The evidence is scant, but it’s there:

 

Ali Yussef / AFP/Getty Images

Children jump and run as Iraqi troops arrive in their neighborhood to distribute food rations in the impoverished Sadr City district of eastern Baghdad. Iraqi troops poured into the Baghdad Shiite bastion of Sadr City three days ago for the first time in eight weeks, without resistance from militias who have fought deadly street battles with US forces.

Iraq violence falls to four-year low, U.S. says

The military says crackdowns by the Iraqi government are working, and that the number of attacks has dropped to about 300 a week from 1,600 in June.

The other day in the Times, Bill Kristol quoted a Marine helicopter pilot:

“I was in Iraq from the 2nd to the 12th this month. In my current job I go over there twice a year for two weeks to collect lessons learned and fly a few sorties …

“The biggest deal for me was the fact that even after we have pulled out thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops, peace continues to hold in Anbar. In fact, I was shocked by two things when flying over Ramadi and Fallujah. First, the streetlights are back on. It is crazy to see Iraqi cities lit up completely, and since they are all on grid power now, you don’t see the crazy black/brown outs when you fly over and the generators pop like you would back in 2005/6. The power now seems to extend even into the suburbs and light industry on the edges of the major cities as well.

“Second, there are people, regular civilians, walking the streets at night. That was very unusual and got the visitor (me) laughed at when I told our terminal controller that I had personnel walking down a street on the radio.”

Most people would mock such “progress,” and of course they’re right to. No one who refers to it as “progress” would ever consider living under such conditions. It’s the height of arrogance to claim this resumption of some normalcy in some pockets of Iraq as a success. It is only a small half-step up from the hell unleashed by the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the “coalition of the willing’s” occupation of an alien country ruled by tribal passions, located in a region little understood by those who made war on it.

This ignorance is evident from what the locals in Basra have told NYT reporter Stephen Farrell, who also reports on progress but (wisely) never uses that word [e.a.]:

With the death squads in hiding and Islamist militias evicted from their strongholds by the Iraqi Army, few doubt that this once-lawless port is in better shape than it was just two months ago. …

Two months after Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki ordered the military offensive, residents of Basra talk of feeling safer, if not yet entirely safe, after years of oppression by armed gangs and “enforcers” of Shariah, or Islamic law. In the four years that British troops patrolled here, from 2003 to late 2007, the outlaws emerged and preyed on musicians, alcohol sellers, Christians, unveiled women, academics — anyone not embracing their extreme vision of Islam.

Now the shops and restaurants in Basra are open later, and alcohol is back on sale, discreetly. The government’s troops seem to have quelled Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other militias. …

In the inevitable post-mortems, a principal question has been whether the multinational troops in southern Iraq, led by the British, should have rid the city of its gangsters long ago. …

But Iraqis are asking why it didn’t happen years ago …

Aside from the fact that it’s ridiculously impertinent and impudent and nervy for Iraqis to ask why, during the hell on earth that was this war in its early years, the coalition didn’t save them from sharia sooner, it turns out that cultural and demographic differences have played a big role in the outcomes in different parts of Iraq:

[In Basra], mafia-style Shiite gangs rose in an overwhelmingly Shiite town; up north, Sunni and Shiite factions waged civil war in divided cities like Baghdad and Baquba.

This is exactly the kind of thing that the coalition forces didn’t know before launching the war.

There’s also the little matter of cultural differences between the British and the Americans:

“I have been very frustrated at the British,” said Brig. Gen. Edan Jaber, a police commander in Basra. He said the British “gave a high priority to their own security” and “were not forceful with the cases they faced in the street.”

It is a common criticism. “The Americans go in with huge force and hit hard, not like the British,” one Iraqi soldier complained.

And then there’s the cultural difference between Iraqis and free Westerners—the one you’re not allowed to say in public in the West without being accused of being a neocon or a warmonger. That same Iraqi soldier elaborated on his complaint, and made an observation [e.a.]:

““The Americans go in with huge force and hit hard, not like the British. Our people need a powerful force, not a weak one. We had just left Saddam Hussein behind. How could anyone be soft after that?”

That’s a good question, particularly as it relates to electoral politics in America in 2008, where one (presumptive) candidate consistently appears soft and the other one doesn’t.

These two headlines were next to each other at Memeorandum yesterday:

John Bolton to be target of citizen’s arrest at Hay Festival — John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, faces a citizen’s arrest when he addresses an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales this evening. — George Monbiot, the journalist and activist …

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

Discussion: MoJoBlog and A Blog For All

Discussion:

Jonathan Stein / MoJoBlog: John Bolton to Be Target of Citizens Arrest in Wales

Lawhawk / A Blog For All: Journalist Seeks To Arrest John Bolton in UK

New York Times:

Al Qaeda Warrior Uses Internet to Rally Women — BRUSSELS — On the street, Malika El Aroud is anonymous in an Islamic black veil covering all but her eyes. — In her living room, Ms. El Aroud, a 48-year-old Belgian, wears the ordinary look of middle age: a plain black T-shirt and pants and curly brown hair.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

 

Discussion: Jihad Watch, JammieWearingFool, The Poor Man Institute and Danger Room

Discussion:

Robert / Jihad Watch: Muslim woman wages Internet jihad in Belgium

JammieWearingFool: ‘She is Very Radical, Very Sly and Very Dangerous’

The Poor Man Institute: I am beginning to suspect that the War on Terror is composed entirely of horses**t

Noah Shachtman / Danger Room: She Wages Online Jihad

I’ve been saying for a while now that the world is upside down. These headlines underscore that reality:

The former U.S. ambassador to the UN—whose role is to represent the United States in front of the world—is targeted by “progressives” [in this case, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper] as a criminal because he was ” ‘instrumental in preparing and initiating the Iraq war by disseminating false claims through the State Department” while he was under-secretary of state for arms control.’ ”

Meanwhile, an acknowledged jihadist, whose role is “to inspire other people to wage jihad,”gets the front page treatment in the New York Times, which quotes the director of Belgium’s federal police force thus: “She enjoys the protection that [lenient Belgian law] offers. At the same time, she is a potential threat.”

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that “war-mongering” is being treated as a crime on one side—namely, ours—but not on the other. Not very fair, that. Nor very confidence-inspiring for your normal everyday citizen of the West, who wants the authorities to prevent crimes—to act before a terrorist incident occurs, not to react afterward.

After all, anyone can react after a crime is committed—in any number of ways, including the extralegal. If the authorities allow too many such crimes to occur (through lenient laws, or lenient enforcement of laws), eventually the people being hurt by such crimes will start to take the law into their own hands.

It was Michael Blowhard (whose 2 Blowhards site is one of the best treasure troves on the internet) who first suggested*** that bloggers are performance artists and that those of us who “follow” blogs are in fact following serial dramas [scroll down to the comment posted at 3:29 a.m.] [e.a.]:

If you follow blogs, you’re checking in on “characters” — Terry Teachout, Neil Kramer, Alice in Texas. (Each of whom is, to some extent, a kind of performance artist.) And stories semi-sorta evolve out of this. If you’ve got a circle of blogs (and bloggers) you follow, it can almost be like being a fan of a soap opera — all these familiar characters, going on and on …

If “Blowhard” is right about blog readers being voyeurs and bloggers being a species of exhibitionist—and he is—then Andrew Sullivan must be the undisputed barometer (or performance artist) of the political blogosphere. Everyone is watching Sullivan’s political journey to see where he goes next.

Last night, Sullivan quoted one of his readers, who is hanging on his every move:

Herewith, a prediction: by Labor Day, you will have long since given up on Obama and will be advocating the election of McCain. For all the reasons the various villains of the Republican Party hate him, and for the fact that he more closely matches your policy wishes than Obama does or ever will, he will be your man.

I have a feeling, once the prospect of Hillary being president is safely foreclosed, so will your support for Obama be. At least I hope so.

But it’s not just Sullivan’s readers (as well as yours truly, a devoted if often frustrated and irritated fan) who’s   are addicted to the drama queen’s arias. George Packer, who just wrote a piece for the New Yorker dissecting the death of the conservative movement, is also a Sullivan follower:

I read Sullivan every day, partly to find out how far his disenchantment will carry him in the very strange direction of Obama-style uplift—how long his temperament will win out over his ideas.

Wherever Sullivan goes, we follow along (which is different from following, of course). But still …

Hats off!

———-

***I’m not an internet scholar, so I don’t know if “Michael Blowhard” was actually the first to suggest this. However, he’s the first person I read who suggested this, so he’s first in my book.

The other day, the NYT’s Kit Seelye described how slips of the candidates’ tongues play out in today’s world:

The speed at which [Clinton's RFK assassination] remarks were transmitted and reacted to illustrated the new reality candidates are grappling with in this year’s campaign, in which Mr. Obama’s own remarks about “bitter” small-town voters ricocheted around the Internet.

Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were initially reported online by The New York Post, whose reporters were not traveling with the Clinton campaign but were instead watching a live video feed of the meeting with newspaper editors. Its report quickly jumped to the Drudge Report, then whipped around the Internet and on television, with outraged comments piling up on Web sites.

Campaign aides were taken aback by the quick reaction to her remarks, but then quickly realized that Mrs. Clinton had to backpedal. She then spoke to the traveling press corps for the first time in more than a week, at a supermarket here.

Yesterday, Seelye followed up andn described the devastating effect that this latest sensational pseudo-event has had on Clinton’s campaign:

The Clinton campaign began a concerted effort over the weekend to try to “set the record straight” and contain the damage from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s comments Friday about Robert F. Kennedy.

In a letter to The Daily News, published Sunday, Mrs. Clinton said her remarks had been taken entirely out of context.

Her aides also said that the news media and the campaign of Senator Barack Obama were partly responsible for fanning the flames.

Seelye gave a lot of space to the dynamic of the controversy, explaining exactly how it got started and how the flames were fanned:

Shortly after Mrs. Clinton spoke on Friday, the Obama campaign jumped on the story, sending an e-mail message to reporters saying her comment had no place in a presidential campaign. It linked to a online report in The New York Post that said Mrs. Clinton was “making an odd comparison between the dead candidate and Barack Obama” — a phrase the newspaper later dropped.

On “Face the Nation” Sunday on CBS, Mr. Wolfson said, “It was unfortunate and unnecessary, and in my opinion, inflammatory, for the Obama campaign to attack Senator Clinton on Friday for these remarks, without obviously knowing the full facts or context.”

The Obama campaign had also e-mailed to reporters a transcript of a harsh critique of Mrs. Clinton on “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” on MSNBC.

On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos, the host of “This Week” on ABC, asked David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s top strategist, about sending the transcript.

“You say you’re not trying to stir the issue up,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said. “But a member of your press staff yesterday was sending around to an entire press list — I have the e-mail here — Keith Olbermann’s searing commentary against Hillary Clinton. So that is stirring this up, isn’t it?”

Indeed it is. The gaffe wars—aka the “distractions”—are very effective. That’s why both sides have been stirring them up, with the help of an all-too-willing press (to great effect, particularly on the Obama side).

Meanwhile: it is all dirty, stinking politics. Here’s what I mean: while his campaign was stirring the tremendous enmity among Democrats, Saint Barack the Post-Partisan was advising Wesleyan graduates to take a vow of poverty in order to gain personal “salvation” through serving the common good.

This comment, and his crowd-pleasing reference to America’s “money culture” didn’t even get picked up by the usual blogospheric suspects, much less the MSM. I guess they don’t qualify as gaffes.

Or perhaps the media is playing favorites in the gaffe wars, too. Rather than cop to that, The Politico’s John Harris writes a mea culpa about the media’s “lack of proportionality” in reporting the “gaffes”

The signature defect of modern political journalism is that it has shredded the ideal of proportionality.

Important stories, sometimes the product of months of serious reporting, that in an earlier era would have captured the attention of the entire political-media community and even redirected the course of a presidential campaign, these days can disappear with barely a whisper.

Trivial stories — the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top — can dominate the campaign narrative for days.

Who can guess what stories will cause the media machine to rev up its hype jets?

Read the whole thing.

The White House calls bullshit on NBC, and the network digs in, likely to its detriment. David Bauder elaborates:

Through its unusual public criticism of NBC’s handling of Richard Engel’s interview with the president, the Bush administration struck at the soft white underbelly of the news division’s co-existence with the opinionated personalities of MSNBC.

“I’m sure you don’t want people to conclude that there is really no distinction between the `news’ as reported on NBC and the `opinion’ as reported on MSNBC, despite the increasing blurring of those lines,” Bush counselor Ed Gillespie wrote to NBC News President Steve Capus in a letter pointedly released to the public.

Tom Rosenstiel is quoted making an obvious point:

“Getting into the game of trying to attract an audience based on your point of view rather than reporting is dangerous because it does invite this kind of backlash,”

Pshaw, says NBC’s Steve Capus:

“Viewers are savvy enough to know the differences in that kind of programming,” Capus said. “The mission of NBC News hasn’t changed. The difference is that MSNBC has had some success, and success comes with attention and scrutiny.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this laissez-fair attitude from NBC. Nor is this the first time I’ve written about this issue.

A year ago, I wrote [note that I have since then updated some inactive links]:

[Why would an organization like NBC News, which just two weeks ago had to [send representatives] on Oprah to explain why they aired as “news” the Cho sick fantasy tapes, be so sanguine about Olbermann switching between opinion (like his denouncement of Giuliani in a Countdown “Special Commentary”) and “journalism” (like his hosting the Republican debate, which featured Giuliani among others)?

Because infotainment rules (obviously!)—that’s why—and it’s up to us viewers to figure out what we should take seriously or not:

Olbermann knows to leave his opinions at home when he anchors events, said Phil Griffin, NBC News senior vice president.

“Keith’s an adult,” Griffin said. “He can tell when it’s appropriate to express himself in a commentary and when to be a journalist. That’s one of his strengths. He knows exactly the tone and his role when he’s doing anything.”

Of course political campaigns are also a circus, and politicians are the world’s most shameless showmen and -women … so, for all I care, Olbermann can throw tomatoes at all of them the next time he hosts a “debate”—that would be really fun!

But he’s still a despicable hack. And NBC News is inviting a further loss of its credibility by referring to Olbermann’s program Countdown as “news” and by referring to anything he does as “journalism.” At least CNN tries to distinguish between “news” and “views” and Glenn Beck refers to himself as a “rodeo clown.”

Since I wrote that post, Olbermann was of course elevated to serious anchor status, with a prominent seat and voice on primary Tuesdays.

Ann Althouse was intrigued by this post from Emily Bazelton about why women stray (which Bazelton wrote in response to a piece by Philip Weiss in New York magazine).

Althouse quotes Bazelton [e.a.]:

Like everything else about male sexuality, the male desire to lie with another woman is boringly uncomplicated. But why do women have affairs? The judgment of literature (Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary) is that they feel trapped and oppressed, or, less sympathetically, that they’re easily gulled by preying males one or two notches up the social ladder. Two centuries later, I would imagine that life is a bit different. The answer we heard from writers like Erica Jong and Gael Greene back in the swingin’ Plato’s Retreat 1970s was that women crave sexual variety in precisely the same way men do. Three decades later, though, feminism no longer insists that women’s desires and inclinations be identical to those of men. It may even be permitted to recognize that, at least superficially, the female sex drive seems, in the aggregate, less pronounced (or at least less conspicuous) than the male sex drive. You don’t hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. You do hear stories about women telling their husbands they no longer want to have sex.

Just because you don’t hear stories about such men doesn’t mean they don’t exist!
This “debate” is all just so much intellectual masturbation, not to mention an utter bore.

David Carr, writing in the New York Times, notes the dearth of media coverage of Iraq:

Even as we celebrate generations of American soldiers past, the women and men who are making that sacrifice today in Iraq and Afghanistan receive less attention every day. There’s plenty of blame to go around: battle fatigue at home, failing media resolve and a government intent on controlling information from the battlefield.

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September.

One “expert” offers the usual bland and unrevealing “explanations”:

“Ironically, the success of the surge and a reduction in violence has led to a reduction in coverage,” said Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “There is evidence that people have made up their minds about this war, and other stories — like the economy and the election — have come along and sucked up all the oxygen.”

There is nothing ironic about the reduction in violence leading to a reduction in coverage. It is totally to be expected. The viewing audience, both for TV and for the movies, has proved to be allergic to the subject of Iraq, as Carr himself notes [e.a.]:

[W]hen Katie Couric, CBS’s embattled anchor, went to Iraq to report the story, she and her network were rewarded with their lowest ratings in over 20 years. Hollywood producers who had hoped there would be a public interest in cinematic perspectives on this war have been similarly punished.

Despite those callous Americans who are “punishing” well-intentioned media types who insist on bringing Iraq to their attention, some noble stalwarts continue to tell the story of Iraq [e.a.]:

Earlier this spring, Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times wrote about flying in a C-130 in Iraq, accompanied by soldiers, including one in a coffin at the back of the plane.

“I wondered what exactly he had died for. And although I did not know him, I felt melancholy as we flew onward, accompanied now by ghosts and memories of loss,” she wrote.

I wonder if it has ever occurred to Carr that this kind of coverage—or, rather, the mind-set that frames this kind of Iraq coverage—is one of the reasons for the audience’s lack of interest in media coverage of Iraq. It’s poisonous, and worse than no coverage at all.

When a reporter writes that she wonders what exactly a just-dead soldier died for, that isn’t a display of compassion, as Carr suggests. Because while Ms. Rubin is scoring “compassion” points with her own cohort, she is pouring salt into the wound of that soldier’s grieving family.

But never mind. Chances are, his family won’t be reading the New York Times. Chances are, they’ll be at a commemoration like the one I attended today:

—in a district where the supposedly bitter folks cling to their guns and their religion, a district that voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama by about 75% to 25%—no one expressed the least doubt about what our war dead have died for, and continue to die for: their country, if it came down to that.

There were no movie cameras recording the event I attended in rural America. There were no luminaries, or representatives from the government. Soldiers, sailors, local guys from the VFW, a pastor, the high school marching band, and maybe 100 local residents gathered to remember their neighbors, and their neighbors’ kids.

