Blogito, Ergo Sum - 4 June 2009

Mr. Moussavi, a former prime minister whose moderate views have won him support from other reformers in Iran, including former President Mohammad Khatami, has positioned himself as the strongest challenger to Mr. Ahmadinejad. Support from the Islamic authorities for the president, who is a religious conservative, appears to have weakened, and he is now widely criticized for Iran’s economic malaise.

With the presidential election to be held June 12, Mr. Moussavi was on the offensive during the debate, which was broadcast by state-run television. At one point he accused Mr. Ahmadinejad of moving Iran toward “dictatorship.” At another, he said that the president’s foreign policy suffered from “adventurism, illusionism, exhibitionism, extremism and superficiality.”

He also took issue with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s constant questioning of the Holocaust, saying that it harmed the country’s standing with the rest of the world and undermined its dignity. “For the past four years you kept saying that the United States is collapsing,” Mr. Moussavi said. “You have said Israel is collapsing. France is collapsing.”

He added, “Your foreign policies have been based on such illusional perceptions.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad, who opened the debate, presented himself as a lonely incumbent who was being challenged by a powerful circle of leaders eager to bring him down. He said that two former presidents, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, were supporting Mr. Moussavi to end his tenure.

Is Obama offering them a good chance to get rid of Ahmadinejad and save face? Of course, his message may not resonate with some:

Not all of our Arab and Persian ‘friends’ agree that these are good things.

Foreign Policy's Daniel Drezner reacts to (Tom Friedman’s) column:

"Imagine that George W. Bush had said the exact same things to Friedman a year ago (not that much of a stretch, actually). He would have been crucified for delivering such a high-handed, arrogant, imperious lecture. Obama, apparently, can get away with it -- if he could, I bet Obama's advance team would have a workplace-safety sign behind him at the upcoming Cairo speech saying, 'This is the 134th day that the Obama administration has not invaded an Arab country. Keep it up!' "

It’s true, and yet Friedman lapped it all up like a puppy dog when it came from Obama.

The president's comments in another interview, with Canal Plus, caused a bit of a tizzy on the right. Red State's Dan Spencer:

"Rebranding America as 'one of the largest Muslim countries' is not at all what I had in mind when I called for then candidate Obama to confront his Muslim issue head on."

One of Obama’s dumber attempts, I thought. Is it clear who doesn’t know the truth of this? Can it be Obama? Or is he figuring the rhetoric counts for more than the facts, or does he think others really won’t know?

Now here's what Obama actually said: "If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."

Huh? We'd also be one of the largest Catholic countries and one of the largest Jewish countries. Seems unobjectionable to me.

That’s like depending upon the definition of ‘is’. The largest sagebrush country, the largest pine tree country, the largest rattlesnake country...boy, Howie is working overtime for an excuse for what is simply a dumb statement made by a guy carried away with hearing himself talk rhapsodically.

Appearing on Fox, Malkin, the founder of Hot Air, complained that there was "denigration" of the blogosphere and that "Hot Air was smeared, unfortunately, by 'The O'Reilly Factor' last night."

O'Reilly backtracked a bit: "Wow. Miss Malkin is upset, because I did not identify the Hussein comment was made by a civilian, not her or her staff. And that's true. I should have been more precise.

"But we often cite hateful civilian comments on blogs and say they should be edited, as we do on BillOReilly.com. That's the point."

The truth is, there are nasty comments posted on just about every site that allows comments, including The Washington Post...

It’s why I don’t post comments. I have enough trouble keeping myself edited as it is. I actually stopped reading the comments posted on other sites, for that matter. They seem to come from the same small group of slightly unhinged people and after a bit they all sound the same. For the most part the commenters are writing in opposition and few of them are thoughtful and calm about it. It seems those types think disagreeing means being disagreeable.

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey isn't buying Bill's explanation:

"O'Reilly explained that he was forced into smearing us because we don't spend our entire day reading comments instead of writing, unlike the responsible folks at his offices, who apparenly police their site in order to make sure that nothing appears on his site that Bill doesn't personally approve."

He noted that among the questionable comments on Billoreilly.com was "NO MARRIAGE FOR HOMOS."

"Sounds like O'Reilly likes a little hate speech, too! This has been Bill O'Reilly's personally approved website for almost a week. The commenter who wrote it has almost 2,000 comments already on Bill O'Reilly's website.

A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion. ...

The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He's the guy who nominates a "racist" to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America's defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama's economic policies to those of Juan Peron's Argentina.

And of course you simply should not even be able to think such things, much less say them. Note how smoothly E. J. added Forbes to the Gingrich-Rush axis of evil. Obama simply deserves to be elevated beyond any criticism at all. The notion that Obama’s economic policies resemble Peron’s is something which must not, cannot be discussed as a possibility.

Liberals, even Liberal columnists who write for a living, don’t mind limiting freedom of speech as long as it’s on the part of the right-wing. Voltaire can simply go take a flying leap.

For all the talk of a media love affair with Obama, there is a deep and largely unconscious conservative bias in the media's discussion of policy. The range of acceptable opinion runs from the moderate left to the far right and cuts off more vigorous progressive perspectives.

Democrats love to think that Limbaugh and Gingrich are weakening the conservative side. But guess what? By dragging the media to the right, Rush and Newt are winning.

There simply isn’t any possibility, Dionne sobs, that this might be a better thing than were the media has been rated in poll after poll after poll.

For the past few years, liberal activists have gathered in Washington each spring for the Take Back America conference, where speaker after speaker -- Obama sometimes among them -- would give rollicking denunciations of the Bush administration before packed rooms of partisans.

But now that Obama has actually taken back America, the activists at this year's gathering feel a bit like the dog that finally caught up with the car. Organizers changed the name from Take Back America to America's Future Now, but that didn't prevent a sharp decline in participation. ...

... as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh know, it's more fun to be an opposition bomb-thrower than a palace guard. "This place was more high-energy last year," said Roger Hickey, who co-directs the Campaign for America's Future with Borosage. "Last year people were jazzed up. . . . Now we're getting into the sausage making of legislation."

The pretense continues that the Democrats didn’t really control both houses of congress for the past two and a half years as well as hold the chairmanships of all of the important committees which control the sausage-making.

Democrats want to pretend it all began with Obama, even though the president is separation-of-powerswise prevented from participating in the sausage-making of legislation, with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi quite adamant about that point.

In 2006, after winning, Pelosi declared Bush to be not only a lame duck but an impotent lame duck who was also irrelevant. She thought that was a great line...at the time...as she sprained her arms patting herself on the back. Nancy, remember, did not spend her time preventing torture at Guantanamo, she said, because she considered her most important role to be electing Democrats to congress as well as electing a Democrat president. She considered herself to be successful at both.

Democrats don’t like any mention made of where the Dow and unemployment and the economy stood in November 2006 when they assumed complete control except for the presidency. And now that they have all three, who do they blame? Bush, of course, formerly known as President Irrelevant.

David Broder brings up something many Democrats would prefer to forget happened:

The Bork battle was historic: a sharp ideological fight in which interest groups on both sides mobilized as if it had been a presidential campaign. When it was over, the conservative jurist -- like Sotomayor a veteran appeals court judge -- complained that when judicial nominees "are treated like political candidates," with searching examination not just of their credentials but also of their ideology and views on controversial issues, the effect is "to erode public confidence in the impartiality of courts and to endanger the independence of the judiciary."

The scars of Bork's 33-hour cross-examination before the Judiciary Committee had not healed 18 years later when Chief Justice John Roberts and Alito both came up for confirmation.

This week, I asked Pryor if he thought we were due for another replay with Sotomayor. "I hope not," he said. "I think the country has moved way beyond Bork, and I hope the Senate has."

One thing that may make it harder to forget the partisan and ideological battles of the past is that President Obama found reasons to oppose both the Bush nominees, Roberts and Alito, in the only Supreme Court confirmation tests during his four years of Senate service.

...on Sept. 22, 2005, Obama said, "I am sorely tempted to vote for Judge Roberts based on my study of his résumé, his conduct during the hearings and a conversation I had with him yesterday afternoon.

"There is absolutely no doubt in my mind Judge Roberts is qualified to sit on the highest court in the land. Moreover, he seems to have the comportment and the temperament that makes for a good judge. He is humble, he is personally decent and he appears to be respectful of different points of view.

"It is absolutely clear to me that Judge Roberts truly loves the law . . . that he does, in fact, deeply respect the basic precepts that go into deciding 95 percent of the cases that come before the federal court -- adherence to precedence, a certain modesty in reading statutes and constitutional text, a respect for procedural regularity, and an impartiality in presiding over the adversarial system. All of these characteristics make me want to vote for Judge Roberts."

The problem, Obama said, comes in the last 5 percent -- the cases where "precedent and rules of construction" are not enough and where justice "can only be determined on the basis of one's deepest values." The rights of women, minorities and the disabled are dependent on those cases where "the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart."

Obama does not think that conservatives have any such similar right to judge based upon what they perceive to be in Sotomayor’s heart, however. It’s something only liberal Democrats can do. But as Broder points out:

Based on the Obama precedent, the White House can hardly complain if Republicans push beyond the question of Sotomayor's qualifications and examine her values -- and her biases.

Someday, the Senate may again be satisfied to examine only professional credentials, recognizing the uncertain dynamics of a nine-person bench. But while the Bork and Obama precedents live, that is not likely.

Did Pryor really believe that the country and Senate had moved beyond Bork, given Obama’s example that both had not? It’s truly stunning to witness how blind an eye Democrats are willing to turn on Obama’s behavior.

