John McCain appeared via satellite with CNN’s Larry King last night, and the two covered a fair amount of ground in a short amount of time. There were a handful of important exchanges, but this was arguably the most striking.

King asked McCain what he’d do, as president, if he learned that bin Laden was in Pakistan, and he had a choice to send in U.S. forces after him. McCain replied, “Larry, I’m not going to go there and here’s why, because Pakistan is a sovereign nation.... But I want to assure you I will get Osama bin Laden as president of the United States and I will bring him to justice no matter what it takes.”

Unless, “what it takes” includes going into Pakistan.

I have to admit, I’ve heard McCain staking out a similar position for months, and I have no idea why he’s sticking to this. Barack Obama has said he’d pursue high-value terrorist targets into areas of Pakistan where the Musharraf government has little or no control, launching limited attacks based on actionable intelligence. McCain believes we shouldn’t pursue these terrorist targets, because he’s concerned about Pakistani “sovereignty.”

But this is crazy. Existing U.S. policy, under the Bush administration, is to go after terrorists in Pakistan. Obama wants to keep this policy in place. In fact, we’ve already executed this policy on more than one occasion, and have killed al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistani mountains. McCain thinks this is a mistake? McCain disagrees with existing U.S. policy? He wants to do “what it takes,” but Pakistani “sovereignty” is so important, McCain would scale back counter-terrorism efforts in the region?

If there’s any coherent rationale behind McCain’s approach, it’s hiding well.

For the first open cycle in a long while, the religious right has had no discernable impact on the presidential race. And yet, the movement continues to believe that it’s powerful enough to start calling the shots when it comes to the Republican ticket, or at a minimum, that the religious right can veto those who fall short of its standards.

In May, the movement let it be known that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) was unacceptable as McCain’s running mate. TV preacher Pat Robertson’s network reported that many “pro-family leaders and activists ... all agree that if John McCain picks Florida Governor Charlie Crist as his running mate, there will be MAJOR dissatisfaction among social conservatives.”

Earlier this month, the religious right said Joe Lieberman was out of the question. “Lieberman’s a great pick for McCain if he doesn’t want to be president,” the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins said. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land called a possible Lieberman VP pick “a catastrophe.”

And this week, the movement said Mitt Romney won’t do, either.

Prominent evangelical leaders are warning Sen. John McCain against picking former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as his running mate, saying their troops will abandon the Republican ticket on Election Day if that happens.

They say Mr. Romney lacks trust on issues such as outlawing abortion and opposing same-sex marriage and because he is a Mormon. Opposition is particularly powerful among those who supported former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in the Republican presidential primaries earlier this year.

“McCain and Romney would be like oil and water,” said evangelical novelist Tim LaHaye, who supported Mr. Huckabee. “We aren’t against Mormonism, but Romney is not a thoroughgoing evangelical and his flip-flopping on issues is understandable in a liberal state like Massachusetts, but our people won’t understand that.”

The Rev. Rob McCoy, pastor of Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, Calif., who speaks at evangelical events across the country, told The Washington Times, “I will vote for McCain unless he does one thing. You know what that is? If he puts Romney on the ticket as veep.”

This is all terribly foolish.

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Back in 2004, Bush told a Florida audience, “[John] Kerry said, and I quote, ‘The war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation.’ (Audience boos.) I disagree…. After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. With those attacks, the terrorists and supporters declared war on the United States of America — and war is what they got. (Audience applauds.)”

Bush, pleased with himself and the reaction, repeated the attack again and again and again. The point was obvious — paint an image in which Bush battles terrorists with the most powerful military in the world, while Kerry fights al Qaeda with cops and lawyers.

Four years later, McCain is picking up where Bush left off. As it turns out, Bush and McCain are clearly wrong.

The United States can defeat al-Qaida if it relies less on force and more on policing and intelligence to root out the terror group’s leaders, a new study contends.

“Keep in mind that terrorist groups are not eradicated overnight,” said the study by the federally funded Rand research center, an organization that counsels the Pentagon.

Its report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term “war on terror” and replace it with “counterterrorism.”

Seth Jones, the lead author of the study and a Rand political scientist, told Reuters, “Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism. The United States has the necessary instruments to defeat al-Qaida, it just needs to shift its strategy.”

Ya don’t say.

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I shudder to think what the reaction might be if Barack Obama tried to pull a stunt like this one.

Vice President Cheney’s invitation to address wounded combat veterans next month has been yanked because the group felt his security demands were Draconian and unreasonable.

