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McCain may be best bet for Republicans

    Lobby dominated, Republicanism has long patronized the wealthy at middleclass expense. The freedom to become wealthy is welcomed. Domination by the wealthy is not. The Republican middleclass base apparently rebelled to regain party control.
    A rebellion requires a rebel leader. The middle-class found one in maverick John McCain. His electoral success is a message for change in Republican priorities.
    Except for the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, most party loyal Republican conservatives will credit McCain’s 80 percent conservative voting record and support him.
    Negatives: He promises secure borders; however, 40 percent of illegal employment balanced with additional work visas would be well received. He’s weak on global warming and business savvy.
    Positives: McCain’s aggressive stance on terrorism and stabilizing Iraq should trump Democrat doves. McCain would end the flawed corn ethanol program. He requested no earmarks last year, and as president will attempt to end them. He tried but failed to control campaign fi - nancing. He opposed Bush tax cuts, convinced they favored the rich, but accepts making them permanent (knowing full well congressional support is lacking).
    Any concessions made to intransigent conservatives will alienate McCain’s middle-class base. His potential presidential triumph requires remaining steadfast, true to his principles. Perceived as a centrist hawk, he will harvest middle-class votes, regardless of party affiliation.
    My guess is he’s the optimum candidate to overcome strong odds against a Republican win.
    WALLACE J. HUGHES
    Charlton

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McCain unlikely to stack Court to fight abortion

    Hillary Clinton’s blessing notwithstanding, many of the New York senator’s supporters will resist the handover to Barack Obama. The sexism that permeated the recent campaign still rankles, and John McCain is far from the standard-issue Republican they instinctively vote against.
    A big sticking point for wavering Democrats will be McCain’s position on reproductive rights. Clinton’s backers are overwhelmingly pro-choice, and they’ll want to know this: Would McCain stock the Supreme Court with foes of Roe v. Wade? The 1973 decision guarantees a right to abortion.
    The answer is unclear but probably “no.” While McCain has positioned himself as “pro-life” during this campaign, his statements over the years show considerable latitude on the issue.
    In a 1999 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board, McCain said, “I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America” to undergo “illegal and dangerous operations.”
    George W. Bush turned that statement against him in the 2000 race for the GOP nomination. The National Right to Life Committee ran ads denouncing McCain — one reason he lost the important South Carolina primary to Bush.
    Addressing conservative South Carolinians last year, McCain said that Roe should be overturned. Primary politics or a change of mind? The former is my guess — and also that in his current pursuit of Hillary Democrats we may see a softening of that position.
    Whatever McCain really thinks, the chances that he would submerge his presidency in the maelstrom of abortion politics seem slim. Partisan battles over court nominees aren’t his thing, either.
    McCain played a central role in the Gang of 14 — the seven Democratic and seven Republican senators who joined hands to find common ground on court appointments. For his efforts at compromise, McCain took a pummeling from the right wing. Note that Obama, the self-styled foe of division, declined to join the bipartisan group.
    And if a President McCain did put forth

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McCain: States
should drill for
oil along coasts

    ARLINGTON, Va. — Sen. John McCain said Monday the federal moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling should be lifted, and individual states given the right to pursue energy exploration in waters near their own coasts.
    With gasoline prices rising and the United States chronically dependent on foreign oil, the Republican presidential contender said his proposal would “be very helpful in the short term resolving our energy crisis.”
    McCain also suggested giving the states incentives, including a greater share of royalties paid by companies that drill for oil, as an incentive to permit exploration.
    Asked how far offshore states should be given control of drilling rights, he said that was a matter for negotiation.

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MoveOn 'Baby Alex' Ad a Real Winner

Friday, June 20, 2008

By: Bill O'Reilly

Have you seen the "Baby Alex" political ad that the radical-left, George Soros-funded organization MoveOn has produced? To some, it plays like a "Saturday Night Live" skit, but the intent is deadly serious: It is designed to damage John McCain.

In the ad, a young mother holding a baby says, "Hi, John McCain, this is Alex and he's my first . . . So, John McCain, when you say you would stay in Iraq for a hundred years, were you counting on Alex? Because, if you were, you can't have him."

I know, you think I'm making that up. No way.

These loopy MoveOn people spent more than one-half million dollars making and marketing the ad. No word on what Baby Alex's cut was.

