As Power Line noted a week ago, as sexy as the John Edwards story is, the far greater news story is the Russian invasion of Georgia. And the confluence of the stories, and the media malpractice that both stories in their own way demonstrate, provides us with quite an incite into the MSM's collective mindset.

Regarding the latter story, Rush Limbaugh notes, It's a Sorry Day for Our Media:

Ladies and gentlemen, permit me a brief moment for a personal message to Campbell Brown, Suzanne Malveaux, and Ed Henry of CNN. Of course, Suzanne Malveaux asks the president of Georgia, "Have you reached out to the Russians, have you tried dialogue?" And then Ed Henry and Campbell Brown made the ludicrous assertion that we can't do anything because we did something arguably worse by going into Iraq than what Russia is doing in Georgia. So specifically to you, Campbell Brown and Ed Henry, you are journalists. You are people who chronicle the passing of events. You witness these events, and you cover them. As such, your memory ought to be reliable. Iraq was not a sovereign nation. Iraq lost its sovereignty because Iraq invaded a sovereign country called Kuwait. In the ensuing war to kick Iraq out of Kuwait, Iraq lost. They then begged us to stop slaughtering their supposedly invincible million man army as it was retreating to Baghdad, which we did.

As terms of the ceasefire, Campbell Brown and Ed Henry, we resume the right to resume kicking their asses at any point if they did not live up to the terms of the surrender agreement. Shockingly, Saddam Hussein did not live up to those terms and continued in wanton violation of 15 Security Council resolutions. You covered all of this, Campbell Brown and Ed Henry, you covered it all. For you to compare Saddam Hussein to the president of Georgia, a democratic and elected president amongst a free people, if you want to start making comparisons, Putin is closer to Saddam Hussein than Saakashvili. These are our best and brightest trained journalists, ladies and gentlemen, covering the stories and then forgetting that they were even there. I doubt that they forgot. They're just pushing the agenda anyway. They willingly sacrifice their credibility, all in the pursuit of an agenda.

The essays that Judd chose for this section illustrate his opinion that America itself has redefined sovereignty so that the right to maintain the governance of a nation now depends on a regime's ability to maintain basic civil rights, and a conform to liberal democratic norms.

Judd notes that the isolationist (or non-interventionist) Right has been quite hostile to this development, "which does of course involve us in the internal affairs of states from Syria to Burma to Somalia to Haiti." However, Judd's selections demonstrate that this is consistent with America's past. Americans after all settled the continent all the way to the Pacific, fought a Civil War at home, and abroad fought Imperialism, Nazism, and Communism successively, all the while requiring other peoples to adopt our own foundational principles.