McCain Turns Out to be Brilliant

John McCain, it turns out, is a genius.

His pick of Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running-mate completely upstaged Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. As of Friday morning the putative brilliance of the speech was the only thing the press and the chattering class could talk about. If McCain had not announced his running mate when he did, they would still be talking about The Speech well into the Monday news cycle.

Instead, the topic is Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. The press is asking, “ Who is she? Is she qualified? What does she do for the ticket?”

Obama’s speech? Yesterday’s news. Oprah may have cried her false eyelashes off in vain.

Palin’s style, her accent, her politics and her values are all straight from the heartland –or as the coastal liberal elites call it, “Flyover Country.” With knee-jerk speed, the Obamists took a dismissive tone with Palin that the supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton will recognize at once.

The very first release from the Obama camp pooh-poohed Palin as the mayor of a small town. That she was, but as mayor she did things that Barack Obama has not yet done…such as manage a budget and a payroll and administer something larger than a charitable fund. As Governor of Alaska she has governed the largest state, in area, in the Union. She has mastered the complex issues of energy and the environment. She has managed a state budget in the billions of dollars.

Well, she’s only done that for two years, scoff the Obamists. But it’s two years more experience as a government executive than Barack Obama can boast of.

Obama has been hailed as a “post-partisan” politician, but it is Sarah Palin who is the genuine article. You’ve got to like the fact that her worst enemies in the state are Republican pols –the arrogantly self-described “Corrupt Bastards Club”-- whose bribe-taking from big oil and ethical lapses she fearlessly exposed and held to up to public scrutiny. How those Alaska Republicans despise her!

The Obamists are trying every talking point they can think of to gain traction against Palin: Does the selection of Palin indicate McCain’s judgment is too poor for the presidency? (On the contrary, it was a bold stroke of genius –see above.) McCain, it is complained. has “rolled the dice” on an ex-beauty queen (second place in the Miss Alaska pageant for which, I imagine, she got $10 and passed “Go.”).

The critics claim Palin’s pro-life views are too extreme (because she believed her unborn Down syndrome baby was a human being and because she brought him into the world —and a loving family— instead of aborting him?). Having complained about Palin’s pro-life views s the Obamists cynically ask if is appropriate for her to accept the Vice Presidency while raising an infant? (Are we saying a woman’s place is in the home??)

She has no foreign policy experience, the liberals cry …Except that she visited Alaskan National Guard troops in Kuwait and was able to visit wounded soldiers in Germany –a feat Obama failed to accomplish. In fact, she has the rare skill of being able to run for president and visit Germany without demanding to make a speech at the Brandenburg Gate.

There is very little mention of how she has lived the kind of typical American life Obama talks so much about but has no experience with personally. Her dad was an elementary schoolteacher and her mom was the school secretary. As point guard of her high school basketball team she helped lead the team to a state championship –while courageously playing through pain thanks to a stress fracture in her leg. She married her high school sweetheart and is still with him 20 years later as a mom of five. She and her husband both earned their livings doing hard physical work. She believes in the Second Amendment: Palin enjoys moose meat stew –especially if she shot the moose herself and most of all if she has spent the day snowmachineing.

She has moral courage that complements her physical stamina. She stands up to big oil and protects the interests of her state’s citizens in the development of Alaskan resources. She insists on clean and ethical government. She won the governorship without the help of the corrupt Republican state establishment, Palin is beholding only to the people, who have given her approval ratings of 80 percent and better.

It was very instructive to watch the Sunday morning news shows. The tone of condescension was overwhelming. Reporters and columnists said that she had appeal –not to college-educated voters, of course, but to blue-collar types who live between the coasts.

New York Times columnist David Brooks told Bob Schieffer that, yes, Palin stood up to big oil; she is a reformer; she took on the Corrupt Bastards Club and beat them…but she hasn’t really done anything! Rudy Giuliani, on “Face the Nation,” corrected Bob Schieffer’s dismissive characterization of her stint as a small town mayor. Palin, Giuliani said, has had to use all the skills of an executive in managing payrolls, making budgets and setting policy. What, he asked, has Obama run? All he has done is make speeches, Giuliani said, answering his own question.

I liked Jesse Jackson’s answer some months ago better. All Obama has run, said Jackson, “is his mouth.”

