Schadenfreude Watch

I'm oddly depressed today, and I can't put my finger on it. Maybe I'm just being disagreeable. Maybe I'm dreading this enormous task ahead. Maybe I'm steeling myself for the inevitable struggle inside the party. But that doesn't stop me from laughing at the lighter moments!

NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin's shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family—clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent "tens of thousands" more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

Oh, that's just too much.

In the same article, it turns out she asked to SPEAK during the concession speech, which is truly amazing (she wanted to start her 2012 stump speech on the decaying corpse of her running mate?). She brought up William Ayers in Carson before the McCain campaign signed off on it. And then this:

At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys' club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. "I'll be just a minute," she said.

You work with what you got, I guess.

But that's not all. It sounds to me like McCain campaign insiders are dropping every little back of oppo they have to sabotage any effort for her to maintain control of the party, out of sheer vindictiveness. As a result, we get fun tidbits like this:

Smith: Now that the election is over, Carl, tell us more about those reports of infighting between Palin and McCain staffers.

Cameron: I wish I could have told you more at the time but all of it was put off the record until after the election. There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lack the degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, and a heartbeat away from the presidency. We’re told by folks that she didn’t know what countries that were in NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, that being the Canada, the US, and Mexico. We’re told she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent rather than a country just in itself ... a whole host of questions that caused serious problems about her knowledgeability. She got very angry at staff, thought that she was mishandled.....was particularly angry about the way the Katie Couric interview went. She didn’t accept preparation for that interview when the aides say that that was part of the problem. And that there were times that she was hard to control emotionally there's talk of temper tantrums at bad news clippings......

Notwithstanding that there is to be an avalanche that will continue for many days now we’re told of stoy upon story of the foibles of Sarah Palin.

The next week or so is going to be REALLY ugly, unless of course you have no stakes in the outcome of the Republican Party leadership whatsoever, in which case you just laugh and laugh and laugh...

Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain, was fired from the Arizona senator's campaign last week for what one aide called "trashing" the campaign staff, three senior McCain advisers tell CNN.

One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading "disinformation" about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials.

Oh, I'm loving life.

Revenge Of The Neocons

Following up on this bizarre story about John McCain seemingly not knowing the name of the Spanish Prime Minister, the damage control artist Randy Scheunemann has stepped away from his lobbying gigs long enough to offer an explanation, and it's worse than the initial assumption that McCain was just confused:

Zapatero is a center-left politician, but McCain has suggested that as president he would seek to repair relations that have been badly frayed in Europe during Bush's tenure. In an early-April interview with a reporter from Spanish newspaper El Pais, McCain said, "This is the moment to leave behind discrepancies with Spain."

He added: "I would like for [President Zapatero] to visit the United States. I am very interested not only in normalizing relations with Spain but in obtaining good and productive relations with the goal of addressing many issues and challenges that we have to confront together." [...]

McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Sheunemann (sic) said McCain's answer was intentional.

"The questioner asked several times about Senator McCain's willingness to meet Zapatero (and id'd him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred). Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview," he said in an e-mail [...]

Asked to explain McCain's apparent shift in tone and position since April, Scheunemann gave almost no ground.

"In this week's interview, Senator McCain did not rule in or rule out a White House meeting with President Zapatero, a NATO ally," he said in an e-mail. "If elected, he will meet with a wide range of allies in a wide variety of venues but is not going to spell out scheduling and meeting location specifics in advance. He also is not going to make reckless promises to meet America's adversaries. It's called keeping your options open, unlike Senator Obama, who has publicly committed to meeting some of the world's worst dictators unconditionally in his first year in office."

(That's Prime Minister Zapatero, genius)

The female interviewer basically backs this up, believing that McCain "ducked the question" because the Bush Administration doesn't have good relations with Zapatero.

Wow. I knew the neocons were belligerent, but this explanation makes them sound suicidal. Spain is a NATO ally. We would be obligated to go to war on their behalf if they were attacked. McCain wants to refuse to meet with their leaders?

This is part of a pattern of the McCain campaign trying to cover up a bad moment with an even worse explanation. But it's also worth noting that the neocons are far more invested in McCain than they ever were in Bush, if that's possible. He's a very willing parrot for all of their petty grudges and magical thinking. And they're scheming to indoctrinate the other half of the ticket.

