Blue Dogs Under the Bus? Go for it, Democrats!

You've got to love Glenn Greenwald. He provides conservatives with so much humorous fodder.

The latest example is Greenwald's call for progressives to target "Blue Dogs," the centrist Democrats who recently "caved" on FISA and are alleged to be "Beltway Democrats" increasing their own power by "mimicking Republicans."

The essay's gotten quite a response. Especially good is this from Jennifer Rubin:

In a piece filled with perfectly awful analysis and advice Glenn Greenwald says that the problem with Congress is that is was too accommodating of the evil agenda of George W. Bush. FISA passage is at the top of the list. If they hadn’t passed that bill, allowing terrorism surveillance to continue and had cut off funding for the war, they wouldn’t have poll numbers in the teens.

He offers no factual support for this, of course, and indeed polling showed that while the decision to go to war remains unpopular voters did not and still don’t favor a cut off of funds. And Greenwald assumes, again without data, that the public like Barack Obama is stewing that the surge worked — and now taking its wrath out on Congress. His solution? Punish the conservative Blue Dog Democrats, target them for defeat and run them out of town on a rail.

To that I say: oh please do. Let’s see them run Nancy Pelosi clones in the South, anti-gun advocates in Colorado and ultra-liberals in Pennsylvania and Ohio. (See, sometimes you forget that conservatives are not alone in their desire to so purify the party that they would winnow it down to a phone-booth size contingent of true believers.)

But, alas, I do not see any sign that the Democrats are following Greenwald’s advice. Unfortunately for the Republicans, Rahm Emanuel figured out that a party — at least one which seeks majority status — must be broad-based and willing to run people who can win in disparate parts of the country.

So on second thought, forget all the criticism. Go for it, Democrats! Throw the Blue Dogs out, vote to cut off funding for the surge and repeal FISA while you’re at it. And don’t you listen to those poll numbers about off-shore drilling either. It’s just a scheme by Fox news to get you to destroy the environment.

This is the biggest kick I've gotten from lampooning Greenwald since Megan McArdle noted that:

Mr. Greenwald's anger at the establishment power structure seems to be rapidly transmuting into anger at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure.

I took a bit more serious a stab at the progressive's attack on "Blue Dogs" in "The Left's Demonology of Vengeance."

Reading Rubin, though, is relaxing. I agree: Go for it, Democrats! LOL!!

Between War and Peace in Iraq

Today's bombing attacks in Baghdad and Kirkuk are a tragic reminder that Iraq remains dangerous amid an overwhelming improvement in the nation's security.

The Los Angeles Times reports on a country that lives between war and peace:

The departure this month of the last of the 28,500 extra troops sent in a U.S. military buildup leaves Iraq in a rickety calm, an in-between space that is not quite war and not quite peace where ethnic and sectarian tensions bubble beneath the surface.

Politicians and U.S. officials hail the remarkable turnaround from open civil war that left 3,700 Iraqis dead during the worst month in the fall of 2006, compared with June's toll of 490, according to Pentagon estimates.

Signs abound that normal life is starting to return. Revelers can idle away the hours at several neighborhood joints in Baghdad where the tables are buried in beers and a man can bring a girlfriend dolled up in a nice dress.

Despite the gains, the political horizon is clouded: Shiite Muslim parties are locked in dangerous rivalries across central and southern Iraq. Kurds and Arabs in the north compete for land with no resolution in sight. U.S.-backed Sunni Arab fighters who turned on the group Al Qaeda in Iraq could return to the insurgency if the government does not deliver jobs and a chance to join the political process.

Bombings, assassinations and kidnappings still occur almost daily. And those out enjoying Baghdad's night life feel safe only because they are staying inside their own districts in a city transformed into a patchwork of enclaves after years of sectarian violence.

Whether the quiet endures hinges on many factors, including the results of yet-unscheduled provincial and national elections and whether Iraq's religious and ethnic factions can find a fair power-sharing formula.

The country is bedeviled by the question: What happens as the U.S. military vacates outposts in Baghdad neighborhoods, where it has stood as a buffer and occasional arbiter between Sunnis and Shiites and even arrested police and army commanders suspected of sectarian agendas?

This really is the central question, not just in Iraq, but in the United States as well, where Barack Obama continues to argue that Iraq's a "distraction" from our challenges elsewhere in the world.

As we can see in the photo above, while some threats remains, Iraqis live today without the fear of violence that was routine just 18-months ago.

Iraqis no longer face ethnic cleansing and genocide. There is no more civil war. Regional commanders of the Iraqi army report no threat from al Qaeda in most of the country.

The rates of Iraqi civilian deaths from violent crime pale in comparison to South Africa.

None of this is to minimize today's suffering, or other deaths of recent months. It is to put things in perspective.

It is also to put things in contrast to war opponents on the left who are nodding approvingly at the attacks, arguing that this morning once again demonstrates the failure of the surge:

The essence of the "success" of the surge is that, as in 2004 and 2005, you only sometimes read about that kind of thing, whereas at its worst you read about it frequently. That's not nothing, but people should understand that even in its "better" state Iraq is very much a shattered society featuring an unenviable quality of life.

That's just not true, as we can see from the analysis - and images - here.

See also, Long War Journal, "Female Suicide Bombers Kill 70 Iraqis in Kirkuk, Baghdad."

Photo Credit: "Iraqi children run in a park in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, July 21. In Baghdad, parks are filled every weekend with families playing and picnicking with their children. That was unthinkable only a year ago, when the first, barely visible signs of a turnaround emerged," Los Angeles Times.

McCain Leads Obama 49-45 Among Likely Voters

Chris Bowers strained over the weekend to find some daylight for Barack Obama in polling data vis-à-vis John McCain, strangely seeing in Obama a move away from the ideological center in the Illinois Senator's European tour:

Obama has regained the sense of pride and inspiration that he lost with the appearance of moving to the center. Moving to the center, or really moving in any direction, is dangerous for a politician because it sends a message that the politician is ashamed and apologetic for who s/he actually is. This head-hanging feeling will almost invariably translate into a loss of support because, in the same way that we don't want to feel ashamed of our country or of ourselves, few Americans want a President who is ashamed of who s/he is. Thus, Obama's overseas trip was the perfect anecdote for the move to the center meme.

