Georgia on my mind

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Pesident Bush sent Secretary of State Condelezza Rice to Tbilisi as an envoy.

The presumptive nominee of the Republican party, Mr. McCain, is sending a bipartisan contingent to Georgia as envoys for his campaign.

(Wow. Is this presumptuous? If Obama had done it, for sure. And McCain wouldn't have let him forget it for being so insolent.)

There's more. While Obama is vacationing in Hawaii, McCain has the floor all to himself. So he is going townhall to townhall, stressing his foreign policy credentials — and turn the political focus to world affairs.

It seemed like all Georgia all of the time, even if the setting didn't appear quite right.

"As you know, over the past several days we've seen that international aggression is, tragically, not a thing of the past," McCain told the audience. "We thought we put a lot of that behind us at the end of the 20th century. But now it's rearing its ugly head in the 21st … [in] the small of nation of Georgia."

(So why was he for the US invasion of Iraq, and wants us to be in Iraq for another 100 years)

Everywhere he went, McCain stressed his knowledge of Georgia. He's been there, he said — and he knows President Mikhail Saakashvili well. In fact, McCain told the crowd in Pennsylvania that he had just been on the phone with the Georgian leader.

"And he wanted me to say thank you to you," McCain said. "To give you his heartfelt thanks for the support of the American people for this tiny little democracy, far away from the United States of America."

(Funny, because when he signed the 'peace treaty' today at the behest of Ms. Rice, Saakashvili was very dismissive of the the West in general, saying that they told him that he was making a mountain out of a molehill when he told the Western leaders that Russia may do what it has now done.)

As McCain pounded his message home, questions started to pop up. McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, it turns out, was a lobbyist working for the nation of Georgia until this year. He's one reason McCain has had that contact with the Georgians, including Saakashvili, over the past several years.

(For the record: McCain has no lobbyists as paid staff. Former lobbyists and advisors who are lobbyists are OK.)

At a news conference in Michigan Wednesday, McCain was asked about the origins of his interest in Georgia.

"All I can say is I have a long record of experience and background and knowledge vis-a-vis our relations with Russia," McCain said. "Although I was deeply disappointed in Russian behavior, I must say this is one in a long series of actions taken by Prime Minister Putin that have been of deep and abiding concern for me for a long time."

(So the Man from the 'Straight Talk Express' skipped the question about Georgia, and talked about Russia instead. It also seems he too has been looking into Putin's eyes and talking to Putin's soul)