Birch’s Boy Crashes on Face the Nation

Evan Bayh appeared Sunday morning on Face the Nation on CBS.

Let’s just charitably say it wasn’t his best performance.

The transcript isn’t up yet, so I’ll settle for the reporting on the Indy Star.

Interviewed on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” the Indiana Democrat said McCain is given to “bellicose rhetoric which has a tendency to inflame conflicts rather than to defuse them.”

This “bellicose rhetoric which has a tendency to inflame conflicts rather than defuse them” would stem from McCain supposedly, according to The One’s own advisers and surrogates, having “roughly the same position” as the Obamassiah?

From the Washington Post:

Richard Holbrooke, an ambassador to the U.N. in the Clinton administration and an Obama supporter, objected to the suggestion that Obama had been late in coming to a tough condemnation of Russia. Obama and McCain are now more or less on the same page in decrying the aggression, he said.

“It is based on an exaggerated and deliberately misleading perception of Senator Obama’s initial statement, which was issued early, while the crisis was unfolding,” he said. “This is an attempt by people supporting Senator McCain to politicize a great international tragedy and it’s not worthy of the dimensions of the problem, especially when both candidates have roughly the same position.”

Perhaps Evan Bayh should explain himself.

Which is it?

Does Barack Obama have “roughly the same position” as John McCain?

Are they “more or less on the same page in decrying the aggression”?

How do such statements square with Bayh’s assertion that McCain is engaging in “bellicose rhetoric”?

(Read more after the leap)

He also said McCain should denounce a new book about Obama that Bayh said is full of “lies and allegations.”

“The old John McCain would denounce that,” Bayh said. “The new John McCain has embraced those kind of tactics.”

Perhaps the Senator needs some cheese to go with his whine.

John McCain has a lengthy record of denouncing a wide variety of campaign tactics and statements directed at Democrats, a sentiment that Democrats never seem to reciprocate.

He denounced a similar book about John Kerry’s war record.

He denounced ads made by Republicans highlighting Obama’s ties to Jeremiah Wright.

He even denounced a conservative talk radio host for using Obama’s middle name.

How did the Obamassiah respond to such campaign civility?

He accused John McCain of being a racist.

Perhaps Evan Bayh needs to explain why a candidacy that purports to transcend politics and represent something new and positive would embrace “those kind of tactics.”

Just a thought.

On “Face the Nation,” Bayh took his first chance to criticize McCain when asked whether McCain went too far in commenting on the conflict between Russia and Georgia in declaring, “Today, we are all Georgians.”

Bayh said he had.

“We are not all Georgians now,” Bayh said. “If we were Georgians and the Russians were invading our country and killing our people, we’d be in a state of war. And clearly that’s not what we want.”

How about when Russians invade our ally and kill its people? Is that clearly not what we want?

Perhaps Evan Bayh needs to be asked simpler questions, ones his limited mind can comprehend.

Is Georgia–a country that has sent troops to Iraq, whose entry into NATO we have advocated, which has a democratically-elected pro-Western government, and where US military personnel were on the ground helping to train their military–an ally of the United States?

Is the Russian invasion of Georgia–which has gone far beyond the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia–wrong?

Is the Russian Army’s repeated violations of cease fires that Moscow has supposedly signed wrong?

Is the indiscriminate Russian bombing of Georgian civilians and the Russian shelling of Georgian civilian population centers wrong?

At what point, in the view of Evan Bayh, does the United States stand with Georgia?

When it was a US ally?

When the country was invaded?

When its civilian populations were bombed?

When the Russians fail to respect their own cease fire?

The only people being bellicose and belligerent are the Russians.

And the only presidential candidate standing up to that bellicosity and belligerence is John McCain.

When an authoritarian government, like that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, is willing to invade a small democracy, like Georgia, during the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games (normally a symbol of international peace and a time of truce), it is not John McCain–with his condemnations–that is going too far.

When an authoritarian government, like that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, is willing to invade a small democracy, like Georgia, during the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, it’s also safe to say that the sort of “sit down and have tea with everyone” and “why can’t we all just get along” foreign policy ideas of Barack Obama are not going to have much success in changing Russian behavior.

On the contrary, such policies are likely to encourage the Russians to engage in even further acts of aggression against their neighbors and former territories.

“Please, Mr. Putin, leave the little country alone? Pretty please? Pretty please with a waffle on top?”

In addition to criticizing McCain’s “bellicose rhetoric,” Bayh said that if “the president and Senator McCain weren’t so obsessed with an open-ended commitment to Iraq, perhaps we would have paid greater attention to some of these issues.”

“The Russians know we’re bogged down in Iraq,” Bayh said.

Where to begin.

First of all, Evan Bayh voted for the war in Iraq.

Second of all, does he think that–as Barack Obama still does–that the surge was a failure?

Third, does he really think that Russia would be less inclined to invade countries allied to the United States after the United States had just retreated from Iraq, as Bayh seems to imply he wants to do?

Fourth, the United States is quite busy in Iraq in military terms, true, but I don’t hear anybody saying that the current situation with regard to Russia’s invasion of Georgia has a military solution.

John McCain, for all of his supposedly “bellicose rhetoric” has not said as much.

There is much that can be done in response to Russia short of all-out war (preventing Russia from entering the World Trade Organization, going forward with missile defense facilities and other bases in Eastern Europe, expelling Russia from the G8, ending Russian participation in the councils of NATO, increasing America’s and NATO’s commitment to the Eastern European democracies, and many more), and our involvement in Iraq has nothing to do with those options.

The fact that the United States is willing to stand firm by its allies–in Iraq and elsewhere–says more to a thuggish bully like Vladimir Putin than Bayh’s implication that we should have retreated from Iraq.

A nation that has just lost a war and sold out one pro-Western and allied government is going to have even less credibility in defending other allies and other pro-Western governments.

Bayh seems to think that we would be better off to retreat from Iraq, a physical manifestation of weakness, than simply be busy there, a physical manifestation of strength.

Now, compare that sophomoric performance by Birch’s Boy to the performance of Minnesota Governor (and Republican VP possibility) Tim Pawlenty:

Not much question there about who would win the vice presidential debates, no?

Another audition interview for Birch’s Boy, and another failure.