This is an unusual interpretation of Obama's trip.

Indeed, Obama himself had "cast the tour as a chance for substantive discussion on issues relevant to the American public."

The tour, in other words, was a chance for the Illinois Senator to gain credibility with Americans in the mainstream, in contrast to what Bowers wants folks to believe.

What is more, the European bounce for Obama that many hailed last week appears to have evaporated.

In contrast to the subjective reality among Bowers and his friends at Open Left, McCain actually leads Obama among like voters in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain moved from being behind by 6 points among "likely" voters a month ago to a 4-point lead over Democrat Barack Obama among that group in the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. McCain still trails slightly among the broader universe of "registered" voters. By both measures, the race is tight.

The Friday-Sunday poll, mostly conducted as Obama was returning from his much-publicized overseas trip and released just this hour, shows McCain now ahead 49%-45% among voters that Gallup believes are most likely to go to the polls in November. In late June, he was behind among likely voters, 50%-44%.

Among registered voters, McCain still trails Obama, but by less. He is behind by 3 percentage points in the new poll (47%-44%) vs. a 6-point disadvantage (48%-42%) in late June.

Results based on the survey of 791 likely voters have margins of error of +/- 4 percentage points -- so McCain's lead is not outside that range. Results based on the survey of 900 registered voters also have margins of error of +/- 4 percentage points.

Gallup editor Frank Newport tells Jill that "registered voters are much more important at the moment," because Election Day is still 100 days away, but that the likely-voter result suggests that it may be possible for McCain to energize Republicans and turn them out this fall.

See also, Rasmussen Reports, "Daily Presidential Tracking Poll," which sees Obama’s Berlin bounce collapsing:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that Barack Obama’s Berlin bounce is fading. Obama now attracts 45% of the vote while John McCain earns 42%. When "leaners" are included, it’s Obama 48% and McCain 45%. Both Obama and McCain are viewed favorably by 56% of voters.

An interesting hypothesis is whether McCain's attack on Obama's indifference to wounded veterans - seen in McCain's "Troops" ad buy over the weekend - is having an effect on the numbers.

See, "McCain: Obama All Politics On Iraq."

Comments on Tennessee Valley Church Killings

Firedoglake is attacking the conservative blogosphere for its alleged silence on the news that "some wingnut crazy shot up a Unitarian church in Tennessee, killing 2 and wounding 7."

Dave Neiwert, also at Firedoglake, argues that the "chickens came home to roost."

I'm troubled to see political polarization in times like these.

I first send out my condolences for the bereaved, and God's blessings to the survivors. But I also want to lay down a moral challenge, to those on both the left and right, for an end to the politicization of these personal tragedies.

The Knoxville News Sentinel has the full story, but the Yankee Confederate has observations on Jim Adkisson, the suspect apprehended in the case:

While many in the political blogosphere will no doubt focus on the fact that Adkisson said he hated liberals and gays, the fact of the matter is that the didn't target a gay club or local progressive political groups, he specifically targeted a church. He did so after expressing beliefs to neighbors in the past that he had an abiding anger against Christianity, an anger that appears rooted in his childhood. The church appears to have been targeted because it embodied at least three things this pathetic human being hated, not just the one or two things I know certain critics will single out as they view the world through their own warped prisms.

Adkisson had apparently planned to keep murdering church-goers until gunned down by police. He planned to keep killing innocents until he died in a hail of police bullets... suicide-by-cop. But he was instead tackled and restrained by church-goers just seconds into his attack as he attempted to reload after shooting his shotgun's magazine dry....

Sunday was a horrible day for the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, and there will be terrible days ahead as they seek to recover, and to heal.

The Tennessee church killings might be seen as an example of domestic terrorism (take note Melissa McEwan) , and no one, no reasonable, thoughtful person, should try to score political points from this tragedy.

A background story, also from the Knoxville News Sentinel, indicates that Adkisson has a history of psychological instablity. He hated "anyone who was different," and he had treatened to kill his wife in 2000. Adkisson had trouble holding down stable employment.

This is a story of personal and community tragedy, not of political payback. Let the healing begin.

Robert Novak Diagnosed With Brain Tumor

Robert Novak, the "dark prince" of American conservative journalism, has been diagnosed with a brain tumor, the Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak said today he has been diagnosed with a brain tumor but says that, “God willing,” he plans to be back at work soon.

Novak said he was diagnosed Sunday with a tumor and will soon begin treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

He issued the following statement:

“On Sunday, July 27, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I have been admitted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where doctors will soon begin appropriate treatment. “I will be suspending my journalistic work for an indefinite but, God willing, not too lengthy period."

Novak is alert and talking — he wrote the statement announcing his illness — but in intensive care, where the hospital does not allow phone calls or flowers, according to his assistant, Kathleen Connolly.

"He's talking,'' Connolly said. "He seemed fine."

The diagnosis was sudden. Novak became ill Sunday during a family outing near Cape Cod, Mass. A family member called 911, and he was brought by ambulance to Brigham and Women's Hospital, where the diagnosis was made.

It’s too early to know whether the tumor is malignant or benign, his assistant said.

"They haven't even done the biopsy yet," Connolly said.

That’s to be done later today, she said.

There's more at the link.

He was visiting his daughter in Massachusetts when he became ill.

Among his many great journalistic moments, Novak predicted that John McCain would become the GOP nominee after the Arizona Senator's comeback win in the New Hampshire primary in January. Novak's been with the Chicago Sun-Times since 1966.

Perhaps his medical condition contributed to his automobile accident last week, when he hit a pedestrian in Washington, D.C. Some bloggers hoped "karma" would catch up with him at the news of the incident (see also Dan Collins).

I wish him a successful recovery. God's blessings to Novak and his family.

**********

UPDATE: It didn't take long for the secular demonologists to attack:

Just go away Novak. No sympathy for you here. You’re [sic] aiding and abetting this criminal administration in treasonous activity will be your well deserved legacy. Say “hi” to Reagan when you get to Hell.

I'll add additional examples of the left's attacks on Novak in later updates, although I won't quote any further demonization. We just need a timeout on the hate once in a while.

Added: The Huffington Post's article on Novak's illness is closed to comments, which is the policy there now, thankfully, to preempt the hate-filled attacks.

Barack Obama is Creepy

Rick Moran demonstrates why he's one of the best conservative writers in the blogosphere, with his essay this morning, "Top Ten Things That Creep Me Out About Obama."

This is a must-read piece, but Moran's smart to come right out and say, "I know it is not politically correct to say that Obama 'creeps me out. '"

It's not, and I think that's why many folks on the right are attacked mercilessly, because they see all the way through Obama's pomp and unseriousness.

In any case, I do want to quote a couple of passages, for example:

6. It creeps me out that with the exception of most conservatives, Obama’s radical associations and radical past – including his being on a first name basis with an unreconstructed terrorist – doesn’t seem to bother many people. What am I missing here? When Obama makes an actual political alliance with a radical Maoist organization like The New Party, going so far as to attending their meetings and recruiting their members to work on his state senate campaign, why is there no call for the candidate to explain himself? Nor has there been any effort – save a couple of scattered stories in the National Review and elsewhere that detail Obama’s association with the radical group ACORN.

It’s as if the entire “Obama movement,” made up mostly of good, mainstream Democrats, is so in thrall to the candidate that they can’t see the warning signs of this fellow’s true radicalism. They dismiss his past by simply pointing to the here and now and saying “See? He really is a moderate kind of guy after all.” We don’t know that because no one has ever – ever – asked him to explain why he sought the endorsement of a radical communist group when running for the state senate and why he associated himself with the radical group ACORN.

Beyond creepy. Truly scary…

5. Has there ever been a creepier presidential hopeful’s spouse than Michelle Obama? She actually said this to a political gathering last February: “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

Rarely has there been a creepier utterance by a major candidate for president or his spouse (Ron Paul has said some very, very creepy things). This one set off alarm bells in my head the moment I heard it. It elicited the question that many of us who oppose this guy have been asking more and more frequently lately.

Just who in the hell does this guy think he is? “Require” us to do what? “Demand” what? Besides coming off sounding like Evita Peron, Michelle Obama has a very weird view of the art of politics which works by persuasion and not by compulsion.

That one registers a 8.5 on the Creepy-O-Meter.

4. It creeps me out that Obama continues to speak as if he is president already and that the election is some mere formality that if he had his druthers, we could do without. His use of the royal “we” is very weird as well. Jack Tapper of ABC News noticed the same thing about Obama and his staff. Just one example of many: During an interview with ABC’s Nightline, he said he “wouldn’t be doing my job as Commander in Chief” if he just did whatever the generals said in Iraq. Obviously, it is not his job. And this is not the only example as Tapper points out in that Newsbusters piece.

A couple of times where the candidate falls into the mental state of what he would do as president and referring to himself as already elected would be understandable. Obama does it all the time and is seemingly unaware of how it makes him appear.

I've long-noted Obama's radical ties, which are so substantial that it's frightening that someone with his background may dramatically influence much of America's future, especially in foreign policy.

But this last part about Obama's creepy tendency toward presumptuousness came home powerfully to me last week. I mean, face it: Obama's Berlin speech was a presidential speech without being president. Obama borrowed liberally from past presidents in making the address, which only made him look more like a "great" presidential wannabe.

But note Moran's top creep:

The number one thing about Obama that creeps me out is the ease and comfort with which he lies. All politicians lie. Presidential candidates lie more than other politicians. But Obama’s lies are brazen and breathtaking.

And just think, this creep might actually win in November!

The Pendulum of Governmental Activism

Friday's Wall Street Journal featured a comprehensive analysis of the ebb and flow of activist government in U.S. history, "Unraveling Reagan: Amid Turmoil, U.S. Turns Away From Decades of Deregulation."

The piece is deceptively titled, I think.

While the article correctly notes a deep shift in government policy toward deregulation and the relaxation of antitrust in the Reagan years, in areas like defense and entitlements government's role expanded during that time. What the story's really getting at, I would argue, is how the public philosophy shifts over time from periods of private interest to periods of public purpose. This the formulation of the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Cycles of American History (1986).

Oftentimes, crises of wrenching tumult in the economy and society force a realignment in the public philosophy toward a new period of political activism and social obligation. Schlesinger was writing during the age of Reagan, and through both Democratic and Republican adminstration's since the late-1980s, we have not seen a shift to Schlesinger's hypothesized era of public purpose.
Are we heading into a new era now, with the acesssion of a new era of activism and governmental responsibility under a possible Democratic adminstratin in 2009?

The housing and financial crisis convulsing the U.S. is powering a new wave of government regulation of business and the economy.

Federal and state governments alike are increasingly hands-on in their effort to deal with failing businesses, plunging house prices, worthless mortgages and soaring energy prices. The steps add up to a major challenge to the movement toward deregulation that has defined American governance for much of the past quarter-century since the "Reagan Revolution" of the early 1980s. In fact, some proponents today of a bigger oversight role for government are Republican heirs to the legacy of President Reagan....

Already, the Federal Reserve has dialed up its scrutiny of Wall Street investment banks, placing officials inside the giant firms and weighing in on their capital requirements, after taking the unusual step of offering tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans. The Fed has also agreed to lend money to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, potentially giving the agency more oversight of the two giant housing-finance companies as well.

At the same time, state utility commissions are re-establishing control over power companies that they ceded during earlier waves of deregulation. The Education Department is taking a step toward nationalizing the market for student loans, after private lenders abandoned that business.

The debate over Washington's hand in the economy is at the heart of the presidential campaign. Both major-party candidates are endorsing proposals to create new, Federal Reserve-style commissions to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and decide how to spend billions of dollars on energy-efficient technology....

The degree of change will depend on who occupies the White House next January. Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic candidate, has talked about a sharp increase in taxes on wealthy Americans, and a windfall-profits tax on oil companies. Republican rival Sen. John McCain would cut taxes on corporations.