With Sarah Palin, McCain is attacking Barack Obama on the latter’s home territory by demonstrating he is willing to take bold action to bring change to government. Comparing Obama’s vice presidential pick of Washington insider (and serial plagiarist) Joe Biden to McCain’s choice of a little-known woman with solid reformist credentials argues credibly that McCain is the genuine agent of change…the real maverick.

Veep! Veep! Straight Talk Express Runs Over Obama’s Big Entrance

Obama’s side is complaining that the decision by McCain to let it slip that he has picked a running mate amounts to “political malpractice.” What that statement amounts to is whining. McCain has cleverly upstaged Obama’s address from Olympus by giving the press a hard news story to dig into…Last minute VP speculations….Maybe Carly Fiorina, the former head of Hewlett-Packard and chairwoman of the RNC’s Victory ’08. Is she headed for Dayton? …Mitt Romney and family have left for Dayton where they will appear with McCain. He was spotted today with what appeared to be a Secret Service detail….Colin Powel’s spokesperson says General Powell has not been vetted and has not filled out a McCain vetting questionnaire…Kay Bailey Hutchinson tells MSNBC she does not want to spend 4 years in DC as Veep. She wants to go home and run for governor of Texas…. Sadly no noticeable buzz for Condi Rice. The smart money is on Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney. Pawlenty has canceled all his public appointments for tomorrow….

Olberman vs. Scarborough …and Brokaw …and Murphy …and Bush …and Wolfson …and Hillary …and Cheney …and etc., etc….

Portfolio’s Jeff Bercovici says feuding anchors Keith Olberman and Joe Scarborough (the latter being the token moderate on the left-oriented MSNBC) should just get the measuring tape, whip out the appropriate equipment and start a’ measuring.

The squabble of anchors going on at MSNBC is easily the least professional-looking spectacle in television news, cable or broadcast. Leaving Olberman’s mike on while Scarborough was attempting political analysis was bush-league. For Olberman to beg for a shovel in the middle of Scarborough’s piece is a stunt no self-respecting college radio station would allow.

Olberman, the converted sportscaster who has taken his “Countdown” show from third place in cable news ratings for that hour to …third place, is reputedly difficult to work with. I have no evidence to back that up --aside from the viral video clip of the “shovel-to-shovel” confrontation with Joe Scarborough described above –and the rumor, which is crisscrossing the Internet, that Olberman wants Tom Brokaw banned form MSNBC. He also reportedly wants to ban Mike Murphy, a moderate columnist from Time, off MSNBC’s air. This, of course, takes nothing away from the loathing Olberman expresses for Bush, Rove, the Clintons, Howard Wolfson, Cheney, etc., etc…

Though it is number one in the cable news field, FOX News still has an unpolished feel to it. Its coverage, I submit, is not as thorough as CNN’s and its production values are only acceptable at best. But the shenanigans at MSNBC and their left-wing bias, make FOX News look like the Tiffany of its field by comparison.

Thank goodness the issue has been cleared up. Barack Obama does NOT think he is the Lord Jesus.

Apparently, he is Zeus.

Or so it would seem, given the stage setting at Mile High Stadium he has had erected for his “acceptance” speech tonight. It is a columned Greco-Roman temple. Only instead of Zeus emerging from amid the snowy columns of the Temple of Obama bearing thunderbolts, we will get Obama --with a teleprompter, but alas, no toga, and no laurel wreath upon his brow.

Seventy thousand will be on hand at Mile High…er… Barackopolis to hear the candidate’s remarks in a setting of such grandeur it could even satisfy a politician’s ego. The event will amount to a recreated Roman triumph, but without the traditional servant to whisper in the honoree’s ear, “Remember, thou are but mortal,” and without, alas, a balloon drop. What, I ask, is a convention without a balloon drop?

John McCain, it is reported, plans to release the name of his running mate today. This will take some of the public and press attention away from Obama’s acceptance speech from Olympus if the story is true.

My dream VP nominee would be Colin Powell, who did NOT attend the convention to praise Obama or put his name in nomination. My second choice: Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas. She is from a state McCain will win anyway, but she is a very able Senate veteran and a woman –too bad she and McCain are not chummy. I would also recommend (if McCain were to listen to me) Condi Rice. How about Mike Huckabee or Fred Thompson? How about General David Petraeus? How about someone that people have HEARD of…??