Comments by the governor of Alaska in her first television interview, in which she said Nato may have to go to war with Russia and took a tough line on Iran's nuclear programme, were the result of two weeks of briefings by neoconservatives.

Sources in the McCain camp, the Republican Party and Washington think tanks say Mrs Palin was identified as a potential future leader of the neoconservative cause in June 2007. That was when the annual summer cruise organised by the right-of-centre Weekly Standard magazine docked in Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, and the pundits on board took tea with Governor Palin.

Her case as John McCain's running mate was later advanced vociferously by William Kristol, the magazine's editor, who is widely seen as one of the founding fathers of American neoconservative thought - including the robust approach to foreign policy which spurred American intervention in Iraq.

In 1988, Mr Kristol became a leading adviser of another inexperienced Republican vice presidential pick, Dan Quayle, tutoring him in foreign affairs. Last week he praised Mrs Palin as "a spectre of a young, attractive, unapologetic conservatism" that "is haunting the liberal elites".

Now many believe that the "neocons", whose standard bearer in government, Vice President Dick Cheney, lost out in Washington power struggles to the more moderate defence secretary Robert Gates and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, last year are seeking to mould Mrs Palin to renew their influence.

They go after everyone. Some of them work out, some of them don't. In the end, they stay in charge. This "twilight of the neocons" idea was vastly overrated.

The Return Of Malachi

It's one thing for disgraced Jack Abramoff buddy Ralph Reed to resurface at all in a Presidential election. It's another thing for him to headline a fundraiser for the Republican nominee. It's quite another for that nominee to be John McCain, who as chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee investigated Reed and Abramoff's bilking of tribes out of millions of dollars through fake Indian gaming ballot initiatives.

McCain's campaign said Tuesday that Reed has no official role in the presidential campaign. But that didn't stop Democrats from castigating Reed's participation in Monday's fund-raiser at the Marriott Marquis.

"John McCain's decision to cozy up to one of the central figures in the Republican culture of corruption shows how far he is willing to go to win," said Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. "Despite all of his rhetoric about reform, McCain's willingness to accept money raised by tainted Abramoff cronies like Ralph Reed shows that McCain simply cannot be trusted to bring change to Washington politics."

The Georgia Democratic Party was even more blunt. "John McCain says he takes the high road, and then he comes to Atlanta and chows down on shrimp cocktail with an unindicted co-conspirator," party spokesman Martin Matheny said.

Reed is tied into all the disgraceful scandals of the Abramoff years, from the Indian gaming deals to forced slavery and sexual assault on the Marianas Islands:

In August 1999, political organizer Ralph Reed's firm sent out a mailer to Alabama conservative Christians asking them to call then-Rep. Bob Riley (R-Ala.) and tell him to vote against legislation that would have made the U.S. commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands subject to federal wage and worker safety laws....

"The radical left, the Big Labor Union Bosses, and Bill Clinton want to pass a law preventing Chinese from coming to work on the Marianas Islands," the mailer from Reed's firm said. The Chinese workers, it added, "are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ" while on the islands, and many "are converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand."

A year earlier, the Department of the Interior -- which oversees federal policy toward the U.S. territory -- presented a very different picture of life for Chinese workers on the islands. An Interior report found that Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.

This is sad, but typical of a campaign fueled by lobbyist money and weighed down with multiple ties to Abramoff.

When Senator John McCain led a Senate investigation three years ago of Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist who later pleaded guilty to fraud charges, Mr. Abramoff’s old firm turned to a former McCain campaign adviser for help.

The firm, Greenberg Traurig, which had quickly cut its ties to Mr. Abramoff, hired Randy Scheunemann, who had been the McCain campaign’s foreign policy adviser in 2000 — and is again this year — for advice on handling the Senate investigation.

“After Greenberg Traurig severed ties to Mr. Abramoff, Mr. Scheunemann advised the law firm on how best to cooperate with the Senate investigation,” said Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign. “The record reflects that the law firm cooperated.”

(by the way, McCain basically let Abramoff off with a warning in his part of the investigation. He also never called his good buddy Reed to testify.)