I thought about the question of an expanding public sector this afternoon, while reading Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

Douthat and Salam, while making the case that the GOP must shift from a near-exclusive focus on social issues and national security to concern for the political-economy of working class constituencies, they also note that periods of public reform work best when they harness the nation's traditional moral conservatism and the blue-collar work ethic of responsiblity and social stakeholding:

These voters were receptive to economic populism (as the success of George Wallace in '68, and then Ross Perot a generation later, made clear), but they weren't particularly receptive to the tax-and-transfer redistributionism that the Democrats of the 1970s and '80s were associated with, because it seemed primarily aimed at taking money out their pockets and handing it out to the underserving poor.

Blue-collar workers were the working class, after all, and the genius of the New Deal had been to use government power to help those who helped themselves - to offer a helping hand to people clambering up the ladder, rather than lavishing subsidies on the indigent. If you had a job, in the New Deal dispensation, you received Social Security benefits. If you saved for a home, you earned a home-mortgage deduction. If you worked hard and played by the rules, you received a pension, medical care, and a large enough salary that your wife could afford to stay at home with the kids.

Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, by contrast, often eliminated the coercive and moralistic element from government spending, and as a result, working-class voters felt themselves to be subsidizing a growing, failing welfare system that cost them money and seemed to undermine their values into the bargain. As a young Republican strategist put it as early as 1969, the "Democratic Party fell victim to the ideological imperatives of a liberalism which had carried it beyond the taxing of few for the benefits of many (the New Deal) to programs taxing the many on behalf of the few."

So, our dilemma for the present era of rising political activism is coming shape of rived governmental power: Will a potential Democratic administration next year preserve traditional conceptions of working-class moralism, or will the failing big-government of the Great Society era reemerge, with an additional propulsion from the postmodern, one-worldist sensiblities of Barack Obama and his affinity to maching-style politics and "progressive" ideological socio-economic reengineering?

Graphic Credit: Wall Street Journal

(Postscript: Douthat and Salam do not provide a footnote for that unnamed "young Republican strategist," but it sounds like Kevin Phillips, who published The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969).

The Far Left's Attack on Direct Democracy

I'm not always a big fan of the initiative process, one of the mechanisms of direct democracy. For the most part, at least in California, the measures have been taken over by the moneyed interests, exactly the opposite of what the Progressive reformers had in mind a century ago.

Yet, there's a majoritarianism to initiatives that's hard to dismiss, and in recent years conservatives have been able to beat back the excesses of the postmodern rights movement with popular revolts from the ballot box.

It's no surprise then, that entrenched minority special interests would work to thwart the will of the voters by abusing the signature petition process by which intiatives qualify for the ballot. John Fund has the story:

The initiative is a reform born out of the Progressive Era, when there was general agreement that powerful interests had too much influence over legislators. It was adopted by most states in the Midwest and West, including Ohio and California. It was largely rejected by Eastern states, which were dominated by political machines, and in the South, where Jim Crow legislators feared giving more power to ordinary people.

But more power to ordinary people remains unpopular in some quarters, and nothing illustrates the war on the initiative more than the reaction to Ward Connerly's measures to ban racial quotas and preferences. The former University of California regent has convinced three liberal states -- California, Washington and Michigan -- to approve race-neutral government policies in public hiring, contracting and university admissions. He also prodded Florida lawmakers into passing such a law. This year his American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) aimed to make the ballot in five more states. But thanks to strong-arm tactics, the initiative has only made the ballot in Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska.

"The key to defeating the initiative is to keep it off the ballot in the first place," says Donna Stern, Midwest director for the Detroit-based By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). "That's the only way we're going to win." Her group's name certainly describes the tactics that are being used to thwart Mr. Connerly.

Fund details a long list of abuses by BAMN and other left-wing actors: Claiming that random "duplicate" blank lines on a petition sheet is evidence of fraud; completely rewriting an initiative's ballot summary to negatively influence voter understanding of the measure, as in case of Missouri's Secretary of State; and harassing and citing local signature-gatherers for circulating petitions in front of a local library in Kansas City, for example.

The article goes on:

In Nebraska, a group in favor of racial preferences ran a radio ad that warned that those who signed the "deceptive" petition "could be at risk for identity theft, robbery, and much worse."

Those on the left are asssumed to more concerned with the "rights" of the people, and with the "democratic process." Indeed, leftists are often thought to be more "tolerant" than the mean, old conservative troglodytes.

In truth, it's a mistaken view that liberals are more concerned about "rights," and they're not more "tolerant." In fact, precisely the opposite is true.

For more on this, see Arthur Brooks, "Liberal Hatemongers."

More Cowbell! Obama Spurns His Poor Kenyan Family

Barack Obama's soaring rhetoric is all fluff. He talks the talk but won't walk the walk. In Berlin, he called to lift up the poor, but it turns out he's left his own poor Kenyan family members to fend for themselves:

It is an extraordinary sight to walk into a basic two-room house under a mango tree in rural east Africa and discover what is essentially a shrine to Barack Obama.

The small brick house with no running water, a tin roof and roving chickens, goats and cows is owned by Sarah Obama, Barack's 86-year-old step-grandmother. Inside, the walls are decorated with a 2008 Obama election sticker, an old "Barack Obama for Senate" poster on which he has written "Mama Sarah Habai [how are you?]", a 2005 calendar that says "The Kenyan Wonder Boy in the US", and more than a dozen family photos.

But this bucolic scene in his father's village of Kogelo near the Equator in western Kenya conceals a troubling reality that, until now, has never been spoken about. Barack Obama, the Evening Standard can reveal, after we went to the village earlier this month, has failed to honour the pledges of assistance that he made to a school named in his honour when he visited here amid great fanfare two years ago.

At that historic homecoming in August 2006 Obama was greeted as a hero with thousands lining the dirt streets of Kogelo. He visited the Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School built on land donated by his paternal grandfather. After addressing the pupils, a third of whom are orphans, and dancing with them as they sang songs in his honour, he was shown a school with four dilapidated classrooms that lacked even basic resources such as water, sanitation and electricity.

