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Georgia/Russia: This just gets better and better

I know I am beginning to try the patience of some readers who wonder why a little warlet in a tiny distant country matters. Hush, dissenters, or I’ll start writing about my iPod again.

In the meantime, events are turning out to have consequences. Even words! Turns out words have consequences! Who knew?

Not John McCain, who got up on his hind legs yesterday and announced, “We are all Georgians.” That was yesterday. Like, a day ago. And now, a day later, here’s the president of Georgia, who has paid McCain’s top foreign-policy advisor $800,000 in lobby fees since 2004, saying, in effect, Time to put your money where your mouth is, big boy.

“Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, ‘We are all Georgians now,’” Saakashvili said on CNN’s American Morning. “Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it’s time to pass from this. From words to deeds.”

What kind of deeds does Mikheil Saakashvili have in mind? He’s coy for the moment, but in case you’re looking for a f’rinstance, here’s Max Boot suggesting “the Pentagon should rush delivery” of Stinger anti-aircraft and Javelin anti-tank missiles to Georgia.

Now, this probably won’t happen. But Saakashvili wants something like it to happen. And he believes that if a President McCain failed to do it, he’d be betraying his word. So at best, the McCain policy is to provide empty promises that will surely lead to crushed hopes.

All the more reason to hope Barack Obama becomes president, right? I don’t know. Both candidates have the same position. That’s not me talking, incidentally: it’s Richard Holbrooke, a Democrat who might get a Cabinet spot in an Obama administration.

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