My Congressman Henry Waxman today called on McCain to return any money Reed aided in raising for him. Waxman also noted this:

One reporter asked Waxman about the tens of thousands of documents McCain assembled in the course of his investigation but refuses to release to the public.

Waxman told us that John McCain has documents that even the House Oversight Committee couldn't get.

The House Abramoff probe also has a tie-in to the missing email scandal. Waxman's committee found that Abramoff was exchanging a lot of email with White House staffers, and not just through government accounts (as required by law).

In fact, the subpoenaed emails were the first indication that White House officials were doing public business over private email accounts, Waxman explained.

This is a complete racket. I'm glad that the Obama campaign is hammering McCain over his lobbyist ties, but the Abramoff-Reed nexus is the big kahuna. They should go deeper.

Georgia, Georgia, No Peace I Find

Well, I guess the rumors of a cease-fire in the Caucasus were very overstated, as the Russians have held their positions, warned the United States not to get involved, and basically redrew the map:

Russia's foreign minister declared Thursday that the world "can forget about" Georgia's territorial integrity, and officials said Russia targeted military infrastructure and equipment — including radars and patrol boats at a Black Sea naval base and oil hub.

...the comments from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared to come as a challenge to the United States, where President Bush has called for Russia to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia."

"One can forget about any talk about Georgia's territorial integrity because, I believe, it is impossible to persuade South Ossetia and Abkhazia to agree with the logic that they can be forced back into the Georgian state," Lavrov told reporters.

And that, as they say, is that. The US has astonishingly little leverage in this conflict, considering their sustained support for Georgia and inability to be seen as an honest broker, as well as a reluctance to get into a shooting war with Russia. It ought to give the whole nation pause as to the effectiveness of the cowboy diplomacy of the Bush years, which John McCain wants to further and even enhance.

It's EASIER for someone like McCain to put on his combat boots and strut about and make belligerent statements against the Russians. It's a war that neoconservatives understand and find more potential in as an electoral tool than talking about Iraq and Afghanistan.

And it's hard not to recognize that sad figure in the Max Boots and John McCains and Bill Bennetts and all the rest with their sustaining roots planted firmly at AEI HQ. After all, what happened to the long twilight struggle against radical Islam? So yesterday, I guess. Or can we do both simultaneously, even though the Russians are themselves up against hostile Islamic groups on their southern periphery?

Watching the Bennetts and the Krauthammers get all jazzed up about Georgia as the new Afghanistan, with all the painfully awkward nostalgia and excitement of an 80s era Gilligan's Island reunion flick is entertaining. But much less so when you realize these jokers might be running the government in six months.

Meanwhile, McCain can't even keep his own words straight on the conflict when they're not completely fed by Randy Scheunemann.

In effect, this is a local conflict where Russia is settling a Near Abroad dispute in their sphere of influence, and the degree to which we have to have a policy on that, especially when Georgia kicked off this conflict by indiscriminately firing on the South Ossetians, is dubious. I agree with Matt Yglesias:

The reality, however, is that Russia has no actual ability to move from Tblisi to Kiev. Georgia is tiny, poor, and geographically located so as to make it difficult for the West to provide it with any practical support. Ukraine has 10 times Georgia's population, 20 times its economic output, and extensive land borders with countries firmly in the Western orbit. The practical impossibility of conquering Ukraine, not American threats, is what will keep the Russians out of Kiev. Meanwhile, it turns out that, contrary to the fears of the hysterics, Russia isn't even going to Tblisi today, much less Ukraine tomorrow or Estonia the day after that. Vladimir Putin, unlike the leader of the United States, is apparently shrewd enough to recognize that military occupations of foreign territories have high costs and scarce benefits.

But while Russia's punishment of Georgia may not have major consequences for America or for world security, a hysterical American response just might. Most obviously, if we were to take things like John McCain's Aug. 12 proclamation that "we are all Georgians" seriously, we would be in the midst of a shooting war with Russia and literally risking the end of human civilization in a nuclear exchange.

