No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, John McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory”. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man.

The aid — along with Vice President Dick Cheney’s high-profile visit to a region the Russians call “the near abroad” — is sure to inflame tensions further. Russia’s leaders have openly accused the United States of having provoked the conflict by arming the Georgia military while encouraging its aspirations to join the NATO alliance.

Republican White House hopeful John McCain’s campaign is highly sensitive to the imagery of holding a celebratory convention as a potential natural disaster looms, after the botched handling of Hurricane Katrina three years go. Republican Party officials were mulling different scenarios, including curtailing the convention.

As intense as the anticipation over Barack Obama’s choice is, it pales next to the hubbub over whether John McCain is going to tap Joe Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. This would give Lieberman a unique niche in American history — one politician who was the vice-presidential nominee for both parties. We would speak of it with awe, like that story about the two-headed turtle in Brooklyn.

Russians were told over breakfast yesterday what really happened in Georgia: the conflict in South Ossetia was part of a plot by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, to stop Barak Obama being elected president of the United States.

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh said during a recent interview that a meeting in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office earlier this year seriously considered a plan to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. The plan, intended to provoke a war with Iran, was ultimately rejected because it wasn’t possible to have Americans killing other Americans.