The Once Mighty is now openly Mocked

Post of the Month: McCain: Let's Compound the Blunder!

Belgravia Dispatch, center-right blog, on the Russo-Georgian conflict and the folly of McCain with the honors:

"And one McCain would have us compound, I stress, again! An honorable man who served his country well, it is clear his time has past and his grasp on the most basic foreign policy calls we'll need to make in the coming years is very tentative indeed. He'll be surrounded by second-tier 'yes-man' realists and residual neo-con swill, few with any ideas worth pursuing if we mean to take the national interest seriously with sobriety and freshness of perspective. So let us help him exit off-stage gracefully, as he served his country with dignity when called upon, but let us not sacrifice our children's future to ignorants with deludely romantic notions of empire."

So there it is. McCain has Jumped the Shark. He may have looked at the conflict in Georgia as an opportunity to burnish his national security credentials and emphasize his perceived strength against Obama’s perceived weakness. But the opposite occurred. Instead of realizing the folly of the Neoconservative position on Georgia, McCain doubles down and compounds the folly by suggesting that the United States and NATO confront Russia militarily over Georgia if necessary. So back to the post of the month on John McCain’s lost opportunity for leadership:

"Been there, done that. Indeed, we have a President who has announced a pre-emptive doctrine which allows us to, willy-nilly, instigate regime change when and where we deem appropriate. Who are we to lecture Putin now? What standing do we have to do so? And what parochial and self-satisfied myopia has us indignantly thinking we are some unimpeachable arbitrer of right and wrong in the international system after the disastrous missteps of the past eight sordid years?

If we mean to help the Georgians escape an even worse fate, we must summon up the intelligence and humility to have a dialogue with Putin, Medvedev, Sergie Lavrov, Vitaly Churkin and the rest of them based on straight talk (not of the McCain variety, and if we can somehow find a messenger of the stature and talent to deliver the message in the right way, hard these days)….. Let us be clear: these men's credibility (ed note: Bush McCain Cheney) is a sad joke, and Putin knows it only too well. So let's get real. Before it's too late, and more facts are created on the ground, mostly on the backs of innocent civilians throughout Georgia's various regions."

So there you go. Conservatives are deserting McCain for, among other reasons, an unwillingness to stomach his unseemly commitment to neo-conservatism. George Bush is a Practitioner of Neo-conservatism. Dick Cheney is a Practitioner of Neo-Conservatism. John McCain is a Practitioner of Neo-conservatism. They all profess faith in this ideology. But they had their moment, their opportunity to lead, to showcase their ideology with a grand social experiment, but the sandstorms of Iraq proved their Ideology to be built upon a mirage.

John McCain had the opportunity to showcase his foreign policy credentials this week and stand tall. And John McCain missed this opportunity; he jumped the shark. Sad, as note above, but it is true.

UPDATE: McCain and friends are being Mocked from The Corner as well.

Condi Stamps her feet, Bush blathers on from a Beach volleyball court in China and McCain is incoherent. So Sad.