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Christopher Hitchens writes on event in Iran.

For a flavor of the political atmosphere in Tehran, Iran, last week, I quote from a young Iranian comrade who furnishes me with regular updates:

“I went to the last major Ahmadinejad rally and got the whiff of what I imagine fascism to have been all about. Lots of splotchy boys who can’t get a date are given guns and told they’re special.”

It’s hard to better this, either as an evocation of the rancid sexual repression that lies at the nasty core of the “Islamic republic” or as a description of the reserve strength that the Iranian para-state, or state within a state, can bring to bear if it ever feels itself even slightly challenged. There is a theoretical reason why the events of the last month in Iran (I am sorry, but I resolutely decline to refer to them as elections) were a crudely stage-managed insult to those who took part in them and those who observed them. And then there is a practical reason. The theoretical reason, though less immediately dramatic and exciting, is the much more interesting and important one. …

A couple of items from WSJ editors. One on the firing of an inspector general who made trouble for an Obama friend, and another on a favored group of investors in the Delphi bankruptcy. You can tell Obama is from Chicago.

President Obama swept to office on the promise of a new kind of politics, but then how do you explain last week’s dismissal of federal Inspector General Gerald Walpin for the crime of trying to protect taxpayer dollars? This is a case that smells of political favoritism and Chicago rules.

A George W. Bush appointee, Mr. Walpin has since 2007 been the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that oversees such subsidized volunteer programs as AmeriCorps. In April 2008 the Corporation asked Mr. Walpin to investigate reports of irregularities at St. HOPE, a California nonprofit run by former NBA star and Obama supporter Kevin Johnson. St. HOPE had received an $850,000 AmeriCorps grant, which was supposed to go for three purposes: tutoring for Sacramento-area students; the redevelopment of several buildings; and theater and art programs.

Gerald Walpin, Inspector General of the Corporation For National and Community Service, was fired by President Barack Obama.

Mr. Walpin’s investigators discovered that the money had been used instead to pad staff salaries, meddle politically in a school-board election, and have AmeriCorps members perform personal services for Mr. Johnson, including washing his car. …

Robert Samuelson does not think much of the health plan.

It’s hard to know whether President Obama’s health-care “reform” is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three. The president keeps saying it’s imperative to control runaway health spending. He’s right. The trouble is that what’s being promoted as health-care “reform” almost certainly won’t suppress spending and, quite probably, will do the opposite. …

Peter Wehner is figuring out the tricks.

In the course of only five months, President Obama has reached into his bag and pulled out a dazzling number of misleading rhetorical tricks.

Let’s begin with his much-touted claim that his Administration is responsible for having “saved or created” at least 150,000 American jobs, even though we have shed well over a million jobs since Obama took office. Jesus may have turned water into wine – but even He did not claim to have turned job losses into job gains. That is the picture Obama is trying to portray. Of course, to place an empirical figure on the number of jobs Obama has “saved” is risible; if Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush had tried to get away with such a stunt, they would have been ridiculed and criticized mercilessly. Among the largely supine and compliant Obama press corps, however, the claim is reported as if it were written on tablets of stone.

Obama’s “saved and created” claim is cousin to the contention by Obama that his Administration – you know, the one which would put an end to “phony accounting” – had identified $2 trillion in savings in his budget. It turns out, though, that $1.6 trillion of this amount qualifies as “savings” under the assumption that the surge in Iraq would have continued for 10 more years. The problem is that Obama made this savings claim despite having already declared that our combat mission in Iraq will end by August 31, 2010 – and despite the fact that the Status of Forces Agreement calls for all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq by December 2011. …

LA Times with the disturbing possibility that the recent Air France disaster could have been prevented.

On June 9, the front page of this newspaper carried a photograph of a red, white and blue object floating, like some sort of gaily colored raft, in a blue-black ocean. To pilots, it brought a chilling sense of deja vu. In November 2001, a similarly shaped and colored object floated in Jamaica Bay, just off Long Island. It was the vertical stabilizer — colloquially, the “tail fin” — of an American Airlines Airbus, Flight 587, that had broken up shortly after taking off from JFK. That fin was practically undamaged; it had parted at the root, each of the massive fittings that attach it to the fuselage torn neatly in half. Here was another such fin: seemingly intact, snapped cleanly from the vanished Air France Flight 447.

The National Transportation Safety Board took almost three years to untangle the mystery of the American Airlines crash. It eventually concluded that the first officer had caused the breakup by stepping too vigorously on the airplane’s rudder pedals, and that the rudder pedals of Airbus airplanes were more susceptible to over-control than those of rival Boeing’s jets.

The rudder is the movable portion of the vertical fin. Unlike the rudder of a boat, it is not used to turn. In fact, the rudders of jets are seldom used at all, except when landing in a strong crosswind or to hold the airplane straight after an engine failure. In this case, the NTSB thought, the pilot had tried to use the rudder to steady the plane in the wake of a 747 several miles ahead and had managed to break the vertical tail off instead.

Pilots were incredulous. The airplane had just taken off and was climbing; it was flying well under its “maneuvering speed,” the speed below which a pilot should be able to use the flight controls in any way without risk of damaging the airplane. How, then, could this pilot possibly have broken the airplane with its own controls? …

News Biscuit announced Windows 7 will be supplied pre-infected.

Software giant Microsoft announced that the long awaited Windows 7 will have all current spyware viruses already pre-installed to save consumers endless hours trawling porn sites to download them at home. The announcement was made live on-line today on both the official Windows site and www.chick-with-dicks.com.

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Election commentary from David Warren.

The elections last week for the European Parliament were probably more open and less rigged than the election yesterday for the Iranian presidency, but we should not jump to any further conclusions. …

… In Iran, the nominal government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been supposedly under challenge from the more “moderate” (symbolic language) Mir Hossein Mousavi; but Ahmadinejad offered only a change of veneer from that of his “reforming” predecessor, Mohammad Khatami. The reality is that the Iranian president is subservient to Iran’s council of ayatollahs, as the European Parliament is to Europe’s technocratic ayatollahs. In both cases the vote is popular theatre.

We are going to return to the kid’s Cairo speech. Jennifer Rubin is first because she introduces Marty Peretz’ comments from The New Republic.

… It (the speech) seems more likely to be a grand effort not to bother his listeners with too many inconvenient facts which might suggest we’re not on the verge of a new Obama era of peaceful co-existence. If one tells the whole story – of Zionism, of wars, of efforts to give the Palestinians their state, of brutality toward women in Muslim countries, and of the impact of a nuclear-armed Iran on the region – then Obama might not be so successful in his charm offensive. And the people who were annoyed with past American administrations for bringing these things up would now be annoyed with him. Where’s the popularity boost in all that?

Moreover, people might scratch their heads, wondering why he persists in his pose of moral equivalence rather than dealing with the fundamental issues: the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize a Jewish state, the lack of a viable negotiator with whom Israel can engage, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran which will blackmail its neighbors and the egregious violation of human (and specifically, women’s) rights by Israel’s neighbors. Come to think of it, why isn’t he?

Perhaps Martin Peretz has seen enough of Obama, just as he saw enough of Deval Patrick.

“I mean, in a way, Obama’s standing above the country, above–above the world, he’s sort of God.” These drug-addicted words come from Evan Thomas, a longtime editor at Newsweek. He uttered them on Chris Matthews’s MSNBC show. Such words would wreak havoc on any person’s ego, even Barack Obama’s. It also would enrage his enemies.

After all, the president has told us that he is a mere student of history, and that he is.

But history these days is no longer a discipline inclined to defend the truthfulness of its claims or the reasonableness of its arguments or the plausibility of its conclusions. More and more, history has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful of what we used to think of as fact. …

… So, in the end, the grand conciliator violated his own principle and spoke asymmetrically: He was very tough on Israel, but he was vague to the Palestinians and to the Arabs. The president was not at all specific about what he wished from people who are still enemies of the Jewish state. Every Israeli concession requires a reciprocal concession, and not just words. But even words are difficult to extract from the Palestinian Authority, the so-called moderates. Mahmoud Abbas said only a fortnight ago that he had only to wait on what Israel surrenders. No reproach from anybody in Washington, except a few honest journalists.

There was one startling passage in Obama’s speech that very few commentators have noticed, perhaps because they also don’t know their history. “Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second president, John Adams, wrote, ‘The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.’” Now, as Michael Oren recounts in his magisterial history of America’s enmeshment in the region, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, the fact is that this treaty, which imposed a ransom of money and ships on the Americans, was a fraud. Moreover, within four years, Tripoli captured another U.S. ship and went on to take into captivity other American vessels and their crews. Suffice it to say that wars, declared by the Pasha of Tripoli and undeclared, continued with more death and more ransom, until 1815. Let it be hoped that the Treaty of Tripoli in which President Obama delights so much will not be a precedent for the agreement he wants to forge between Israel and the Palestinians or between the United States and Iran. It is also a scandal that no one on his intimate staff told him the facts–if, indeed, they knew them–about the settlements with the Barbary Pirates. They are a precedent for nothing, except cheap getting-to-yes ecumenicism.

Jennifer Rubin posts on Obama the Bully.

Peter Beinart pens a column in which he, I think inadvertently, suggests just how ill-conceived Obama’s overt hostility toward Israel is. Beinart suggests the president is doing it to show he’s a tough guy, and because he can get away with it. He writes:

By taking on the Israeli government over the issue of settlement growth, Obama is showing that he’s a gambler overseas as well. Despite the conventional wisdom that an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is impossible anytime soon, he seems hell-bent on pursuing one. And if he breaks china in the process, so be it.

Had Obama disclosed during the campaign that “broken china” included the Israel-U.S. relationship, one wonders if he would have garnered much support from voters who think the U.S.-Israeli relationship is so precious and valuable that it shouldn’t be discarded in a macho display by a neophyte president who has no game-plan for dealing with real threats to American security. (No, not ad-ons to East Jerusalem settlements, but Russia, North Korea and Iran.) …

Ed Morrissey has noticed the same thing in the auto task force.

When we last left the negotiations between Chrysler’s senior bondholders and Barack Obama’s auto task force, Thomas Lauria and his clients alleged that the government used intimidation tactics and threatened to sic the White House press corps on individuals if they didn’t give up their rights to allow the unions to win in the bankruptcy. Congress took an interest in this”madman” theory of the Presidency and got access to some e-mails floating between the task force and an analyst.  Rep, Steven LaTourette (R-OH) reads from the e-mails, in which the auto task force calls Lauria — their attorney — a “terrorist” and refuses to negotiate after a Chrylser expert consulted him: …

Corner post says Obama Care is getting less inevitable day after day.

The administration and Democrats in Congress have been trying to cultivate the impression in the media that passage of an Obama-style, sweeping health-care reform bill is all but inevitable — the only questions are about details and when.

But Obamacare was never inevitable (see my post from April), and it is getting less so by the day.

The reason is simple: There is no coherent and credible plan to pay for it. Most observers expect the legislation will cost somewhere between $1.0 trillion and $1.5 trillion over ten years.

This week we got a glimpse into the challenge the Democrats are now facing. …

Yuval Levin and Bill Kristol expand on those thoughts in the Weekly Standard.

As long as the health care reform plan envisioned by the Obama administration and congressional Democrats was just a series of slogans, it was easy for the left to build support for it and difficult for the right to imagine how it could be stopped. It is hard, after all, to object to vague promises to cut health care costs and cover the uninsured and improve health outcomes. The brute fact of Democratic domination of Washington gave key health industry players an incentive to look as if they wanted to cooperate with the Obama administration. The whole affair began to assume an air of inevitability.

But as general slogans give way to particular plans, reality is setting in. Outlines and drafts of the key House and Senate bills began to emerge last week, and the grim reality of what the Democrats in fact have in mind has started to exercise an undeniable effect upon the politics of health care.

The fact is, the Democrats’ proposals are a liberal wish list of expansions of the role of government in health care, combining an array of taxes, regulations, incentives, and mandates aimed over time to create a massive and unfunded new entitlement that would limit patient choices, ration care, and bankrupt the Treasury. The Democrats’ plan would force everyone into the system through an individual mandate and lead employers to drop their health coverage; their new public insurance plan would then price private insurers out of the game and attract the refugees from private coverage into the public system. All of this would put us well on the road to government-run health care. …

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More on Sotomayor and the New Haven decision from Stuart Taylor.

I admire many things about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, especially her deep compassion for underprivileged people. I may well support her confirmation to the Supreme Court if her testimony next month dispels my concern that her decisions may be biased by the grievance-focused mind-set and the “wise Latina woman” superiority complex displayed in some of her speeches.

But close study of her most famous case only enhances my concern. That’s the 2008 decision in which a panel composed of Sotomayor and two Appeals Court colleagues upheld New Haven’s race-based denial of promotions to white (and two Hispanic) fire-fighters because too few African-Americans had done well on the qualifying exams.

The panel’s decision to adopt as its own U.S. District Judge Janet Arterton’s opinion in the case looks much less defensible up close than it does in most media accounts. One reason is that the detailed factual record strongly suggests that — contrary to Sotomayor’s position — the Connecticut city’s decision to kill the promotions was driven less by its purported legal concerns than by raw racial politics.

Whichever way the Supreme Court rules in the case later this month, I will be surprised if a single justice explicitly approves the specific, quota-friendly logic of the Sotomayor-endorsed Arterton opinion.

Judge Jose Cabranes, Sotomayor’s onetime mentor, accurately described the implication of this logic in his dissent from a 7-6 vote in which the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit refused to reconsider the panel’s ruling. …

Jennifer Rubin expands on Taylor’s thoughts.

… What Taylor also makes clear is that the New Haven city officials knuckled into public pressure by “powerful African Americans” to throw out the test. What better example is there of the need for impartial justice to protect a politically unrepresented and  unpopular figure ( Frank Ricci) from the howls of the mob that would deny him the equal protection of law? Unfortunately Sotomayor didn’t grasp that. She condoned the mob’s bullying and was prepared to give those that caved to their pressure a legal stamp of approval.

The Senate must ask: is this what we want in a Supreme Court justice?

Mark Steyn says we cannot survive as a society of juveniles.

… When President Barack Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment. In the Province of Quebec, patients with severe incontinence – i.e., they’re in the bathroom 12 times a night – wait three years for a simple 30-minute procedure. True, Quebeckers have a year or two on Americans in the life expectancy hit parade, but, if you’re making 12 trips a night to the john 365 times a year for three years, in terms of life-spent-outside-the-bathroom expectancy, an uninsured Vermonter may actually come out ahead.

As Louis XV is said to have predicted, “Après moi, le deluge” – which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System – or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America. …

David Warren reexamines the Cairo speech in the light of the speech at the D-Day anniversary.

… When speaking to a western audience, Obama troubles to get his facts straight. When speaking to an eastern audience, he does not. This suggests a president who can see the difference between sugar and sludge; who was quite unlikely to have fooled himself by anything he said in Cairo. Also, a president comfortable with saying different things to different audiences: which all politicians do, though not always to an alarming degree.

Since Saturday, I have received several interesting communications from persons who know something about the Middle East, admitting that Obama was trawling a line, and yet defend him for doing so. Their argument is sufficiently compelling that I’m inclined to think it explains what Obama and advisers thought they were doing.

Let us assume that Obama’s speechwriting team thought very carefully about how his speech would go over in the Muslim world: not only tactically, but strategically. Moreover, Obama himself, from rather more extensive contact with Muslims in his earlier life than he condescended to explicate while running for president, is reasonably well acquainted with sometimes radical differences in outlook between East and West. And while my correspondents casually admit that the Cairo speech was full of what Churchill used to call “terminological inexactitudes,” they argue that these were “necessary” inexactitudes. …

The speech gets another look from Charles Krauthammer. And he will have none of David Warren’s left-handed compliments.

… Even on freedom of religion, Obama could not resist the compulsion to find fault with his own country: “For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation” — disgracefully giving the impression to a foreign audience not versed in our laws that there is active discrimination against Muslims, when the only restriction, applied to all donors regardless of religion, is on funding charities that serve as fronts for terror.

For all of his philosophy, the philosopher-king protests too much. Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He’s showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.

Distorting history is not truth-telling but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one’s own country.

Camille Paglia covers the speech and a few other topics.

… It was also puzzling how a major statement about religion could seem so detached from religion. Obama projected himself as a floating spectator of other people’s beliefs (as in his memory of hearing the call to prayer in Indonesia). Though he identified himself as a Christian, there was no sign that it goes very deep. Christianity seemed like a badge or school scarf, a testament of affiliation without spiritual convictions or constraints. This was one reason, perhaps, for the odd failure of the speech to acknowledge the common Middle Eastern roots of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, for both of whom the holy city of Jerusalem remains a hotly contested symbol.

