I’ve been reading up on Barack Obama and there are a lot of things I like about him—specifically, his sensible, often common-sensical, and always independent thinking. He does not toe any party line. He creates his own line.

I’ve got one major (insurmountable) problem: I cannot abide Obama’s supporters—both the Obamabots, with their mindless, gushing devotion, and his more educated supporters, with their presumably mindful, gushing devotion.

The more deeply they fall in love with him, the colder I feel toward him.

There you have it. As I said—a conundrum.

What is Obama’s prominent foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski doing in the Middle East?

The New York Sun reports:

A foreign policy adviser to Senator Obama is scheduled to arrive in Syria today as the leader of a RAND Corp. delegation.

Zbigniew Brzezinski will travel to Damascus for meetings as part of a trip Syria’s official Cham News agency described as an “important sign that the end of official dialogue between Washington and Damascus has not prevented dialogue with important American intellectuals and politicians.”

If the Syrian official news agency is reporting this, why is it deliberately and intentionally being kept sub rosa from the American media?

A press officer for the RAND Corp., Lisa Sodders, said the trip was organized by the RAND Center for Middle East Public Policy. She offered scant details on the trip, which she said was not meant to be covered by the press. She said the delegation would be “meeting with several different people, community leaders and government officials throughout the Middle East.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign professed varying degrees of ignorance about Mr. Brzezinski’s trip:

A spokesman for the senator’s presidential campaign, Tommy Vietor, said the campaign did not know Mr. Brzezinski was leading the delegation. “The first we heard of this trip was from you,” he said. He added: “Brzezinski is not a day-to-day adviser for the campaign, he is someone whose guidance Senator Obama seeks on Iraq.”

The State Department’s reaction was guarded:

A spokesman for the State Department, David Foley, yesterday offered no comment on Mr. Brzezinski’s scheduled travel to Damascus. “In light of the ongoing Syrian interference in the presidential election process in Lebanon, the continued flow of foreign fighters into Iraq from Syria, the continued support for Palestinian terrorist groups and Hezbollah, we call on Damascus to cease its destructive tactics.”

Others, for example Clinton supporter Eliot Engel, were not so shy about expressing their thoughts and feelings:

A supporter of Mrs. Clinton, Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York, said he found it hard to believe that one of the Illinois senator’s main advisers would not know that his visit to Syria would appear to have the tacit consent of the Obama campaign.

“People are going to say if you are advising Obama, you are representing Obama,” Mr. Engel said. “At this time when we are in the middle of an election, I can’t believe that for him to go to Syria at this moment would not appear he was going with at least some tacit approval of the candidate he is advising. I would think he would realize that,” Mr. Engel said.

Today’s New York Times reports that Obama’s campaign is all caught up, albeit far below the surface, in race issues.

My suggestion for Mr. Obama is that he ought to watch his flanks, because he’s being torpedoed. His bid for the presidency is about a lot more than America’s domestic travails, as Leon Wieseltier clarifies bracingly in The New Republic:

It is not “the politics of fear” to remind Obama’s legions of the blissful that, while they are watching Scarlett Johansson sway to the beat, somewhere deep inside a quasi independent territory we might call Islamistan people are making plans to blow them to bits. (Yes, they can.) …

[Into] this unirenic [and unstable global] environment strides Obama, pledging to extract us promptly from Iraq and to negotiate with our enemies. What is the role of a conciliator in an unconciliating world? You might think that in such conditions he is even more of an historical necessity-but why would you think that all that stands between the world and peace is one man? …. There are autonomous countries and cultures out there. The turbulence that I have described is not caused by misunderstandings. It is caused by the interests of powers and the beliefs of peoples. Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Islamabad, Gaza City, Khartoum, Caracas-does Obama really believe that he has something to propose to these ruthless regimes that they have not already considered? Does he plan to move them, to organize them, to show them change they can believe in? With what trick of empathy, what euphoria, does he hope to join the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds in Iraq?

Good questions, Mr. Wieseltier.

Who knew?

On Tuesday night, the nine members of the Berkeley City Council are expected to do something they, or the Marines, for that matter, very rarely do: retreat in the face of fierce opposition. …

[Their] proclamation, which called the Marines “uninvited and unwelcome intruders,” sparked an angry response in the form of hundreds of telephone calls, thousands of e-mail messages and countless hours of “How dare they!” on the radio and elsewhere.

This is one of the cases where not all publicity is good publicity.

Code Pink, seen here in a recent performance,

and other fringe radical groups probably thought it was a good idea for Berkeley to take on the Marines,  to call attention to the continuing war in Iraq, along with their aggressive malice toward anyone they decree responsible for it.

Undoubtedly, they thought they were “safe” doing this on their home turf in Northern California, whose demographic is Nancy Pelosi’s core constituency (the one she was signaling on Sunday when she repeatedly called the surge and Iraq a “failure.“)

Something tells me that this constituency’s “ideas” are going to be tested in the coming months. One straw in the wind is the Berkeley mayor’s cluelessness, and his clumsy attempt to pretend that the city council didn’t launch a frontal attack on the United States armed services as a hostile entity:

Mayor Tom Bates, who was in the Army and seems slightly bewildered by the backlash, said the [new] resolution would be “a substitute for what we’ve had out there.”

“Actually I wouldn’t even call it a substitute,” Mr. Bates said a moment later. “I think it’s just a restating of our policy.”

Somehow, I doubt that Mr. Bates will be allowed to rewrite Berkeley’s history with impunity.

The Council regularly takes up foreign policy and other faraway issues. But even veterans of the scene say the Marine hoopla is one for the books.

Ms. Olds, who voted for the parking spot but not the language about the Marines, said she had never seen such a response. Not that the Council did not deserve it, she added.

“I live in the [Berkeley] hills,” Ms. Olds said. “And they don’t like this one bit.”

I’m pretty sure that the folks who live in the “hills” are rich Democrats—Pelosi’s core constituency. They allow the fringe to represent the views of their party at their own risk.