It was very moving. I wish David Carr had been there. Perhaps he would have understood that Ms. Rubin’s kind of reporting is worse than no reporting at all.

Memorial Day in rural America

Click here to enlarge.

There are a lot of freelancers doing foreign policy these days, but there is none so reckless as this one:

Britain and other European governments should break from the US over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter told the Guardian yesterday. Carter, visiting the Welsh border town of Hay for the Guardian literary festival, described the EU’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as “supine” and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as “embarrassing”.

Referring to the possibility of Europe breaking with the US in an interview with the Guardian, he said: “Why not? They’re not our vassals. They occupy an equal position with the US.”

Then he went and “revealed” previously unknown “truths” that paint the United States as a party that is playing in bad faith in the Middle East:

Carter said the Quartet’s policy of not talking to Hamas unless it recognised Israel and fulfilled two other conditions had been drafted by Elliot Abrams, an official in the national security council at the White House. He called Abrams “a very militant supporter of Israel”. … “The Quartet’s final document had been drafted in Washington in advance, and not a line was changed,” he said.

Then, for good measure, he inserted himself in electoral politics:

Earlier, Carter, told Sky News that Hillary Clinton should abandon her battle to become Democratic presidential candidate after the last round of primaries in early June.

But that as as nothing compared to the hell he unleashed with another “revelation”:

Jimmy Carter says Israel had 150 nuclear weapons

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

His remark, made at the Hay-on-Wye festival which promotes current affairs books and literature, is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence.

After a while, one really does begin to wonder whose side that shitbag is on.  However: it’s pretty obvious that he’s preaching to the European elite choir because he can’t get any traction here at home. And that’s a good thing. Still …

We hear a lot about the evil colonial power Israel. Do we hear about the hi-tech mecca Israel? Not so much … till this past week:

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer:

“Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company,” Ballmer said, adding that the proportion of Microsoft employees per capita in Israel was similar to that in the United States.
Over the past two years, Microsoft bought five companies in Israel, adding to its two R&D centers in Haifa, which employ a total of 600 people. …

Ballmer praised the IT sector in Israel for being very advanced, and said Tel Aviv, as the birthplace of many start-ups, was a type of Silicon Valley.

Google’s Sergey Brin:

How has Israel changed since your previous visits?

“It’s pretty impressive just to see how the tech industry has continued to grow. The development, kind of just looking at the city of Tel Aviv. I mean, there are a bunch of buildings. Maybe I’m crazy, but I feel like there are lots of buildings that weren’t here when I was here last. And I’ve just seen some of the companies and their state of development, the levels developed here - it’s just incredible.”

Those are nice endorsements, of course. But something else is afoot in the Holy Land.
An unusual column from the Ha’aretz columnist Bradley Burston, usually a very low-key writer, tells me that things inside Israel are changing, too. Burston writes an open letter to his Palestinian friends:

I understand that you believe that rockets and mortars from the north, south, east, and, eventually, west, can depopulate and peel back and obliterate the borders of pre-1967 Israel until there will be no need to agree to a Jewish state on those borders, no need to compromise on refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, no need to talk, no need for self-scrutiny and reconsideration, no need to bend.

I understand that you believe that this is your right, religiously, morally, politically. I understand why you believe that you can wait.

But this month, three generations since 1948, since your Nakba, this is what I ask you to consider:

Your time is running out.

If you do not begin to act with all of your wisdom in moving toward statehood, you run the risk of becoming the Kurds of the Mediterranean basin, the Native Americans of the Middle East, permanently stateless, eternally denied.

If you do not begin to rethink the course which the Palestinian national movement has taken, you must begin to consider the idea of a world without a Palestine. The world is beginning to feel more and more comfortable with that possibility, and it is time for you to think hard about the reasons why.

We in the post-modern West have spent years educating ourselves to believe that all cultures are equally valid - with the possible exception, of course, of our own. We have taken it on faith that to criticize the culture of an indigenous people is obscenely imperialist, paternalist.

In short, we gave you a pass. And we encouraged you to give yourselves one. In respecting you for your steadfastness, we refrained from calling you on your passivity. In accepting and amplifying your contentions as to Israel’s acts of wrongdoing, we chose not to hold you accountable for your own, or to explain them away as a function of occupation,

You learned, over time, to hold Israel responsible for the whole of your plight. You learned, over time, to ignore, explain away, blame entirely on Israel, or otherwise deny the ways in which your actions and, in particular, your passivity, have deepened and fostered your misery. You learned to excuse your leaders their corruption, and their policy of foiling Israeli and foreign attempts to improve your conditions. You learned to excuse your Arab brothers their duplicity and their lip service and their exploitation and their cold shoulder and their contempt and their consummate failure to come to your aid.

In the process, you may have grown accustomed to a definition of time, and of indigenous peoples, that bears re-examination. There is, first of all, this:

The Jews are an indigenous people here, no less than you.

The Jews have every right to have a nation here, no less than you.

The Jews are stubborn and proud and fundamentally fierce as hell, no less than you.

You have dismissed the Jews as a foreign influence. You have dismissed their history, waved away their blood and sinew tie to Jerusalem, acted as though they have no business here but evil.

But in the decades you have spent misleading yourself about the true nature of the culture and the origins of the Jews, generation upon generation of Jews has been born here. They are natives. They are not going anywhere. And even the leftists among them are willing to die in defense of staying on this soil.

Food for thought … one hopes.

… is a wife who calls the shots:

But we’re supposed to lay off wifey?
I don’t think so.

(via Newsbusters)

When I posted about the massive rally for Obama in Oregon, I titled the post “rock star numbers.”

Well, whaddaya know? Obama got 75,000 people at his “rally” because the “rally” started life as a free concert [e.a.]:

Unmentioned in national reporting was the fact that Obama was preceded by a rare, 45-minute free concert by actual rock stars The Decemberists. The Portland-based band has drawn rave reviews from Rolling Stone magazine, which gave their 2005 album Picaresque four and a half stars (out of five), and another four and a half stars for 2007’s The Crane Wife.

How many of the people showed up to hear Obama, and how many to hear the band?

