WaPo carrying A3 story about McCain's Georgian Lobbyist Advisor

[DogPoundPup]

"ethics experts have raised concerns about former lobbyists for foreign governments providing advice to presidential candidates about those same countries. "The question is, who is the client? Is the adviser loyal to income from a foreign client, or is he loyal to the candidate he is working for now?" said James Thurber, a lobbying expert at American University. "It's dangerous if you're getting advice from people who are very close to countries on one side or another of a conflict."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/12/AR2008081202932.html?nav=rss_politics/elections

AND THIS:

It appears that Scheunemann and his buddies have played a significant role in pushing Georgia's brilliant but flawed leader Mikheil Saakashvili into what The Daily Telegraph characterised yesterday in a useful profile as his "catastrophic blunder" in invading South Ossetia.

Josh Marshall has been tracking this story quite well. In this post, he quotes a Wall Street Journal column noting Scheunemann's ties to Georgia and speculating that having "a leading expert" on the former Soviet Republic on the team will help the McCain campaign:

It's genuinely hard to know where to start with this sort of nonsense. To say that Randy has a conflict of interest misses the point …

Scheunemann's 'policy' was to get the Georgians ginned up on the idea that we were their close military allies and that we'd come to their rescue if their brinksmanship with the Russians went bad. Well, that didn't work out very well. Any situation where you start the shooting and then find yourself begging for a ceasefire within 48 hours is a major blunder. He's not an 'expert' on Georgia; he's the lead guy on the policy that got us into this situation. And the fact that John McCain would make him his chief policy advisor after he's been the conductor on so many trainwrecks should tell us all we need to know about Sen. McCain's foreign policy judgment.
http://publicaddress.net/system/topic,1283,hard_news_the_newest_neocon_catastrophe.sm

[Muttocracy]

1. what have people been slipping in the journalists' coffee lately?

They've been doing some reporting! :)