they like his style

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