While we’re enveloped in campaign excitement, the rest of the world goes about its business. Some three days after Palestinians blew their way through the border with Egypt, Egyptian soldiers are reportedly fleeing rather than confront the problem and close the border.

The BBC explains the problem:

Egypt is in a bind. It did not want the border breached.

The Egyptian government despises and fears Hamas. It fears opposition forces within Egypt, including religious fundamentalists, being strengthened by Hamas ideology.

But equally, Egypt does not want to be seen directly as “Gaza’s jailer”. So closing the border, amid scenes of Arab fighting Arab - Palestinian stones against Egyptian riot shields - is also very unwelcome.

Israel has moved to suggest that any failure to close the border by Egypt would justify Israel in handing over responsibility for the future welfare of the people of Gaza to Egypt - neatly ridding Israel of a problem, and the source of so much international criticism.

That will not happen, but the Rafah border breach and the extraordinary scenes of a mass Palestinian breakout for shopping or simply for fresh air may yet have profound political effects on the entire Middle East peace process.

Here are the two things that might happen, according to the BBC:

The downside could be a hardening of attitudes on all sides, further complicating or poisoning the climate for concessions in the dialogue which US President George W Bush is hoping to accelerate.

The upside could be a realisation that the present situation in Gaza, and the split between Hamas there, and Fatah in the West Bank, is utterly unsustainable.

What will happen?

Stay tuned. But not to the MSM.

Roger L. Simon thinks the NYT demonstrates pathological hatred of Rudy Giuliani:

The idea that the NYT actually backs a Republican for President seems more likely to be a spoof at The Onion, but it’s evidently for real and they are giving the (very weak) nod to McCain. Yawn…. but what’s fascinating is that the brief remarks supporting McCain are followed by an attack on Rudy which is virtually pathological:

The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking.

It goes on. When I used the word pathological, I wasn’t exaggerating. The hatred is out of control. It would be interesting to speculate on why, but it’s late and I leave that to readers.

It’s fun to speculate why! Here’s my idea: New York liberals are afraid that if Rudy gets elected, they’re gonna have to answer for him—kinda the way that American Jews have to answer for Israel. Everyone will hate and blame New York, and we can’t have that!

Upset as I am that the MSM is ignoring everything happening in the world in order to saturate us with campaign coverage—which is an entirely different issue—Jack Shafer says pretty much everything I think about the kind of coverage we’re getting: why not cover it as a horse race [e.a.]? ***

[Y]ou can no more divorce “horseracism” (to pinch Brian Montopoli’s coinage) from campaign coverage than you can divorce horseracism from the coverage of horse races.

Horse-race coverage isn’t the devil spawn of the television age. Scholar C. Anthony Broh dates horse-race coverage of campaigns back to 1888 …. [H]e catalogs its many pluses. Horse-race journalism increases voter interest in campaigns, something you can’t say for the average newspaper’s delineation of a position paper. “The horse-race image encourages reporters to emphasize competition rather than to forecast results,” Broh writes, …

Shafer catalogs some of the issues that have been raised (which helps to educate voters while entertaining them) , and then he makes the most important point of all: that the media is not the be-all and end-all for those those want to inform themselves about political platforms and issues.

But even if the press corps had abandoned substance, no voter is more than a mouse click away from detailed policy papers and unfiltered campaign speeches by the candidates. If you’re not an informed political consumer this year, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

He also makes the obvious point:

A political campaign is more than a traveling debate society. Beyond the issues, voters need to know why a candidate is (or isn’t) performing well in the polls, is (or isn’t) raising money, is (or isn’t) drawing crowds of supporters, or is (or isn’t) keeping his cool. Candidates win or lose for a reason, reasons that have to do with issue papers but also with how they carry themselves and present their positions. Candidates appreciate this fact, which is why they commission private polls so they can construct their own horse-race results and act on them.

Read the whole thing.

It’s so obvious a point: Politicians are competing for our votes. Why wouldn’t we want to watch the competition?

All I would add is that how candidates hold up under the pressures of a political campaign also gives undecided voters information they take into consideration when deciding (assuming that they’re paying attention, which is a big assumption to make).

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*** Anecdotal evidence indicates that the coverage is a hit. I know a lot of people who aren’t very much into politics who have been following the antics—it’s just another kind of Reality TV show!