My question is this: Who on earth would take that message seriously? What kind of voter is that supposed to reach?

The basic premise of the ad was a conversation from last January between Sen. McCain and the late Tim Russert. McCain told Russert that U.S. troops are needed around the world but we have to keep them safe. The Q&A went like this:

Russert: "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years."

McCain: "Maybe 100 . . . We've been in South Korea — we've been in Japan for 60 years. That'd be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed."

Now, Baby Alex might not understand the geo-political implications of the comment, but honest adults should. The U.S. military is stationed overseas to protect our interests and to defuse dangerous situations, like turmoil in the Persian Gulf. That's tough for a child to digest, but, come on, it's not a kooky position even if you disagree.

Propaganda aside, I liked the Baby Alex ad so much that I'm suggesting MoveOn produce a series of them. Let's see . . . how about Baby Alex thanking his mom for not aborting him? That has a political theme to it.

Also, Baby Alex could extend his gratitude to the FBI for keeping his parents safe since the attack on 9/11. Alex could also, through his perspicacious mother, demonstrate his eagerness to see Islamic fascism defeated — so he and all the other babies won't have to deal with it when they grow up.

Perhaps Baby Alex's mom could also explain to him that he will never have to live under a tyrant like Saddam Hussein because his country embraces freedom. And then, after all that, Alex could settle in for a nice nap knowing that a nutritious meal will be ready for him upon awakening — a meal millions of babies in other countries will never get.

Those ideas should keep MoveOn very busy this election year, and I am definitely looking forward to seeing the spots on TV. Thank you, George Soros. You're a patriot.

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McCain: States should drill for oil along coasts

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At least, flip-flops show candidates listen

    Mr. McCain seems to have flipflopped on the oil issue. What does that mean? It means he’s doing what the system is set up to do.
    Listen to the people. Sure, it may not be what he believes, but it’s the majority of Americans who feel we need more oil. So he is flip-flopping. Not necessarily a bad thing (listening to the people).
    Mr. Obama doesn’t tell us what he’s going to do, besides raise taxes (Mr. Obama can pay with no problem) and punish the United States — no, he tells us just what Mr. McCain will do (even if he takes it out of context). Hopefully when Obama’s speech writer tells him what he’s going to do, he will tell us.
    More taxes in New York state? Nope, they’re fees now — like user fees when you register your vehicle. There’s a new one for you. Look at your renewal.
    If Mr. Obama wants to win, he’d better start flip-flopping.
    BILL ZILBERMAN
    Niskyauna

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McCain Promises to Talk About Gay Marriage

Friday, June 27, 2008

By: Phil Brennan
Wooing conservative evangelical voters at a private meeting, Republican presidential candidate John McCain promised to speak out against gay marriage and seriously consider picking an anti-abortion running mate.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Senator McCain had a private confab in Ohio with several influential social conservatives who have criticized him for failing to toe the conservative line embraced by evangelical Christians. The newspaper reported that McCain scored some points with his audience.

Some of those attending the meeting confided to the Times that McCain would take seriously their requests that he choose an anti-abortion running mate and promised that he would talk more openly about his opposition to gay marriage, a pledge the Times wrote he carried out later when he endorsed a ballot measure in California to ban gay marriage.

"It was obvious there were a lot of changed hearts in the room," said Phil Burress, who led Ohio's anti-gay-marriage ballot measure in 2004. "We realized that he's with us on the majority of the issues we care about."

Meeting privately with evangelicals and promising to heed their concerns won't cut it with the evangelicals attendees, participants told the Times, adding that McCain needs to embrace their positions publicly, not just privately.

"We told him that if he didn't come out and share his pro-family stances on these issues, then he can kiss Ohio goodbye," Burress said. "We can't deliver his message for him."

The Arizona senator is showing his determination to win evangelical support by scheduling meetings with top Christian leaders. He is due to fly to Asheville, N.C., Sunday to meet privately with the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, who met with Obama earlier. McCain told the Ohio group that he hopes to meet with Focus on the Family's Dr. James C. Dobson, who has said he would not vote for McCain.

"The senator spoke fondly of him, but believes there's probably room for some bridge-building," said Mike Gonidakis, head of Ohio Right to Life.

