Barack Obama said yesterday that “Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint, and to avoid an escalation to full scale war.” John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann criticized the apparent moral equivalence in Obama’s statement: “That’s kind of like saying after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, that Kuwait and Iraq need to show restraint, or like saying in 1968 [when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia] … that the Czechoslovaks should show restraint”. Scheunemann is now being attacked by both the Obama campaign and a PR firm working for the Kremlin because he has worked on behalf of the Republic of Georgia. Ben Smith reports: