Helene Cooper/Thom Shanker: After Mixed US Messages, a War Erupted in Georgia. George Bush in particular, and the Republican Right in general, are in power largely because of their skills at rhetoric and manipulating public symbols, regardless of their practical consequences and import. This works basically because the media focuses on what people say, not on what they do, and they enforce a debilitating, semi-religious orthodoxy, castigating anyone who says anything out of line. Problem is: what sounds right often isn't right. There are plenty of examples of this. A classic one is how Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 by attacking Carter for signing away the Panama Canal, which the US has famously "stole fair and square." He ran on it. He won. He did nothing at all about it once he won. Even when his VP and successor, George Bush I, invaded and regime changed Panama, he didn't give a second thought to recovering the Canal. Everyone in Washington understood that the Panama Canal issue was nothing but bullshit rhetoric.

Unfortunately, some foreigners don't understand that US politicians don't really mean three-fourths of the crap they say. Take Georgia's demagogic nationalist president Mikheil Saakashvili, for instance. He ran for office on a campaign of taking back Abkhazia and South Ossetia, by force even. He made his pitch to Bush, and Bush loved it: just his kind of rhetoric, plus some troops for Iraq, plus arms business for US and Israel. Only problem was that Saakashvili thought he should do what he kept talking about doing. How foolish was that?

The notable thing about this article is that it highlights the fact that even Condoleezza Rice knew the difference between bullshit rhetoric for public consumption and common sense in the real world -- but, of course, she wouldn't let the latter get in the way of the former. Just a month ago Rice went to Tbilisi to play up the Georgia-US friendship in public, but reportedly also to cool Saakashvili's heels in private:

During a private dinner on July 9, Ms. Rice's aides say, she warned President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia not to get into a military conflict with Russia that Georgia could not win. "She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to put a non-use of force pledge on the table," according to a senior administration official who accompanied Ms. Rice to the Georgian capital.

But publicly, Ms. Rice struck a different tone, one of defiant support for Georgia in the face of Russian pressure. "I'm going to visit a friend and I don't expect much comment about the United States going to visit a friend," she told reporters just before arriving in Tbilisi, even as Russian jets were conducting intimidating maneuvers over South Ossetia.

I picked up this link from WarInContext, where the next article linked to was titled "U.S. puts brakes on Israeli plan for attack on Iran nuclear facilities." Hopefully, Israelis will be smarter about keeping rhetoric and reality separate. Still, the only way to be at all sure is to start saying things that we know, especially things that we've learned the hard way, instead of just going on spouting bullshit that makes us feel good assuming nobody it's not intended for will take it seriously anyway.

But then if Bush, McCain, et al., did that they'd have nothing to run on.

I see from TPM that McCain claims he talks to Saakashvili daily, that McCain aide/lobbyist Randy Scheunemann has signed a new deal to represent Georgia as a foreign agent in the US, and that McCain's Senater buddies Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman are off on a junket to Georgia. McCain's crawling pretty far out on this particular limb, maybe to the point of conducting his own unelected foreign policy. That is, of course, something Republicans have less compunction about doing than Democrats -- cf. Reagan's negotiations with Iran to dissuade them from releasing US hostages prior to the 1980 election, or Nixon's use of Henry Kissinger and others to keep LBJ from cutting any peace deal with Vietnam before the 1968 votes were cast. Still, this is pretty brazen, undermining his own party's sitting president, and not even on the eve of an election.