Good question! But it doesn’t matter, because the “optics,” as I referred to them, told the story. Or, rather, the pictures that were spread far and wide (including by yours truly) told exactly the Big Lie that Team Obama wanted to communicate—that there is a huge, unstoppable “movement” for the candidate.

Let’s examine that proposition. There are indeed a lot of people in America who are excited by Obama. Many millions have voted for him in the primaries, and he has sparked the excitement of the “creative community,” which has turned him into a pop culture phenom, which in turn has made him into a celebrity, with legions of fans—which is unusual, to say the least, for a political candidate..

Indeed, it’s been a long time since a politician excited the popular imagination to this extent. Obama brings a great deal of talent, intelligence, skill, and flexibility, and great craftiness, to the practice of politics. He is particularly effective at deflecting criticism. He does it by appealing to political correctness, public decorum, and popular prejudices. (When you are the model of personal dignity and decorum, and a very cool cat to boot, how could you go wrong by decrying “divisiveness,” “distractions,” “distortions,” “Bush’s war,” “Bush’s failed policies” “endless war,” “fear-mongering,” “the same old solutions,”?)

It’s all so effective that even I want to believe him. And that is precisely what makes me wary. Because I don’t join movements. I am naturally skeptical, and deeply suspicious of mass enthusiasms, particularly in politics. After all, if a movie star has a lot of unthinking fans, the worst that can happen is that the star gets too big for his/her britches and annoys the hell out of the rest of us due to overexposure. By contrast, if a political star has a lot of unthinking fans …

Not that Dreams from My Father is Mao’s Little Red Book. But no political star can possibly live up to the hopes that people place in him or her. There are no magic solutions to intractable, centuries-old problems. There are no easy answers. To exploit people’s hopes is, in my opinion, just as cynical as exploiting people’s fears.

Barack Obama is one of the most cynical politicians I’ve ever witnessed. He’s a snake oil peddler of the highest order—slicker even than Slick Willy.

Those influential people who are overexcited by him and should know better—the opinion leaders of the MSM—should, like me, take that as a signal to brake.

Instead, they’ve put the pedal to the metal, as Alessandra Stanley details in today’s New York Times.

Even her victory speech in Kentucky, shown live on cable news, was given perfunctory attention — a footnote to someone else’s page in history. When MSNBC called the Kentucky primary early in the evening, Tim Russert, host of “Meet the Press,” said her success with women and blue-collar voters “means Senator Obama has a lot of work to do” and sketched a rehabilitation plan. He did not mention Mrs. Clinton by name in that disquisition.

NBC simply erased Clinton from the picture, Ms. Stanley suggests. I would be full of admiration for Ms. Stanley’s courageous observation of a rival news organization if her own newspaper weren’t precisely guilty of the same thing.

Note that Clinton’s blowout of Obama in Kentucky isn’t even mentioned on the front page of the New York Times, or, for that matter, inside the news pages either. Indeed, as the headline writer says,

Clinton Fades Even in a Victory

Asserting their primacy, the media elite—from NBC to the New York Times—closes ranks and declares that it’s a victory only when they say it’s a victory. Obama is the clear winner.

Obama Declares Bid Is ‘Within Reach’

Perception is reality.

Will the American people buy this “truth”?

No.

We’ve been hearing a lot of empty but heated rhetoric from Obama and McCain on Iran. Now, listen to the words of a consummate diplomat and expert political operator—SecDef Robert Gates [e.a.]:

The top uniformed US military officer told Congress Tuesday that Iran is directly jeopardizing peace in Iraq, prompting fresh calls from senators that the US pursue diplomatic talks with Teheran. …

Gates said he supports sitting down with officials from Teheran, but only after the US has developed significant leverage. In such cases as Libya and North Korea, these countries were seeking to relieve economic pressures imposed by sanctions, Gates said.

“The key here is developing leverage, either through economic or diplomatic or military pressures on the Iranian government so they believe they must have talks with the United States because there is something they want from us, and that is the relief of the pressure,” Gates said.

See how easy it is to demand preconditions while sounding reasonable? Obama should pay attention.

Whenever bad news crops up about the Kennedys, I always think of Caroline, and I wonder how she keeps going with grace and dignity, but she does.

Soon her last remaining confidant from her father’s generation—her moral support—will be gone.

Sad.

Who’d have thought that, during our sixth year in and with more than 150,000 Americans in-country, Iraq would barely register as a blip in the public consciousness?

[A]nti-war activists are also trying to keep the war in the public eye. Last month, nine protesters gathered in front of the Regional Enterprise Tower, Downtown, where U.S. Sens. Arlen Specter and Bob Casey have offices.

“Please think about this. It’s important,” Lynne Flavin, 60, of Lawrenceville, told passersby. She held a blood red sign that said, “Support the Troops. End the War.”

Few people gave more than a glance.

Ralph Peters addresses the same issue in today’s New York Post, but from a different angle:

Do we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there?
If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines.

Want a real “inconvenient truth?” Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating.

But that fact isn’t helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

You won’t see that above the fold in The New York Times. And forget the Obama-intoxicated news networks - they’ve adopted his story line that the clock stopped back in 2003.

On November 2, 2007, the New York Times, once known as the “newspaper of record,” published a story about Barack Obama’s intended foreign policy. The story was based on a lengthy interview with the candidate. It was headlined as follows:

Obama Pledges ‘Aggressive’ Iran Diplomacy

Here are the relevant excerpts, which detail in depth the kinds of things Obama said he was willing to offer Iran:

[H]e asserted that Iran’s support for militant groups in Iraq reflected its anxiety over the Bush administration’s policies in the region, including talk of a possible American military strike on Iranian nuclear installations.

Making clear that he planned to talk to Iran without preconditions, Mr. Obama emphasized further that “changes in behavior” by Iran could possibly be rewarded with membership in the World Trade Organization, other economic benefits and security guarantees.

“We are willing to talk about certain assurances in the context of them showing some good faith,” he said in the interview at his campaign headquarters here. “I think it is important for us to send a signal that we are not hellbent on regime change, just for the sake of regime change, but expect changes in behavior. And there are both carrots and there are sticks available to them for those changes in behavior.”

The reporters sought clarification about the “sticks.”