Others who are considered possible candidates include South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sen. John Thune of South Dakota. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is another possible candidate, though his decision to run for the Senate in 2010 would make a presidential bid in 2012 more difficult.

However, he could easily accept the nomination as vice president under Jindal. I found it interesting that after Bush picked a vice president with no presidential aspiration of his own that Obama should pick a vice president with no possibility whatsoever of succeeding him, either. The vice president used to be virtually an automatic successor position.

What does a nuclear madman have to do to get America's attention? On Memorial Day, the North Koreans detonated "an underground atomic device many times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki," as my old colleagues at the Irish Times put it. You'd think that would rate something higher than "World News in Brief, see foot of Page 37. " But instead, Washington was consumed by the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who apparently has a "compelling personal story."

Doesn't Kim Jong-il have a compelling personal story? Like Judge Sotomayor, he grew up in a poor neighborhood (North Korea), yet he has managed to become a nuclear power, shattering the glass ceiling to take his seat at the old nuclear boys club.

Isn't that an inspiring narrative? Once upon a time, you had to be a great power, one of the Big Five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, to sit at the nuclear table: America, Britain, France, Russia, China, the old sons of power and privilege. But now the mentally unstable scion of an impoverished no-account backwater with a gross domestic product lower than Zimbabwe's has joined their ranks: Celebrate diversity!

Actually it amounts to a remarkable accomplishment and you almost have to wonder how it would be possible to do at all. I guess it’s because Kim has focused virtually all of that DGP on the program?

If you're American, it's natural to assume the North Korean problem is about North Korea, just like the Iraq war is about Iraq. But they're not. If you're starving to death in Pyongyang, North Korea is about North Korea. For everyone else, North Korea and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Iran, are about America: American will, American purpose, American credibility.

The rest of the world doesn't observe Memorial Day. But it understands the crude symbolism of a rogue nuclear test staged on the day designated to honor American war dead and greeted with only half-hearted pro-forma diplomatese from Washington. Pyongyang's actions were "a matter of" - Drumroll please! - "grave concern," the president declared.

I’d say that both of those adjectives are likely to be met by a majority of the American publish with “huh, whazzat?” Perhaps Kim is more conversant with English, however.

Out there in the chancelleries and presidential palaces, they're beginning to get the message. The regime in Pyongyang is not merely trying to "provoke" America but demonstrating to potential clients that you can do so with impunity. A black-market economy reliant on exports of heroin, sex slaves and knockoff Viagra is attempting to supersize its business model and turn itself into a nuclear Wal-Mart.

Among the distinguished guests present for North Korea's October 2006 test were representatives of the Iranian government. Former President George W. Bush was much mocked for yoking the two nations together in his now all-but-forgotten "axis of evil" speech, but the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported a few weeks ago that the North Korean-built (and Israeli-bombed) plutonium-production facility in Syria was paid for by Tehran. How many other Iranian clients are getting nuclear subsidies?

One of the oddest arguments that Liberals seem to find satisfying is the fact that no direct link which can be demonstrated between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 means that Saddam was therefore okay to be let alone...this despite the fact that the original U.N. approved war from 1991 was still in effect, paused only by a cease-fire agreement which Saddam had already repeatedly breached.

No, they said, no 9/11 harm meant no foul. As for the missing WMD, that term had been forcibly segued into meaning only nuclear weapons, yellowcake uranium et al, as Mighty Joe Wilson demonstrated Iraq had not bought recently. Of course it mattered not that the word Bush used was “sought” with reference to buying, nor did it matter that Iraq already had piles of yellowcake on hand under U.N. auspices. There’s a large segment of the population, it seems, which is willing to let slide virtually any behavior as long as they can manage to find some justification for it. Sometimes they have to stretch pretty far.

In the ever-more-pitiful straw-clutching of the State Department, America is said to be banking on a post-Kim era. He apparently has had a bad stroke and might be dead within a decade or three. So what? It's a safe bet that whoever emerges from a power struggle between the family, the party and the military is committed to nuclearization as the principal rationale of the state.

Likewise, in Iran's imminent election, both "extremists" and "moderates" are pro-nuke. You want an Iranian moderate? Here's Hashemi Rafsanjani, the moderate who lost to crazy Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the last time: He called Israel "the most hideous occurrence in history," which the Muslim world "will vomit out from its midst" with "a single atomic bomb." Nuking the "Zionist entity" is as bipartisan as motherhood and apple pie. ...

In what Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post calls "the post-American world," other nations will follow that model. We are building a world in which the wealthiest nations on the planet, from Norway to New Zealand, are all but defenseless, while bankrupt dysfunctional squats go nuclear.

Even with inevitable and generous submissions to nuclear blackmail, how long do you think that arrangement will last? In the formulation of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, we are on the brink of "man-caused disaster."

Not a fun column to read and I gave you only some excerpts to go with the link.