The veep had planned to speak to the Disabled American Veterans at 8:30 a.m. at its August convention in Las Vegas.

His staff insisted the sick vets be sequestered for two hours before Cheney’s arrival and couldn’t leave until he’d finished talking, officials confirmed.

“Word got back to us … that this would be a prerequisite,” said the veterans executive director, David Gorman, who noted the meeting hall doesn’t have any rest rooms. “We told them it just wasn’t acceptable.”

David Autry, another Disabled American Veterans official, said Cheney’s demands would be “a huge imposition on our delegates.”

That certainly seems to be the case. Some of the veterans were severely wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan, and many more are elderly veterans who “left pieces of themselves on foreign battlefields since World War II.” Getting to an early-morning event two hours beforehand, and getting stuck in a room they can’t leave, isn’t much of an option.

Once inside, the vets “could not leave the meeting room, and the bathrooms are outside,” Autry added.

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In John McCain’s interview with George Stephanopoulos yesterday, McCain was asked about an issue that he rarely talks about: affirmative action.

That McCain answered by talking about his opposition to “quotas” was, of course, ridiculous. “Quotas” and “affirmative action” are not the same thing, as McCain knows (or, at least, after 26 years in Congress, should know). But just as importantly, McCain’s position comes as something of a surprise, given that he used to take the opposite position, even having described ballot initiatives like the one this year in Arizona as “divisive.”

OK, so McCain flip-flopped. That’s hardly a shock; he does this all the time. What’s interesting, though, is that McCain may not actually know his own position on the issue.

After the interview aired, and Barack Obama expressed his “disappointment” with McCain’s response, CNN followed up with the McCain campaign directly. McCain’s spokesperson, Tucker Bounds, told CNN via a written statement, “John McCain has always been opposed to government-mandated hiring quotas…. He has long stood for the protection of civil rights and equal opportunity for all Americans.”

CNN’s report added, “But pressed about whether McCain indeed supports the Arizona initiative, the campaign would not answer.”

There are already serious questions about whether McCain is able to speak on behalf of the McCain campaign. This won't help.

Download | play Download | play (h/t BillW)

By one count, the president has publicly vowed to “solve problems, not pass them on to future presidents and future generations” upwards of 400 times.

As the clock starts to run out on Bush’s presidency, we know, of course, that the opposite is true. Global warming, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, a weak economy … not only is Bush passing monumental problems onto his successor, he’s created new ones that didn’t exist when he got there.

This is especially true when it comes to the federal budget. Bush inherited the largest surplus ever recorded ($128 billion), but his fiscal legacy is a painful one.

The White House on Monday predicted a record deficit of $490 billion for the 2009 budget year, a senior government official told CNN.

The deficit would amount to roughly 3.5 percent of the nation’s $14 trillion economy.

The official pointed to a faltering economy and the bipartisan $170 billion stimulus package that passed earlier this year for the record deficit.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said Bush “will be remembered as the most fiscally irresponsible president in our nation’s history,” adding, “If they gave out Olympic medals for fiscal irresponsibility, President Bush would take the gold, silver and bronze. With his eight years in office, he will have had the five highest deficits ever recorded. And the highest of those deficits is now projected to come in 2009, as he leaves office.”

Wait, it gets worse.

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It’s a study in contrasts. From the Jerusalem Post:

Two months ago in the Oval Office, President George W. Bush, coming to the end of a two-term presidency and presumably as expert on Israeli-Palestinian policy as he is ever going to be, was accompanied by a team of no fewer than five advisers and spokespeople during a 40-minute interview with this writer and three other Israeli journalists.

In March, on his whirlwind visit to Israel, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, one of whose primary strengths is said to be his intimate grasp of foreign affairs, chose to bring along Sen. Joe Lieberman to the interview our diplomatic correspondent Herb Keinon and I conducted with him, looked to Lieberman several times for reassurance on his answers and seemed a little flummoxed by a question relating to the nuances of settlement construction. (emphasis added)

On Wednesday evening, toward the end of his packed one-day visit here, Barack Obama, the Democratic senator who is leading the race for the White House and who lacks long years of foreign policy involvement, spoke to The Jerusalem Post with only a single aide in his King David Hotel room, and that aide’s sole contribution to the conversation was to suggest that the candidate and I switch seats so that our photographer would get better lighting for his pictures.

Indeed, the Jerusalem Post added that this may have been Obama’s second trip to Israel, but he “knew precisely what he wanted to say about the most intricate issues confronting and concerning Israel, and expressed himself clearly, even stridently on key subjects.”

