Playing President: Update

Back when Barack Obama took his big trip to the Middle East and Europe, where he met with foreign leaders and visited troops, many conservatives criticized him for his presumptuousness. The collective sentiment seemed to be, Who does Obama think he is, the president?

Well, now that Obama is on vacation, his rival, John McCain, has been doing a little presidential play acting of his own. I speak, of course, of McCain's forceful rhetoric on the situation in Georgia. Last week, the Financial Times ran a story that claimed McCain's statements had upstaged Bush's reaction to the crisis. And now, Georgia's President, Mikhell Saakashvili, has called on McCain to put his political muscle where his mouth is. Via CNN:

"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 into deeds."

Of course, there's nothing McCain can really do about the situation in Georgia, but that's not stopping him from using the incursion as proof positive of his foreign policy credentials. One wonders how conservatives would have reacted if Obama had been the one to take such a high-profile stand. Furthermore, given that McCain's main conduit for information on the Georgia/Russia conflict, Randy Scheunemann, is himself a recent lobbyist for the Georgian government, and that Condi Rice herself warned Georgia not to provoke the Russians, can we be sure that McCain's line of attack is appropriate to the circumstances?

UPDATE: And now McCain has announced that he's sending two of his would-be cabinet members, Joe Lieberman (R-Ct.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to Georgia so they can get in on the charade, as well. I'm sure we'll hear Charles Krauthammer ask "Who does McCain think he is?" in his next column. Upping the irony, McCain added "in the 21st century, nations don't invade other nations." Huh? Do Iraq and Afghanistan ring a bell? Guess he meant to say that they shouldn't. But then we're just back to Bush's "Do as I say, not as I do" approach to foreign policy. Watch: