Richard Cohen hates me
I started the Richard Cohen Project as a weird way to make fun of Richard Cohen, and also as a writing exercise for myself. So, in that spirit, I'm gonna give TRCP a week off, because I feel the need to actually man up and salute Richard Cohen and say that this is the smartest column I've read about the conflict between Russia and Georgia. There is literally nothing for me to grab a hold of and mock. It is a first. No soapy platitudes, no lame cultural references, no inadvertently horrible metaphors. Just a really well-written column.

So, awesome. I am uninspired to mockery, Richard Cohen. You've won this round, and you've done it by being a level-headed realist:

Last year, Brent Scowcroft described to the Council on Foreign Relations his "most difficult judgment call" as George H.W. Bush's national security adviser. It entailed preparing Bush for an early morning news conference regarding an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Later on, Scowcroft was asked about the first Bush administration's decision to look the other way as Saddam Hussein's attack helicopters slaughtered Shiites in the south of Iraq. He seemed unmoved. It is not for nothing that he is called a "realist."

Now I, too, would like to become a realist -- if just for a day. I'd like to ask who among us is willing to fight to bring South Ossetia back into the Georgian fold? How about Abkhazia? These are the ethnic enclaves that Georgia claims and Russia -- not to put too fine a point on it -- supports. They are the immediate reasons for the recent war.

I ask my nasty little questions because it has been the policy of the current Bush administration to have Georgia as well as Ukraine admitted to NATO. This would mean that if either country got into a dust-up with its neighbor Russia, we would scramble the jets, stoke up the usual talk radio personalities and sally into yet another lovely war. Before this happens, can we at least debate whether this is a good idea? Cynic that I am, I have my doubts.

The whole thing is good and he's right. And this pops up from time to time, any time there's some regional conflict somewhere, people start talking about Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Germany invading Poland and whatever else, and the only reason for it is straight up bloodlust. People love war. People love to see their country asserting itself, so they get excited about the prospect of this tiny regional conflict, ANY tiny regional conflict, inflating itself into World War III. Then Vietnam what? Afghanistan who? We must defeat the new Hitler, for he is easily defined as evil!

Anytime I hear anybody talk like this I picture them in Superman underoos. It makes CNN more bearable.

Why do they like war so much? Why do they salivate every time some tiny skirmish breaks out? "This is it! Now Iran's going to side with the fruit cart vendors and England will side with the hot dog vendors and China and North Korea will join Iran and we and the Australians will defend the stake the hot dog vendor has for this corner and then BLASTO! We dominate the woooooooorld!!"

It's like bad kids. Like children. They want so so so so bad to break things, any excuse to break things. Any excuse to smash Iran's face in, even though they pose no actual threat to us. Any excuse to, in the sage words of Jonah Goldberg, "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." These are the big words of cowards, the easy words of shit-stained little men who will never actually be the ones to do the "throwing" (the patrolling, the shooting, the being shot, the being dismembered and torn to pieces, the nightmares for years from memories of dismembering and tearing to pieces). These are soft little boys in air conditioned rooms, where it's so easy to sound so goddamned tough.

War is occasionally a sad necessity, but to these horrible creatures it's just a game. A gleeful, exciting game. For them there is no debate about whether we should go to war over some tiny skirmish that will work itself out in a week or two. There is only the thrill rising in their chest that "Oh boy this could be The One!!"

So, way to go Richard Cohen. Great column.

All of which is to say that (in spite of the fact that yes yes polls don't mean anything in the summer when nobody's actually paying attention and the conventions haven't even started) I'm amazed that John McCain has taken a national lead in the polls. In poll after poll after poll, without a name attached to it, the country prefers Obama's policies (tax hike on rich, pulling out of Iraq on timetable, pro-choice, diverting billions to investment in renewables, etc). Most of these polls aren't even close. But they prefer McCain when a name is attached to it. They trust him more to handle the economy, even though they disagree with his economic policies. America, do you need Bernie Mac to come back to life to get in your face?

That just says to me that (a) brainless attack ads work and (b) people is fo' dumb.

*****UPDATE*****
Didn't see this, but this poll pretty much makes my point again. Middle class voters overwhelmingly prefer liberal positions on things like health care and immigration, but the more liberal candidate is still tied with the conservative. What makes people vote against the guy who will do what they want, other than effective "branding" (read: "personality-based innuendo and attacks").