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But Will They Respect Him in the Morning?
by Ann Coulter (more by this author)

Posted 07/23/2008 ET
Updated 07/23/2008 ET

Back before the Republican Party was saddled with John McCain as its nominee, The New York Times called him "the only Republican who promises to end the George Bush style of governing from and on behalf of a small, angry fringe." The paper praised him for "working across the aisle to develop sound bipartisan legislation" and predicted that he would appeal to "a broader range of Americans than the rest of the Republican field."

At the same time, the Times denounced "the real" Rudy Giuliani as "a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man" and Mitt Romney as "shape-shifting," claiming it's "hard to find an issue on which he has not repositioned himself to the right since he was governor of Massachusetts."

Here are a few issues I found that Romney hadn't switched positions on, and it wasn't "hard": tax cuts, health care, same-sex marriage, illegal immigration and the surge in Iraq. The only issue on which Romney had changed his position was abortion, irritating people who would prefer for Republicans to refuse to run in places like Massachusetts and New York City in order to preserve their perfect pro-life credentials.

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof echoed the editorial page in early February with a column titled: "Who Is More Electable?" In the very first sentence, Kristof concluded that McCain is "the Republican most likely to win the November election." Kristof touted McCain's "unusual appeal among swing voters" and cited polls that showed McCain would do "stunningly well" in a general election.

Also in February, CNN produced polls showing McCain doing better than "generic Republican" in a general election, which Jeffrey Toobin said was a tribute to how "well respected" McCain is. Hey, is it too late for us to nominate "generic Republican"?

And on MSNBC's "Hardball," from the way Chris Matthews carried on about McCain, you'd think he had caught a glimpse of Obama's ankle. Matthews said that McCain was "the real straight talker ... a profile in courage ... more seasoned than the current president, a patriot, of course ... honest and respected in the media. He has all the pluses in the world of a sort of a, you know, an Audie Murphy, if you will, a real war hero."

I guess the party's over.

Now the Times won't even publish McCain's op-ed. I wouldn't have published it either -- I've read it twice and I still can't remember what it says -- but I also wouldn't have published McCain's seven op-eds in The New York Times since 1996.

Since McCain has gone from being a Republican "maverick" who attacks Republicans and promotes liberal causes to the Republican nominee for president, he's also gone from being one of the Times' most frequent op-ed guest columnists to being an unpublishable illiterate.

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Froma Harrop
McCain of yesteryear better than today
Froma Harrop is a nationally syndicated columnist.

    Too bad there’s no time-traveling on Election Day. The more moderate John McCain of eight years ago would make a very attractive candidate, and Barack Obama eight years from now could offer an impressive track record.
    Of course, we can time-travel in our heads. And that ability accounts for polls showing a tight race in a year when the Democrat should be surfing double-digit margins.
    We know what McCain was like in 2000, when he ran for president with a fresh maverick message. There was no Obama eight years ago — or even four years ago — at least on the national stage. The lack of ballast makes his messianic rallies, now spanning the continents, a bit creepy. Where did he come from?
    The miracle of McCain’s poll numbers is that they are so high at a time when economic meltdown has become the top anxiety, and he has little to say about it. In terms of policy, he’s actually moving away from the light. The McCain of 2000, who opposed Bush tax cuts for being tilted to the rich, has transformed himself into a classic moneybags Republican. He now vows to preserve the Bush tax cuts and cut the corporate tax.
    It’s pointless to wave the charts showing that rich people pay most of the income taxes. That’s how it should be, since the tax is supposed to be progressive — and it doesn’t include the payroll and other regressive taxes that the non-rich shell out. The main problem with our taxes is that we’re not collecting enough of them to cover government costs, hence the galloping budget deficits.
    McCain has a good record on the spending side, but the government must still pay whatever bills come due. If it doesn’t do this with tax revenues, it does it with borrowing, which is a tax on the next generation.
    The McCain of 2000 would not have put the words “Social Security” and “disgrace” within an hour of each other. The disgrace, he said in a recent speech, was “paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today.”
    That happens to be the way Social Security works, and contrary to its critics, the system is in pretty good shape. We may have to fiddle with contributions or benefits in the future, but that need not be a big deal. Baby boomers had both their payroll taxes hiked and retirement ages delayed, and no one’s burning tires in the streets. (Medicare is something else ...)
    Occasionally, McCain 2008 is more progressive on taxes than Obama 2008. McCain would repeal the 54-cent-a-gallon tax on imported sugar-based ethanol. (Most of it comes from Brazil.) Obama supports the tariff, and a cornucopia of other corporate subsidies for the domestic corn-based ethanol industry, which so generously fills his coffers.
    Corn ethanol is a very mixed bag. It plays a large role in rising food prices. And it is less energy-efficient than the kind made with sugar cane.
    McCain positions like this one — especially gutsy when advanced in corn-producing states — keep the spark going for moderates through the dark hours. And again, we have our memories.
    Jonathan Chait writes in The New Republic that “the upside to a candidate who changes his philosophical orientation as often as McCain is that he could always switch back.” That possibility, combined with McCain’s respect for bipartisanship, is why this campaign doesn’t have “that death-and-life quality” acutely felt when the candidate was George W. Bush. That’s why, as Chait well puts it, “a lot of liberals (still) kind of like John McCain.”
    And that’s why the polls are a lot closer than they ought to be.

