‘Nations don’t invade other nations’ (some restrictions may apply)

August 14, 2008

John McCain has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, and the very first sentence reads, “For anyone who thought that stark international aggression was a thing of the past, the last week must have come as a startling wake-up call.”

I can appreciate how awkward it must be for guys like McCain to claim the moral high ground after being a cheerleader for the war in Iraq, but embracing a neoconservative worldview and denouncing “stark international aggression” at the same time ends up sounding pretty foolish.

And yet, it’s apparently become a standard talking point.

“In the 21st century

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,” McCain said, “nations don’t invade other nations.” Seriously. That’s what he said.

Sam Stein responded, “It was the type of foreign policy rhetorical blunder that has regularly plagued the McCain campaign and could have diplomatic ripples as well. Certainly the comment was meant in innocence. But for those predisposed to the notion that the U.S. is an increasingly arrogant international actor, the suggestion by a presidential candidate that, in this day and age, countries don’t invade one another — when the U.S. is occupying two foreign nations — does little to alleviate that negative perception.”

Or, put another way, invasions for me, but not for thee.

I’d add, by the way, that this isn’t just a problem for McCain — the Bush administration has struggled with this as well, as “The Daily Show” helped highlight the other day.Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, publicly stated, “The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe — those days are gone.”

“It’s amazing,” Jon Stewart said, “how adding the phrase ‘in Europe’ makes our actions more palatable. Even fun. It’s the geo-political equivalent of the fortune cookies’ ‘in bed.'”

And just the other day while being interviewed by Bob Costas, Bu$h claimed that there isn’t anything wrong with America; we don’t have any problems.

The bottom line is that McCain, Bu$h, and the rest of the GOP elite (corporate lackeys all) are so completely insulated and shielded from average peoples’ everyday lives that these ‘gaffes’ etc., are not slips of the the tongue or anything like that. They indicate what these people truly believe.

So to hear McCain make a comment like that doesn’t speak to his painfully obvious lack of grasp of the situation, rather, he is so completely out of touch with reality he actually believes the lies speweing from the hole on the front of his face.

  • I think JSMcC*nt is declaring that America is not a 21st Century country. Which is true. Bill Clinton tried to build a bridge to the 21st Century and Al Gore was elected by the American People to walk us across it to energy independence and liberation from “Interests” in the Middle East and the Russian “Near Abroad” when the Texas Oil Mafia executed a judicial coup and stole the Presidency so they could burn the bridge and leave us in the 20th Century Oil Economy and Dependence on sources in unstable parts of the world.

    Gee, thank you Anthony Kennedy.

  • This definitely has to be included in the list of McCain Flipflops. Jukebox John is at it again. Play some Skynyrd!

  • My bad. According to Wikipedia it straddles both continents. I guess we will only be outraged with the part of Georgia that lies in Europe. Those saps in the Asian part are on their own.

  • Should be played right along with Bush saying “we don’t torture”.

    I wonder what McCain they would say if Russia claimed that Georgia was in cahoots with the Chechen terrorists, and that the Georgians might give those Chechens some WMDs, so we better get them first before the smoking gun is a mushroom cloud.

    Then it would be OK to invade them, I guess.

  • Cut and run.

    Does John McCain seem rational? I say he would quickly declair “victory” in Iraq and abruptly pull everyone out if he wanted to send his toy soldiers off somewhere else for him to thump his chest. What happened to Iran? He seems to be puching wildly in the air.

    Yesterday he said the Russian situation should not be politisized, but was asked if his campaign had not politisized it when Lieberman made his snide comments about Barack Obama. McCain went completely blank and eventually gave the most stuttering, rambling, incoherent answer imaginable. I think the debates will be a revelation.

  • The silver lining here is this is a perfect opportunity for Obama to gently tear McCain completely apart on this one. This one line should be used again and again and again to grind that crusty old gnome into the ground. No sane person could hear this and not see the hypocrisy.

    NOTE TO SELF: Be sure to remind all the insane people I know to get out and vote on Wednesday, November 5th.

  • Zak: Yesterday he said the Russian situation should not be politisized

    This is the republican version of “to be perfectly honest” or “with all due respect” or “no offense, but…”. When you’re an authoritarian, you can easily convince your minions that you are not politicizing an issue by merely saying that you won’t. Then? Hack away!

    In the boardroom of human dignity, the republican conscience is a whiteboard with nothing on it.

  • Aside from the obvious stupidity as explained above, I assume that McCain is aware that Georgia (not Russia) started the whole mess, right? Probably based on false information from their BFF McCain that the States would back them up?

  • As Pat Buchanan frequently says about McCain’s statements, “They may be completely wrong, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t work politically.”

    The inside the beltway pundits, the corporate media chattering class, and many dumbocrap politicians have seem to strike the same bellicose rhetoric about the Russia-Georgia war.

    McCrap will do just fine in the debates, as long as he continues to lie and make things up and the corporate media don’t call him on it. Is anyone convinced that they will?

  • This is the 21st century, people don’t vote to give complete idiots the authority to invade other nations(?). Oh that’s right, I voted to give a complete moron the authority to invade another nation (based on completely fabricated bullshit)!

    – John McTrollop

  • IOKIYAR

    That and the fact that the majority of Americans think we’re the good guys who only go to war reluctantly. Which has never happened in the entire history of the country, but never mind the facts.

  • This is exactly the kind of thing Obama was warning about when he took his stand against the invasion of Iraq. We have ceded the moral highground. How can our government now say that what Russia is doing is immoral? We gave up that position when we went into Iraq.

    Congrats Republican’ts! We are now equal to the godless commies you fear so much!

  • Certainly the comment was meant in innocence.

    FAIL.

    Even people’s attempts to cover for McCainiac remind me of BushBot’s campaigns. Now, I would think that McCane’s oft-touted level of experience would make his “blunders” even more problematic. Apparently this isn’t so. Stand up and utter any flat out lie you want. If you’ve got an (R) after your name some jackass will claim you just made a little goof.

  • McCain said, “nations don’t invade other nations.”

    What’s McCain’s defense for this comment? That Russia isn’t a nation, it’s a “rogue state”?

    That the US doesn’t invade nations, it only “liberates” them?

  • McCain just spouts “tough talk” to get votes. He can’t pronounce the name of his friend President Saakashvili correctly. Saakashvili tells McCain to give him action instead of talk (ironically, McCain disses Obama in the campaign for just “talk”). So McCain sends Graham and Lieberman (who helps McCain correct his gaffes) to Georgia to do whatever. McCain has said he expects “more wars.” Maybe he had an all-out war with Russia in mind. Even the Georgians are mad at Saakashvili for initiating military action in independent province South Ossetia. Would McCain be savvy enough to tell Saakashvili how the president miscalculated?

  • Even more of a problem, the US has been pretty much relegated to the role of mediator and impartial broker. Our moral authority and military has beenutaralized by the moron who currently occupies the White House. McCain further removed us from being a significant player in this scenario by taking sides long before all of the facts about the situation and how it started were known. He just had his “3 am moment” and failed it miserably.

    The only way McCain wins this election is if he gets a huge turnout of the economically and diplomatically illiterate who make up a growing sector of this country.

  • RacerX #6 says… it should be Played along with Bush saying we don’t torture…Imagine McCain saying that…it sounds like it was written for the Daily show.

    “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations…and we don’t torture”,…then a clip of Joe Lieberman whispering in his ear and then McCain says,…”er I’m sorry..a..a…a Russia doesn’t torture?”,…Lieberman whispers again, McCain says more quietly to Lieberman but we still overhear …”Russia didn’t invade Iraq?”…then into the camera…”It’s the 21st century and …that’s not the kind of change we can believe in” smiles and smirks.

    We got a good glimpse of the kind of idiot we’d have as president by McCain “playing” president with a lobbyists dictating what our policy should be based on the huge fees he received from the country he is lobbying for. Now that is an “ex”-change you could believe would happen, if this war seeking candidate ever gets in. The true face of McCain would get us all killed. We are not “all Georgians”, that is what a lobbyist claims to make big bucks (“hell, I’ll even get McCain to nominate you for a Nobel Peace Prize for $60,000 more. You fire on Russia and the US Military will back you up…you’ll see…McCain has a lot of pool with the military…”).

    Why is McCain talking to the Georgian president on a daily basis…he’s not a diplomatic adviser or president…McCain and Shuneurman need to STFU and quit complicating the situation for political gain, which they very well may have instigated along with Rove(who was in the area on “vacation”) in the first place.

    McCAIN WOULD RATHER START A WAR THAN LOSE A POLITICAL CAMPAIGN!

    He is shameless and would do or say anything to be president.

  • John McCain has just showed the world how unfit he is to lead a country, his bragging about his friendship with the pres of Georgia, his statement about talking with him every day by phone, his advisers job as lobbyist for Georgia etc. Now the facts are coming from the BBC, from a 12 year old girl on Fox channel just returned from South Ossetia, from all directions – the aggressor in this war was Georgia, the little girl said she wanted to give her thanks to the Russian troops who saved them, which made the Fox employee rather uncomfortable. Now I see a massive damage control exercise coming from the McCain camp. They picked the wrong horse in this race, and Russia soundly beat them, where does that leave us – yet again with diminished credibility.

  • “Other nations don’t invade nations.” There, that fixed it.

    The original comment spotlights a long-standing national blind spot. The US has had a serious attitude of “it’s OK if you’re Anerica (or one of our pet dictators)” since the 1950’s. If there were a medal for invading other countries, we’d have it. (umm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Forces_Expeditionary_Medal). If you think you have purity of intent, anything goes. IOKIYAR is merely a domestic and more tribal version of the larger phenomenon.

  • Who cares if the Bush administration or McCain (or even Obama) supports Georgia against ‘Russian aggression.’ Media pundits can bloat all they want to as well, but the truth is Georgia was the aggressor against Russian territory – fact that it took three days to discern by the lapdog media is deplorable, which applies to most blog-head opinion pieces as well. This is all a ploy by US, with complicity of a couple of hundred Israeli advisers in Georgia orchestrating the military, to back an eventual invasion of Iran. Doesn’t anyone ever ask why Iran would even use an atomic device that would kill as many Palestinians as Jews? All the while Georgia and Russia are full blown nuclear powers, not to mention Pakistan who was selling nuclear technology on the open market. The term ‘WMD’ itself was invented as a ruse to invade Iraq, a fact that few knee-jerk politicos probably even remember. Screw opinions, do your own homework and just tell the damn truth – that’s the only way we’ll ever get out of this pitiful power-play of a self-wrought mess into which we’re all headed like sheep for slaughter. My vote for pres. would be Jon Stewart, at least he’s sincere and ain’t invested in being a BS artist – that’s why it’s the only ‘news show’ worth watching.

  • What were McCain and his fellow Republicans thinking when they offered this talking point about Russia? People who live in glass houses, etc.

    Condi Rice, at least, said that Russia was wrong to invade a neighbor. Maybe then what the USA is doing is all right, since Iraq is way across the sea.

  • “Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

    – Hermann Goerring

    ——————————————————————————–

    “Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”

    – Julius Caesar

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