He told the assembled press, local politicians (who included current Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga), and students: "Hopefully I can provide some assistance in the future to this school and all that it can be." He then turned to the school's principal, Yuanita Obiero, and assured her and her teachers: "I know you are working very hard and struggling to bring up this school, but I have said I will assist the school and I will do so."

Obiero says that although Obama did not explicitly use the word "financial" to qualify the nature of the assistance he was offering, "there was no doubt among us [teachers] that is what he meant. We interpreted his words as meaning he would help fund the school, either personally or by raising sponsors or both, in order to give our school desperately-needed modern facilities and a facelift". She added that 10 of the school's 144 pupils are Obama's relatives. Obiero was not the only one to think that the US Senator from Illinois, who had recently acquired a $1.65 million house in Chicago, would cough up. Obama's own grandmother Sarah confidently told reporters before his visit: "When he comes down here, he will change the face of the school and, believe me, our poverty in Kogelo will be a thing of the past."

But the Evening Standard has heard that the promises he made to help the school as well as a local orphanage appear to have been empty.

Maybe Obama just has the fever of self-satisfied charismatic hypocrisy ... "and the only prescription . . . is more cowbell!"

Image Credit: The People's Cube

Debating Digital Reading

Are we really reading when we're logged on to the web, surfing and social networking to our heart's content?

I don't think so, which is why this piece from the New York Times caught my attention, "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?":

Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Note, first, that I just love the picture!

We have two laptaps at home, plus a desktop downstairs, and someone's always online - so this debate's hitting close to home.

It's a serious question, though, whether digital communications are destroying serious reading.

I'm online now, as a blogger, all day sometimes. I'll read the newspaper in hardcopy and on the web, multi-task with a baseball game or an old movie, while I cruise web checking for the hottest news controversies. A blog post follows shortly thereafter.

But I take time every day to read. I have about three or four books going currently, plus I keep up with print periodicals and scholarly journals. I make it a point to get out and read at Barnes and Noble in the afternoons or on weekends, and I read every evening. For me, the online life enhances and improves my teaching and thinking. Online communications seem to be integral to the life of the mind in the digital age.

I worry about young people, though.

My oldest son's entering 7th grade in September. I've been bugging him for the last month to put down his cell phone and his iTouch and pick up a book! He's so smart, and does well in school, and, frankly, I'm not one to harangue him all the time. We work hard during the school months, and he's a very disciplined student. He also like to read Manga comics and Harry Potter, so it comes and goes with my boy.

My students are another story. Cell phones are out of control in the classroom. Nowawadays I just stand near students who are texting in class, and I have students who routinely surf the web during lectures. Rare is the studious student, the young scholar who delights in books and holds forth on the latest litarary or political controversies. Oh, sure, I get many who are engaged, but it does seem for too many that books aren't as important as talking on the phone.

The remainder of the Times' piece looks at the debate in educational scholarship.

The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards.
It is perhaps that final purpose that book champions emphasize the most.

“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

I'm inclined to agree with McCullough. So, it's off to read something in hardback.

Oh, no, there's another hot story at Memeorandum. That book will have to wait!!

GOP Unfairly Branded as White Supremist

Christopher Bodenner, writing at the Daily Dish, was impressed with Shelby Steele's recent analysis of Barack Obama's racial politics at the Wall Street Journal - and for good reason. Next to Juan Williams, Steele's the most thoughtful commentator on the pathologies of black victimology in America today.

But what really got me interested was Bodenner's link to an essay by Margaret Kimberley, "Freedom Rider: Shelby Steele Loves White Supremacy."

Kimberley, writing at The Black Commentator, says:

Shelby Steele is a well known black conservative, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a leading right wing think tank. Steele has made a lucrative career for himself by lambasting black people and praising white people. He says that racism is all in the past, that all is right with the world and it is up to black people to admit it and stop complaining.

Recently on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal Steele outdid himself. Steele lamented that white people just aren’t as vicious as they used to be. He believes that the legacy of slavery, segregation and American imperialism left a terrible legacy on white people. Of course, the worst impact was on the oppressed and subjugated, but Steele isn’t very worried about the legacy the past left on them.

Kimberley stretches too far when she goes off on the Iraq war as "racist." Yet, she's clear in making the radical left-wing case for an alleged entrenched, undending white supremacy in the GOP today:

Steele’s confusion is so great that one has to wonder if he even reads the newspaper or watches the news. “There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant”....

Steele’s assertion that there are no advocates of white supremacy is truly difficult to fathom ... If he thinks white supremacists have disappeared he need only look in the mirror. He has achieved the rare feat of being a man of color who cheerleads for an idea that has murdered and otherwise destroyed the lives of millions of people he should identify with. He believes in manifest destiny, imperialism and white skin privilege. Consequently, he exults in shame and hatred of his own people ....

The Wall Street Journal and Steele have had a long running love affair. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the onslaught of federal government inaction that created so much suffering...

The Black Commentator announces it's committed to the "struggle" for "peace" and "social justice," Marxist revolutionary code language, but Kimberley's ideas are common on the left today.

For example, we saw a left-wing backlash in response to Bruce Bartlett's recent article, "The GOP Is the Party of Civil Rights."

Crooked Timber, for instance, attacked Bartlett's necrophilia, that is, his love of "dead" Republicans:

Bartlett does not even claim, in the op-ed, that there are living Republicans who deserve the support of African-Americans, due to their support for civil rights. The most recent instance he cites is Richard Nixon, who supported affirmative action as a way of busting racist unions. He is, apparently, seriously arguing that African-Americans should consider voting for dead people.

Lawyers, Guns and Money also attacks Bartlett:

The problems with Bruce Bartlett's pseudo-historical WSJ piece are almost too numerous to contemplate. For starters, it's laughable for him to suggest ... that the varieties of racism [marking] the pre-civil rights era have somehow been "buried"...

The left's outrage with Shelby Steele, as well as with writers like Bruce Bartlett, reflects the nihilist tendency to smear all Republicans as unequivocally racist.

These attacks are unprincipled and outrageous. Republicans (or conservatives) historically stress traditional values, such as equal treatment under the law. They argue that society should be organized around excellence and achievement, not handouts, quotas, and racial recrimination.