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Candidate McCain rejects ‘audacity of hopelessness’ in Iraq
BY TOM RAUM The Associated Press

    DENVER — Republican presidential candidate John McCain, ridiculing Barack Obama for “the audacity of hopelessness” in his policies on Iraq, said Friday that the entire Middle East could have plunged into war had U.S. troops been withdrawn as his rival advocated.
    Speaking to an audience of Hispanic military veterans, McCain stepped up his criticism of Obama while the Illinois senator continued his headline-grabbing tour of the Middle East and Europe. The Arizona Republican contended that Obama’s policies — he opposed sending more troops to Iraq in the “surge” that McCain supported — would have led to defeat there and in Afghanistan.
    “We rejected the audacity of hopelessness, and we were right,” McCain said, a play on the title of Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope.”
    McCain laid out a near-apocalyptic chain of events he said could have resulted had Obama managed to stop the troop buildup ordered by President Bush: U.S. forces retreating under fire, the Iraqi army collapsing, civilian casualties increasing dramatically, al-Qaida killing cooperative Sunni sheiks and finding safe havens to train fighters and launch attacks on Americans, and civil war, genocide and a wider conflict.
    “Above all, America would have been humiliated and weakened,” he said. “Terrorists would have seen our defeat as evidence America lacked the resolve to defeat them. As Iraq descended into chaos, other countries in the Middle East would have come to the aid of their favored factions, and the entire region might have erupted in war.”
    Noting that the buildup was unpopular with most Americans, McCain said: “Sen. Obama told the American people what he thought you wanted to hear. I told you the truth.”
    Obama has called for a withdrawal over 16 months. McCain again criticized him for advocating “a politically expedient timetable” and for voting against funding for troops. McCain had raised eyebrows earlier this week by charging that Obama “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.”
    With one exception, Obama has voted for every spending bill for troops at war. In 2007, Bush vetoed a bill that provided funding on condition of troop withdrawals, and Obama joined 13 other senators who opposed the measure that took its place.
    McCain’s speech in Denver came at the conclusion of a week in which he struggled against Obama’s overseas tour de force. Yet amid the awkward moments, McCain managed to campaign busily in key battleground states and to raise millions of dollars at fundraisers.
    Polls in many swing states are close, and some are tightening. The Arizona Republican sought to turn this to his advantage in what was clearly a difficult week to be a stayat-home candidate.
    McCain repeatedly emphasized his long military and congressional background, scolded Obama from afar on foreign policy, and kept playfully fueling speculation that he was close to picking a running mate.

JOE AMON/THE DENVER POST
Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., enters to address the American GI Forum Convention at the Grand Hyatt in Denver on Friday.

