When Russian troops attacked Georgia, I expected the "blame America first" crowd to claim it was somehow our fault. And I figured that the purveyors of moral equivalence would suggest that we were in no position to criticize Russia since we invaded Iraq. (Never mind that we liberated Iraq from a brutal, genocidal dictatorship after it defied 14 U.N. resolutions, whereas the Russsians are trying to topple a democratic government and want to take over a free country as a first step to reestablishing a Russian Empire.)
But I admit that even I was surprised by Robert Scheer's insane conspiracy theory claiming that the McCain campaign is behind the whole thing:
Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?
Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government, ending his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.
Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. Iraq invasion.
…
In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia's membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia's Vladimir Putin.
Um, unless I'm mistaken, Saakashvili's "bellicose views" are that Russia should stop supporting rebel armies in two provinces that have long been a part of Georgia, should stop trying to intimidate and dominate Georgia, and has no right to annex Georgia. <snark>What a monster.</snark>
As for the rest of Scheer's screed, it criticizes Georgia's "imperial designs" on two of its own provinces, it attempts to demonstrate that the whole Georgia crisis was manufactured by McCain and his "neoconservative cabal" to further his election chances, and it paints Vladimir Putin as an innocent victim.
Wow.