Obama’s lack of fervor may be one reason he rejects and perhaps cannot comprehend the religious passions that perennially erupt around the globe and that will never be waved away by mere words. By approaching religion with the cool, neutral voice of the American professional elite, Obama was sometimes simplistic and even inadvertently condescending, as in his gift bag of educational perks like “scholarships,” “internships,” and “online learning” — as if any of these could checkmate the seething, hallucinatory obsessions of jihadism. …

… Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama’s Waterloo. All the backtracking and spin doctoring in the world will not erase that major blunder, which made the new president seem reckless, naive and out of control of his own party, which was in effect dictating to him from Capitol Hill. The GOP has failed thus far to gain traction only because it is trudging through a severe talent drought. But the moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate — which is why Mitt Romney’s political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave. …

With a few caveats, Samizdata calls our attention to an article in Forbes.

That piece by Joel Kotkin examines the misfortunes of Britain’s Labour Party and suggests the same thing might be in store for the Dems. We can only hope.

The thrashing of Britain’s New Labour Party–which came in a weak third in local and European Parliament elections this week–may seem a minor event compared to Barack Obama’s triumphal overseas tour. Yet in many ways the humiliation of New Labour should send some potential warning shots across the bow of the good ship Obama.

Labour’s defeat, of course, stemmed in part from local conditions, notably a cascading Parliamentary expense scandal that appears most damaging to the party in power. Yet beyond those sordid details lies a more grave tale–of the possible decline of the phenomenon I describe as gentry liberalism.

Gentry liberalism–which reached its height in Britain earlier this decade and is currently peaking in the U.S.–melded traditional left-of-center constituencies, such as organized labor and ethnic minorities, with an expanding class of upper-class professionals from field like media, finance and technology.

Under the telegenic Tony Blair, an Obama before his time, this coalition extended well into the middle-class suburbs. It made for an unbeatable electoral juggernaut.

But today, this broad coalition lies in ruins. An urban expert at the London School of Economics, Tony Travers, suggests that New Labour’s biggest loss is due to the erosion of middle-class suburban support. The party also appears to be shedding significant parts of its historic working-class base, particularly those constituents who aren’t members of the public employee unions. …

Borowitz reports Ahmadinejad won the Stanley Cup.

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Mark Steyn was in the National Review.

A mere year ago the notion that the government would take over General Motors would have seemed incredible. Yet here we are, with the president of the United States firing the CEO and personally calling the mayor of Detroit to assure him he has no plans to move the head office out of the city. Not literally, not yet. But in any practical sense it’s now headquartered in Washington. In another twelve months, I wonder what currently unthinkable scenarios will have become faits accomplis.

For those of us who have lived under jurisdictions where the government builds your car, the Obama presidency is already a kind of epic tragedy — 1970s Britain but on a Heaven’s Gate budget. Not just grey, humdrum, second-tier industrial decline — the kind that made Dundee, Scotland, just a plausible stand-in for Brezhnev-era Moscow when the BBC came to make a film on the Soviet retirement of the traitor Guy Burgess. No, this is a fabulous money-no-object plummet on caviar-greased skids. Millions and billions and trillions are shoveled into the hole, and leave no trace.

President Obama, in that rhetorical tic that’s already become a bit of a bore, likes to position himself as a man who won’t duck the tough decisions. So, faced with a U.S. automobile industry that so overcompensates its workers it can’t make a car for a price anybody’s willing to pay for it, the president handed over control to the very unions whose demands are principally responsible for that irreconcilable arithmetic. Presented with a similar situation 30 years ago, Mrs. Thatcher took on the unions and, eventually, destroyed their power. That was a tough decision. …

And in The Corner. A couple of times.

Spengler thinks we will run out of credit soon.

… Just how does America finance a $1.8 trillion deficit? The most that overseas investors ever have invested in the US in a year is $400 billion, and it is unlikely that foreign governments will purchase this quantity of Treasury debt under present conditions. Assuming (optimistically) that foreigners buy $300 billion worth of Treasuries per year, that leaves $1.5 trillion to finance. For the American private sector to finance $1.5 trillion worth of Treasury debt, or about 11% of GDP, presumes a savings rate of 11% of GDP, something America has not seen since the early 1980s. The present recession has pushed the personal savings rate up to 6%, with painful economic consequences.

But even a return to the very high savings rates of the early 1980s would barely cover the Treasury’s financing needs. There would be nothing left over for corporate debt, mortgages, or any other financing requirements.

The economy, of course would crash under these circumstances. To make up the gap, the Federal Reserve has increased its balance sheet to provide credit to the economy by over $1 trillion since last August, including $600 billion of securities purchases.

The Federal Reserve can’t keep monetizing debt, that is, printing money in order to buy securities. The perception that it is coming close to the end of its tether is the proximate cause of the jump in interest rates. …

Power Line defends Obama against some of what Anne Bayefsky wrote two days ago. We’ll lead with that.

President Obama’s Cairo speech has drawn lots of criticism, some of it quite harsh. Anne Bayefsky’s post today on The Corner is among the harshest I’ve seen.

Obama deserves some of the criticism he has received. However, some of it is, I think, wide of the mark.

For example, Bayefsky says that “Obama equated the Holocaust to Palestinian ‘dislocation.’” But Obama did no such thing. Here is what he said: …

That said, we have David Warren’s view of the speech.

… Obama’s is a different, more insidious vanity. He acknowledges his rhetorical gift as a gift, but imagines the solutions to problems coalesce of their own accord in his presence. He is President Orpheus, the “poet king,” transforming nature with his music. The German weekly, Die Zeit, expressed this perfectly in a headline: “I am a dream!”

It is the failure to acknowledge hard realities that makes Obama dangerous. As a wise Texan of my acquaintance put it, “he is attempting to model himself on Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. But, it’s with a twist. He sees himself as the Great Mediator — the One who will step into every conflict around the globe, bring to bear his superior intelligence and teleprompted eloquence, and leave the parties in a warm embrace.”

Another old friend, the errant “neocon” David Frum, explained what is shocking in that Cairo speech: to find an American president no longer mediating domestic American conflicts, but rather, those between his own country and some of her deadliest enemies. This may be presented as “reaching out” but, in practice, it leaves his own side unchampioned, unrepresented, and in the end, undefended.

Moreover, he is playing this game with a child’s understanding of the history and the stakes.

The Cairo speech is loaded with historical howlers. …

We were going to have Camille Paglia here who liked the speech but Salon loaded their site with a bug that so far Pickerhead has been unable to remove. When we figure that out, she’ll be here. In her place how ’bout Ann Coulter’s thoughts on Cairo?

Well, I’m glad that’s over! Now that our silver-tongued president has gone to Cairo to soothe Muslims’ hurt feelings, they love us again! Muslims in Pakistan expressed their appreciation for President Barack Obama’s speech by bombing a fancy hotel in Peshawar this week.

Operating on the liberal premise that what Arabs really respect is weakness, Obama listed, incorrectly, Muslims’ historical contributions to mankind, such as algebra (actually that was the ancient Babylonians), the compass (that was the Chinese), pens (the Chinese again) and medical discoveries (huh?).

But why be picky? All these inventions came in mighty handy on Sept. 11, 2001! Thanks, Muslims!!

Obama bravely told the Cairo audience that 9/11 was a very nasty thing for Muslims to do to us, but on the other hand, they are victims of colonization.

Except we didn’t colonize them. The French and the British did. So why are Arabs flying planes into our buildings and not the Arc de Triomphe? (And gosh, haven’t the Arabs done a lot with the Middle East since the French and the British left!)

In another sharks-to-kittens comparison, Obama said, “Now let me be clear, issues of women’s equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam.” No, he said, “the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life.”

So on one hand, 12-year-old girls are stoned to death for the crime of being raped in Muslim countries. But on the other hand, we still don’t have enough female firefighters here in America. …

Thomas Sowell reviews “Character of Nations” by Angelo Codevilla.

In an age that values cleverness over wisdom, it is not surprising that many superficial but clever books get more attention than a wise book like “The Character of Nations” by Angelo Codevilla, even though the latter has far more serious implications for the changing character of our own nation.

