With Russia beating up on Georgia at the very same time as the Olympics are underway in Beijing, it’s perhaps inevitable that the conversation has now turned to the propriety of Russia hosting the 2014 winter games while under the rule of a “bad actor” regime. This, combined with the boomlet earlier this year for the idea of boycotting the Beijing games, makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be better to adopt a policy of trying to award the Olympics only to unimportant countries.

Of course you couldn’t make an official “unimportant countries only” rule because some unimportant countries, Italy for example, probably would like to maintain that they are in fact important. But as a commonsense guideline, I think we know which countries the important ones are with our fancy nuclear arsenals and UN Security Council seats. A rule like “the United States gets to host Olympics but great power rivals whose governments we don’t approve of don’t” has a certain appeal from a U.S. point of view but it doesn’t seem likely to be adopted. But if the Olympics were always being held in someplace like Portugal or Argentina or the Netherlands it seems to me that folks could just enjoy the spectacle for what it is and be spared some of the endless controversy about boycotts and so forth.

Dave Alpert brings us the past of the future of Metro in the Washington, DC area — an expansion proposal that was in circulation circa the mid-1990s.

It seems John McCain’s statement on Georgia was partially lifted from a Wikipedia entry on the country. Given that McCain, by his own admission, can’t use the internet it’s a bit of an ironic situation though perhaps it counts as progress of some sort.

Commenter Aleks asks “Doesn’t the speculative rather than dry reporting nature of the blog free you to guess at what the hell President Mikhail Saakashvili could possibly have expected to happen?” It does! Best guess is that the central element in his calculation was that there’s only one road from Russia in to South Ossetia. Saakashvili was hoping, I think, that Georgia’s newly upgraded forces could quickly seize Tskhinvali and then either capture or destroy the tunnel connecting Russia to South Ossetia. Obviously, he misjudged his own country’s capabilities.

But it’s important to recognize that there was probably a larger miscalculation here. It seems to me that Georgia is actually lucky that Saakashvili’s military plans misfired. The idea, after all, was to force Russia to choose between accepting defeat in South Ossetia and marching through Georgia proper. Saakashvili, one assumes, thought that under the circumstances Russia would choose to accept defeat. I think, however, that he’s almost certainly wrong about that. Russia gives every sign of being really, really, really committed to its position on this issue and it’s hard to say why Saakashvili would have thought that Putin might be inclined to back down. One assumes that Saakashvili thought the U.S. would back him strongly enough to scare Russia off. That, however, is again a major miscalculation. The basic reality about Georgia is that Russia cares much, much, much more about what happens there than does the United States of America. One wonders whether Saakashvili just didn’t understand this somehow, or else if there were specific contacts of his inside the United States who gave him bad information of some kind.

It seems the McCain campaign has decided to take advantage of the violent conflict in Georgia to score political points against Barack Obama by criticizing him for going on vacation while McCain “has twice spoken with the President of Georgia, and is working to prevent a close American ally from collapsing under the weight of a Russian invasion.”

But, look, nothing McCain is doing is actually helping Georgia. Various diplomats from the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and elsewhere are trying to negotiate an end to the crisis. Obama is trying to relax before the hard months of campaigning ahead. And McCain is . . . engaged in political posturing and a lot of empty tough guy rhetoric that’s better suited to a Bill Kristol column than to the White House. A lot of the rhetoric about this situation has, in my view, been over the top but I think it’s clear that America has a real-but-limited interest in maintaining a Georgia that isn’t entirely under Moscow’s thumb. But what’s needed are practical steps in that direction, not empty sloganeering and political stunts.