Irony Is SO Dead

Or perhaps John McCain has entered a temporal anomaly, as often happened to the various Star Trek crews. Yesterday McCain said of the Russian military action in Georgia,

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.

To which I say (singing):

Have you forgotten how it felt that day
To see your homeland under fire
And her people blown away?
Have you forgotten when those towers fell?
We had neighbors still inside
Going through a living hell
And you say we shouldn’t worry ’bout Bin Laden
Have you forgotten?

I think McCain should be evaluated for possible Alzheimer’s. I’m serious. In early stages, people remember past clearly but can’t remember recent. Early stage Alzheimer’s would explain a lot.

Sam Stein writes,

Speaking to reporters about the situation in Georgia, Sen. John McCain denounced the aggressive posture of Russia by claiming that:”in the 21st century nations don’t invade other nations.”

The man’s brain neurons are not firing.

Sometimes the headline says it all:

Bush, Decrying ‘Bullying,’ Calls for Russia to Leave Georgia

Delicious. Meanwhile, the Creature still thinks he rules the world by imperial fiat:

President Bush Wednesday promised that U.S. naval forces would deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn Georgia before his administration had received approval from Turkey, which controls naval access to the Black Sea, or the Pentagon had planned a seaborne operation, U.S. officials said Thursday.

As of late Thursday, Ankara, a NATO ally, hadn’t cleared any U.S. naval vessels to steam to Georgia through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, the officials said. Under the 1936 Montreaux Convention, countries must notify Turkey before sending warships through the straits.

Pentagon officials told McClatchy that they were increasingly dubious that any U.S. Navy vessels would join the aid operation, in large part because the U.S.-based hospital ships likely to go, the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy, would take weeks to arrive.

“The president was writing checks to the Georgians without knowing what he had in the bank,” said a senior administration official.

BTW, the President, who just got back from spending most of a week sitting in the stands of various Olympic competitions in Beijing, today is beginning a two-week vacation in Crawford, Texas.

Update: My long-time fan the Confederate Yankee doesn’t like the way we lefties are giggling over McCain’s “first probably serious crisis internationally since the Cold War” line. In particular he accused Matt Yglesias of “intellectual dishonesty” for writing this:

Satyam notes “the Gulf War, 9/11, and the Iraq War, to name a few” as possible alternatives. But 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.

To this the CY says,

Is Yglesias actually daft enough to suggest that acknowledging a new or renewed threat is wrong, and that it should be ignored so you can stick with your party’s pre-planned script?

No, Yeglesias is not that daft, because that’s not what he suggested, as anyone with working critical thinking skills who can actually read beyond a third-grade level would have understood.

Simple answers to simple questions …