The recently published second edition of Professor Codevilla’s book is remarkable just for its subject, quite aside from the impressive breadth of its scope and the depth of its insights. But clever people among today’s intelligentsia disdain the very idea that there is such a thing as “national character.”

Everything from punctuality to alcohol consumption may vary greatly from one country to another, but the “one world” ideology and the “multicultural” dogma make it obligatory for many among the intelligentsia to act as if none of this has anything to do with the poverty, corruption and violence of much of the Third World or with the low standard of living in the Soviet Union, one of the most richly endowed nations on earth, when it came to natural resources. …

Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is out in paperback. Gives Jonah a chance for a victory lap.

In the greatest hoax of modern history, Russia’s ruling ‘socialist workers party,’ the Communists, established them selves as the polar opposites of their two socialist clones, the National Socialist German Workers Party (quicknamed ‘the Nazis’) and Italy’s Marxist-inspired Fascisti, by branding both as ‘the fascists,’” writes Tom Wolfe. “This spin of all spins,” he says, has played “havoc” upon Western political discourse ever since. I’m fond of that insight not only because I agree with it, or because it is from a blurb for my book Liberal Fascism, which has just come out in paperback (with a new afterword on Barack Obama, who fits so seamlessly into my thesis that he reminds me of the replacement shark in Jaws II). I repeat Wolfe’s pithy summation of the knot I tried to cut because it helps explain the liberal response to the book. The initial reaction — or pre-reaction, since Liberal Fascism was attacked several years before it came out — was simply to declare its thesis so absurd that no serious person should bother to crack its spine. The “spin of all spins” had solidified into conventional wisdom among mainstream liberals, and questioning it amounted to secular heresy.

Some liberals tried to debunk the book more systematically, but for the most part they just confirmed that the “spin of all spins” was exactly that. Consider University of Texas historian David Oshinsky’s review for the New York Times. He began by quickly summarizing the main points of my argument: The Left uses the term “fascist” to demonize its enemies; fascism was a left-wing phenomenon; Mussolini was a socialist; American Progressivism was disturbingly fascistic, and FDR’s New Deal had fascistic elements as well. Only when he reached this last point did Oshinsky offer a clear dissent, writing, “Goldberg is less convincing here because he can’t get a handle on Roosevelt’s admittedly elusive personality.” Well, okay. But I don’t get to Roosevelt for more than 130 pages, at which point I’ve already overturned the liberal applecart. It was a remarkable concession. …

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During the debate over Hillary-Care, Phil Gramm was famous for his aside that if it passed, “We would never be able to unf**k it.” Mona Charen in National Review revives the thought, but more delicately, when writing about Obama’s health care plans.

You might suppose that President Obama has his hands full running two wars, administering General Motors, “rescuing” the banking system, attempting to empower unions over management, hushing up whispers about hypocrisy regarding Guantanamo detainees, managing the mortgage crisis, imposing “clean energy” on the nation, handling nuclear North Korea and nearly nuclear Iran, “stimulating” the economy, reviving the “peace process” between Palestinians and Israelis, inaugurating a new relationship with Russia and with the Muslim world, and reversing the rise of the world’s oceans, but no, he has one more agenda item — overhauling U.S. health care.

The administration is hoping that a health bill will be voted on by early August, which may be overly optimistic but still means that this summer will be dominated by the health-care debate. Its outcome will determine the overall success or failure of Obama’s effort to torque America toward the European model of statism. It isn’t just that the health-care sector accounts for 17 percent of the U.S. economy. It is also the case that, if enacted, a nationalized health service — no matter how crushingly expensive or bureaucratic — will vitiate arguments about the proper scope of government. All future pleas for reducing the size of the state will run into the accusation that the small-government advocate is eager to take antibiotics from the mouth of a child or insulin from a diabetic. …

In his blog, Keith Hennessey, former economic advisor to Bush 43 provides his understanding of the shape of the health care bill.

… Calling it the “Kennedy” bill is something of an overstatement.  Senator Kennedy chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee, and his staff wrote the draft.  By all reports, however, Chairman Kennedy’s health is preventing him from being heavily involved in the drafting.  Senator Reid has designated Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) to supervise the process, but as best I can tell, it’s really the Kennedy committee staff who are making most of the key decisions.  For now I will call it the Kennedy-Dodd bill.

As the committee staff emphasized to the press after the leak, this is an interim draft.  I assume things will move around over the next several weeks as discussions among Senators and their staffs continue.  This is therefore far from a final product, but it provides a useful insight into current thinking among some key Senate Democrats.

Here are 15 things to know about the draft Kennedy-Dodd health bill. …

Michael Barone wonders if socialized medicine will be an easy sell to Obama’s voters.

… the segment of the electorate that did most to produce the Obama victory and give the Democrats large majorities in Congress is the least concerned and least informed about health care. That segment is the 18 percent of voters under 30. Young voters preferred Obama to John McCain by a 66 to 32 percent margin, according to the exit poll. Voters 30 and over preferred Obama by only a 50 to 49 percent margin. Some 63 percent of the young voted Democratic for House of Representatives. Only 51 percent of the rest of Americans did so. Without the young, the votes would clearly not be there for what the Democrats are trying to force through.

But what do the young know or care about health insurance? They have the fewest medical problems of the whole population. Their image of health care, at least until they become pregnant and have babies, is university health services. …

John Stossel reminds us of the power of markets; even in the field of health care.

… the doctors have mastered the anti-free-market sneer: Markets are good for crass consumer goods like washing machines and computers, but health care is too complicated for people to understand.

But that’s nonsense. When you buy a car, must you be an expert on automotive engineering? No. And yet the worst you can buy in America is much better than the best that the Soviet bloc’s central planners could produce. Remember the Trabant? The Yugo? They disappeared along with the Berlin Wall because governments never serve consumers as well as market competitors do.

Maybe 2 percent of customers understand complex products like cars, but they guide the market — and the rest of us free-ride on their effort. When government stays out, good companies grow. Bad ones atrophy. Competition and cost-conscious buyers who spend their own money assure that all the popular cars, computers, etc. are pretty good.

The same would go for medicine — if only more of us were spending our own money for health care. We see quality rise and prices fall in the few areas where consumers are in control, like cosmetic and Lasik eye surgery. Doctors constantly make improvements because they must please their customers. They even give out their cell numbers. …

Byron York writes on Washington’s preparation for the health care debate.

It’s hard to tell whether this meeting, at a La Madeleine restaurant in a sprawling shopping-center complex just outside Washington, is the start of a historic movement or just a strangely wonkish group-therapy session.

About 20 people from Northern Virginia have come to this faux-rustic French café on a Saturday morning to discuss health care reform. That alone makes them unusual; after all, there are a lot of other things one could be doing to begin the weekend. But they have answered the call from Organizing for America (OFA), which is basically the 2008 Obama campaign operating under a new name.

“This is the political issue I care about most, apart from the war,” declares one woman, who says she was born and raised in Canada and favors a Canadian-style, single-payer health care system for the U.S. …

Jay Cost in Real Clear Politics Blog examines the possible DC reception for health care overhaul.

Like any theoretical model, this simplifies reality a great deal. The real world is much more complex (we’ll bring in some of these complexities tomorrow). Nevertheless – this model’s explanatory power is quite great.

First, it helps explain why major legislative overhauls often fail. You can appreciate this yourself by playing around with different status quos and alternatives. Generally speaking, when the status quo is somewhere in the middle of the policy spectrum, it is extremely difficult to defeat it. Somebody – be it the president, the veto pivot, the median voter, or the filibuster pivot – will usually prefer the status quo to a given alternative.

Second, it helps explain why policy changes – when they happen – tend to be incremental. Again return to the above graph and play around with different scenarios. When you find an alternative that can beat the status quo, you’ll probably note that it does not upend the world by that much.

Nevertheless, it does allow for major policy overhauls – like what we saw during the New Deal or the Great Society. What matters is the arrangement of the key players’ preferences relative to the status quo. When preferences are relatively homogenous, and there is enough distance between those preferences and the status quo – significant changes in public policy can occur.

Rich Lowry writes on the laughter greeting Geithner in China. If the health care bill passes, there will be lots more laughing at our credit throughout the world.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wasn’t playing for yucks when he visited China last week. But when he told students at a Chinese university that China’s assets in the U.S. are “very safe,” the audience burst out in laughter.