Douglas MacKinnon, a longstanding GOP operative, argued last week that the GOP is unfairly branded as racist:

As a Republican with a conservative point of view, I have written more on the greatness of black America, and the need for my party to reach out to that community, than just about anyone I know....

And yet as much as I and other Republicans try to increase the dialogue, correct the record and derail the hateful rhetoric that divides us, others choose to deliberately ignore heartfelt efforts. As one example, last September, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote a column titled “The Ugly Side of the GOP.”

In a somewhat rambling piece that was syndicated all over the nation, Herbert said, “Last week the Republicans showed once again just how anti-black their party really is”...

MacKinnon wrote a column in response these claims, and then forwarded it to Herbert. To which MacKinnon notes, "Unfortunately, he chose to ignore my outreach..."

Herbert's non-response is no surprise.

The meme that America is irredeemably racist - and especially that the GOP is the bastion of today's Jim Crow ideology - provides the far left-wing of the Democratic Party a powerful tool of guilt-mongering and racial victimology.

Jesse Jackson blew the mask off this meme, however, with his totally corrupt double-standard on Barack Obama, when he announced that the Illinois Senator should be castrated for allegedly talking down to black Americans about personal responsibility.

Note how Fox News was branded as "racist" for just broadcasting these issues.

As I've noted many times this year, to the extent that we've seen outright racism in election 2008, it's been on the Democratic Party side (see, "Barack Obama and the Political Psychology of Race").

If we see genuine white supremacy on the right, it's at the margins, among people associated with Stormfront and extreme right-wing Paulbots, as well as racist vigiliante blogs on the redneck wilderness.

One extremist blogger announced recently that Sherri Shepard of the View should be kicked to the curb, which reflects the kind of white supremist hatred depicted in films such as American History X:

Elisabeth Hasselbeck got baited into a discussion she can not win, not on the air, not in a liberal minded show and not being as sweet as she is. She needed to get up and grab that dumb bitch by her horse hair weave and curb stomp her ass.

It's true that vile views like these can be readily found on the extremist right-wing fringe, but as we've seen in Bartlett and MacKinnon's essays above, mainstream Republicans have repudiated this hatred time and again.

This will continue to be a challenge for the GOP (who are not only slurred by the left as racist, but "pseudo fascist" as well), although the party's eminently better positioned - on the basis of history and basic values of decency and fair play - to lead the country toward the colorblind society that is rightfully America's bounty.

See also, The Next Right, "How John McCain Should Respond To Racism."

Related: Classical Values, "The Fascists Are Still Coming!

Obama in Germany: Ich Bin Ein Beginner!

The New York Times notes that Barack Obama borrowed liberally from America's greatest presidents in his speech in Berlin last week, and that's not mentioning The Bard:

Any presidential hopeful introducing himself to a German-speaking crowd might be tempted to draw on the eloquence of Shakespeare, the wisdom of Lincoln, the idealism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the youthful energy of John F. Kennedy or the grit of Ronald Reagan. Better yet: why not invoke them all? This is what Senator Barack Obama seems to have done in the speech he gave on Thursday before a crowd of 200,000 in the Tiergarten. Here are the candences and phrases, along with Mr. Obama's echoes [at the link].

Obama's been compared favorably - or at least, credibly - to Abraham Lincoln, but if his copycat turn in Berlin is the measure, he can't touch America's greatest leader:

History is Watching

Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, Pa., Nov. 19, 1863. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

Barack Obama: Now the world will watch and remember what we do here - what we do with this moment.

Andrew Ferguson, sums it up as nothing more than ethereal fluff:

Floating along on a cloud of metaphor and generality allows Obama to do what he wants to do, in the Berlin speech and elsewhere....

To pump a little vigor into his limp sentiments, Obama attached them to a hypnotic refrain. "This is the moment," he said in Berlin, repeatedly. But where's the urgency come from? What's the rush? In the long train of platitudes he suggested no discrete, definable policy that needed to be adopted urgently, beyond his call to unity, which isn't a policy but an aspiration. You get the idea that the urgency doesn't arise from an assessment of reality but from a rhetorical need. He's got to keep the folks on their toes somehow.

Obama couldn't come to Berlin and deliver a speech full of portent, as Reagan and Kennedy did before him, and as his publicists suggested he might. For all the talk about this being our time and us being the people, Obama shows no sign of really believing we live in portentous times. This is surely part of his appeal. It's not surprising that when he came to Berlin and said nothing at all, none of his admirers seemed disappointed...

Image Credit: Michelle Malkin

McCain Hammers Obama with New Ad Buy

John McCain's taking advantage of Barack Obama's recent military missteps with a new campaign spot that notes:

Barack Obama never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan. He hadn't been to Iraq in years. He voted against funding our troops. And now, he made time to go to the gym, but cancelled a visit with wounded troops...

Watch the "Troops":

Allahpundit and Mike Allen at the Politico have the analysis (here and here).

Allen notes that the Obama campaign hit back, saying McCain "is an honorable man who is running an increasingly dishonorable campaign."

Maybe that reaction will play with the press corps, but the McCain camp's smart to take advantage of the gaping liabilities opening up from Obama's European tour.

The trouble is not just Obama's scrubbed Landstuhl visit, but his overall presumptuousness as some president-in-waiting; moreover, the Berlin address was so hopelessly radical in its "one-worldism" that former Ambassador John Bolton called it "nearly incoherent" in its complete divorce from Cold War history and the realities of international power politics.

It was, for Karl at Protein Wisdom, "The Vacuity of Hope."

See also, Jamie Kirchick, "On Iraq, Now is When Judgment Matters."

**********

UPDATE: The nihilist left contingents aren't too happy about McCain's new ad:

The stink of desperation is permeating the McCain campaign. Obviously fearful and jealous of the positive reception that Obama received in the allied countries, he's releasing an ad criticizing Obama for failing to visit the wounded troops in Germany after the Pentagon threw an 11th hour restriction on the visit.

Keep these ads coming - the Democrats'll be twisting throughout the summer and fall.

