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Mark Steyn takes us back to Putin’s star turn at the NY Times OpEd.

For generations, eminent New York Times wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman’s more recent effusions to the “enlightened” Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually figure it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin’s impressive debut on the op-ed page this week.

It pains me to have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I’d be a KGB torturer. His “plea for caution” was an exquisitely masterful parody of liberal bromides far better than most of the Times’ in-house writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law, was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no longer seen as “a model of democracy” but instead as erratic cowboys “cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” He warned against chest-thumping about “American exceptionalism,” pointing out that, just like America’s grade-school classrooms, in the international community everyone is exceptional in his own way.

All this the average Times reader would find entirely unexceptional. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama’s core platitude: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” …

… When the president’s an irrelevant narcissist and his secretary of state’s a vainglorious buffoon, Marco Rubio shouldn’t be telling the world don’t worry, the other party’s a joke, too.

Charles Krauthammer thinks we got a bad deal in Syria last week.

… And what does America get? Obama saves face.

Some deal.

As for the peace process, it has about zero chance of disarming Damascus. We’ve spent nine years disarming an infinitely smaller arsenal in Libya — in conditions of peace — and we’re still finding undeclared stockpiles.

Yet consider what’s happened over the last month. Assad uses poison gas on civilians and is branded, by the United States above all, a war criminal. Putin, covering for the war criminal, is exposed, isolated, courting pariah status.

And now? Assad, far from receiving punishment of any kind, goes from monster to peace partner. Putin bestrides the world stage, playing dealmaker. He’s welcomed by America as a constructive partner. Now a world statesman, he takes to the New York Times to blame American interventionist arrogance — a.k.a. “American exceptionalism” — for inducing small states to acquire WMDs in the first place.

And Obama gets to slink away from a Syrian debacle of his own making. Such are the fruits of a diplomacy of epic incompetence.

Responding to the new Putintate, Peggy Noonan has good ideas about what is exceptional in our country.

… America is not exceptional because it has long attempted to be a force for good in the world, it attempts to be a force for good because it is exceptional. It is a nation formed not by brute, grunting tribes come together over the fire to consolidate their power and expand their land base, but by people who came from many places. They coalesced around not blood lines but ideals, and they defined, delineated and won their political rights in accordance with ground-breaking Western and Enlightenment thought. That was something new in history, and quite exceptional. We fought a war to win our freedom, won it against the early odds, understood we owed much to God, and moved forward as a people attempting to be worthy of what he’d given us.

We had been obliged, and had obligations. If you don’t understand this about America you don’t understand anything.

I don’t know why the idea of American exceptionalism seems to grate so on Mr. Putin. Perhaps he simply misunderstands what is meant by it and takes it to be a reference to American superiority, which it is not. Perhaps it makes him think of who won the Cold War and how. Maybe the whole concept makes him think of what Russia did, almost 100 years ago now, to upend and thwart its own greatness, with a communist revolution that lasted 75 years and whose atheism, a core part of its ideology, attempted to rid his great nation of its faith, and almost succeeded. Maybe it grates on him that in his time some of the stupider Americans have crowed about American exceptionalism a bit too much—and those crowing loudest understood it least.

But I suspect on some level he’s just a little envious of the greatness of America’s beginnings. The Russian Revolution almost killed Russia—they’re still recovering. The American Revolution has been animating us for more than two centuries. …

Wait until you see the example of media protecting president bystander provided by Power Line.

Congress (Dems included) was mugged by minimum-wage reality last week. Kate Bachelder has the story in WSJ’s Political Diary.

Members of Congress sometimes bump into economic reality. Take Tuesday’s vote on a bill to delay federally mandated minimum-wage increases in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa, U.S. territories in the South Pacific. Congress agreed, 415-0, that a minimum-wage requirement can worsen economic mobility, though apparently only on small islands.

The government has historically granted the territories an exemption from minimum-wage requirements under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The last federal increase in 2007, to $7.25 from $5.15, required CNMI and American Samoa for the first time to raise their minimum wage by $0.50 per year until it reached parity with the states. The bill included American Somoa only after Nancy Pelosi came under attack for granting an exemption to a place that had factories for companies headquartered in her district.

Even with the minimum wage currently only at $5.55 in CNMI after three increases, the requirement has caused so much economic tumult that Congress has now passed two pieces of legislation, in 2010 and on Tuesday, to extend the transition period for the islands.

That’s because the minimum-wage hikes have slammed local economies, which were already reporting years of declining GDP when the increases began. Government Accountability Office studies have shown that wage floors tend to do precisely the opposite of what their supporters purport. …

Michelle Malkin celebrates the gun control loss in CO.