Mr. Obama declined to say if he would consider military action if Iran did not abandon its presumed nuclear weapons program or if he would settle for a strategy of deterring and containing a nuclear-armed Iran.

“My decision making, with respect to military options versus diplomatic options, a containment strategy versus a strike strategy, is going to be informed by how is that going to impact not just Iran,” he said, “but how is that going to impact the stability of the region and how’s that going to impact our long-term security interests.”

To underscore the point, Obama’s then-top foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, gave an interview to the New Statesman in which she confirmed Obama’s views about aggressive diplomacy:

The way to do it, according to Power, is “to be in the room with the bad guys but not to check your principles in at the door”. Obama would engage with Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. He would sit down with North Korea and Syria. Is there anyone he wouldn’t talk to? “Not among elected heads of state. He won’t talk to Hamas, but he would talk to Abbas.”

This morning, Jennifer Rubin described the Obama campaign’s efforts to blot out Obama’s words—and intentions—: to rewrite history and to cover up the truth with lies, as Bob Dylan once wrote (except that he was castigating the media, whereas I am castigating the slippery and increasingly untrustworthy and unreliable Barack Obama).

Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisor, is at it again. She is on a mission to save Obama from himself, insisting that he never promised to meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad–and that he never said without preconditions.

The bizarre additional explanation this time is that it was some other unnamed leader of Iran he may have had in mind for a get together. Two problems :1) it is a lie and 2) huh? As to the first, there is ample documentation–from Obama’s own mouth–that it was Ahmadinejad he had in mind and that he would meet without preconditions (in the first year of his presidency, no less). The media has been reporting as much for a year and it was a prime source of disagreement with Hillary Clinton. If his campaign persists in this line of defense, he risks not just losing the foreign policy debate but his reputation for practicing the New Politics. (In other words he will, in the eyes of the public, not simply be a novice in foreign policy, but a liar.)

One commenter’s remarks are worth reprinting (almost) in full:

Its interseting that the Obama campaign is spinning out of control this early. Did we only have to scratch the surface? I thought it would take more.

James Rubin’s original claim that McCain was “smearing” Obama didn’t seem to take hold. It was about the 5th time I have seen a reporter or professor use the term “smear” to protect Barack Obama from analysis.

Obama doesn’t know if he should appeal to his liberal base, or start running in the general election. As he is getting his act together, these writers have invoked “smear” to anyone who would dare challenge his flip-flops. [Jamie] Rubin, of course, wants to ignore very simple facts. He used a partial quote!

Now, as Jennifer Rubin points out, Susan Rice claims Obama has been on the bandwagon the whole time. Except for the inconvenient truth called documentation. This is really getting strange. I wonder how the Obama campaign is going use the words “snippet” and “smear” to get out this mess. Well, it so happens that Ahmadinejad is another strange uncle that Obama can’t disown or never talk to.

Another commenter, considering today’s political climate and the fact that the media is now an open player in presidential (and even world) politics (which I wrote about here), offers a word of warning:

Obama has really backed himself into a corner here. Watching him try to get out of it is thoroughly enjoyable. When it’s all said and done, however, I don’t think he’s quite going to be able to do it.

But I admit he just might. I know the MSM isn’t as powerful as it used to be, but it is still formidable, and every drop of leverage and influence it can muster will be mobilized on Obama’s behalf for the next 24 weeks. That is a great advantage to have, and we who oppose Obama’s candidacy should not be naive about the MSM’s potential to make the difference for him.

Another commenter makes a funny:

The question of who speaks for the Obama campaign - supporters in the media, advisors like Susan Rice, endorsers like Gary Hart, or the candidate himself - is even more difficult to figure out than who speaks for Iran.

When all else fails, seek laughter. It helps.

Oh yes, and compare and contrast this kerfuffle with what is happening in the real world, where, the Jerusalem Post reports (and the White House strenuously denies), President Bush is considering attacking Iran’s nuclear installations before the end of his presidency.

See lots of interesting back-and-forth about the advisability (or inadvisability) of confronting Iran here and here.

This, in particular, is worth contemplating:

Nuclear capability will give Iran the kind of umbrella of impunity that will allow it to double its mischief in the region without fear of retribution. Do you like the way Hezbollah and Hamas behave in their respective domains? You will love it when Iran has nukes! Do you find it hard to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict now? Try when Iran’s nukes enable its proxies to up the ante. Are you worried about Shia unrest in Kuwait and Bahrain? Prepare for more trouble when Iran’s nuclear bomb casts a shadow on those countries. Do you think oil prices are too high? Save for a cold winter, when Iran’s speedboats swarm the Gulf and harass supertankers. Do you really think anyone will risk a nuclear showdown for any of the above?

Consider this as well: Iran might lend its nukes and ballistic missiles to friends like Venezuela, to get San Francisco within range. It would not be overstretching–Hugo Chavez will surely pick up the bill to pay the costs of the exercise. Unbelievable? Why?

The left, committed pacifists, and increasingly unself-confident and paralyzed liberals are embroiled in a massive failure of the imagination. Good people find it hard to imagine that real evil exists in the world. This kind of thinking needs to end. One way or the other, it will end.

I am a born fighter, and I want to nip it in the bud before it happens. Where do you stand?

(via the Georgetown Book Shop)

I’d be a total hypocrite if I said I was surprised by this (my blog is called Infotainment Rules, after all), but it seems that PBS’s NewsHour—one of the last remaining outposts of  in-depth, not-hysterical, and thoughtful daily coverage of current events— is not long for this world.

On May 1, salaries were frozen at the newscast, and company contributions to 401(k) retirement funds were suspended, cutbacks suggested by the staff. “NewsHour” still has two corporate sponsors — Chevron and the Pacific Life Insurance Company — and it receives support from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But only part of the Archer money has been replaced, leaving the budget several million dollars short.

“NewsHour,” along with other PBS mainstays, may have a longer-term problem. Not only are corporations cutting back on all forms of advertising during the current economic slowdown, but public television’s model — soliciting long-term commitments — is also increasingly out of step with the changing needs of corporations, which no longer sponsor public television programs for purely philanthropic reasons.

Indeed. Unless you’re “green” and can give Corporation Big Foot a nice reflecting green glow and the moral superiority that goes along with it, your outstretched hands will stay empty. Be gone! There’s no money in corporate coffers for philanthropy.

