Not only has the Russian military overrun Georgia's. Now a Russian media blitzkrieg is rolling over Western handwringing. Op-eds by Russia's minister of foreign affairs Sergei Lavrov in the Financial Times (Aug. 13) and Wall Street Journal (Aug. 20) and by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in the New York Times (Aug. 20) mount a point-by-point assault on the Western narrative of Soviet-style aggression against"a beautiful little country" and its "wonderful people," to quote Saakashvili's enabler-in-chief, John McCain.

Among the great disgusting moments in U.S. presidential campaign history, ring up John McCain recasting the Russian invasion of Georgia as a religious war in last night's Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency, hosted by megapastor Pastor Rick Warren. In a great pandering mush, McCain managed to fuse democratic evangelicalism with Christian evangelicalism in a fairy tale version of the current catastrophe (excuse the caps; that's how the available transcript is formatted):

True to form, John McCain is calling for NATO to deploy peacekeeping troops to Georgia:

NATO's North Atlantic Council should convene in emergency session to demand a ceasefire and begin discussions on both the deployment of an international peacekeeping force to South Ossetia and the implications for NATO's future relationship with Russia, a Partnership for Peace nation. NATO's decision to withhold a Membership Action Plan for Georgia might have been viewed as a green light by Russia for its attacks on Georgia, and I urge the NATO allies to revisit the decision.

I remember George Bush Sr., while building a campaign on impugning Michael Dukakis' patriotism, protesting (paraphrasing here), "I'm not questioning his patriotism, just his judgment." Hypocrisy is the debt that vice pays to virtue. Bush at least recognized that openly questioning his opponent's patriotism was scurrilous.

McCain, on the other hand, has made a conscious choice to explictly base his campaign on the absurd allegation that Obama "would rather lose a war than lose a campaign." That's worse than a direct assault on patriotism - it's a denial of the Obama's integrity. Here's  
the latest:

McCain has found a line of attack against Obama with which he's very comfortable: he used it repeatedly against Bill Clinton. Here it is, as expressed on Jul. 20 by advisor Randy Scheunemann:

Barack Obama says he wants a 'safe and responsible' withdrawal from Iraq, but is stubbornly adhering to an unconditional withdrawal that places politics above the advice of our military commanders, the success of our troops, and the security of the American people.

[Hat tip to RKA for getting this news out first. A few grace notes below.]

Breaking: Obama has called for withdrawing removing U.S. combat brigades from Iraq within sixteen months of Jan 2009.

No seriously -- writing in today's New York Times, he has seized on Maliki's call for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal to double down -- to declare victory and get out. That's a double victory cry -- Iraq's government is sovereign, and my call for troop withdrawal is/was the right strategy. Never mind that I was wrong about the surge's prospects for success. He's going to seize on that success; McCain won't. McCain's sword is knocked out of his hand.

Obama, you can do better.

I'm not referring to your position on the pending FISA bill, though I don't believe it should be allowed to pass in its current form. I'm talking about your explanation of your shift in position.

Obama is understood to have a bit of a Lincoln fixation. Perhaps that's why, while reading through Obama's June 30 speech on patriotism, I was struck by a little cold-eyed, split-second qualification to a paragraph's paean to Lincoln. Here it is:

Abraham Lincoln did not simply win a war or hold the Union together. In his unwillingness to demonize those against whom he fought; in his refusal to succumb to either the hatred or self-righteousness that war can unleash; in his ultimate insistence that in the aftermath of war the nation would no longer remain half slave and half free; and his trust in the better angels of our nature - he displayed the wisdom and courage that sets a standard for patriotism (my emphasis).

Obama's recent call to expand and renew George W. Bush's government outreach to faith-based charities has been widely denounced as one of several expedient quick-steps to the center.

In fact this initiative is consistent with longstanding tenets of Obama's thinking -- or, if you want to be cynical about it, of his positioning. His July 1 speech in Zanesville Ohio introducing this plan touched several interlocking core Obama themes.

What's the chief reason Obama wants to extricate U.S. troops from Iraq? He wants to concentrate more troops and money and energy on the fight against al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Compare the New York Times' front page June 30 account of the renewed danger we face from a reinvigorated al Qaeda, grown strong in the tribal badlands of Pakistan, with Obama's diagnosis of our chief strategic priority on March 19. Laid side by side, the two documents offer a powerful case in support of Obama's claim that judgment and analytical power -- the ability to gather and process facts -- are more important than experience in a given field.

As the U.S. political pendulum swings left, one residual effect of thirty years of right-wing dominance is the persistent meme that policies designed to arrest growing income inequality and invest in the common welfare are tired, stock, unimaginative, predictable.