The Chinese own so much of our debt, they have a keen interest in U.S. fiscal probity, and apparently they take a dim view of our ability to achieve it. The mandarins of a notionally communist government are now forced to harangue the world’s emblematic capitalist country about its ever-spiraling public debt. Mao Zedong and John D. Rockefeller must be spinning in their graves, at an equal rate though in different directions.

The students didn’t even titter at Geithner’s most hilarious line of all: that America is going to control the cost of government by creating an expansive new government health-care program. Heretofore, a Ted Kennedy–supported health-care reform that will cost at least $1.5 trillion over ten years would have been considered new spending, plain and simple. That was before the advent of Barack Obama and of fiscally prudent overspending. …

You can laugh more reading about late frosts in Canada and June snow in Western North Dakota.

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Last week, Spengler suggested Obama’s Cairo speech should have been make in India. Now we can get his reactions to the speech from his blog.

Of many strange moments in President Obama’s Cairo speech, perhaps the strangest is the conclusion:

The Holy Quran tells us, Mankind, we have created you male and a female. And we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.

The Talmud tells us, The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.
The Holy Bible tells us, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

What does the idea of gender and tribe distinction have to do with peace? The answer is nothing, except that Obama’s speechwriters felt compelled to drag out some Koranic quotation that sounded vaguely like the biblical and rabbinic concept of peace. The fact that this was the best they could do speaks volumes.

The first human vision of universal peace came from Isaiah, and all classic Jewish sources repeat this theme, as do Christian sources. The Koran, however, contains numerous warnings not to make peace with non-Muslims, but not a single statement comparable to those in Jewish and Christian sources. This may be verified by searching for the word, “peace,” in any of the several online versions of the Koran, including this one from the University of Michigan. …

In another post, Spengler deals with the moral equivalence arguments.

… Or equivalencies between perceived Muslim suffering and Jewish suffering. Israeli leaders noted with distaste Obama’s equation of the Holocaust with Palestinian suffering. The Jerusalem Post reported this morning:

“Obama shockingly equated the destruction of European Jewry to the suffering Arabs brought upon themselves when they declared war on the nascent state of Israel,” National Union MK Arye Eldad said. “If he doesn’t understand the difference, perhaps he will when he visits the Buchenwald camp [on Friday]. And if he still won’t get it then, the Muslims will teach him a painful lesson that his predecessor learned on September 11.”

Just what is the great “suffering” of the Palestinian people? Per capital income of Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza strip is estimated at $2,900, or $8 a day. Half of Egyptians live on $2 a day or less. Living standards among Palestinian “refugees” (no where else in history have the great-great-grandchildren of refugees been classified as refugees) are somewhat better than those in Egypt and other Arab countries without substantial oil exports. Foreign aid per capita of $300 per year is the highest in the world. The Palestinians, to be sure, are subject to considerable annoyance and delays in movement due to Israeli counterterrorism controls, but that is another matter.

Nonetheless, the humiliation of the Palestinians — for it is humiliation rather than impoverishment — looms as large in Arab eyes as the extermination of European Jewry. Obama obliged by accommodating the linked megalomania and paranoia of his audience. …

If you think he is harsh, he’s just a warm-up for Anne Bayefsky in National Review.

President Obama’s Cairo speech was nothing short of an earthquake — a distortion of history, an insult to the Jewish people, and an abandonment of very real human-rights victims in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is not surprising that Arabs and Muslims in a position to speak were enthusiastic. It is more surprising that American commentators are praising the speech for its political craftiness, rather than decrying its treachery of historic proportions.

Obama equated the Holocaust to Palestinian “dislocation.” In his words: “The Jewish people were persecuted. . . . anti-Semitism . . . culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. . . . Six million Jews were killed. . . . On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” This parallelism amounts to the fictitious Arab narrative that the deliberate mass murder of six million Jews for the crime of being Jewish is analogous to a Jewish-driven violation of Palestinian rights.

Speaking in an Arab country to Arabs and Muslims, Obama pointedly singled out European responsibility for the Holocaust — “anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.” In other contexts, the European emphasis would be a curiosity. In Egypt, it was no accident. The Arab storyline has always been that Arabs have been forced to suffer the creation of Israel for a European crime.

In fact, Obama’s Egyptian hosts would have been only too familiar with Arab anti-Semitism during World War II (and beyond). After all, Obama was speaking in the country that schooled and later welcomed back Grand Mufti Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini as a national hero. This was the man who spent the war years in Berlin as Hitler’s guest facilitating the murder of Jews. …

You knew we were going to find our way to Evan Thomas’ Obama as ”sort of god” comment. Peter Wehner in Contentions leads the way.

On Friday evening Newsweek editor Evan Thomas had an extraordinary exchange with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Thomas, commenting on Obama’s Cairo speech, said, “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above — above the world, he’s sort of God.” And when Thomas was asked by Matthews, “Reagan and World War II and the sense of us as the good guys in the world, how are we doing?” Thomas replied:

Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn’t felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task. We’re seen too often as the bad guys. And he — he has a very different job from — Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is “we are above that now.” We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial.

These comments reveal several notable things.

The first is that it is now impossible to mock the media’s adoration for Obama. In the past, if conservatives had said that MSM commentators viewed Obama as God, people would have assumed they were exaggerating in order to make a point. But in this instance, there is no exaggeration; Thomas stated that Obama is “sort of God.” It appears as if in their unguarded moments, Thomas and those like him really do view Obama as the Anointed One, a political Messiah, not only a gift from heaven but the Creator of Heaven and Earth. …

A Jim Manzi Corner post shows how ignorant Evan Thomas is about Reagan’s tributes to our allies.

I think Evan Thomas is pretty far off-base when says in reference to the symbolic meaning of various D-Day observances that:

…Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial.”

Here are the first nine paragraphs of Reagan’s famous “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” speech given at Normandy on the 40th anniversary of D-Day (all bold added):

We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved and the world prayed for its rescue. Here, in Normandy, the rescue began. Here, the Allies stood and fought against tyranny, in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, two hundred and twenty-five Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. …

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Stuart Taylor writes again on Sotomayor with even stronger condemnation of her affirmative action views.

Conservative critics of Judge Sonia Sotomayor may be digging themselves into a hole if they keep hurling the tired old “liberal activist” slogan at her. The reason is that her supporters can plausibly retort that these days, the Supreme Court’s conservatives are as activist as the liberals, especially on racial issues.

But conservatives and like-minded centrists can win the political debate if they focus not on buzzwords but on in-depth, civil discourse about the very big issue on which Sotomayor and her liberal supporters are most at odds — and the conservative justices most in tune — with the vast majority of Americans.

That issue is racially preferential affirmative action. By this, I mean the many forms of supposedly benign discrimination against whites and Asians that have been engineered over the past 45 years to advance blacks and Hispanics in the workforce, in college admissions, and in government contracting.

The long-standing public disapproval of such preferences was documented yet again by a major Quinnipiac University poll released on June 3, showing that American voters, by a lopsided margin, want them abolished. …

Abby Thernstrom wants to know when Obama is going to get past race.

Some of us thought the election of Barack Obama as president might signal a fading away of the old identity politics.

The assumption that fundamental lines of division in politics are set by race and ethnicity would seem to be a bit passé when 43 percent of white voters cast their ballots for a proudly “post-racial” African-American.

But the president himself has made identity politics front-page news with his selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his Supreme Court nominee. She played an important role in the New Haven firefighters’ case (Ricci v. DeStefano) now awaiting decision by the Supreme Court. …

Given the way Obama treated Roberts and Alito, David Broder says he has nothing to complain about when Sotomayor gets slammed.

… 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.

Victor Davis Hanson wants to know if it’s going to be race and resentment all the time.

… One would have thought with the presidency, or nomination to the Supreme Court, or with the office of Attorney General, or First Lady, such hurt feelings and old grievances might wane; but instead the resentment seems to be ubiquitous, and growing, and the lectures will be with us for the next four years in almost every imaginable circumstance. If the administration is not careful, millions of Americans are going to begin feeling that they are caricatured pretty much as those once were in rural Pennsylvania.

VDH says she can her resentments and he’ll have his reservations.

… I think Team Obama will have to retract any characterization that Sotomayor “misspoke,” given that she seemed to say it ad nauseam over the years — at some point how can one really suggest that she did not believe what she so often proclaimed?

