And if he were president, there would be peace on earth by now:

“If I was president, this [Hezbollah vs. Israel] wouldn’t have happened,” said Kerry during a noon stop at Honest John’s bar and grill in Detroit’s Cass Corridor.

Bush has been so concentrated on the war in Iraq that other Middle East tension arose as a result, he said.

…the idea of Gore for Vice President is floated.

The inconvenient truth is that as a politician, Gore has always been more successful in a supporting role. …

The reaction to Gore’s movie has been impressive, but it doesn’t change the fact that he misplayed a winning hand in 2000. He gives great lecture, but mediocre stump speech. And global warming isn’t yet a central issue to build a presidential campaign around. On the other hand, it’s ideal for a vice presidential candidate, suggesting a ticket ready to grapple with the challenges of the future.

Ouch.

In a report on CNN earlier today, the reporter (I think it was John Roberts) mentioned the circumstances of one rocket attack in northern Israel (I think it was in Haifa). In the course of his report, he noted in passing (one rocket passed through several layers of concrete) that Israelis are required to have bomb shelters.

I’ve searched Google News for more information about this and found only a handful of relevant mentions. Here’s one:

Nahariyans who have stayed in the town are feeling anxious and claustrophobic. Houses built since the mid-1990s have mandatory, reinforced “safe rooms,” so residents go there when air-raid sirens wail.

Others have to make use of the town’s more than 160 municipal shelters.

Here’s another:

Intel has moved employees in Haifa, which is located about 20 miles south of the Lebanese border, into a bomb shelter equipped with Wi-Fi, an Intel Israel representative told Reuters.

This would seem to be a salient piece of context for reporting on the ground in Israel, no? I mean, this is a liberal democracy where it is “normal” to have a bomb shelter in your home, or for your branch office, because your safety can come down to that.

How do we measure “proportionality” in such a context and in such a neighborhood as the Middle East? And why has everyone in the MSM jumped on the “Israel used disproportionate force” angle without reporting this element of the story?

The real bias of the talking-head media culture is ignorance and lack of intellectual curiosity.

Even for someone who knows that television news organizations are woefully lacking in overseas facilities (not to mention basic knowledge about the areas they “cover,” which makes them susceptible to manipulation by our enemies for propaganda purposes), the emptiness of the reporting, the lack of context, the absence of explanation of basic facts about the region, the conflict, the history, the potential impact on American concerns—i.e., the stakes—is shocking.

The MSM was caught with its pants down and has no idea how to handle this story. They’re so wrapped up in being “fair and balanced,” careful to allow Hezbollah press officers to have their say, that they are failing utterly to tell basics of the story: who? what? why? where? when?

The scrambling to get up to speed by pundits and bloggers is painful to behold, too.

Bill Maher—who, famously, was among the first American public figures to be told to “watch what they say” after 9/11—is, of course, politically incorrect. I’m not even going to try to pretend that he might serve as a barometer of “elite opinion.”

Maher does have a refreshing outlook, though. He loves being on the same side as his president.

I love it that a U.S. president doesn’t pretend Arab-Israeli conflict is an even-steven proposition. Lots of ethnic peoples, probably most, have at one time or another lost some territory; nobody’s ever completely happy with their borders; people move and get moved, which is why the 20th century saw the movement of tens if not hundreds of millions of refugees in countries around the world. There was no entity of Arabs called “Palestine” before Israel made the desert bloom. If those 600,000 original Palestinian refugees had been handled with maturity by their Arab brethren, who had nothing but space to put them, they could have moved on — the way Germans, Czechs, Poles, Chinese and everybody else has, including, of course, the Jews.

A HuffPo commenter disagrees:

Hey, Bill. Aren’t you an American? This stance of yours is as whacked as your position on Iraq.
Since when is defending yourself means having the right to go all out nuts. Defend yourself by stopping the assaults. defend yourself by being a good neighbor. Defend yourself by being a part of a civilized community with rights and obligations to talk and if necessary, negotiate. Do we teach our children to defend themselves by going home and getting Daddy’s guns and kill all the kids on the playground because one kid spit on them. Get a life. If your analogy held true, then Dillon Klebold was just defending himself in the Columbine shootings. After all. Dillon was mocked in the cafeteria.
Proportionality is the key. Decency is the key. Geez…get a grip, Bill.
Starting a holacaust is over the line. Evewn for Jews.

The other day I said that most Americans can’t step outside of their own shoes and into the shoes of an Israeli. I think this guy makes my point: to him, the Middle Eastern conflict is a playground fight. No matter that the playground is in the world’s roughest neighborhood, where they play by the Hama Rules.

In February 1982 the secular Syrian government of President Hafez al-Assad faced a mortal threat from Islamic extremists, who sought to topple the Assad regime. How did it respond? President Assad identified the rebellion as emanating from Syria’s fourth-largest city — Hama — and he literally leveled it, pounding the fundamentalist neighborhoods with artillery for days. Once the guns fell silent, he plowed up the rubble and bulldozed it flat, into vast parking lots. Amnesty International estimated that 10,000 to 25,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, were killed in the merciless crackdown. Syria has not had a Muslim extremist problem since.

(Thomas Friedman, New York Times, September 21, 2001)

Normally, I wouldn’t post “news” about the Iranian Farceur-in-Chief’s latest provocations—this time he has declared that Israel “pushed the button of its own destruction” in the attack on Hezbollah—but I want it preserved in my archives: evidence of Iran’s shamelessness.

In solidarity with its Hezbollah brothers, Iran is now holding its own Jewish hostages: Iranian Jews who have shown their loyalty to Ahmadinejad by protesting Israel and praising Hezbollah. But that’s not all. The entire Iranian population is now encouraged to do its bit against Israel:

In Teheran, the government has sanctioned billboards showing Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and a message that it is the duty of Muslims to “wipe out” Israel. Officials also organized a demonstration in the southern city of Shiraz by Iran’s small Jewish community calling for Israel’s destruction and praising Hizbullah.