I will grant him this, Sen. McCain becomes markedly more animated and focused when he's talking about the Tsarist Empire and the Cold War. And I can see that Mark Halperin at ABC News is getting with the program when he cheers McCain's ability to use the Georgian crisis as an opportunity to "distance himself from the more accommodationist Bush Administration."

I think Halperin does us all a service by signaling that the Bush administration will seem "accomodationist" in comparison to a potential McCain administration. At several points in his statements over the last few days McCain has said that he "doesn't think" we're headed back to the Cold War. But listen to the tone of his voice and tell me if it doesn't sound like the one President Bush used to employ when he'd say, circa 2002-2003, that we were taking every step possible to avoid war with Iraq.