McCain Doesn’t Rock

The McCain-Palin campaign is having a hard time getting its groove on.

For politicians, every public event features a soundtrack of popular music, selected by the campaign staff as anthemic of the message du jour. Bill Clinton used Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow until we all ripped the Stevie Nicks posters from our bedroom walls in violent fits of overload. Hillary Clinton held an internet-based, you-select-my-theme-song contest which, after more than 200,000 electronic votes, somehow chose Canadian schlock diva Celine Dion’s You and I. PUMA must stand for Positively Unlistenable Musical Aesthetics.

But seemingly each time McCain and Palin put the needle to vinyl, they receive a cease-and-desist demand from the recording artists.

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Mishandling Russia

Russia is, once again, a big goddamned problem for America and NATO.

The invasion of Georgia is just the latest and most unavoidable sign of trouble — and most overt headache — in an international relationship that never gelled, as perhaps it should have, at the end of the Cold War. The recklessness provocation of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili gave Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his sock-monkey, President Dimitri Medvedev, all the pretense required to remind NATO who controls the neighborhood.

Colin Powell: Unlikely Avitar of a Failed and Shameful U.S. Foreign Policy

 

The political obituaries for Colin Powell nicely illustrate the myopia and forgetfulness of what passes for media scrutiny in this country. Like a Greek chorus reading from the same script, all the press commentary intones that Secretary Powell has been out of the loop on every high-profile issue of foreign policy since the decision to go to war in Iraq. Only since then? Hell, he was never in the loop!

In his very first week in office, Secretary Powell declared that the Bush administration would build on the substantial negotiations commenced by the Clinton administration to bring North Korea into the community of nations. He was promptly bitch-slapped by Vice President Cheney and was not heard from again for nine months. The 10 September 2001 issue of Time magazine asked from its cover, “Where is Colin Powell?”