Despite the solid credentials of Justice Sotomayor, and her winning personality, I still think all this is going to be a lot more serious than Obama thinks, since the president is essentially saying to the American people that their next Supreme Court justice on regular occasions, in print and before the public, has reiterated that race and gender make someone intrinsically a better or worse judge — precisely the opposite ideology from what Obama embraced in his hope-and-change, no-blue/no-red-state rhetoric.

A disinterested observer would conclude that Justice Sotomayor is race-obsessed. In her now much quoted 2001 UC Berkeley speech she invoked “Latina/Latino” no less than 38 times, in addition to a variety of other racial-identifying synonyms. When one reads the speech over, the obsession with race become almost overwhelming, and I think the public has legitimate worries (more than the Obama threshold of 5% of cases) over whether a judge so cognizant of race could be race-blind in her decision making. …

Ed Whelan Corner posts on Soto’s Puerto Rican nationalism and her public cheerleading for Obama.

In a speech that she delivered to the Black, Latino, Asian Pacific American Law Alumni Association on April 17, 2009 — two weeks before news of the Souter vacancy broke — Judge Sotomayor made a number of references to President Obama that seem surprisingly and disturbingly partisan coming from a sitting federal judge:

“The power of working together was, this past November, resoundingly proven.” (p. 6)

“The wide coalition of groups that joined forces to elect America’s first Afro-American President was awe inspiring in both the passion the members of the coalition exhibited in their efforts and the discipline they showed in the execution of their goals.” (p. 7)

“On November 4, we saw past our ethnic, religious and gender differences.” (p. 10)

“What is our challenge today: Our challenge as lawyers and court related professionals and staff, as citizens of the world is to keep the spirit of the common joy we shared on November 4 alive in our everyday existence.” (p. 11)

“It is the message of service that President Obama is trying to trumpet and it is a clarion call we are obligated to heed.” (p. 13)

Canon 2 of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges provides that a judge “should act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” Sotomayor’s public cheerleading for Obama seems clearly to violate that ethical obligation.

Jennifer Rubin closes the Sotomayor section.

… Obama and his team, not without good reason, have a nearly unlimited confidence in their ability to control the narrative and direct the national debate. But from time to time, whether on Guantanamo or the stimulus plan, reality swamps the spin. The voters can assess for themselves what is being sold. On Sotomayor they can decide whether she and, by inference, the president are selling a vision they don’t like.

Along the way they may discover that the president and his nominee are, how shall we say it, not at all empathetic toward the victims of race preferences.

David Harsanyi says if Coloradans are not careful their state will be broke just like California.

… Colorado’s dynamic economy relies on a multitude of factors, but none of those factors happens to be the presence of wise governors or legislators. Sensible governance is made compulsory by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) and other state spending limits — which keeps government lean and responsible, yet also allow the state the flexibility to ask voters for more funding.

Now, politicians abhor few things more than the unpleasant task of justifying their spending to the riff-raff. Even more distasteful is dealing with bothersome spending limits that retard an elected official’s transcendent powers to help you out.

Accordingly, the bellyaching over spending caps in Colorado is ceaseless. How anyone but a shyster politician could argue that allowing a budget to grow 6 percent over the previous year’s total (and more if you count transportation and capital projects) is unfair is yet to be determined. Few Colorado families or businesses, I am relatively sure, enjoy that kind of latitude.

Yet, this week — only days after California voters overwhelmingly rejected their state’s bid at economic anarchy — Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter signed legislation to eliminate Colorado’s spending limit, which henceforth will be referred to as the “Californiacation.” …

It turns out Wal-Mart is helping people eat better. This from Forbes.

One might think that “everyday low prices” for food would mean that people would eat much more–stuff themselves, even. So one would expect to see more obese folks in places where Wal-Mart does more business. Right? Think again. Research tells a different story.

The University of North Carolina-Greensboro’s Charles Courtemanche and I are finishing a study of big retail stores and obesity. In our first round of statistical analysis we found that greater consumer access to a Wal-Mart store was associated with lower body-mass indexes and a lower probability of being obese.

As we gathered more data on Wal-Mart discount stores, Wal-Mart Supercenters, warehouse clubs like Sam’s Club, Costco and BJ’s Wholesale Club, and other outlets, we found that the correlation holds up under a variety of different circumstances, with a clear relationship between warehouse clubs and better eating habits emerging over time. Further, we found that Wal-Mart’s effect on weight is largest for women, the poor, African-Americans and people who live in urban areas. …

According to Scrappleface, Sotomayor says a “wise Latina” would not have picked her.

… President Obama said he would not comment further on the controversy, “since matching wits with a Latina woman is above my pay grade.”

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Mark Steyn thinks the fall of GM, and the speech, are indications of decline.

… And so it goes. Like General Motors, America is “too big to fail.” So it won’t, not immediately. It will linger on in a twilight existence, sclerotic and ineffectual, declining unto a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past, but able on occasion to throw out impressive words albeit strung together without much meaning: empower, peace, justice, prosperity – just to take one windy gust from the president’s Cairo speech.

There’s better phrase-making in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in a coinage of Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations. The president emeritus is a sober, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes, “The country’s economy, infrastructure, public schools and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less-vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit.” That last is the one to watch: A great power can survive a lot of things, but not “a mediocrity of spirit.” A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower.

Charles Krauthammer’s thoughts.

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one concrete declaration of new American policy: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over “natural growth” may curry favor with the Muslim “street.” But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

National Review conducted on online symposium on the Cairo speech. Here are a few participants.

Mansoor Ijaz.

… Where he failed in Cairo was to delineate the overarching fact that Islam’s troubles lie within. It is not that America is not at war with Islam. It is that Islam is at war within itself — to identify what this religion and system of beliefs is in the modern age. Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian sidekick Ayman Al Zawahiri want to take us all back to the Stone Age because they have nothing better to offer their followers than hate-filled preaching. Why didn’t Obama say that?

Islam’s worst enemies are within it. If wealthy Gulf Arabs want peace for Palestinians with Israel, why don’t they take a fraction of their profligate spending (in nightclubs in Geneva, at bars in London, at boutiques in Milan) and redirect it to rebuilding Palestinian enclaves with schools, hospitals, food-production facilities, and manufacturing plants? We might then have durable peace possible in the Middle East. Why didn’t Obama say that? …

Angelo M. Codevilla.

Just imagine: After a thousand years during which Islam and Western civilization have trod opposite paths in philosophy, science, and the most basic attitudes toward relations between the sexes and the role of work in life — and after a half-century during which Muslims have murdered Western ambassadors and Olympians, to the cheers of millions of their own — suddenly a young American seems to believe he can conjure up a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” How could anyone imagine he possesses such a “reset button”? The answer only starts with Yuppie hubris. …

Amir Taheri.

The speech could do a lot of harm. Obama endorsed the basic claim of Islamists such as Osama bin Laden and Ali Khamenehi, who divide the world  into Dar al-Islam (House of Peace) and Dar al-Harb (House of War).

By abandoning Bush’s Freedom Agenda, Obama could encourage despots whose brutal role has given radical Islamists, acting as opponents of the established order, a certain legitimacy.

Obama’s position on women in Islam was pathetic. …

Andrew McCarthy.

President Obama’s Cairo speech should have been called “a pretend beginning” rather than “a new beginning.” To the extent it wasn’t dangerously naïve, it provided little more than warmed-over left-wing dogma: Obama portrayed Islam and the world as he and other progressives would have them (the president said “progress” eleven times), rather than as they are — under the risible claim that his desired “partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t.”

In Obama’s bowdlerized Islam, the Koran teaches merely that “whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.” Quite apart from the fact that the president simply purged the very next inconvenient verse (which, as Robert Spencer points out, mandates the crucifixion or mutilation of those who fight against Allah and Muhammad), many in the Muslim world — not just terrorists — subscribe to a supremacist interpretation of scripture that does not regard non-Muslims as “innocents.” …

Regarding Andrew’s above lines from the Koran, Lisa Schiffren notes their roots in the Jewish Babylonian Talmud.

As a cornerstone of the case that Islam is the religion of peace, the Koranic sura which Andy cited, 5:32 (“The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.”), has more problems than the mere fact that it is entirely contradicted by the following verse (i.e., the one promising execution, crucifixion, or decapitation to those who oppose Allah and his messenger).