Keep fingers crossed that it isn’t Joe Lieberman. Though my Connecticut neighbor has lots to recommend him, his pro-choice views would injure McCain with his conservative and evangelical base voters. The very notion of a pro-choice running mate made Rush Limbaugh fly off the handle on his show yesterday, declaring such a selection would destroy the GOP.

What we are most likely to get is governors Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty –both nice guys but not as powerful a choice as Biden is for Obama.

Critique of Obama Becomes Thoughtcrime

Barack Obama would like to see a Dallas billionaire, Harold Simmons, prosecuted and sent to jail.

Now there is nothing novel about a Democrat at the far left of his party wishing ill for a billionaire. They hate billionaires on principle, if for no other reason. But Obama’s complaint comes straight from George Orwell: Thoughtcrime.

Specifically, Simmons funded and bought television time for a commercial detailing Barack Obama’s relationship with radical bomb-thrower and former Weatherman Underground member William Ayers.

I can call him a “bomb-thrower” without facing libel, because he is admittedly the guy who planted bombs at the Pentagon, New York City Police Headquarters and the U.S. Capitol and who was on the run for 10 years. His wife is another ex-Weatherman fugitive Bernadette Dohrn.

In a 2001 autobiography Ayers said, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Another interesting Ayers quote from back in the day was, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents." "What a country," Ayers said in 2001, after having met Obama years before; "It makes me want to puke."

In the 1990’s the couple hosted the Obama at a meet and greet for his first State Senate run. This was the launch of Obama’s political career. Ayers served with Obama from 1999 through 2001 on the non-profit Woods Fund of Chicago as paid board members. Ayers has donated at least once before to an Obama campaign.

Ayers has not expressed any regret for having set bombs in public buildings.

Now that is the content of the ad, which you can see here: http://www.americanissuesproject.org/. Obama general counsel Bob Bauer is calling for the prosecution of Simmons for what he alleges is “a knowing and willful violation of the individual aggregate contribution limits.” (Politico Aug. 27, 2008). In other words, he is not challenging the content, but the legality of running any such ad in the first place.

Of course it is the thought that counts. Would Bauer be calling for a prosecution if the ad were just another item in the media worship of Barack Obama?

Ed Martin, president of The American Issues Project, observed acidly that despots in the past, “generally had to wait until they were in power to throw people who disagreed with them into jail.”

Nancy Pelosi has just as little patience with thoughtcrime. The Savior of the Planet, as she describes her mission, was confronted by demonstrators yesterday chanting “Drill here! Drill now!” reflecting the views of about two thirds to three quarters of the population.

Pelosi responded, “Right here?…Can we drill your brains?” Charming. Congressional Majority Leader Steny Hoyer chimed in saying that “thinking Americans” (his emphasis ...remember only liberals are officially intelligent) know that Americans don’t have a quarter of the world’s oil, though we use 25 percent of all fossil fuel energy.

Meanwhile Ms. Pelosi’s new career as a Catholic theologian continues to attract, if not rave reviews, raving Catholic bishops. You may recall Pelosi appealed to her ardent Catholicism as authority when she claimed on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” that the “doctors of the church,” by which she meant its most distinguished theologians, have been unable to state when human life begins.

So far Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, CT, the chairman of the Bishop’s Committee on Doctrine (what the Church teaches), Archbishops Donald Wuerl of Washington and Charles Chaput of Denver, Cardinal Edward Egan of New York and Cardinal Justin Rigali chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Pro-Life Activities, have all had the audacity to contradict Ms. Pelosi by stating that Catholic doctrine has always taught that human life begins at the moment of conception.

Brendan Daly, a Pelosi spokesman, set these thoughtcriminals straight saying the congresswoman bases her statement on Saint Augustine who wrote that “the law does not provide that the act [abortion] pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation.”

Cardinal Rigali and Bishop Lori responded stating that while uniformed and unscientific beliefs about embryo development in the Middle Ages led to differences in the penalties for commission of the sin of abortion, “the Church's moral teaching never justified or permitted abortion at any stage of development.''

Daly was obliged to fall back on the final, lame argument of pro-choice Catholic Democrats, saying that many American Catholics disagree with the Church’s teaching. Anyway, he observed, Pelosi believes making family planning more available could reduce the number of abortions.

The Church forbids contraception, too.

Junge und Spieljunge (Boy and Playboy)

As this century progresses, scholars are going to give a lot of thought as to which philosophers had the greatest influence on the 20^th Century.

Was it Karl Marx, whose “scientific” reading of history and modern definition of communism sparked so much conflict and political change?

Was it Nietzsche, whose theory of the super-man and declaration that “God is dead” unintentionally provided the underpinnings for the rise of Nazism in Germany?

Was it Jean Paul Sartre, whose existentialism gave us all a word to use to that makes our conversation sound intellectual –even if we don’t quite know what it means? *

Or was it Hugh M. “Call me ‘Hef’” Hefner?

Aside from Hefner’s genius in figuring out that it is the publishers, not the writers, who make all the money in the literary field, it was his philosophy that has changed society most profoundly, deeply and permanently.

Hefner went to great lengths to produce a product –Playboy-- that was many cuts above the near-pornographic “men’s magazines” of his day (the 1950’s) and infinitely classier than the raw hardcore stuff your local variety store owner kept under the counter for his “special” customers.

Hef dressed up Playboy with fiction from top writers and cutting-edge articles on music, art, clothing, theatre, cinema, hi-fi, and all the other accoutrements of the good life. The magazine discussed issues such as racial prejudice, the hypocrisy of modern advertising (while maxing out its ad pages) and modern politics. It offered celebrity interviews, satire, humor and even poetry.

There was so much substantial and serious content in the magazine that you could almost believe it when your friend, when admitting he read Playboy, claimed, “I only read it for the articles about jazz and men’s fashion.”

It was a hell of a lot of cover that Hef provided for the individual who wanted to look at girlie pictures without the stigma attached to the traditional men’s magazines. Hef had recreated Esquire, but with a tad less drapery on the girls.

With a liberal slant that gave the magazine a bit of political cover, and quality content to offset the girlie pictures, Playboy achieved a kind of legitimacy. And being a legitimate way to look at semi-naked women, the magazine took off like a rocket, its wild success admittedly surprising Hefner and all others involved. Playboy and its readers acquired a sort of semi-respectability in the first 15 years of publication that gave Hefner a lot of influence on popular culture.

In Playboy, Hef was selling an outlook on life and on women, all protests to the contrary. Readers were encouraged to see themselves as hip, well informed and sophisticated. A desirable woman was defined as the girl next door –the compliant one with the big breasts, that is.

It was in the change in attitudes about sex that Hefner’s magazine demonstrated the most influence –with the help of modern feminism. Hefner was smart enough not to equate feminism with man-hating in the pages of Playboy, a mistake some men made when the movement gathered strength in the late 1960’s and through the 1070’s. In fact, the rejection of women being forced to conform to traditional roles and stereotypes, the insistence on women’s total personal freedom, meshed perfectly with the consequences-free lifestyle that Playboy illustrated for men.

And in a world of no consequences, where anything “consenting adults” do whatever they want to, women became disposable, as did relationships and responsibility. Sex, which had been a kind of seal binding a relationship, was now just another part of dating recreation, like dinner, drinking and dancing.

Then, in the 1970’s, the door Hefner cracked open was kicked in.

If Hefner’s magazine had been the thin entering wedge for classy pornography, it served the same purpose for enterprises that Hef did not choose to undertake. At first, Playboy was cloned. The British magazine Penthouse, which could be described as a slightly rougher imitation of Playboy, appeared in an American version. Gallery (where I freelanced as a music and book reviewer and who still owe me $1,400) soon followed: a low-rent version of Playboy that didn’t bother to airbrush out the bruises or the cellulite on the legs of their models. Then came Hustler.

To say, as publisher Larry Flynt remarked recently, that Hustler “pushed the envelope of taste,” is something of an understatement. Flynt reveled in what he could get away with. Let Hefner have the artsy, good-taste end of the business: Flynt wanted the rest of the market that Hef was careful not to cater to. Not everyone who bought Playboy was a young, hip, upscale exec who carefully read the articles on jazz and fashion. A lot of the readership was guys who wanted to buy explicit pictures of naked women without feeling like perverts doing so. And, until Hustler, Playboy and its clones were all they had. For the not-necessarily-young, un-hip, working-class Joes, Hustler was an exact fit in content and taste –and, thanks to the legitimacy Hefner achieved for Playboy, Hustler was just as publicly purchasable without the buyer feeling like a deviant. Flynt became a wealthy man.