Many journalists seem to think that skepticism about Obama's "liberal" policies is a badge of sophistication. In this week's Fortune, for example, Nina Easton casts Obama's economic plans this way:

Say what you like about McCain's policy incoherence -- his major on-the-record flip-flops (Bush tax cuts, warrantless wiretapping, exempting the CIA from torture prohibitions, immigration reform, offshore drilling, etc. etc.), his open disavowals of supposedly current policy positions (not privatizing the existing social security program, eliminating the alternative minimum tax, refusing to bail out homeowners), his ventures into fantasyland (League of Democracies, offsetting hundreds of billions in tax cuts by eliminating earmarks).

The fact remains: he was right about the surge. Not necessarily about what to do next, or what our long-term goals in Iraq should be, but about the need to reduce violence and reach a minimum level of stability before we could expect any political progress. He was not just lucky-right; he was right because he understood the military requirements, and how a measure of military success might give the Iraqi government room to maneuver.

The Wall Street Journal Online published a terrific interview with Obama on economics yesterday - wide-ranging, confrontational, moving freely between theory and policy specifics.

Unfortunately, the front-page print writeup by Bob Davis and Amy Chozicki fails to do the discussion justice. Curiously, it's only two-thirds as long as the print writeup of a March 3 economics interview with McCain -- early fruits, perhaps, of Murdoch's stated desire to make WSJ features shorter. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's chief economic advisor, gets almost half again as much ink as Obama, and much of the article is devoted to dubious parallels between Obama's plan for Federal venture capital-style investment in alternative energy and past failed Federal attempts at alternative energy investment.

Obama is blessed with a deep resonant voice and fluent delivery. Luck of the draw, and part -- but only part -- of his incantatory appeal. Why do his speeches stir so many so deeply -- even people who resist, who ask themselves where's the beef or remind themselves that they're opposed to his policies?

When Obama speaks off the cuff, he pauses and stammers and audibly thinks his way through. In his speeches, there's tremendous fluency, but the intonation still follows that think-it-through rhythm. Long pauses spring rolling clauses; short "on the one hand" setups march slowly uphill toward long "on the other hand" torrents.

Many have complained that Obama's speeches are short on substance. If "substance" means concrete policy proposals, this is sometimes true and sometimes not. Often his laundry lists are as long as Hillary's. But the policy discussion, lengthy or not, is always framed by Obama's personal historiography. That's where the real charge comes from.

In his recent Obama and the Death of Clintonism,  Slate's John Dickerson notes that a major part of the Clintons' pain is that Obama ran against Clintonism, equating the Clintons' "triangulation and poll-driven" politics with a broken system that needs to be reformed. Having sketched out the critique, Dickerson asks, fairly enough:

So what will Obamaism (or is it Obamology?) look like now that the Democratic Party is his to shape? There are a few specific, if not overarching, data points. As an antidote to the secrecy of Clinton's 1994 health care plan, Obama has promised his health care negotiations will be on C-SPAN for all to behold. When Hillary Clinton offered a gas-tax holiday, Obama argued against it, framing the plan as vintage Clintonism—a small meaningless sop confected only for political advantage. He said that if elected, it was just this kind of nonsense he'd avoid.

When asked about his lack of executive experience, Obama often says, "look at my campaign" -- which combined unmatched analysis of the delegate map with equally impressive execution when it came to getting out the targeted vote/caucus. Others have countered that historically, running a brilliant campaign does not correlate particularly well with governing effectively.

This campaign is unprecedented, however -- in length, in candidate exposure, and in the relative strength of the opposition that Obama first overtook and then held in check. And while the campaign's vote-targeting tactical brilliance is not in itself sufficient to predict effective use of executive power in office, a more fundamental aspect of Obama's performance in this most gladitorial of nomination fights bodes very well for the way he's likely to govern.

"Vote for the top tee shirt design" invites the Hillary Clinton website. And one of the five choices really seems to capture Ms. Clinton's world view. Hillary, it blazons across a field of dense type listing denizens of the fifty states ("Alabamians, Arizonians..."). We're all a part of her bigger picture.

In its quasi-benevolent -- or should I say omnibenevolent? -- way, this Planet Hillary vision seems as overdeterminedas her use of an assassination to illustrate a long campaign season. Hillary's got us all in her sights. She will take care of us all. It's all about her.

John McCain continues to oversimplify the threats to U.S. security emerging from the Middle East. In his speech on nuclear security delivered iin Arlington, VA, May 27, he said:

President Ahmadinejad has threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and represents a threat to every country in the region - one we cannot ignore or minimize.