Prescient?

McCain supporters are obviously going to try and run a good distance with the argument that he was somehow “prescient” on the question of Russian power. I’m not quite sure how to put this, but McCain’s apparent inability to view Russian foreign policy as anything other than retooled Soviet ambition strikes me as unhelpfully alarmist. Let’s recall that if things had gone as McCain preferred, the United States would have somehow expelled the Russians from the G-8, forced NATO to rapidly absorb Georgia and the Ukraine, unleashed the fookin’ fury on Iran, and pursued any any number of other needlessly provocative (and delusional) goals. (On the other hand, things certainly did go McCain’s way in the run-up to the Iraq War, which was in itself has been an absolute crackerjack for US-Russian relations. In the very least, the Russians seem to have developed an appreciation for the virtues of regime change; to their modest credit, they seem to have outperformed the Bush administration in so far as creating a pretext for that sort of work.)

I suspect things will get even more pointlessly silly in the coming weeks. McCain is already arguing that the pussification of NATO green-lighted Russian aggression, while his blogospheric taint-moisteners are in full St. Vitus’ dance, comparing the conflict in South Ossetia to the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Afghanistan, warning once more that Barack Obama is a minstrelized Jimmy Carter, and calling for the US to . . . I dunno, go kill a few Muslims somewhere to show the Russians we mean business. I predict that with a few days, “National Greatness Conservatives” will begin calling out the pantywaists in the State department for “losing South Ossetia”; insisting that all of this traces back to our Failure of Will in Iraq; reviving Bush’s assertion that global tyranny is still FDR’s fault; and reminding the world that the Russia is once more trying to execute the dying wishes of Peter the Great.

. . . Well, I’ll admit I hadn’t thought of this one: Someday, apparently, “8/8” will be remembered as this generation’s “9/11,” or something. Does this mean we can still keep playing that shitty Lee Greenwood song during the 7th inning stretch?