Was John McCain so up to speed on Georgia that his campaign had to look it up and crib the entry from Wikipedia?

Late Update: TPM Reader JO counter-snarks …

Really great title. But I’m not sure you really want to make this point. It just kills the “McCain can’t work a computer” meme.

A few weeks ago Left Blogistan was mocking McCain for his lack of computer skills. Here he is cutting and pasting, and from Wikipedia no less. I mean, he leaped over the Microsoft Encarta era completely. Give the guy some credit — at least he didn’t copy from World Book Encyclopedia.

I see George “Macaca” Allen is on Fox explaining why John McCain’s gonzo antics trying to get us into a nuclear confrontation over Georgia shows why we desperately need to make him president as soon as possible. But I do notice that McCain is bragging about how he’s been repeatedly on the phone talking with the President of Georgia (as has Obama) and generally conducting his own mini-foreign policy.

Says the FT …

John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, on Monday upstaged George W. Bush’s administration over the Georgia crisis with his strongest statement so far calling on the US and its allies to come together in “universal condemnation of Russian aggression”.

Mr McCain, who gave his first response early last Friday several hours before any official word from the Bush administration, said the US should take steps to assist Georgia and other democracies in the region that he said were threatened by Russia’s actions.

“Russia’s aggression against Georgia is both a matter of urgent moral and strategic importance to the United States,” said Mr McCain. “The implications go beyond their threat to . . . a democratic Georgia. Russia is using violence against Georgia, in part, to intimidate other neighbours such as Ukraine, for choosing to associate with the west.”

Mr McCain’s statement – his third since the crisis began – stood in clear contrast on Monday to the relatively low-key response of the Bush administration and the Obama campaign. Barack Obama himself issued a statement on Saturday but remains on vacation in Hawaii. President Bush, at the Beijing Olympics on Saturday, expressed “grave concern” about Moscow’s “disproportionate response” in South Ossetia, but did not follow Mr McCain in portraying the crisis as a watershed moment for democracy in the region.

Isn’t this a bit, well … presumptuous.

Someone might want to mention to Sen. McCain that we only have one president at a time (however feeble he might be) and he shouldn’t be reaching above his station.

Anatol Lieven of DC’s New America Foundation has a very different take on the Georgia crisis than you’re likely to see in the US press. It appears in the Times of London.

I don’t sign on or not sign on to the entirety of his take. I need to learn more. But it is at least a needed counterbalance to a lot of the rah-rah nonsense I’m seeing in a lot of coverage I’m seeing. Take a look.

Fred Kaplan on Georgia …

Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

It’s heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times–officials, soldiers, and citizens–wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It’s infuriating because it’s clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would. When Bush (properly) pushed for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, Putin warned that he would do the same for pro-Russian secessionists elsewhere, by which he could only have meant Georgia’s separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin had taken drastic steps in earlier disputes over those regions–for instance, embargoing all trade with Georgia–with an implicit threat that he could inflict far greater punishment. Yet Bush continued to entice Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out.

Scott Horton has some more sage thoughts.

Josh Green’s much-anticipated article in The Atlantic about the struggles in Hillaryland has just gone live online, complete with a treasure trove of internal Hillary campaign memos that paint a vivid portrait of the campaign’s internal battles over strategy.

The memos show even more clearly than before that chief Hillary strategist Mark Penn advocated a brutally negative and xenophobic campaign against Obama, and they reveal a host of internal tensions on other matters.

Andrew Sullivan is right about this. This is something that transcends whatever immediate campaign tactics or even strategy Barack Obama may be pursuing. It goes beyond him. It goes beyond the Democrats. The whole country needs to wake up.

The foreign policy of the last seven-plus years has been an unmitigated disaster for the United States by virtually every measure. And John McCain would ramp up all the worst traits of the current administration. His instincts are always toward force and the people advising him come squarely from the Cheney wing of the current administration. In comparison to Bush he’s not just more of the same. There’s every reason to believe he’d be much worse.

The current situation in Georgia and his response should make clear to everyone how dangerous a president John McCain would be.

In Newsweek, John Barry makes the argument for the truly insane approach to the Georgian crisis — first, the simpleton’s historical analogies, then the totally loopy prescription — issue a guarantee of Georgia’s independence and sovereignty and back it up by sending the 82nd Airborne (after all they’re done in Iraq, so they’re available) into the country as a tripwire.

Brilliant.

(Do whatever you can to make sure John McCain is not elected president. Too many opportunities for crazy mischief to let him get his hands on the military and the bomb.)

In a sense the revelations of Mark Penn’s ‘xenophobia’ memos is old news, a post-mortem on a campaign that was all-consuming three months ago and now part of history. But seeing the memos beyond the message is instructive, highly instructive for another reason.

During the campaign there was a lot of clucking about whether the campaign’s message just accidentally stumbled on to charged words and associations. And now we can see what was obvious at the time — that the people in charge of the message weren’t sloppy and unlucky but rather what you would expect, professionals following a detailed plan.

Now how about Sen. McCain? You see his ads lining Obama up with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, a new ad with the tagline “hot chicks dig Obama” (yes, those are the actual words in McCain’s ad) and countless montages of Obama as pop music sensation. How do you think McCain’s memos read?

Only the deeply naive or the deliberately oblivious — which regrettably includes the greater number of the people covering the campaign — don’t know the answer to that question.

TPM Reader KD not optimistic …

As a black guy I can appreciate what McCain is doing. The subtext of the add is hot WHITE chicks dig him. The genius of the strategy is that Obama cannot call him out without being accused of playing the race card again. Apparently now in America, it is worse to call out subtle racism than to actually practice it.

Now that McCain has in effect inoculated himself against the charge, you can expect to see these type of subtle ads kept being run. McCain will never run an add saying that Obama will sleep with your white daughter, but his ads will all have a subtle insinuation of this theme. The goal will be repetition. And they are counting on the media to play and talk about the ads. I dont think Obama can do anything about it.

If Obama loses, his decision to kill the 527’s will be a key reason why. Right now they would be carpet bombing McCain into the stone age (no pun intended). Move On on other 527’s would have numerous ads on how McCain thinks Americans are whining about the economy, how confused McCain always is, etc. McCain would be on the defensive, instead of making Obama react to every new ad.

The only hope now is that Obama’s ground game. His ads have been most unimpressive. They lack creativity. The media really do not want to talk about them. One hopes that this all will change. Right now I give McCain’s new campaign manager an A+. He may be despicable, but he knows what he is doing.

Republican lawyers gearing up to challenge Democratic voter registration drives. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.