He didn’t even need Lieberman there to help him struggle through the interview.

I’m curious. If you’d just arrived from another planet, and didn’t know a thing about either candidate, who would you say is the self-described expert on foreign policy and who would you say is relatively inexperienced on matters of international affairs?

On the advice of more than 50 retired generals and admirals, the House Armed Services Committee agreed this week to revisit the utility of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. The discriminatory standard, which has led to the discharge of thousands of capable troops serving in the midst of two wars, has already been rejected by voters, and lawmakers are prepared to rethink the approach.

But what’s the best way to win the policy debate? Emphasize fairness? Military readiness? The fact that gay soldiers are already serving their country honorably? The fact that it costs a lot of money to undermine our own national security?

No, as it turns out, the way to make it painfully obvious that the right is wrong about this is simply to let conservatives present their argument out loud.

Holding the first hearing in 15 years on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, lawmakers invited a quartet of veterans to testify on the subject and also extended an invitation to [Elaine Donnelly], who has been working for years to protect our fighting forces from the malign influence of women.

Donnelly treated the panel to an extraordinary exhibition of rage. She warned of “transgenders in the military.” She warned that lesbians would take pictures of people in the shower. She spoke ominously of gays spreading “HIV positivity” through the ranks.

“We’re talking about real consequences for real people,” Donnelly proclaimed. Her written statement added warnings about “inappropriate passive/aggressive actions common in the homosexual community,” the prospects of “forcible sodomy” and “exotic forms of sexual expression,” and the case of “a group of black lesbians who decided to gang-assault” a fellow soldier.

At the witness table with Donnelly, retired Navy Capt. Joan Darrah, a lesbian, rolled her eyes in disbelief. Retired Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva, a gay man who was wounded in Iraq, looked as if he would explode.

Ironically, the more this apparently unhinged lunatic railed against gays in her testimony, the more lawmakers realized there are no legitimate arguments in support of the DADT policy.

Oliver Willis concluded, “In the near future some kid is going to ask his dad: ‘You mean they really stopped people for serving their country, not because they couldn’t perform the job but because they were gay? That’s dumb.’”

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei have an interesting item in the Politico the other day that generated quite a bit of attention, about John McCain’s series of verbal “gaffes.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said “Iraq” on Monday when he apparently meant “Afghanistan”, adding to a string of mixed-up word choices that is giving ammunition to the opposition.

Just in the past three weeks, McCain has also mistaken “Somalia” for “Sudan,” and even football’s Green Bay Packers for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Ironically, the errors have been concentrated in what should be his area of expertise: foreign affairs.

In a sense, “gaffe” is overly forgiving. It implies that McCain means to say the right thing, but tends to misspeak. I don’t see it that way at all. “Gaffe” suggests McCain knows what he’s talking about, but is burdened by the occasional embarrassing verbal faux pas.

But that’s not the real story here. The important point is that McCain, most, seems hopelessly clueless and confused. That’s far more significant than the occasional “gaffe.”

In Obama's speech in Berlin yesterday, the presumptive Democratic nominee explained early on, "I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen -- a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world."

The last four words seem to have caused a stir at McCain HQ and in far-right circles. Apparently, "citizen of the world" sounds like one-world government or something.

But before conservatives get too excited about this, they may want to remember that Obama's not the first American to use the phrase. An Andrew Sullivan reader noted:

I’ve noticed that McCain, and the right in general, are latching on to Obama’s statement that he was speaking as a “proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world.” I see an attempt at cultural warfare in the making, and it should be squelched fast. The argument from the right appears to be that only some squishy leftist would call himself a “citizen of the world,” or that using the term suggests less than a full attachment to one’s own country (even if accompanied by a statement like Obama’s that he’s a “proud citizen of the United States”). A reader over at Politico has already noted that John F. Kennedy used the same phrase in his famous inaugural address in referring to his global audience.

I also did a one minute Google search – and I’m sure I could find more if I did a 15-minute Google search – and discovered that President George H.W. Bush used the exact phrase “citizen of the world” in presenting the national medal of the arts to Vladimir Horowitz, the legendary Russian-born pianist who became a US citizen in 1940. Was he insulting Horowitz as a lefty? I don’t think so. Also, Ronald Reagan introduced himself in a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations as “both a citizen of the United States and of the world.” Do McCain and the right really want to start this meme?

When McCain & Co. bash Reagan and Bush for using the same phrase, I'll respect their intellectual consistency. But I have a hunch that's not going to happen.