Frank Rich, laying out the best line of attack against McCain, concludes with this: “Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?”
Saakashvili is not a saint walking the earth, but he does not belong in the same sentence as Chalabi and Musharraf. And the fact that Rich can put him there, and that no one will bat an eye, is perhaps the best example yet of the smug, blame-the-victim attitude that continues to define liberal chat in the wake of the Russia-Georgia war. Amazingly, democratic-minded people are demonizing the leader of the Rose Revolution, while urging us to become “sensitized to the Russian point of view,” as one former Fulbright scholar puts it in a letter to the editor today. “This is not to say that Vladimir Putin is Mr. Nice Guy…” continues the letter. That’s a statement that would warm Putin’s heart, if one can speak of such a thing.
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