nuclear Armageddon. Ever since Harry Truman in 1948, it's been a reliable way of getting elected as President.

McCain's chief foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, has until recently worn two hats, acting as McCain's lead foreign policy man and also as a lobbyist for Georgia. Filings by the McCain campaign and reports to the US Department of Commerce show that between January 1, 2007 and May 15, 2008 the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann nearly $70,000 and, across the same period, the government of Georgia paid Scheunemann's firm, Orion Strategies, $290,000 in lobbying fees. Scheuneman has since quit the lobbying firm, a two-man operation.

So Scheunemann indubitably had the ears of both Saakashvili and of McCain. What advice he tendered his patrons is a matter of speculation, but any advisor to McCain would certainly regard a vintage Cold War era confrontation between the United States and Russia as potentially a huge plus for the Republican candidate. He certainly seized the

opportunity for manly bluster about Russia’s conduct.

Also on McCain's team are various members of the Brzezinski clan, headed by Zbigniew, a veteran Cold Warrior from the Carter presidency of the 1970s. Brzezinski has publicly boasted of his role, as President Carter’s foreign policy adviser, in luring the Russians into their ill-fated intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. A year later the US boycotted the Moscow Olympics of 1980.

Brzezinski, a Pole, is fanatically anti-Russian and has been thundering on the TV talk shows about the era of darkness that will descend on mankind if Russia is permitted to put Georgia in its place.

Barack Obama, whose initial public comments were relatively demure, has also felt it necessary to ratchet up his rhetoric, dutifully pinning the Hitler label on Putin. Nonetheless, his foreign policy team has instructed the press that McCain is a Cold War zealot, perfectly capable of blowing up the planet.

So is the electorate ready to be pushed