Kim’s “advice” to the Republican Party here reads like it came straight from her real boss, former McCain advisor and Orion Strategies PR guy Randy Scheunemann. Has anyone heard from him since the ignomious circular firing squad end of the McCain campaign and Scheunemann’s outing as the guy who leaked rumors about VP nominee Sarah Palin behind her back to the press in The New York Times? Of course not.
http://larussophobeexposed.blogspot.com/2009/02/devil-and-beltway-bandits-went-down-to.html
The Devil and Beltway Bandits Went Down to Georgia
There was the Romanian Vladimir Socor, a lugubrious specter haunting the Tbilisi Marriott, who had the virtue of seeming to believe everything he wrote; and there was the Russian-born pundit Ariel Cohen, who, when I last saw him, was airily being quoted by a Bloomberg reporter on the validity of Azerbaijan’s elections he had flown in a day too late to watch. They had friends at AEI and DoD; they felt passionately about Israel and Iraq; their employers were “non-partisan” think tanks that favored the categorical statement and the far-right.
Last to arrive were the mercenaries, who spent days meeting Georgian politicians at the Marriott’s maroon-walled café and nights getting the full-court Georgian press – a trifecta of feasting, dancing, and Saakashvili – that Georgia reserved solely for lobbyists and consumer-minded travel writers. The mercenaries didn’t work for the American government or for Georgia but for themselves, charging such top dollar that it is still unclear who their real funders could be. Chief among them was Randy Scheunemann, McCain foreign policy advisor and former President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, who lobbied for Georgia through his firm, Orion. (Orion, get it? That’s the hunter constellation, one of the brightest in the sky.) There was oil in the next country over; there was a pipeline to build and NATO to expand. And yet it was in the misty world of Washington influence where they were at their best. (“Yes, but what is it that you actually do?” I asked his bombshell blond Estonian employee more than once before being gracefully deferred.)