Plus, in London today, Obama's caught on a hot mic saying, "if" he's successful, he's going to be needing "big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking."

Well, at least the presidential transition's already underway.

San Diego Minutemen Adopt-a-Highway!

The immigration crisis had made headlines this last couple of weeks, but frankly the news that the Minutemen won their federal court case to Adopt-a-Highway along San Diego's stretch of Interstate-5 is a kicker:

An anti-illegal-immigration group's Adopt-a-Highway sign was re-posted this week on Interstate 5 near the Border Patrol checkpoint in San Clemente after a federal judge ruled that it did not pose a danger to the public.

State transit officials had moved the San Diego Minutemen's sign to a less-busy highway in eastern San Diego County, saying they were concerned that it would become a gathering place for protesters and clog the busy interstate.

The Adopt-a-Highway program "is not a forum for advertising or public discourse," Caltrans officials said on the agency's website.

The Minutemen sued in federal court, saying that the sign's removal violated the organization's right to free speech. A judge ruled last month that the sign did not pose a danger to the public and should be re-posted. It had been moved to a stretch of California 52.

"We are all thrilled to see our Adopt-a-Highway recognition sign back up, standing more proudly than ever," the group's founder, Jeff Schwilk, said in a statement posted on its website. "The U.S. Constitution has thankfully trumped the lies and coercion of the illegal alien activists. . . . Thank you to Americans nationwide who helped us win this critical legal fight for our rights and to have our message heard by all America!"

I doubt San Francisco's getting the message.

As Cinnamon Stillwell pointed out recently:

Under the city's 1989 voter-approved sanctuary ordinance, police officers and other city employees are prohibited from inquiring into immigration status. In addition, the city will not direct municipal funds or employees towards assisting federal immigration enforcement, unless such assistance is required by federal or state law or a warrant.

No doubt such protections warm the heart of the city's liberal leadership. But San Francisco's status as a sanctuary city is having unintended consequences.

The brutal and senseless murder last month of Tony Bologna and his sons Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16, at the hands of Edwin Ramos, a native of El Salvador and known member of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) street gang, was a reminder that inviting illegal activity can turn deadly. The Bolognas were on their way back from a family picnic when they inadvertently blocked Ramos' car from making a left turn in the Excelsior district. When Bologna politely backed up to let the other car past, Ramos responded by opening fire and killing all three passengers. Ramos has been charged with three counts of murder, with the added penalty of street-gang involvement....

While San Francisco's sanctuary city ordinance may have been well-intentioned, it has resulted in an untenable and anarchic situation that is taking its toll on city residents and surrounding counties alike. Providing sanctuary for law-breakers at the expense of law-abiding citizens is neither a compassionate nor a moral approach.

That's well said.

There's more on this at Neptunus Lex and Wake Up America!

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times

The Left's Demonology of Vengeance

At the same time that Barack Obama's been presumptiously preparing his presidential transition team, the hard left forces of the nihilist left are sharpening their knives in preparation for a campaign of legal vengeance against the Bush administration's alleged record of war crimes in the battle against global terror.

Salon, for example, ran a piece earlier this week entitled "Exposing Bush's Historic Abuse of Power," which suggests the formation of a new "Church Commission" to investigate domestic surveillance in the Bush years (the article includes the obligatory Nazi Reichsadler pictured above).

Also, there's news this week that left-wing bloggers (and their allies on the Paulbot right) are mounting a program of electoral mobilization against Democrats who supported the FISA reform bill just passed in Congress. Leading the pack is Jane Hamsher, who has teamed with fringe libertarians to form a group called The Strange Bedfellows. The organization's goal is to promote an "accountability" campaign of legal recrimination against the administration's "lawless surveillance state."

One gets a good sense of how intense are the demands for extremist retribution in Matt Stoler's post, "Democratic Congressional Candidate Alan Grayson on Iraq Reckoning: 'We'll Put People in Prison'":

One of the most exciting candidates I've met this cycle is Alan Grayson, a high profile trial lawyer who has been suing defense contractors for fraud, and is now running for Florida's eighth district in central Florida. I spent some time with him at Netroots Nation, and took video. Usually I have to push candidates to become more aggressive, in Grayson's case, he pushed me. Grayson is part of a new crew of progressive professionals, people like Darcy Burner and Donna Edwards with a tremendous track record of success in fields other than politics who are crossing over into the progressive sector out of a sheer revulsion of where this country is headed. It's different than the civil rights era of liberalism and the single issue liberalism of the 1980s, much more fearless.

Because of his track record suing defense contractors, Grayson is completely uninterested and unintimidated by ridiculous arguments about secrecy and national security. He thinks that war crimes have been committed, that people need to be put in prison, and that we absolutely cannot let bygones be bygones with the 2000-2008 era.

That last section really sums it up.

For the nihilist left, few are putting a priority on improving the econony, rebuilding infrastruce, or exploring means toward American energy independence - some of the top issues facing the mass of rank-and-file Democratic Party voters. What's motivated the hard left hordes are subterranean questions of lawbreaking by the administration. The agenda of electing "agressive progressives" is code language for mounting a campaign of revenge against Republicans who are routinely alleged to have taken the country "recklessly toward war. Just this week Representitive Dennis Kucinich, a leader of antiwar contingent in Congress, held hearings on Capitol Hill to investigate the administration for "leading the country to war under false pretenses."

Recall that the Iraq war, of course, was launched under a bipartisan congressional mandate, but within months of the same Democrats in Congress - who supported America's goal to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction - turned around for cheap partisan purposes to advocate the craven withdrawal from Iraq, the abandonment of our troops, and the surrender to the forces of Islamist totalitarianism.

As for the legal case for war crimes, the issue's debateable, and establishing them as a top priority in 2009 would create a political circus. The administration might do well to prevent a massive witch hunt by issues blanket pardons before leaving office.

Of course, it's hard to see the left's push for criminal prosecutions as more than diabolical partisan revenge. These developments, indeed, are the natural consequence of the left's doctrine of hatred. The incessant calls for criminal prosecution against the Bush administration satisfies the radical left's psychological need for vengeance against the percieved slights of intellectual and political marginalization.

