The phone call is real

Washington Times By Mona Charen Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Hillary Clinton's best anti-Obama ad came to be known as the "3 a.m. phone call." It stoked voter worries that in the event of an international crisis, the first-term junior senator from Illinois might be out of his depth.
On Aug. 8, the White House phone did ring, alerting President Bush that the Soviet Union, um, that is, Russia, had just sent columns of tanks and armored personnel carriers across the internationally recognized border of Georgia (formerly the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia), a tiny, democratic, America-friendly, Western-leaning country in the Caucasus.
It was a near perfect laboratory test - the sort that real life rarely provides until it's too late - for how the two nominees for president would respond to an international emergency. (It also tested the current president - more on that in a moment.) Mr. Obama flunked. ...MORE...