Not that providing the news to the public should be left to philanthropists. But nor is receiving “the news” an entitlement of the people. If we expect those who profit from the public airwaves to offer us the people a public service by telling us “the news,” then we the people must demand it (rather than shrug and accept the circus performances on offer at the “cable news” shows as “news”).

Of course if we are no longer the audience but are rather the people formerly known as the audience, then that has to be factored in, too.

Either way, those who want to know what’s going on in the world around them will need to do more than sit passively in front of a box—or a flat panel. They’ll have to interact, and look around, and read, and judge for themselves the veracity and reliability of what they’re reading. Critical-thinking skills will be more important than ever in this brave new world.

Threaten them—and that’s exactly what Barack Obama did the other day:

Democrat Barack Obama said on Sunday he would pursue a vigorous antitrust policy if he becomes U.S. president and singled out the media industry as one area where government regulators would need to be watchful as consolidation increases.

“I will assure that we will have an antitrust division that is serious about pursuing cases,” the Illinois senator told an audience of mostly senior citizens in Oregon.

“There are going to be areas, in the media for example where we’re seeing more and more consolidation, that I think (it) is legitimate to ask…is the consumer being served?”

 Matt Stoller sets up a likely scenario under an Obama administration [e.a.]:

It’s going to be really interesting to see how Obama’s administration takes on the media, and frankly, if I were a network executive, I’d be worried.  The White House and Brian Williams may find the Pentagon Pundit scandal to be nothing more than what happens on liberal blogs, but Obama is wondering if their business model is really “serving the consumer,” and what the Justice Department might have to say about that.

His commenters are appalled:

He just gave himself the Kiss of Death. Guaranteed. … But now Obama is going to make the press go nuclear on him because he just made the biggest mistake one could ever make. …

And that mistake is saying you are going breakup the media conglomerates. You just don’t do that before you are elected. Rest assured that every, and I mean every writer and columnist, and broadcaster has got their marching orders and if they still want to be employed by the very people who Obama wants to hurt they will write what the boss wants them to write, say what the boss wants them to say, and do everything in their power that the boss gets what he wants and that is the defeat of Obama.

 ————

This seems like the sort of issue where you play nice during the election and knife the big media corporations in the back once elected.

————

If I was one of those who sacrificed financially so I could give to Obama and then he pulls a bone head move like this I would certainly want my money back.

What kind of good politician pisses on the very feet of the press who has the power to, figuratively speaking, politically assassinate him?

Yeah, I kinda wonder about that, and I keep coming back to the idea that Obama is, shall we say, a little overconfident at this point, and in love with the image of himself as the progressive hero who will save America.

Meanehile, he whines about the media’s “unfair” treatment of his wife, who’s out there battling for him—and saying stupid, intelligence-insulting things—night and day.

If she chooses to speak for him—and she certainly doesn’t hold back—then she’s fair game. It’s not faaaaaiiiiiiiiir. Wah wah wah.

This isn’t my issue, but I inherited an interest in it from my mother, who was, before she retired, a scientist—and who suffered horrible discrimination because she was a woman: salary caps, infrequent promotions, and frequent, corrosive disrespect from male peers and superiors. Science was a man’s world. Any woman who dared enter it knew exactly what she was getting into, and if she didn’t, she soon found out, and made her choices.

Science is still a man’s world, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Read, for example, this book and marvel at the politics of science and think about how many women you know would volunteer to play in that game. Still, the women I know who could have gone into science because they were qualified and skilled but decided on other fields did so by choice, often because their chosen professions were more people-oriented than lab-oriented, as scientists’ jobs mostly are.

That’s a purely anecdotal, conventional-wisdom kind of “prejudice” of mine, so I was interested to have it confirmed.

Tom Maguire:

The NY Times tells us that women are under-represented in science and technology because of a deplorable macho sexist workplace environment.

The Boston Globe (owned by the Times, but evidently not read) tells us that women are underrepresented in these fields because they aren’t interested.

‘Round and ’round we go …

——–

p.s. Lately, I’ve been using song lyrics as post titles. I feel guilty about not attributing them, though.

Today’s post title is from the eponymous song “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?,” by Lerner and Loewe, from the musical My Fair Lady … and I can hear Rex Harrison “singing” it now …

I won’t insult you by tell you where this comes from.

This is from “Free Fallin’,” by Tom Petty.

According to Michael Tomasky, Obama’s fans love him for the same reason that Keith Olbermann’s fans love him—not because what he says makes sense, but because he’s feisty and pushes back:

He is standing for an alternative vision of how America should operate in the world, and he is defending it tooth and nail. … This is a good manifestation of why so many Americans have rallied to Obama as the breath of fresh air the country needs right now. He’s taking some interesting chances.

Tomasky thinks this love of Obama’s feistiness is a good thing in itself, and that it’s even more important (”for now”) than agreeing with his policy vision [e.a.]:

I’m not sold on the idea that negotiations without preconditions with hostile powers are the world’s best strategy. If the US had some leverage over Iran that might be one thing, but, in our current state, we have little. Still, this is one of those cases where the symbolic message of what Obama did last Friday is more important, for now, than the substance.

I am stumped by this opinion from an opinion “leader,” the notion that a candidate’s opinions don’t matter (for now), that only his style matters (for now). This suggests that we should give him the nomination already, and the benefit of the doubt, because he’s got such a fine style.

That, of course, is straight out of the Andrew Sullivan School of Candidate Adoration. Speaking of which, in today’s textbook example of a person with a Harvard Ph.D. and no common sense, Sullivan claims, along with his BFF Barack (who also has an advanced degree from Harvard—what’s up with that?), that Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea are just not important enough for the big bad United States to worry about:

America’s economy is 68 times the size of Iran’s, which is an economic basketcase, and rendered more so by religiously oriented mismanagement. America’s military capacity is simply stratospherically greater than a ramshackle Islamist state like Iran’s. Yes: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weaponry destabilizes the region, and yes, if such weaponry were handed to terrorists, the threat could be enormous. But it’s hard to see why such a threat would be any greater than, say, Pakistan’s government supplying Islamist terrorists with such weapons.