Quick, call the CDC. We’ve got a RockyMountain outbreak of Acute Sore Loser Fever. After failing to stave off two historic recall bids on Tuesday, two delusional state legislators and their national party bosses just can’t help but double-down and trash voters as dumb, sick, criminal and profligate.

The ululations of gun-grabbing Democrats here in my adopted home state are reverberating far and wide. Appearing on cable TV Thursday to answer the question “What happened?” Pueblo State Sen. Angela Giron sputtered that she lost her seat due to “voter suppression.” Giron whined to CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin that voters “weren’t able to get to the polls” and that there was “voter confusion.”

“Voter confusion”? My goodness. You’d think there were no public libraries, local television stations, talk radio, newspapers, blogs, Facebook, Twitter or government websites to get information about the elections. (Oh, and pay no attention to the massive 6-to-1 spending advantage that Giron and her fellow recall target John Morse, formerly the president of the state Senate, enjoyed.)

“Voter suppression”? Dios mio! You’d think there were New Black Panther Party thugs standing outside the polls shouting racist epithets and waving police batons!

But no, there was no “voter confusion” or “voter suppression.” In fact, as the Colorado Peak Politics blog pointed out, the “majority of turnout in (Giron’s) district was Democrat, by a large margin. And she still lost. Voter suppression (is) not even believable.”

Giron lost in her Obama-loving Democratic Senate District 3 by a whopping 12 points. …

For what it’s worth, turns out it was Sec. Clinton who first proclaimed the “red line.” At least that is the story from Daily Caller.

.. On August 11, 2012, ten days before Obama’s statement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu had a joint press conference in Istanbul.  During that press conference the following exchange happened:

QUESTION: Madam Secretary, for you, can you tell us a little bit more in detail about your meeting with the opposition activists? Did you get a better sense of whether they are really prepared to be able to be involved in leading a transition? What kind of questions did you ask them about who is actually doing the fighting on the ground? And what kind of answers did you get?

And then, for both of you, there has been a lot of talk about this common operational picture. What exactly is that common operational picture? Does it involve the potential of this corridor from Aleppo, north to the border here, turning into some kind of safe haven? And does it include anything on how to deal with the chemical weapons that everyone has expressed concern about? Thank you.

SECRETARY CLINTON: [yadda yadda] And both the minister and I saw eye to eye on the many tasks that are ahead of us, and the kinds of contingencies that we have to plan for, including the one you mentioned in the horrible event that chemical weapons were used. And everyone has made it clear to the Syrian regime that is a red line for the world, [italics mine] what would that mean in terms of response and humanitarian and medical emergency assistance, and of course, what needs to be done to secure those stocks from every being used, or from falling into the wrong hands.

It appears that where Obama deviated from script was in omitting “for the world” and substituting “for us.” …

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Out of the spot light, House IRS investigators have been grinding out the work. WSJ Editors comment.

Congress’s investigation into the IRS targeting of conservatives has been continuing out of the Syria headlines, and it’s turning up news. Emails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee between former Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner and her staff raise doubts about IRS claims that the targeting wasn’t politically motivated and that low-level employees in Cincinnati masterminded the operation.

In a February 2011 email, Ms. Lerner advised her staff—including then Exempt Organizations Technical Manager Michael Seto and then Rulings and Agreements director Holly Paz—that a Tea Party matter is “very dangerous,” and is something “Counsel and [Lerner adviser] Judy Kindell need to be in on.” Ms. Lerner adds, “Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.”

That’s a different tune than the IRS sang in May when former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller said the agency’s overzealous enforcement was the work of two “rogue” employees in Cincinnati. When the story broke, Ms. Lerner suggested that her office had been unaware of the pattern of targeting until she read about it in the newspaper. “So it was pretty much we started seeing information in the press that raised questions for us, and we went back and took a look,” she said in May. …

Carol Platt Liebau has more.

… Perhaps one of the most sinister statements in the newly-released Lerner emails is the following: After receiving an article about Democrats complaining about anonymous donors financing attack ads against them, Lerner wrote, “”Perhaps the (Federal Election Commission) will save the day.” 

Hm.  So is it a coincidence, as reported here on Townhall, that Lois Lerner colluded with a lawyer from the FEC to try to influence the record before the FEC — at least twice — and illegally sharing confidential information?  The answer has always been obvious; now it is increasingly so.

The more the facts in the IRS targeting scandal emerges, the more obvious it becomes that this was a partisan operation, in which law-abiding Americans were discriminated against based only on their political views. …

In City Journal, Steve Malanga asks “Who will audit the auditors?”

The Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups has revived old fears about the agency’s vast taxing and auditing powers, so easy to abuse. But the IRS isn’t alone in holding those powers. Across the country, states and municipalities have endowed thousands of revenue and audit bureaucracies with similar capabilities. Critics complain that officials use these entities to harass enemies and help allies. The evidence makes clear just how well-founded those concerns are—especially since these agencies typically receive far less scrutiny than the IRS does.

Under the administration of Democratic governor Bill Richardson, New Mexico’s labor department sparked controversy in 2006 for auditing the state’s Republican Party. The audit, launched shortly after the party criticized the governor harshly, was meant to examine whether it was complying with state laws on employment taxes. After initially claiming that a computer had randomly chosen the GOP for scrutiny, the state admitted that an employee of the labor department had selected the party. Under fire from state newspapers, the Richardson administration turned the audit over to a private firm. The controversy faded after the firm found the Republican Party “squeaky clean,” as the Santa Fe New Mexican put it, though the paper noted that the audit was “more harassment than just due vigilance on the labor department’s part.” …

While the IRS was harassing tea party groups, they were assisting obama voters. Investor’s Business Daily with the story.

At the same time the IRS harassed Republican nonprofit groups during the 2012 political campaign, it selectively advised black churches and other Democrat nonprofits on how far they can go in campaigning for President Obama and other Democrats.

This raw exercise in political favoritism has not been reported in the context of the still-smoldering IRS scandal, in which the agency in 2012 audited big GOP donors and blocked Tea Party groups trying to obtain tax-exempt status as part of what House investigators suspect was an effort to re-elect the president.

But that same year, top officials with both the IRS and Justice Department — including the IRS commissioner and attorney general — met in Washington with several dozen prominent black church ministers representing millions of voters to brief them on how to get their flocks out to vote without breaking federal tax laws.

The “summit” on energizing the black vote in houses of worship was hosted by the Democrat-controlled Congressional Black Caucus inside the U.S. Capitol on May 30, 2012.

The Daily Caller has an example of how the IRS may have been recruited by greens to audit a land owner.

The Inspector General of the U.S. Treasury Department is investigating whether an environmental group pressured the Internal Revenue Service into auditing a Virginia farmer and tea partier, according to attorneys, policy analysts and other sources familiar with the case.

But the investigation has not discouraged IRS auditors, who are expanding their audit of Martha Boneta in what has become a high-profile dispute over property rights.

Boneta told The Daily Caller in an interview that she has been asked to submit “reams and reams” of new information in addition to the original audit request.

Boneta said that she and her legal representatives recently met with a special agent of the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Information (TIGTA) “on two separate days, for almost five hours.”

While Boneta would not comment on the details of the meeting, she did say the “close coordination and collusion” between the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) and the FauquierCounty government in Virginia could become central to the ongoing investigation. The meetings with the special agent took place earlier this summer and with witnesses as recently as this past week. …

And to top off the day, World News Daily has a story on how the IRS is beating up veterans.

The Internal Revenue Service, which has been caught harassing conservative organizations with demands for personal ideological details, such as the content of prayers, now is doing the same to veterans’ groups.

Louis J. Celli Jr., director of the National Legislative Division at the American Legion, spoke exclusively with WND about the developing problem.

He said that officials at American Legion headquarters have been getting calls from a number of the group’s outposts complaining of IRS agents who, during the course of their inspections, were demanding personal information.

The information, Celli said, includes birth dates and Social Security numbers of members.

Celli said one outpost in Texas, where officials were unable to comply immediately with the requirements, was fined $12,000, or $1,000 for each of 12 days it failed to produce the documents the IRS demanded.

Celli lamented that such actions mean the American Legion will have less money for many of the veteran-related programs it sponsors. …

The Blaze has some good news about citizens fighting back against traffic cameras.

Citizens across the country have grumbled about speed cameras, but someone in Wicomico County, Maryland appears to be making a physical — and political — point.

A photo posted on the blog SBY News shows a traffic camera that’s been spray-painted over the lens and tagged with the year 1776, the year the U.S. declared independence.

“Good for them!” blog publisher Joe Albero wrote.

Some commenting on the post seem to agree. Here are a few:

Everytime I drive past one, I secretly wish someone would do that. I would gladly donate to their bail if they get caught.

I love it then the top it off 1776 nice touch

Next, surveillance cameras for the surveillance cameras. …

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Alluding to Bismarck saying “there is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America”, Craig Pirrong posts on Syria.

Second terms seldom end well.  Some implode in scandal (Lewinsky; Iran-Contra; Watergate).  Some dissolve into incoherence, as second raters take over key positions.  Some are overwhelmed by events, frequently of their own making, combined with exhaustion (Bush comes to mind especially).  All are bedeviled by the end-game problem.  Many-especially Republican administrations-are particularly hampered by a hostile press.   Modestly successful first term administrations should take a lesson from James K. Polk and rest on their laurels, but he is the exception that proves the rule.

