We really have to thank John McCain for the laugh of the week. Several laughs, actually. What a fine president he’ll make – if he doesn’t like what his handlers tell him he’ll go off on a tangent and do almost anything. Pick a vice president? Sure, I’ll just run out in the street and find someone.

He’s clearly not a man who would plot and plan for months to fabricate excuses for a war his handlers have foisted on him. Hell, no – not he. With such a penchant for original thought he’d strike out on his own with some masterful stroke. He’d probably seize on the first likely looking lie to come down the pike – maybe yellowcake from Africa – and endorse it.

But I can’t really hold his vice presidential choice against him – she has to be a lot better than Dick Cheney. She hasn’t started any wars, at least. She may have supported some oil industry surrogates with plans for Alaska to secede from the union, but surely secession is an honored dream of considerable pedigree in the United States. She doesn’t believe in global warming – what’s wrong with that? It’s not as extreme as some of the goofy things she does believe.

Quite prominent, but maybe not top of the pile is the idea that the few spoonfuls of oil that could be drilled out of the Alaska Wildlife Refuge would solve America’s supertanker-sized appetite merely for barbecue fuel. Even the most generous estimates of the oil potential there would only keep the US going for a matter of weeks. Perhaps she intends that such an oil grab would be followed up by seizing Canada’s outer continental shelf in the Beaufort – which, by the way, hasn’t any proven oil reserves at all right now.

Canada would be as easy a pushover for the States as Georgia was for Russia, and getting NATO to go along with it is as easy as arm-twisting at a suitable conference. No doubt she could learn from Darth Vader how to trick the world’s other loose cannon, Stephen Harper, into blundering into a war he could not possibly win. Then she could push for US troops to take over Ottawa and declare the independence of Innu-whatever and the North West Territories. Just the same old geopolitics, which is why the Europeans are holding back over Georgia. What’s that about foolish things people choose to believe? Well it turns out that Cheney sent an his adviser Joseph R. Wood to Tbilisi just before Sakashvilli unleashed his artillery bombardment on sleeping civilians in S. Ossetia. And Randy Scheunemann, John McCain’s foreign policy adviser is a lobbyist for Georgia, while he calls Sakashvilli a friend. Somebody gave the Georgians a nudge.

Article Author: Christopher Hoare

Writer of speculative fiction – retired oil exploration surveyor – living at the edge of the Rocky Mountains. Read more about me at Double Dragon Publishing.

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