It is one of the suras that comes straight from another religion. Not that they teach this in Al Azhar, but the original occurrence of the line is found in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, 4:5. You know, the book in which the ancient rabbis interpret Jewish law. It reads …

Caroline Glick comments on the speech.

From an Israeli perspective, Pres. Barack Obama’s speech today in Cairo was deeply disturbing. Both rhetorically and programmatically, Obama’s speech was a renunciation of America’s strategic alliance with Israel.

Rhetorically, Obama’s sugar coated the pathologies of the Islamic world — from the tyranny that characterizes its regimes, to the misogyny, xenophobia, Jew hatred, and general intolerance that characterizes its societies. In so doing he made clear that his idea of pressing the restart button with the Islamic world involves erasing the moral distinctions between the Islamic world and the free world.

In contrast, Obama’s perverse characterization of Israel — of the sources of its legitimacy and of its behavior — made clear that he shares the Arab world’s view that there is something basically illegitimate about the Jewish state. …

Charles Hurt in the NY Post.

… The problem with talking so much is that you eventually just start babbling and saying a bunch of stuff that makes no sense.

At one point, Obama fretted over the rise of new power that, to the horror of civilized people, exudes an obsessed and twisted view of “sexuality” and “mindless violence.”

Islamo-fascism?

No, the Internet.

They guy is confronting one of the most evil and relentless mindsets in the history of man and he finds room in his big address to whine about the Internet — by far a greater tool for freedom than anything else. …

You never again have to watch the kid president before his teleprompter, because a Daily Beast blogger has broken his speech code.

President Obama has faced his share of tough issues and audiences over the years, but at every turn he’s managed to defuse tension with a well-timed speech. Already he’s receiving rave reviews for this morning’s address in Cairo, Egypt, on America’s relationship with the Muslim world. But how does he do it? We analyzed Obama’s most famous speeches to bring you this handy instruction manual.

Step 1. Thanks for having me.

Step 2. Express shock that someone with your life story could ever stand before such a crowd…

Step 3. …But that’s just America for you. …

We have a couple of items on the auto bankrupts. First from the Corner.

… gotta love Indiana’s Richard Mourdock (PDF): “‘Hoosier retirees and taxpayers are being deprived of millions of dollars in their funds while a foreign corporation [Fiat] receives a windfall at no cost, this is not equitable,’ stated [Indiana state] Treasurer Mourdock.” He also called the administration’s actions “unprecedented and illegal.”

Hoosier retirees and taxpayers . . . doesn’t exactly square with Obama administration’s depiction of its opponents as a bunch of Wall Street vultures.

Michael Levine from the Financial Times.

… the Obama administration overtly played favourites to get the United Auto Workers protection it would not have received under Section 1113, probably elevating costs in a way that will damage prospects for a successful reorganisation. It made and imposed business judgments on GM about what cars to make and what plants to close (and perhaps about suppliers and distribution) that no one in the government or on the task force had the experience to make and for which no one would be financially accountable. Worst of all, despite Sunday’s desperate attempt to distance itself from GM’s future decisions, it left its fingerprints all over the new plan. Inevitably the White House will take political and hence financial responsibility for its success, relieving pressure on management and labour to succeed. Ultimately it elected to adopt an industrial policy toward the industry that failed utterly in the UK, and has worked out badly and expensively in France and Italy.

Finally, in the process, it disturbed the security of expectation that has made lenders willing to provide capital as secured credit, thus handicapping all US industry and undermining what has been, for all its flaws, one of the best financial reorganisation processes in the world, now emulated elsewhere.

The administration took a tragic situation and turned it into an expensive mess to pay a political debt. It wasted billions of dollars over many months delaying GM’s filing and then implicitly put itself on the hook for many billions more. The financial, political and social echoes of that decision will be with us for a long time. In short, they blew it.

We close with Mark Steyn who has found a need for another czar.

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If you want a clue for one of the reasons the left is still so nasty, even after their big win, it is in Jennifer Rubin’s post about a Quinnipiac poll showing the center-right nature of the country. The left knows they won’t be in power long because the media can’t forever hide all the mistakes.

… We will have the confirmation hearing for Sotomayor this summer. In each of these the public will hear arguments about quotas, preferences, historical discrimination, preferential treatment, and multiculturalism. Conservatives who extol the concept of individual, as opposed to group, rights and who eschew the practice of divvying up by race, are on firm constitutional footing. This poll confirms that they also are speaking for the overwhelming number of Americans who think it is time to get beyond identity politics and racial preferences.

Jonathan Tobin posts on the obsequious Friedman interview with the president.

… Friedman was able to get Obama to stop talking about himself long enough to tell him an old joke about a guy who prays to win the lottery but never buys a ticket. The point of this knee-slapper is that nobody in the Middle East has given peace a chance. It made the president laugh and gave the columnist the opportunity once again to pose as an adviser (rather than a mere Boswell) to the powerful.

Obama, as Max pointed out, then said:

We have a joke around the White House. We’re just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working — and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East.

Oh, the perils of honesty! That’s the word Obama used earlier this week in another pre-Cairo interview with NPR to describe his hostile attitude toward Israel. If this was a contest to see which of the two was the most self-infatuated, I guess you’ve got to give the decision to Obama.

But the point here is that the big fibbers are Friedman and Obama, not the Israelis who, they imply, have never lifted a finger for peace and have no interest in hearing the truth.

The fact is Israel has been anteing up for peace since 1993,  when it signed the Oslo Accords, brought the PLO and its terrorist leader Yasser Arafat back to the country, and handed most of the West Bank and Gaza over to him. …

Mark Steyn posts on Mali Muslim massacre.

David Warren on Tiananmen, D-Day and what we fight for.

We have two important anniversaries this week: tomorrow is the 20th of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Saturday will be the 65th of D-Day. Both events retain “educational value,” and today I shall try to remember why.

I was not around for D-Day. Recently I buried a father who was, and at an age to make me realize that the Second World War will soon exist only as book knowledge. Include, in that book, what was incised in stone over the battlefields of France, where Western leaders will gather on the weekend for verbal tributes, and where a few surviving veterans will recall the comrades of their vanished youth.

Much is forgotten, but nothing is lost. The whole history of the world is inscribed in God’s living memory. We will, according to this religious view, again glimpse that record on a Day of Judgement. I do not believe for one moment that what is forgotten therefore disappears. For that is the ostrich view of space and time, suitable only for those who are in hiding. …

David Harsanyi takes up the subject of General Motors.

For those of you who have carefully avoided piddling away your hard-earned dollars on a General Motors vehicle, resistance is futile. You’re a majority “investor” now. Rejoice.

Taxpayers, our president has decreed, are impelled to preserve a prehistoric, poorly run, unprofitable private corporation. Now, the only question becomes: What does all this sacrifice mean?

Will GM be run as profitably and efficiently as Amtrak? Will GM be paid not to produce like the agricultural sector? Will it feed into an economic bubble like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Will it boast the negligible oversight and waste of the so-called stimulus package? Will it feature the fiscal irresponsibility of Social Security? Or will we see the runaway costs of Medicaid?

So many options. …

National Review editors on the peril for Milwaukee’s school choice program.

Milwaukee is home to America’s most vibrant school-choice program: More than 20,000 students participate, almost all of them minorities. They have made academic gains and boast higher graduation rates than their peers in public schools. They even save money for taxpayers. Inevitably, Democrats in the state capital are trying to eviscerate the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

They’ve wanted to gut school choice for years, at the behest of teacher-union patrons who believe education should be a government monopoly. Until recently, Republicans have stood in the way. That changed following last year’s elections. Now, for the first time since the advent of school choice in Milwaukee two decades ago, Madison is a one-party capital. The governor, Jim Doyle, is a Democrat. Members of his party control both the state assembly and the state senate. School choice is in their crosshairs. …

Karl Rove gets to say, “It’s gonna be the economy, stupid.”

… It is becoming clear that the economy is now the top issue. Mr. Obama’s presidency may well rise or fall on it. The economy will be his responsibility long before next year’s elections. Americans may give him a chance to turn things around, but voters can turn unforgiving very quickly if promised jobs don’t materialize.

That’s what happened in Louisiana, where voters accepted Democrat Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s missteps before Hurricane Katrina but brutally rejected her afterward because she failed to turn the state around.

Until now, the new president has benefited from public willingness to give him a honeymoon. He decided to use that grace period to push for the largest expansion of government in U.S. history and to reward political allies (see the sweetheart deals Big Labor received in the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies).

