First let me make one thing perfectly clear: Wonks Anonymous does not believe that John McCain has ever felt anything but love for his country or has ever consciously done anything to damage its interests or to involve it in fruitless and harmful entanglements with somewhat unsavory foreign powers.

Next Wonks Anonymous must note that - despite his 'maverick' airs - John McCain is a creature of Washington and:

It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of ours, which has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made the tour of it, and are come to the brink of the void beyond), it is a very little speck. There is much good in it ; there are many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is, that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air. (The quote is from Charles Dickens' Bleak House, page 8 of the SOHO edition courtesy of Google Books. )

And John McCain's advisers are also very much creatures of Washington. One of them, Randy Scheunemann, is now on leave from the lobbying business but has spent the past three and one half years lobbying for The Republic of Georgia. Work for Georgia has brought Mr. Scheunemann and his partner about $1 million.  This same firm was one of the major promoters of the Iraq war on behalf of Ahmad Chalabi and others. Something here does not pass the smell test.

While he does not question John McCain's patriotism,  Wonks Anonymous does have strong doubts about the wisdom of John McCain's stance on The Republic of Georgia. He also wonders if this support was entirely John McCain's idea. More Dickens here folks. A description of a lady at the head of the fashionable world:

She supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals — seeing herself in her glass, where indeed she looks so. Yet, every dim little star revolving about her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices ; and lives upon as accurate a calculation and as nice a measure of her moral nature, as her dress-maker takes of her physical proportions. Is a new dress, a new custom, a new singer, a new dancer, a new form of jewellery, a new dwarf or giant, a new chapel, a new anything, to be set up? There are deferential people, in a dozen callings, whom my Lady Dedlock suspects of nothing but prostration before her, who can tell you how to manage her as if she were a baby;who do nothing but nurse her all their lives; who, humbly affecting to follow with profound subservience, lead her and her whole troop after them ; who, in hooking one, hook all and bear them off, as Lemuel Gulliver bore away the stately fleet of the majestic Lilliput.(ibid. page 12)

Of course we are not talking about dresses or customs or singers and dancers - not even Paris Hilton - we are talking about nations and peoples and wars and armies. John McCain, and his friends in the Washington Press Corps, and too many others of both parties inside the beltway, have spent so long among the flattery and attentions of the lobbyists that they can no longer think critically about the position of this nation or of its true interests.

Time for a change?