By all accounts, McCain just wants to engage in some irresponsible posturing rather than to follow through on the implications of his words, but even excessive posturing and loose talk of a new Cold War with Russia would have real costs. Specifically, both McCain and Barack Obama have recognized that an agreement with Russia related to nuclear-weapons reductions is key to revitalizing the global nonproliferation regime. Russia can't conquer Ukraine or Estonia, but it can play a key role in helping or hindering American efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. And unlike the status of South Ossetia, nuclear proliferation is actually important to the United States. Having frittered away the past seven years on a foreign policy driven by hubris, the United States can ill-afford to misplace its priorities. With the active phase of the war over, we need to move beyond it as quickly as possible to more important issues, not indulge baroque fantasies of renewed great-power conflict.

Exactly. Humanitarian assistance to an ally is fine, but the talk of World War III is very dangerous.

Peter at Duck of Minerva has more.

Why Is Randy Scheunemann Still Employed?

This is indicative of John McCain's entire campaign.

Sen. John McCain's top foreign policy adviser prepped his boss for an April 17 phone call with the president of Georgia and then helped the presumptive Republican presidential nominee prepare a strong statement of support for the fledgling republic.

The day of the call, a lobbying firm partly owned by the adviser, Randy Scheunemann, signed a $200,000 contract to continue providing strategic advice to the Georgian government in Washington.

The McCain campaign said Georgia's lobbying contract with Orion Strategies had no bearing on the candidate's decision to speak with President Mikheil Saakashvili and did not influence his statement. "The Embassy of Georgia requested the call," said campaign spokesman Brian Rogers.

Um, so what? The guy's a registered lobbyist for a foreign agent embroiled in a conflict with the Russians. McCain has rushed to Georgia's side, telling the country that "we are all Georgians." His top foreign policy advisor is being paid by them. Can you say "conflict of interest"?

Scheunemann is a C-level neocon, and Georgia is a C-level neocon entity, but the fact that this war has burst to the surface not only gives the appearance of impropriety, it damages our foreign policy. You can't tell me that this isn't very harmful.

(CNN) – Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili on Wednesday called for John McCain and other American leaders to do more for Georgia in their response to the conflict in his country.

“Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, ‘We are all Georgians now,’” Saakashvili said on CNN’s American Morning. “Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it’s time to pass from this. From words to deeds.”

So McCain's freelancing is putting pressure on the Bush Administration to act - by attacking the Russians or something just as foolhardy. And there's a foreign lobbyist right in the middle of all this.

Scheunemann should clearly be fired. But I think Obama's campaign has this right:

Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for the Democratic candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, said Scheunemann's business ties to Georgia raise questions about how much he influenced McCain's position on the Georgia conflict.

"It's these sorts of appearances of a conflict of interest that are a natural consequence of having a campaign run by lobbyists, staffed by lobbyists and being ensconced in a lobbyist culture for over a quarter of a century," Sevugan said.

It's bigger than Scheunemann. It's about the culture of Washington that permits this gross conflict of interest.

Think Progress has more on how Scheunemann likely orchestrated McCain's nomination of Saakashvili for the Nobel Prize, for his own financial gain. This is unbelievable.

War!

Georgia and Russia are kicking off the Olympic Games with a shooting war over South Ossetia.

The president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, in a televised address, accused Russia of sending fighter jets to bomb Georgian towns to help the breakaway territory of South Ossetia, where a large number of Russian citizens live.

Russian officials in turn said that the Georgian military had attacked Russian peacekeepers stationed in the area. The Russian Defense Ministry announced late Friday afternoon that it was sending reinforcements to South Ossetia, a move that followed Russian President Dmitry Medvedev telling an emergency meeting of his security council that "we will not allow the deaths of our compatriots to go unpunished."

In a phone interview with McClatchy, Georgian Foreign Minister Eka Tkeshelashvili confirmed that Russian units had passed through the Roki tunnel connecting the two countries. She said she worried that war with Russia was increasingly possible.

Georgia is not a NATO member, but you can bet that under a McCain Presidency, he'd be sending forces or at list logistical personnel over to help them fight the Russians. After all, Randy Scheunemann, a top foreign policy advisor to McCain, has been a paid lobbyist for Georgia.

I know that military tensions are supposed to automatically argue for the Republican, but in this case I really think it's the opposite. In a dangerous world, we can't dedicate all this time and effort to keeping the lid on Iraq.

UPDATE: Obama's statement:

I strongly condemn the outbreak of violence in Georgia, and urge an immediate end to armed conflict. Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint, and to avoid an escalation to full scale war. Georgia’s territorial integrity must be respected. All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability in Georgia, and the United States, the United Nations Security Council, and the international community should fully support a peaceful resolution to this crisis.

Walking Gaffe Machine

Is it the self-assuredness or just the ability to rely on the compliant press that enables John McCain to bust out all these misstatements on a daily basis?

Adding to the total today is the idea that Iraq was the first major post-9/11 conflict... boy, I knew that the GOP forgot about Afghanistan, but I didn't know they TOTALLY forgot about it.

And then he tried to deflect Barack Obama's successful speech in Berlin today by saying that "I would rather speak at a rally or a political gathering any place outside of the country after I am president of the United States," apparently forgetting the events of a month ago:

However, on June 20, McCain himself gave a speech in Canada -- to the Economic Club of Canada -- in which he applauded NAFTA's successes. An implicit message behind that speech was that Obama had been critical of the trade accord. Also, McCain's trip to Canada was paid for by the campaign.

I could loop in the persistent and damaging reports about Randy Scheunemann working in close contact with Bush Library briber Stephen Payne on influence-peddling schemes, too.

If I were McCain I'd just pack it in and follow the route of William McKinley's front-porch campaign - never leave the office or the homestead, and for God's sake don't open your mouth anymore.

Obama's New Vision Of Foreign Policy

One area where we've almost unequivocally seen good Obama is in the area of foreign policy, where, despite what the media wags want to claim, he's been remarkably consistent in his vision for placing Iraq in geopolitical context, strengthening alliances, finding and eradicating loose nukes and offering a more hopeful vision to the world. He's put together another national security ad which stresses that judgment and a change in mindset is what's needed, and in particular putting an end to this idea that problem-solving can only be achieved with guns and rockets. This was endorsed today by, of all people, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned yesterday against the risk of a "creeping militarization" of U.S. foreign policy, saying the State Department should lead U.S. engagement with other countries, with the military playing a supporting role.

"We cannot kill or capture our way to victory" in the long-term campaign against terrorism, Gates said, arguing that military action should be subordinate to political and economic efforts to undermine extremism.

Gates is of course accurate. The State Department, NGOs, and anti-poverty organizations have been sidelined in favor of private military contractors, the police state and the World Bank trying to hold rogue states for ransom. The reliance on supreme military power means that no military action can fail, lest we look weak in front of our enemies. And as Robert Farley notes, this leads to some sunk costs.

To the extent that the United States must devote years, billions upon billions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of troops to "winning" in Iraq, the very purpose of the invasion is undermined. It does no good to "throw some little country against the wall" if in doing so our own capacity to act is severely wounded; other little countries that might have been intimidated take note of the fact that we are incapable of acting. This was, of course, why Don Rumsfeld bitterly resisted proposals to go into Iraq with substantially more troops, why he resisted the idea of increasing troop levels, and why he resisted the shift to counter-insurgency; he understood that such moves undermined the purpose of the invasion in the first place. To the extent that the war has been about the extension of American imperium, it has failed disastrously.

But that was one of the real purposes of Iraq - to show those A-Rabs who's boss, and to project massive military power over the Middle East. This does nothing for stability, only for hegemony. And our faltering approach has even screwed that up.

This is what Obama is reacting against. He offers a new strategy based on common interests and mutual respect; he wants to place everything on the global stage in full context and allow one element of our foreign policy to connect to all the others. McCain is about separation, about "winning in Iraq" and "winning in Afghanistan" without noting the relationship between the two. And despite Obama's approach being as far removed from George Bush as possible, that's McCain's latest area of attack:

The McCain campaign is taking their effort to distance their candidate from the unpopular President Bush to a whole new level: McCain's advisers are now openly attacking Bush on Iraq -- and not only that, they're also saying that Barack Obama is the one who is like Bush on the war!

On a conference call just now with reporters, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann compared Barack Obama's insistence on a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq to Bush's insistence that we were winning even as things went badly for years.

Considering Scheunemann's past as the author of the Iraqi Liberation Act and a close confidant of AHMAD CHALABI, ferchrissakes, you'd think he'd be careful not to ever question anyone else's judgment again. But of course, that would require a passing familiarity with the concept of shame.