Here Robert Wright talks a bit about the problems with our recognition of Kosovo independence:

Meanwhile, whatever one thinks this all says about the liberal hawk movement, it just reflects a staggering incompetence on the part of the Bush administration. At the end of the day, recognizing Kosovo independent was probably the best choice to make, but it’s a very problematic path. It’s the kind of thing that, before you do it, you need to lay the most groundwork possible and also have plans in place for dealing with the fallout. Instead, the administration seems to have kind of wandered into it as a kind of afterthought. In part it just illustrates that Bush is a crappy president, but it also highlights one of the highest prices of the Iraq War — it’s an enormous drain on the attention of senior policymakers. Many aspects of US foreign policy, however, can’t be left on autopilot. Senior political leaders need to be involved and engaged or else nobody’s around to keep things on track.

I’d go see this:

It’s weird to think of something so random as a ten year-old purchase of a television station in Pittsburgh as posing a major political problem for John McCain, but much more so than other politicians he’s made the myth of some kind of preternatural powers of honestness central to his persona. At the same time, he’s told a series of whoppers in the past few days. First we heard that he’d literally never done favors for lobbyists or special interests when, clearly, he did try to intervene with the FCC on behalf of Paxson Communications. Then he said he’d never met with Bud Paxson himself about this, even though in a 2002 deposition he said he had met Paxson.

Now the Washington Post reports that Paxson, too, is contradicting McCain’s story and also contradicting the desperate spin McCain tried to put on his earlier deposition. Paxson also says McCain is wrong about never having met with Vicki Iseman on this issue. Which of course makes sense. We know that McCain tried to help Paxson out on this. We know that Iseman’s job at the time was to get legislators to help Paxson out. And we know that McCain and Iseman were friends at the time. It would be pretty weird if she’d never mentioned the whole thing to him, and he was just inspired to go write the letter by coincidence.