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Explosive issue of race hits Obama-McCain campaign
BY LIZ SIDOTI The Associated Press

    WASHINGTON — John McCain accused Barack Obama of playing politics with race on Thursday, raising the explosive issue after the first black candidate with a serious chance of winning the White House claimed Republicans will try to scare voters by saying he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”
    Until now, the subject of race has been almost taboo in the campaign, at least in public, with both sides fearing its destructive force.
    “I’m disappointed that Senator Obama would say the things he’s saying,” McCain told reporters in Racine, Wis. The Arizona senator said he agreed with campaign manager Rick Davis’ statement earlier that “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.” The aide was suggesting McCain had been wrongfully accused.
    In turn, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said, “We weren’t suggesting in any way he’s using race as an issue” but that McCain “is using the same, old low-road politics that voters are very unhappy about to distract voters from the real issues in this campaign.”
    A day earlier and in response to a hard-hitting McCain commercial, Obama argued that President Bush and McCain have little to offer voters so Republicans will resort to a strategy of fear to keep the White House.
    “What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”
    He didn’t explain the comment. But it evoked images of past presidents who grace U.S. paper money, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant. All were white men, and all but Grant were older than Obama when elected.
    Obama long has talked about his physical appearance in speeches, but McCain advisers argue he crossed a significant line by accusing the GOP of scare tactics and alluding to his own race in the same breath.
    The back-and-forth was the latest spike in a contest that’s grown increasingly negative despite pledges by both Obama and McCain to run aboveboard campaigns. The daily rhetoric has turned red-hot as both maneuver for advantage and polls show the race competitive three months before the election.
    At 46, Obama is serving his fi rst Senate term and working to overcome concerns of voters that he’s not ready to be president. McCain is trying to stoke the notion that the Democrat is too inexperienced to make the judgments necessary to lead a country in times of war and economic straits.
    Polls show a close contest nationally and in key battleground states, including electoral prizes like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. The political environment after two Bush terms tilts heavily in the Democrats’ favor, but voter skepticism about Obama has helped keep the contest within McCain’s reach.
    In recent days, McCain has been going after Obama with new fervor, painting him as not ready to lead and too liberal for the country. It’s an aggressive approach reminiscent of GOP operative Karl Rove, who orchestrated Bush’s back-to-back victories in part by tearing down Democratic opponents.

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McCain Gaffes, Volunteering Wife For Topless Contest

August 05, 2008 5:31 PM

ANC News' Gregory Wallace and Sara Just Report:
Sen. John McCain, R-Az., perhaps unknowingly, volunteered his wife for a beauty pageant on Monday that often features contestants topless -- and, occasionally, without any  decency -- at the Sturgis, South Dakota, motorcycle rally.

"I was looking at the Sturgis schedule, and noticed that you had a beauty pageant, so I encouraged Cindy to compete," McCain told an audience at the rally.  "I told her [that] with a little luck, she could be the only woman to serve as both the First Lady and Miss Buffalo Chip."

The audience, clearly better versed in the details of the pageant, cheered and whistled their approval.

This annual rally, now in its 62nd year, rally attracts upwards of 500,000 riders in August to the small town of 5,500.  The contest is named for the Buffalo Chip campground, home to about 25,000 riders for the nine-day rally.

The Arizona senator, according to the Buffalo Chip campground website, was participating in "the Buffalo Chip's annual Tribute to American Veterans and Active Duty Servicemen."  The site also says that many attendees are "veterans and active duty servicemen who will have a great appreciation for McCain's family history of service to our country."

McCain also promised the audience that he would only speak briefly.

"I know that we are waiting with great anticipation for Kid Rock and the other entertainment," the Arizona senator said.

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George Will
McCain might win by exploiting Russia’s invasion of Georgia
George Will is a nationally syndicated columnist.