No one is claiming that a nuclear Iran will be a bigger threat than anuclear Pakistan. The point is to avoid turning Iran into another Pakistan.

The deeper question - to which it is hard to evince an easy answer - is whether Iran is uniquely immune to nuclear deterrence because the apocalyptic mindset of some of its leaders makes them suicidal as a nation and as a regime.

We have their statements - which should at times prompt alarm - and we have their record for the past quarter century. That record suggests a despicable regime that nonetheless acts rationally in its own interests and defense.

Really? Organizing, arming, supporting, funding, and inciding terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah are the rational acts of a country defending itself?

But what are our options if we assume that this regime - unlike Kim Jong-Il or Stalin - cannot be deterred? The only logical response is invasion of pre-emptive bombing, with no clear guarantee of success and an enormous chance of blow-back in the wider war.

Indeed. Those are the options: do something or do nothing (sit idly by while the threat grows).

Appeasement means giving a regime something in return for its aggression, in the vain hope that it will be deterred.

Iran is being plenty agressive, and what we’d be giving Iran in an Obama administration in return for its aggression is “dialogue,” in the vain hope that Iran will be deterred.

Any way you slice it, Mr. Sullivan, that is appeasement—of a regime that murders gays for the “crime” of being gay and that allows girls to be married at the age of 9. But perhaps those things don’t matter anymore, now that your BFF Barack will wave his magic wand and make all those bad things go away on a tide of

[spelling fixed]

The Overton Window is a theory that describes a range of acceptable ideas in political discourse and a (theoretical) way to make formerly unacceptable ideas gradually more acceptable . It’s a game of “Compared to What?” The idea is that by introducing ever more extreme ideas into the discourse, you reduce the feeling of menace from formerly threatening ideas. So: gradually, what was once totally unacceptable—say, openly gay couples living together in straight society—becomes utterly ordinary and unremarkable.

Jeffrey Goldberg, in today’s New York Times, opens up the Overton Window of American discourse about Israel with tough talk for the creaky, knee-jerking pro-Israel lobby groups.

The people of Aipac and the Conference of Presidents are well meaning, and their work in strengthening the overall relationship between America and Israel has ensured them a place in the world to come. But what’s needed now is a radical rethinking of what it means to be pro-Israel.

…

I am not wishing that the next president be hostile to Israel, God forbid. But what Israel needs is an American president who not only helps defend it against the existential threat posed by Iran and Islamic fundamentalism, but helps it to come to grips with the existential threat from within. A pro-Israel president today would be one who prods the Jewish state — publicly, continuously and vociferously — to create conditions on the West Bank that would allow for the birth of a moderate Palestinian state.

In crisis there is always opportunity. There’s no doubt that Israel is in crisis [e.a.]:

[Olmert] was expansive, and persuasive, on the Zionist need for a Palestinian state. Without a Palestine — a viable, territorially contiguous Palestine — Arabs under Israeli control will, in the not-distant future, outnumber the country’s Jews.

“We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us,” he said. If this happens, and worldwide sanctions are imposed as they were against the white-minority government, “the state of Israel is finished,” Mr. Olmert said in an earlier interview. This is why he, and his mentor, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, turned so fiercely against the Jewish settlement movement, which has entangled Israel unnecessarily in the lives of West Bank Palestinians. Once, men like Mr. Sharon and Mr. Olmert saw the settlers as the vanguards of Zionism; today, the settlements are seen, properly, as the forerunner of a binational state. In other words, as the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy.

Will those in crisis seize it as an opportunity? It means investing—money, time, effort, PR—in the West Bank, turning it into a local success story, and the faster the better.

Will anyone have the imagination to turn things around in this way?

At least Goldberg took an important first step, by making it okay to talk about it in polite society.

Or perhaps it isn’t okay to talk about this in public. Indeed, perhaps it’s “jewidice”  “jewicide”   [emphasis in original]:

Read that again. Prods (as in pressures) Israel to surrender Jewish land to Islamic jihad. That’s what this kapo is saying.

Sheesh.

Let the NYT’s top reviewers, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, writing from Cannes, tell you the answer in one short sentence:

If you want escapism it is sometimes necessary to flee the screening rooms altogether.

The movies are supposed to be entertaining, right?
Well, American Idol is entertaining a lot of people.

Even Campaign ‘08 is entertaining a lot of people.

Meanwhile, the movies are a fucking drag.

“A Christmas Story” is one of the more lighthearted competition selections. It begins with the death of a child and includes a vicious sibling feud, mental illness and cancer.

Wait … because it gets worse. Here’s Manohla Dargis on the big hope of Cannes [e.a.]:

I was bored out of my mind while watching [the new Indiana Jones movie], which makes me think that Steven Spielberg was terribly bored while directing it.

Get us rewrite! Stat!

Barack Obama is already making excuses—and blaming Fox News, among others—for his expected massive loss in Kentucky:

Obama conceded that he has a steep challenge to get his message and background to voters in states such as Kentucky — where he trails Sen. Hillary Clinton by 27 points, according to a poll published earlier this week — and West Virginia, where voters chose Clinton over Obama by 40 points on Tuesday. …

“Part of it is because there have been these e-mails that have been sent out very systematically, presumably by various political opponents, although I don’t know who,” he said. “And there are a lot of voters who get their news from Fox News. Fox has been pumping up rumors about my religious beliefs or my patriotism or what have you since the beginning of the campaign.”

Barack Obama refuses to face—and to speak—the truth: that he has limited appeal as a general election candidate, and that a whole lot of Democrats don’t like him.

Meanwhile, our president, who is constantly accused of lying, tells some very inconvenient truths to the backward regimes of the Middle East:

Too often in the Middle East, politics has consisted of one leader in power and the opposition in jail. America is deeply concerned about the plight of political prisoners in this region, as well as democratic activists who are intimidated or repressed, newspapers and civil society organizations that are shut down, and dissidents whose voices are stifled. The time has come for nations across the Middle East to abandon these practices, and treat their people with dignity and the respect they deserve. I call on all nations to release their prisoners of conscience, open up their political debate, and trust their people to chart their future. (Applause.)

For his trouble,