The difficulty for Mr. Obama will be when the public sees where his decisions lead — higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher taxes, sluggish growth, and a jobless recovery.

Tony Blankley expands on the subject.

The Roman historian Livy famously described the terminal plight of the late Roman Republic: “Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus” (“We can bear neither our shortcomings nor the remedies for them”). As I reread this phrase in Christian Meier’s biography of Julius Caesar this past weekend, I couldn’t help thinking of America’s current fiscal profligacy — which has been growing for years at an ever-accelerating rate.

Of course, since last fall’s financial/economic crisis, the rate of profligacy has become supercharged. Like the Roman Republic’s lament, we think we can’t survive without deficit spending — but we soon won’t be able to survive with deficit spending, either.

In 2012, federal debt will be more than $15 trillion. Annual interest probably will be between $1 trillion and $1.7 trillion — depending on whether long bonds remain at about 3.5 percent or go to recent historic rates (6 to 7 percent). Deficits will average about $1 trillion a year — $22 trillion by 2019. Yearly interest payments then will be more than $2 trillion. That’s the good news. …

A Contentions post too.

… Bernanke is engaged in an effort to stimulate an economic recovery by using monetary tools to reduce the level of medium and long-term interest rates (”quantitative easing”). The Treasury is trying to add to the effort by using fiscal tools (Keynesian stimulus). What everyone hopes will happen is that the economy will pick up and start generating its own momentum, so that by the time interest rates start ticking up by themselves, we’ll be able to lay off both the quantitative easing and the stimulus spending.

The danger, however, is that expectations for economic recovery will cause investor dollars to flow away from Treasury debt and dollar-denominated investments altogether, before the job has been done. As medium and long-term interest rates rise, Bernanke finds himself under considerable pressure to expand the quantitative easing program, which he’s very reluctant to do because of the danger of runaway inflation.

That leaves the Treasury needing to keep borrowing gargantuan amounts of money for a long time to come, probably years. And that keeps steady upward pressure on interest rates in the economically-sensitive medium and long range segments of the yield curve. …

We close this section with a piece from the Financial Times.

Standard and Poor’s decision to downgrade its outlook for British sovereign debt from “stable” to “negative” should be a wake-up call for the US Congress and administration. Let us hope they wake up.

Under President Barack Obama’s budget plan, the federal debt is exploding. To be precise, it is rising – and will continue to rise – much faster than gross domestic product, a measure of America’s ability to service it. The federal debt was equivalent to 41 per cent of GDP at the end of 2008; the Congressional Budget Office projects it will increase to 82 per cent of GDP in 10 years. With no change in policy, it could hit 100 per cent of GDP in just another five years.

“A government debt burden of that [100 per cent] level, if sustained, would in Standard & Poor’s view be incompatible with a triple A rating,” as the risk rating agency stated last week.

I believe the risk posed by this debt is systemic and could do more damage to the economy than the recent financial crisis. …

Borowitz reports the president gave a Chevy Malibu to the Saudi king.

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Spengler notes the foolishness of an address to the “Muslim world.”

… To speak to the “Muslim world”, is to speak not to a fact, but rather to an aspiration, and that is the aspiration that Islam shall be a global state religion as its founders intended. To address this aspiration is to breathe life into it. For an American president to validate such an aspiration is madness. America is not at war with Islam, unless, that is, Islam were to take a political form that threatens America’s global interests. These interests include friendly relationships with nation-states that have a Muslim majority, such as Egypt, Turkey and Jordan. To address “the Muslim world” is to conjure up a prospective enemy, for global political Islam only can exist as the enemy of the nation-states with which America has allied.

Obama, the White House press office told reporters last week, will address among other issues the Arab-Israeli issue. What does it imply to raise this issue in a speech to the “Muslim world”? Nearly 700 million of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims live in Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, countries which share no linguistic or cultural affinities with the Arabs, and have only religion in common.

They have no strategic interest whatever in the outcome of war or peace in the Levant. Their only possible interest is religious. Does the United States really believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is religious in origin? …

… Thus far, Obama’s efforts to propitiate the “Muslim world” have made the administration’s future work all the harder. Iran is convinced that the administration needs it to help out in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has all the less incentive to abandon its central goal of developing nuclear weapons. Pakistan is in the midst of a bloody civil war forced upon it by the United States. After Obama leaned on the Israelis to halt settlement construction, the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas left Washington convinced that Obama will force out the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the next two years.

For his trouble, Obama will get more bloodshed in Pakistan, more megalomania from Iran, more triumphalism from the Palestinians, and less control over Iraq and Afghanistan. Of all the available bad choices, Obama has taken the worst. It is hard to imagine any consequence except a steep diminution of American influence.

Corner posts on the visit to Egypt.

“One of the largest Muslim countries.” Jeesh.

More on the large Muslim country.

Richard Epstein has more on Sotomayor.

Barack Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for a Supreme Court seat has put both her defenders and attackers into high gear. In my previous Forbes column, I indicated some of my deep reservations about the Sotomayor candidacy based on her perfunctory performance in Didden v. Town of Port Chester, where the panel brushed aside the “public use” language in the constitution’s takings clause.

Likewise, the cryptic panel decision of her panel in the New Haven firefighters’ case, Ricci v. DeStefano, also evidenced a tin ear to the explosive statutory and constitutional issues that arose when New Haven chose to disregard its own promotion test on the sole ground that it identified few (indeed, no) African-American candidates as eligible for promotion to captain and lieutenant.

On this occasion, I won’t ask why Judge Sotomayor took an intellectual pass on a hard case, which is now before the Supreme Court. Instead I will examine the other side of the coin, which is the serious intellectual weakness in the conservative case against her confirmation. Note that I consciously use the term “conservative” in opposition to the decidedly different “libertarian” orientation. …

Mark Steyn Corner post on empathy on the Court.

Thomas Sowell on the nomination.

… Laws are made for the benefit of the citizens, not for the self-indulgences of judges. Making excuses for such self-indulgences and calling them “inevitable” is part of the cleverness that has eroded the rule of law and undermined respect for the law.

Something else is said to be “inevitable” by the clever people. That is the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. But it was only a year and a half ago that Hillary Clinton’s winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for president was considered “inevitable.”

The Republicans certainly do not have the votes to stop Judge Sotomayor from being confirmed — if all the Democrats vote for her. But that depends on what the people say. It looked like a done deal a couple of years ago when an amnesty bill for illegal aliens was sailing through the Senate with bipartisan support. But public outrage brought that political steamroller to a screeching halt.

Nothing is inevitable in a democracy unless the public lets the political spinmasters and media talking heads lead them around by the nose. …

Mona Charen says it is cruel to casually call someone racist.

The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has already achieved a boon for our political culture: It has helped leading liberals and Democrats to discover that being tarred as a racist on flimsy grounds is unfair and deeply unpleasant. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, when asked on “Face the Nation” to respond to Rush Limbaugh’s and Newt Gingrich’s comments about Sotomayor, said, “That’s an absolutely terrible thing to throw around. Based on that statement — that one word ‘better than’ (sic) — to call someone a racist is just terrible and I would hope that Republicans would not do this.”

Sen. Feinstein is right as far she went. She avoided one undeniable fact though. If a white male nominee had been discovered to have said something similar — that he was better situated to judge due to his background and life experiences than a Latina woman — he would be cashiered so fast as to induce whiplash. Those are the unwritten rules that Limbaugh and Gingrich are attempting, one suspects, to expose for their one-sidedness. Nevertheless, the instant labeling of the woman, based on one unwise remark, is hardly fair. If Democrats are learning this now, that’s excellent news. One hopes they will remember this discovery when the wheel turns and a Republican nominee is before the Senate. Certainly they didn’t seem to get it as recently as 2002, when President Bush nominated Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. …

Treasury Sec. Geithner was laughed at in China.

… Mr Geithner told politicians and academics in Beijing that he still supports a strong US dollar, and insisted that the trillions of dollars of Chinese investments would not be unduly damaged by the economic crisis. Speaking at Peking University, Mr Geithner said: “Chinese assets are very safe.”

The comment provoked loud laughter from the audience of students. There are growing fears over the size and sustainability of the US budget deficit, which is set to rise to almost 13pc of GDP this year as the world’s biggest economy fights off recession. …

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