    Last August, John McCain’s campaign was a guttering candle, out of money but flush with halfbaked ideas that were unlikely to be improved by further baking. Anyway, to have many ideas is to have too many for a campaign’s concluding sprint, and McCain’s revival has not been robust enough to bring him even with Barack Obama. Now McCain’s rejuvenated hopes rest on his ability to recast this election, focusing it on who should lead America in a world suddenly darkened by Russia’s war of European conquest.
    To begin the recasting, he should weed from the unkempt garden of his political thinking the populism which often seems like mere attitudinizing redeemed by insincerity. His silliness about sinful Wall Street and exploitative corporations cannot compete with Democratic entrees in the nonsense sweepstakes. Furthermore, his populism subverts his strength — the perception that although he is an acquired taste, he is serious, hence incapable of selfcelebratory froth such as “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
    McCain’s populism, if such there must be, should be distilled into one proposal that would be popular and, unlike most populism, not economically injurious. The proposal, for which he has expressed sympathy, is: No offi - cer of any corporation receiving a federal subsidy, broadly defined, can be paid more than the highest federal civil servant ($124,010 for a GS-15). This would abruptly halt the galloping expansion of private economic entities — is GM next? — eager to become, in effect, joint ventures with Washington.
    Next, McCain should make an asset of an inevitability by promising two presidential vetoes. The inevitability is enlarged Democratic congressional majorities in 2009. Americans suffer political astigmatism. They squint at Washington, seeing an incompetent cornucopia that is too big but which should expand to give them more blessings. Their voting behavior, however, generally conforms to their professed suspicion about unchecked power in Washington: In 31 election cycles since the restoration of normal politics after the Second World War, 19 of them produced divided government — the executive and legislative branches not controlled by the same party.
    Two Democratic priorities in the next Congress would placate two factions that hold the party’s leash — organized labor and the far left. One is abolition of workers’ right to secret ballots in unionization elections. The other is restoration of the “fairness doctrine” in order to kill talk radio, on which liberals cannot compete. The doctrine would expose broadcasters to endless threats of litigation over government rules about how many views must be presented, on which issues, by whom, for how long and in what manner.
    By promising to veto both of these forthcoming assaults on fundamental freedoms, McCain would give specific content to voters’ usually unfocused fear of one-party government. Then, having delighted conservatives, who have thus far curbed their enthusiasm for him, he should make this challenge:
    He should ask Obama to join him in a town meeting on lessons from Russia’s aggression. Both candidates favor NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, perhaps Vladimir Putin’s next victim. But does Russia’s behavior cause Obama to rethink reliance on “soft power” — dialogue, disapproval, diplomacy, economic carrots and sticks — which Putin considers almost an oxymoron? Does Russia’s resort to military coercion, and its arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, cause Obama to revise his resistance to missile defense? Obama, unlike McCain, believes Russia belongs in the G-8. Does Obama think Russia should be admitted to the World Trade Organization? Does Obama consider Putin helpful regarding Iran? Does Obama accept the description of the G-8 as an organization of the largest “industrialized democracies“? Does he think China should be admitted?
    McCain, like Republicans generally, reveres Ronald Reagan. But such reverence seems to involve an obligatory sunniness, which suits neither McCain nor this moment. A great political thinker of the last century, Raymond Aron, was right: “What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.” McCain must convince voters that Obama’s complacent confidence in the taming abilities of soft power is the effect of liberalism’s scary sentimentalism about a dangerous thing, human nature, and a fiction, “the community of nations.”
    McCain is hardly the change many people have been eagerly waiting for, but Putin is part of the change we must confront. Until Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it seemed that not even the Democratic Party could lose this election. But it might if McCain can make it turn on the question of who is ornery enough to give Putin a convincing, deterring telephone call at 3 a.m.

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And None Dare Call It Treason
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Posted 08/22/2008


Who is Randy Scheunemann?

He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.

But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.

He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 -- pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.

What were Mikheil's marching orders to Tbilisi's man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.

Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann's client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.

U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?

Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.

That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality -- namely, that Russia's control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with Russia.

If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain, Barack Obama, Bush, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.

Not only did Scheunemann's two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.

Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June 1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.

The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of protector of Russians left behind in the "near abroad" when the Soviet Union broke apart.

Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians out.

This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.

Scheunemann's resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9-11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9-11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.

Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain's camp.

The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.

Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?

Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George Bush?

"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence ... a free people ought to be constantly awake," Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call it treason.

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McCain makes decision on VP running mate

By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer
11 minutes ago



DENVER - Republican presidential candidate John McCain decided on a running mate early Thursday, and one top prospect, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, abruptly canceled numerous public appearances.

The Arizona senator will appear with his No. 2 at an Ohio rally on Friday, aides said, though they provided no details on who McCain had picked.

Without explanation, Pawlenty called off an Associated Press interview at the last minute, as well as other media interviews in Denver, site of the Democratic National Convention.

Others believed to be in contention for the No. 2 slot on the GOP ticket included former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who was meeting with donors throughout California, and Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who was vacationing on New York's Long Island.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, too, was still a possibility, as was the idea that McCain would choose a dark horse from any number of names that have circulated.

Fueling speculation that McCain would choose either Pawlenty or Romney or anothe