. The key is that McCain, both in terms of policy and temperament, wants to court that result.

It’s sort of funny when he’s just an unhinged senator. But think for a moment where we’d be if this man were president right now, as he may well be in six months. This man takes the counsel of the people who got us into the Iraq War. On foreign policy, he is in league with the people who were so extreme they’ve now largely been kicked out of the Bush administration. People like John Bolton and others like him.

It’s beyond Obama or political strategy or dinging McCain on this or that policy.

This man is simply too dangerous and unstable to be president. People need to wake up and get a look of the preview he’s giving us of a McCain presidency.

But someone should call him out.

From TPM Reader KB …

Josh, I agree with your reader email that it is almost impossible at this point for Obama himself to call out McCain on playing the race card. But that doesn’t mean an outsider can’t call out McCain. Imagine if a respected, non-partisan, friend-of-McCain went public with concerns about the images in McCain’s advertising. One wonders what Colin and Alma Powell think of the images in the McCain ad and the racial subtext to them. A Powell rebuke would be powerful and debilitating to the McCain campaign. It would change the game.

The President of Georgia just quoted John McCain in a speech before a large crowd in Tbilisi. It helps having one of the Georgian president’s employees running your foreign policy team.

Late update: Here’s the video: