Crisis? McCain Will Give You Crisis!

By Cernig

Yesterday, John McCain told an audience in Colorado:

My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War. This is an act of aggression.

Georgia, of course. There's soooo much wrong with that statement, as Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias and Rock Richard all point out. Matt writes:

beyond McCain’s seemingly poor memory, the interesting thing is the confusion in terms of high-level concepts. It was just a little while ago that McCain was giving speeches about how “the threat of radical Islamic terrorism” is “transcendent challenge of our time.” Now Russia seems to be the transcendent challenge. Which is the problem with an approach to world affairs characterized by a near-constant hysteria about threat levels and a pathological inability to set priorities.

Near constant hysteria, yes. But I'm not so sure about not setting priorities. The McCain priority is to get McCain elected and if that means creating a whole new war-wagon then, hey- it worked for Bush in '04. The teeny, tiny problem is that while Bush settled on a war of choice with Iraq and did everything to make it happen, McCain has apparently decided on a war with Russia.