How would the trad media have portrayed Barack Obama if he had behaved as John McCain has done since Georgian President Saakashvili sent troops into South Ossetia? Would it have been 'presumptuous' to issue proposals to intervene in the fighting even before the President had spoken? To stake out an aggressive position far in front of anything the US wished to adopt? To attack a rival candidate for refusing to do the same?
How about if he'd compared the original, impetuous aggressors in this ugly conflict to the victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001? What if he claimed to be able to speak for the nation?
"I told [Saakashvili] that I know I speak for every American when I said to him, today, we are all Georgians."
No. Instead it looks like the term being used in the trad media to describe McCain's every action in regard to Georgia - no matter how ill-advised - is 'prescient'. Here is an example of that famous 'prescience': McCain nominated Saakashvili for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Presumably McCain was able to foresee that in 2008 repeated efforts to convince Saakashvili to keep the peace with Russia would work out so well for everybody.
A veritable Themistocles in his 'prescience', John McCain is. But 'presumptuous'? Not so far, it would seem.