Literally. Jackson Diehl talks about the “vacuum” in the peace process, how it was filled in the past, and how it looms now:

President Bush once asked former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon why he had proposed his bold plan to evacuate Israeli settlers and soldiers unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. “To fill the vacuum,” Sharon frankly replied. Before Sharon uncorked the idea in the fall of 2003, the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” was stalemated, and there was mounting international pressure for progress. Proposals from outsiders and would-be brokers were proliferating; Sharon feared one of them would eventually gain traction and be imposed on him. So, with the flair that won him many a battlefield victory, he outflanked the incipient discussion.

Three years later, in the aftermath of a war that was one of the unforeseen consequences of Sharon’s strategy, a similar vacuum looms before his successors. Once again there seems no clear way forward toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace. The unilateral West Bank pullout championed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert earlier this year is, at least for now, dead. But a settlement seems more urgent than ever, and lots of people have ideas: Jacques Chirac, Kofi Annan, the Arab League.

Yep, it sure does suck. Read the whole thing.

Dana Milbank reports on a stupid, unnecessary, and heated exchange between “reporter” Peggy Fox and candidate George Allen about Allen’s “heritage” (he’s rumored to descend from Jews):

At a debate in Tysons Corner yesterday between Republican Allen and Democrat Webb, WUSA-TV’s Peggy Fox asked Allen, the tobacco-chewing, cowboy-boot-wearing son of a pro football coach, if his Tunisian-born mother has Jewish blood.

“It has been reported,” said Fox, that “your grandfather Felix, whom you were given your middle name for, was Jewish. Could you please tell us whether your forebears include Jews and, if so, at which point Jewish identity might have ended?”

Allen recoiled as if he had been struck. His supporters in the audience booed and hissed. “To be getting into what religion my mother is, I don’t think is relevant,” Allen said, furiously. “Why is that relevant — my religion, Jim’s religion or the religious beliefs of anyone out there?”

“Honesty, that’s all,” questioner Fox answered, looking a bit frightened.

“Oh, that’s just all? That’s just all,” the senator mocked, pressing his attack. He directed Fox to “ask questions about issues that really matter to people here in Virginia” and refrain from “making aspersions.”

“Let’s move on,” proposed the moderator, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News.***

Questioned later, Fox said she was totally taken aback by Allen’s reaction to her question.

“I was shocked,” she said after the event. Disclosing that her great-grandfather was a Mormon polygamist, she added: “Why would he get so angry at the suggestion there might be something in your background that’s Jewish? I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.”

Yet she makes clear that her motive was to dig up something Allen had been “denying” and to confront him with it. She refers to this as “curiosity.”

Fox said her motive was curiosity. “I thought it was important to find out is this part of his heritage, because if it is nobody knows it. Do you deny part of your heritage for political reasons?”

Has it come down to this?—that reporters play Gotcha! with politicians’ religion?

It has now gotten to the point where I cannot stand to watch

Why do “reporters” continue to debase themselves, their profession, and the rest of us with their childish, surly, entitled, grotesque behavior?

———— 

***I note from watching This Week that Stephanopoulos is often the first to try to avoid sticky subjects. Two Sundays ago, for example, he cut off Katrina VandenHeuvel at the knees when she announced that the administration and Republican politicians must face a “reckoning” over their support for “torture,” a position that is decreasing the moral stature of the U.S. (no free transcript available, and I’m not shelling out money for it).

 Before the words were out of her mouth, Stephanopoulos said that the politicians would face a reckoning at the polls in November—which is exactly the right attitude and answer.

Enough with the witch-hunting! But I fear they’re just getting started, with the election two full years away…

These new best friends really dig each other:

Via GOP Vixen, who also ran a “caption this” contest. Two excellent contributions:

The right hand knows what the left hand is doing and it is jealous.

 Ahmadinejad gets his hands on a short-range missile.

 

Yesterday’s featured photo of the loving duo:

And then there was their danse macabre:

After which they couldn’t keep their hands off each other:

Michiko Kakutani, book reviewer for the New York Times, is deeply offended by the most recent work of Judge Richard Posner, a book about the Constitution in the age of terrorism, which he titled Not a Suicide Pact.

This willingness to bend the Constitution reflects Judge Posner’s archly pragmatic approach to the law and his penchant for eschewing larger principles in favor of utilitarian, cost-benefit analysis. Efficiency, market dynamics and short-term consequences are what concern Judge Posner, not enduring values or legal precedents.

One result is a depressing relativism in which there are no higher ideals and no absolute rights worth protecting. It is a distinctly cynical outlook that imputes the most mercenary of motives to everyone from journalists to judges: just as Judge Posner has asserted that the media merely pander to the demands of their audiences rather than striving to inform the public, so he suggests in these pages that justices simply “make up constitutional law as they go along,” following subjective criteria instead of striving to uphold principle and precedent.

Funny how Kakutani doesn’t see this same phenomenon from the other side: the totally cynical outlook of almost every liberal reporter, anchor, and commentator in the blogosphere and the media about the policies of the Bush administration, which, from the moment it took office, was branded as interested only in making America safe for its business cronies.

That this ultra-cynical critique was also leveled against Bush’s decision to topple Saddam (No Blood for Oil! No Blood for Halliburton!) is, frankly, a disgrace. It implies that BushCo played fast and loose with American lives (not to mention billions of dollars) just because it could.

That liberal/media cynicism is cocktail-party chatter, and it quickly entered mainstream media coverage. It was the reason that war opponents were unable to tip the scales against deposing Saddam: their arguments fell on deaf ears from an American media audience/public that is not nearly as cynical about its government as the media elite.

The liberal establishment, represented by the media, has seriously overreached. Instead of displaying a strong skepticism about government, it has run a relentless attack on BushCo for lying to Americans (i.e., deliberately misleading them) on issue after issue.

Most people just don’t buy it. So it has backfired, and it will continue to backfire.