Lightweight this, bitchez!

So John Edwards is put at a disadvantage as a result of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto today because he's "a lightweight" on foreign policy, eh?

Not so fast, Joe Scarborough:

Edwards spoke in Waukon this afternoon about having calls in to Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf. Then, at his second event in Decorah, he told Iowans that he got his call returned.

“He called me,” Edwards said, “because I told the ambassador I’d like to speak to him. I met him a few years ago, which I think I told you earlier, and we had a conversation in which I urged him to continue the democratization process. He told me, he gave me his assurances that he intended to do that, and we also spoke about having international independent investigators allowed into the country for transparency purposes, for credibility purposes, and we spoke briefly about the elections.”

Edwards is the only candidate to have said publicly that he received a call from Musharraf today. Edwards did not join in the fight between rivals Clinton and Obama over which candidate has the best foreign policy advisers, and asked what this conversation does for his own foreign policy credibility, Edwards referred back to the complexity of the issue.

“I think that the most important thing is to understand what’s actually happening within Pakistan, the complex nature of the problems there, and to be visionary about what America needs to be doing,” he told reporters.

While Rudy Giuliani is out there running yet more ads on which he climbs once again on top of the pile of 9/11 corpses and says that only he will kill enough Muslims to satisfy the bloodlust of the Republican base, and Hillary and Obama are playing "Mine's bigger" on foreign policy, old Johnny the Tortoise is on the phone with Musharraf. As Marc Ambinder says in the Atlantic: "That's one heck of a talking point."

The RadioIowa blog has an MP3 of Edwards talking about the situation in Pakistan.

Even the National Review Online is rendered speechless that the guy they thought was just a pretty face was the go-to guy on the Democratic side today.

More from Cliff Schecter at Brave New Films, at MyDD, and at Le Grand Orange,