Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain, was fired from the Arizona senator’s campaign last week for what one aide called “trashing” the campaign staff, three senior McCain advisers tell CNN. One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading “disinformation” about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials. “He was positioning himself with Palin at the expense of John McCain’s campaign message,” said one of the aides.

Not that it would’ve mattered much in this atmosphere of economic uncertainty—and it certainly wouldn’t’ve mattered to more than a handful of DC people even in boom times—but I do wish John McCain had ditched this belligerent little man earlier during his campaign.

I saw Randy Scheunemann speak at two events and came away profoundly unimpressed each time. The man’s a shrill ideologue who, given his privileged position and long history of working with McCain, was probably responsible for the most unpalatable foreign policy positions articulated by the Republican side.

Here’s to hoping his career isn’t resurrected by a resurgent Palin in 2012.

Bill Clinton Helps Out… By letting America know that Senator Obama had no clue what to do when the financial crisis hit. At 3AM, how many people will a President Obama have time to chat with?

“You know what he did?” Clinton said, heralding Obama’s reaction to the financial crisis. “First he took a little heat for not saying much. I knew what he was doing. He talked to his advisers – he talked to my economic advisers, he called Hillary. He called me. He called Warren Buffet. He called all those people, you know why? Because he knew it was complicated and before he said anything he wanted to understand.”

I have to say I’m with Bill on this one. I’m really sick of hip-shooting yahoos “making decisions” in places of power at times of crisis. Judging by how well John McCain’s campaign suspension stunt went over, I’d say that many people would agree with me.

That said, with what has been happening during the last three weeks on Wall Street, I don’t think I’ve ever cared less whether Obama or McCain would commit troops to solve a humanitarian crisis in Congo. Or whether the candidates think Russia is an Evil Empire. Or whether they’d send troops to the Middle East to fight Iran if Israel was attacked. Since neither candidate was able to go beyond the standard populist bromides when talking about the financial crisis, hearing them talk about what they would do internationally sounded incredibly silly and irrelevant.

EDIT: I should note that I’m coming down with a cold and am in a foul mood. Reading around the web, it doesn’t seem that people were as down on the debate as I was.

For a democracy to properly function, however, the base base must not be agitated with populism and demagoguery. If it is, ugliness ensues and democracy is threatened. Witness this WaPo report:

Worse, Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

Sow the seeds of discord, reap the whirlwind. Something like that.

Some younger guy said he should be President, but some cranky older guy said that yet another guy named Petraeus should be President. Maybe the old guy was like Petraeus’s butler or something?

Overall, McCain’s foreign policy vision was disquieting. His linking of Iran solely to Israel’s existence was pure demagoguery, his Iraq “victory” talk was nothing more than a drawn out soundbyte which betrayed serious delusions about Iraq’s future, and his defense of our pro-Musharraf Pakistan policy was at best unconvincing in the face of Obama’s cheap and disingenuous criticisms.

What surprised me most, however, was McCain’s incoherence on Georgia, an argument in which I thought he had the tactical (if not wholly practical) advantage over Obama. Obama’s reaction to the Georgia crisis as it was unfolding came off as McCain-lite—a muddled and uncertain saber-rattle. All McCain had to do last night was be forceful and single-minded to have Obama look out of his depth. Yet McCain bungled it:

I don’t believe we’re going to go back to the Cold War. I am sure that that will not happen. But I do believe that we need to bolster our friends and allies. And that wasn’t just about a problem between Georgia and Russia. It had everything to do with energy. There’s a pipeline that runs from the Caspian through Georgia through Turkey. And, of course, we know that the Russians control other sources of energy into Europe, which they have used from time to time. It’s not accidental that the presidents of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine flew to Georgia, flew to Tbilisi, where I have spent significant amount of time with a great young president, Misha Saakashvili. And they showed solidarity with them, but, also, they are very concerned about the Russian threats to regain their status of the old Russian to regain their status of the old Russian empire. Now, I think the Russians ought to understand that we will support — we, the United States — will support the inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine in the natural process, inclusion into NATO.

At pains to show how much he knew, McCain was scattershot and unconvincing. Which is it, Senator? Is it that we must stand by fledgling democracies no matter what, as the neoconservatives demand? Is it a wholly energy-centered (and quite frankly insane) gambit which demands we try to snake a pipeline from the Caspian between a hostile Iran and an increasingly hostile Russia at the expense of both powers? Or is it that Russia is acting on old Imperial impulses and must be stopped for some reason?

It’s a shame that McCain didn’t turn to friends like Chuck Hagel and Tony Cordesman, and went to unqualified ideologues like Randy Scheunemann instead. He certainly had the opportunity to be the foreign policy “adult” this election.

One thing worth keeping in mind about great power conflicts is that they’re rarely inevitable. At times, France and England have been at war, and at times they’ve been allies. A lot of it has to do with how leaders interact with each other, and whether they aggressively court conflict or publicly seek a constructive relationship. If you court conflict, soon enough, the other country does, and both sides build up a narrative of slights and provocations — many of them quite real — that lead to war and discord. But it is a choice: You can decide whether you want a relationship defined by transgressions and stare-downs, or whether you want a relationship where the overriding narrative is of alliance and both sides work to play down points of disagreement. Scheunemann, here, is courting conflict, and as McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser, that’s a pretty good indicator for how a McCain administration would look.

Yes, the American electorate will choose one candidate over another. And some small subset of the voters may in fact base that choice on the candidate’s foreign policy views. So in that very narrow present tense sense, we do face a sort of choice between confrontationalist nationalism and consensus-building internationalism.

But in the grand historical scheme of things, I’d argue that great power conflict is indeed inevitable. One should look at Scheunemann and McCain as merely the latest incarnation of the “hard-liner” type, one that will forever be with us, and one that will sporadically come to power in our nation and in others. No number of institutional frameworks will prevent this all too human tendency from bubbling up at the most inopportune times in history.

To admit this is not to be fatalistic—this election matters and I find the McCain team’s rhetoric unsettling. I just reject the suggestion that great power conflict is a recurring simple error in judgment (one that can be implicitly corrected in the enlightened future) rather than one of the main, enduring motors of history.

Alas, I’ve only slept two hours last night, so a longer post is out of the question. I’ll try to do it tomorrow.