David Remnick, the National Enquirer, and the rest of this week's media winners and sinners

Nothing has made a larger contribution to the destruction of intelligent political discourse in America than the constant repetition of preposterous notions by an army of cable news commentators with above-average hair and anemic intellects.

Russia's invasion of Georgia provoked the latest orgy of fatuous remarks, most of them variations on the theme that last week's events were a "big win" for John McCain. Why? Because "any foreign policy crisis that doesn't include Iraq" is automatically a political plus for the Republican—because of his superior "experience." The chorus grew louder after McCain's pathetic plagiarism of JFK at the Berlin wall—"We are all Georgians now"—a majestic declaration that vibrated across America with the same resonance as a penny dropped into a teacup.

Put aside for a moment the fact that Barack Obama speaks knowledgeably about every foreign policy issue, from the war in Iraq to nuclear proliferation, while McCain still can't distinguish Shiites from Sunnis or the Sudan from Somalia, regularly forgets that Czechoslovakia ceased to exist 16 years ago, and most recently created an imaginary border between Pakistan and Iraq.

Forget all that: What matters in the cable news world is that McCain has had the wrong foreign policy positions on many more issues for much longer than Obama. Therefore, McCain is obviously "the more experienced candidate" whenever anything blows up abroad.

Missing, of course, from this "analysis" is the most important element in this crisis: the fact that it was America's invasion of Iraq—the one McCain fiercely advocated, and Obama just as fiercely opposed—that made Russia's invasion possible, by eviscerating the idea that there was anything special about violating the borders of a sovereign state, and by fatally weakening America's capacity to act militarily anywhere outside of Iraq and Afghanistan.

There were three particularly honorable exceptions to this mindless babble: John Stewart, Michael Dobbs, and David Remnick. This was Stewart's explanation of America's moral bankruptcy:

"You always know the president is pissed off when he starts talking in nonsensical absolutes that he himself would never follow." Bush: "Russia has invaded a sovereign state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century."

"Snap!" went Stewart: "Russia is so 20th century; this century is all about preemptive strikes."

Writing in the Outlook section in the Washington Post, Michael Dobbs identified the new American impotence: "The bottom line is that the United States is overextended militarily, diplomatically and economically ... The United States is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and needs Russian support in the coming trial of strength with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. Instead of speaking softly and wielding a big stick ... the American policeman has been loudly lecturing the rest of the world while waving an increasingly unimpressive baton."

New Yorker editor David Remnick was the most eloquent of all. Like Dobbs had in the Post, Remnick dismissed the too-easy comparisons by the neocons of Putin to Hitler and of Georgia's invasion by Russia to Czechoslovakia's in 1968 or Hungary's in 1956: "Everything is what it is, and not another thing. Cartoonish rhetoric only contributes to the dangerous return of what some conservatives seem to crave—the other, the enemy, the us versus them of the Cold War."

Remnick is at his very best when he describes the disappearance of America's capacity to cajole other nations into better behavior: "Even ordinary Russians find it mightily trying to be lectured on questions of sovereignty and moral diplomacy by the West, particularly the United States, which, even before Iraq, had a long history of foreign intervention, overt and covert—politics by other means. After the exposure of the Bush Administration's behavior prior to the invasion of Iraq and its unapologetic use of torture, why would any leader, much less Putin, respond to moral suasion from Washington? That is America's tragedy, and the world's."

Indeed it is. It is also one of the most important reasons we must elect Barack Obama president, instead of a mindless cheerleader for all of Bush's foreign policy catastrophes—the candidate revered by cable newsmen for his "experience."