It's not enough to organize for a restoration of the public spirit in health care, transportation, or other areas of needed revitalization, under a possible Democratic administration. The modern ideological hatred of the secular left demands nothing short of a totalizing political persecution for the very democratically-legitimated conservative leaders who have run the run the country for the last seven years.

Barack Obama's Audacity of Hopelessness

I read passages last night, at Powerline, of John McCain's speech to the American GI Forum in Denver. The full text of the address is here.

McCain's message is exceedingly timely, given this last week's debate on the surge in Iraq. McCain, in reminding us of the political risks in staying the course, foreshadows a powerful and promising direction for his campaign throughout the summer and fall:

Eighteen months ago, America faced a crisis as profound as any in our history. Iraq was in flames, torn apart by violence that was escaping our control. Al Qaeda was succeeding in what Osama bin Laden called the central front in their war against us. The mullahs in Iran waited for America's humiliation in Iraq, and the resulting increase in their influence. Thousands of Iraqis died violently every month. American casualties were mounting. We were on the brink of a disastrous defeat just a little more than five years after the attacks of September 11, and America faced a profound choice. Would we accept defeat and leave Iraq and our strategic position in the Middle East in ruins, risking a wider war in the near future? Or would we summon our resolve, deploy additional forces, and change our failed strategy? Senator Obama and I also faced a decision, which amounted to a real-time test for a future commander-in-chief. America passed that test. I believe my judgment passed that test. And I believe Senator Obama's failed.

We both knew the politically safe choice was to support some form of retreat. All the polls said the "surge" was unpopular. Many pundits, experts and policymakers opposed it and advocated withdrawing our troops and accepting the consequences. I chose to support the new counterinsurgency strategy backed by additional troops - which I had advocated since 2003, after my first trip to Iraq. Many observers said my position would end my hopes of becoming president. I said I would rather lose a campaign than see America lose a war. My choice was not smart politics. It didn't test well in focus groups. It ignored all the polls. It also didn't matter. The country I love had one final chance to succeed in Iraq. The new strategy was it. So I supported it. Today, the effects of the new strategy are obvious. The surge has succeeded, and we are, at long last, finally winning this war.

Senator Obama made a different choice. He not only opposed the new strategy, but actually tried to prevent us from implementing it. He didn't just advocate defeat, he tried to legislate it. When his efforts failed, he continued to predict the failure of our troops. As our soldiers and Marines prepared to move into Baghdad neighborhoods and Anbari villages, Senator Obama predicted that their efforts would make the sectarian violence in Iraq worse, not better.

And as our troops took the fight to the enemy, Senator Obama tried to cut off funding for them. He was one of only 14 senators to vote against the emergency funding in May 2007 that supported our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He would choose to lose in Iraq in hopes of winning in Afghanistan. But had his position been adopted, we would have lost both wars....

Senator Obama told the American people what he thought you wanted to hear. I told you the truth. From the early days of this war, I feared the administration was pursuing a mistaken strategy, and I said so. I went to Iraq many times, and heard all the phony explanations about how we were winning. I knew we were failing, and I told that to an administration that did not want to hear it. I pushed for the strategy that is now succeeding before most people even admitted that there was a problem.

Fortunately, Senator Obama failed, not our military. We rejected the audacity of hopelessness, and we were right. Violence in Iraq fell to such low levels for such a long time that Senator Obama, detecting the success he never believed possible, falsely claimed that he had always predicted it. There have been almost no sectarian killings in Baghdad for more than 13 weeks. American casualties are at the lowest levels recorded in this war. The Iraqi Army is stronger and fighting harder. The Iraqi Government has met most of the benchmarks for political progress we demanded of them, and the nation's largest Sunni party recently rejoined the government. In Iraq, we are no longer on the doorstep of defeat, but on the road to victory.

Senator Obama said this week that even knowing what he knows today that he still would have opposed the surge. In retrospect, given the opportunity to choose between failure and success, he chooses failure. I cannot conceive of a Commander in Chief making that choice.

A new hope is rising in Iraq today. Across the country, Iraqis are preparing for upcoming provincial elections. And security has improved enough to permit the Iraqi government to begin seriously providing services and opportunities to the Iraqi people. This progress is encouraging but reversible if we heed those who have always counseled defeat when they now argue to risk our fragile gains and withdraw from Iraq according to a politically expedient timetable rather than the advice from the commanders who so brilliantly led this stunning turnaround in our situation in Iraq.

This is the message that needs to be sharpened and hammered consistently through November. It's a message that's been sitting idle, while McCain's fortunes have been smothered by media adulation for Obama, and the worldwide reception of the ethereal new world leader.

But public opinion shows that the press favoritism has not translated into political advantage for Obama at the polls. Americans are deeply concerned with Obama's cultural difference and lack of experience. McCain can sharpen public understanding by taking off the gloves, as he's begun to do so with his Denver speech.

As Karl at Protein Wisdom observes:

In today’s New York Post, Kirsten Powers may overestimate how juggernauty Barack Obama’s campaign may be, but she is generally correct about the way in which the McCain contraption (credit Allahpundit) is still sputtering: “If he wants to run as Hillary 2.0, then McCain should rip off some of her better stuff.”

Camp McCain does not lack for analysis of the campaign’s weaknesses. Powers follows Time magazine’s Mark Halperin (h/t RTO Trainer) and National Review’s Rich Lowry & Ramnesh Ponnuru in offering analysis and advice. The point common to these pieces — though not always expressly stated — is messaging. The McCain campaign too often seems like a pudding without a theme.

Perhaps we might now be seeing a productive theme emerging.

Obama's world tour highlights the Illinois Senator's massive popularity overseas, but his missteps at Berlin and Lansdstuhl demonstrate a host of personal contractions and a poverty of perseverance in the face of global threats. These may prove fatally damaging at home.

Are we at a turningpoint in the campaign?

I think we are, and events may well rebound in McCain's favor, especially if he's able to continue crafting a message the combines his embodiment of national greatness with a carefully delivered narrative on Obama's disastrous political liabilities.