Now it was Flynt, not Hefner, on the cutting edge, daring to do more and show more, challenging government, law enforcement and organized religion on

free speech and obscenity. Flynt conferred on the more straight laced (!) Hefner a sort of establishment respectability by comparison.

By the 1990s events had long been out of Hefner’s power to influence. With the coming of the Internet a man could see anything –absolutely anything!-- he liked for a few bucks or for nothing at all, in the comfort of his own home, without the embarrassment of having to purchase the material in public, and even if owning the material was in defiance of the law. Thanks to the Internet, the whole world is awash in pornography that every day profoundly influences and defines how millions of men think of women.

To borrow a thought from the late Daniel Moynahan, pornography is dumbing deviance down --for both genders. It is certainly one of the engines behind the sexualization of children, and the fragility –or disposability, if you will-- of modern relationships. Women are arguably more objectified than they were before the feminist revolution. Men are used to thinking of virtually any sexual behavior as permitted, as legitimate. Women are used by men more viciously now than in the Bad Old Days before the Sixties, for now they lack even the protection of society’s hypocrisy, much less its religion and traditional mores. Too many women are faced with choosing a life of anger, solitude or victimhood. Or they can embrace deviance –which is now the norm.

Without Hef, the publisher turned philosopher, it might never have happened.

* The word is “existential.”

Thank God for Misty May...

Thank God for Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh.

If you live in a cave and don’t know who they are, they are the gold medal-winning stars of that classic Olympic sport, Micro-Bikini Women’s Beach Volleyball.

Every fourth summer, the youth of the world assemble, the torch is lit and the struggle of Misty’s and Kerri’s gluteii maximii inside their volleyball outfits begins. NBC makes a gallant, even daring, attempt to portray what is going on around them as a sporting event, but what it is in reality is blessed relief from the mundane fare of primetime television.

Misty is the wife of the luckiest catcher in Major League Baseball and is demonstrably one of the most perfect physical specimens at the XXIX Olympics –and that is with tough competition from the Brazilian team—and the Chinese and every other beach volleyball duo. As a group these extraordinarily fit-looking young ladies are eye-popping advertisements for diet and exercise. There are other edifying aspects of the game which, I discovered, is even more enjoyable to watch when it is played in the rain.

The entire spectacle, as it unfolded in Beijing, represents the apex of Chinese civilization since Mao introduced the country (by force) to Glorious Socialism in 1949. The freethinking young intellectuals who were paraded around in dunce caps and mocked during the Great Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s (at least those not actually murdered) run the country now and their gift to the People’s Republic is to bring real bikini volleyball, to the heart of the late Chairman Mao’s domain.

What would Mao have thought, tuning in to Must See TV this week and seeing a line of Chinese models in bikinis doing their cheerleader thing as a couple of tanned and lithe American women prepare to face off against two nubile goddesses from the beach at Ipanima? Knowing his history, which included a gourmet’s (and a gourmand’s) appreciation of women, Madame Mao notwithstanding, the Chairman probably would have put down his Little Red Remote and settled in for a night of quality television.

The Chinese have made sure there is something for everyone at this Olympics, especially pedophiles, it seems, since the Chinese women’s national gymnastics team are only slightly older than actual embryos. Being of a certain age, I had to avert my eyes for most of their part of the competition. Ever since the death of Jon Benet Ramsay I have found the sight of little girls wearing more than an even pound of makeup to be just a smidge unsettling. Doing that, and then putting said eight year old in a leotard for the world to ogle in High Definition is just wrong. Not that staring at actual 16 year olds is right, but it is measurably less creepy.

I forget that these girls, some of whom was missing a baby tooth for the Games, have ironclad proof that they are 16: a certificate from the Chinese government. Why would they lie? Ogle away!

You don’t have to be Humbert Humbert* to enjoy the rest of the games. You don’t even have to like sports –though if you do, the competition alone is worth the watching. There is women’s trampoline, ladies’ platform diving, the women’s 100 meter and 200 meter dashes, ladies’ hurdles, and women’s pole vaulting. If you think you discern a trend here, you are so right.

If only the Olympic Games lasted forever. But soon they will be replaced by such entirely plausible dramas as Life, in which a former detective, sentenced to life in prison, and exonerated after doing time, comes back to the police force and picks right up where he left off. Then there is the series where British nannies cure deeply dysfunctional families and then take off in hot air balloons to challenge the Luftwaffe in the skies over Germany.

Okay, I made that last one up, but I am sending the idea to Program Development at FOX.

And all kidding aside, Misty and Kerry are amazing athletes who actually play better than they look. And they look really good. I can’t wait for the XXX Olympics.

*Literary reference. See Nabokov, Vladimir.

Russia's Power Politics, 1914-Style

There is no reason on God’s green earth why Russia and the United States should ever come to blows.

On the other hand, in 1914 there was no reason why Russia, France and England should have to have gone to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. No reason except the insanity of power politics as practiced before the Great War. It was the sheer purposelessness of the struggle, the insanity of it all, that was the most demoralizing aspect of the Great War.

After two world wars and the Cold War, our European cousins are very keen on "soft power;" getting things done by diplomacy, persuasion and moral force. It worked for a while and then reality set in, first in the former Yugoslavia and now in Georgia. Now power politics, 1914-style, is back in vogue. Here's why:

Russia has grievances against us that won’t go away. In the 1980's we blocked the Soviet expansion into Afghanistan by arming the Mujahideen. Once they learned how to shoot down Hind helicopters with Sparrow air-to-air missiles it was only a matter of time. We also lured the Soviets into an arms race they didn’t need --or could afford-- to pursue in the 1980’s. When we tossed in the Star Wars chip, they had a breakdown of national will because they utterly believed we could build a system that would negate their intercontinental rocket forces.

Fooled ya! We’re still trying to make the damn thing work 20 years later. It was Ronald Reagan’s coup de grace to the back of the head of communism.

Instead of propping up the USSR in gratitude for being liberated 60 years earlier, the ungrateful eastern European satellite nations gleefully quit the Warsaw Pact. Now they are mostly members of NATO and the European Union and out of Moscow’s grasp. The fact that the presidents of Poland and the Balkan nations dared travel to Tiblisi in the middle of the war, to proclaim solidarity in public with Georgia indicates enormous moral courage –and the knowledge that their security is America’s direct concern.

Except for recently, with the fighting in Georgia, the Russian public regards the United States the Number One Enemy. Russians, from the man in the street to the ex-KGB operative who manipulates the president of Russia like a marionette—they all long for the days when a threat from Russia made the United States and the West tremble.

They long for the days when, in what they call the “near abroad,” the leaders of nations on the Soviet periphery phoned Moscow to check in before making a rest room visit. They don’t just miss the respect the mighty Soviet Union generated; they miss the fear the USSR inspired. Bullying is a part of Russian life, families, neighborhoods, schools, even the armed forces, are riddled with bullies.

Vladimir Putin is an old-time KGB bully.

Putin believes in the power of the bully. Disgusted after the Chechin terrorist attack on a grade school and subsequent massacre, Putin noted darkly that in this world, “The weak are to be beaten.”

Georgia was made an example of because it was weak. Weakness inspires contempt in Russia. More than the so-called provocations in South Ossetia (really stirred up by the Russians themselves), more than siding with the United States, Georgia’s major crime was to be weak. The Russian instinct, when presented with the face of a homeless, helpless, weeping civilian, is to smash that contemptible face in with the heel of a jackboot, as Orwell said, forever and ever.

Having beaten Georgia on the battlefield, Russia now wishes to humiliate her. Again and again. In the past week the Kremlin announced, “Georgian territorial integrity is a dead issue.” Russian soldiers are acting in accord with that statement, robbing everything of value they can get their hands on and digging in on Georgian national territory, despite the promise from Moscow that they were leaving.

We are flying in humanitarian supplies and, I hope, weapons to rearm Georgian soldiers and militia. We are going to have to stand beside our friends when their noses are bloodied because they are our friends, and especially because they are weak. In this world, Americans believe, the strong help the weak, whatever the risk.

Russia is richer than ever in its history thanks to energy revenues. It has all the land it can use and all the raw materials. They simply aspire to smash a few faces from time to time as their God-given right and to scare the rest of the world.

Which leads me to a question. Of the two, who is best suited to deal with Fascist Russia? Barack Obama, or John McClain? This is turning out to be much more important a presidential election than we had dreamed just 14 days ago.