But I am hard pressed to find a historical precedent for the public humiliation of a president so early in his second term, due to his own strategic foreign policy blunders, as we are witnessing with Obama at present. …

… There are those who take glee in Obama’s distress.  I am not one of them.  Through his blunders he has humiliated his office, and humiliated the country.  His personal distress is irrelevant: the damage to the nation far too relevant indeed.  He has emboldened our enemies-and yes, Russia is an enemy and views the US as its enemy-and dismayed our friends.  Radical and dangerous forces-notably the Iranians-will be tempted to take advantage, and allies disconcerted by Obama’s fecklessness and confusion (Israel, Saudi Arabia) may feel impelled to act on their own in self-defense, despairing of the ability and willingness of the US to act decisively.  Such a situation is fraught with danger, especially with a wounded president.  That the wounds are self-inflicted makes it all the more discouraging.

I noted the other day that Obama sounded an uncertain trumpet on Syria.  Demons have responded to that call.  I have no idea how he retrieves the situation, especially when he must rely on pompous buffoons  like Kerry and Hagel and Biden for advice and execution.

I have often said I hope Bismarck was right about the special providence that America shares with fools and drunkards. Putin certainly doesn’t believe in it, but never have we needed more for this to be true.  Obama has definitely proven himself to be no Bismarck, but he had better hope Bismarck was right.

Daniel Henninger calls it the “Laurel and Hardy Presidency.” 

After writing in the London Telegraph that Monday was “the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began,” former British ambassador Charles Crawford asked simply: “How has this happened?”

On the answer, opinions might differ. Or maybe not. A consensus assessment of the past week’s events could easily form around Oliver Hardy’s famous lament to the compulsive bumbler Stan Laurel: “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten us into!”

In the interplay between Barack Obama and John Kerry, it’s not obvious which one is Laurel and which one is Hardy. But diplomatic slapstick is not funny. No one wants to live in a Laurel and Hardy presidency. In a Laurel and Hardy presidency, red lines vanish, shots across the bow are word balloons, and a display of U.S. power with the whole world watching is going to be “unbelievably small.”

The past week was a perfect storm of American malfunction. Colliding at the center of a serious foreign-policy crisis was Barack Obama’s manifest skills deficit, conservative animosity toward Mr. Obama, Republican distrust of his leadership, and the reflexive opportunism of politicians from Washington to Moscow.

It is Barack Obama’s impulse to make himself and whatever is in his head the center of attention. By now, we are used to it. But this week he turned himself, the presidency and the United States into a spectacle. We were alternately shocked and agog at these events. Now the sobering-up has to begin. …

Let’s turn to the left/liberal media. What does Time’s Joe Klein think?

It has been one of the more stunning and inexplicable displays of presidential incompetence that I’ve ever witnessed. The failure cuts straight to the heart of a perpetual criticism of the Obama White House: that the President thinks he can do foreign policy all by his lonesome. This has been the most closely held American foreign-policy-making process since Nixon and Kissinger, only there’s no Kissinger. There is no éminence grise—think of someone like Brent Scowcroft—who can say to Obama with real power and credibility, Mr. President, you’re doing the wrong thing here. Let’s consider the consequences if you call the use of chemical weapons a “red line.” Or, Mr. President, how can you talk about this being “the world’s red line” if the world isn’t willing to take action? …

… The public presentation of his policies has been left to the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry, whose statements had to be refuted twice by the President in the Syria speech. Kerry had said there might be a need for “boots on the ground” in Syria. (Obama: No boots.) Kerry had said the military strikes would be “unbelievably small.” (Obama: We don’t do pinpricks.) Worst of all, Kerry bumbled into prematurely mentioning a not-very-convincing Russian “plan” to get rid of the Syrian chemical weapons. This had been under private discussion for months, apparently, the sort of dither that bad guys—Saddam, the Iranians, Assad—always use as a delaying tactic. Kerry, in bellicose mode, seemed to be making fun of the idea—and the Russians called him on it. Kerry’s staff tried to walk back this megagaffe, calling it a “rhetorical exercise.” As it stands, no one will be surprised if the offer is a ruse, but the Administration is now trapped into seeing it through and gambling that it will be easier to get a congressional vote if it fails.

Which gets close to the Obama Administration’s problem: there have been too many “rhetorical exercises,” too many loose pronouncements of American intent without having game-planned the consequences. This persistent problem—remember the President’s needless and dangerous assertion that his policy wasn’t the “containment” of the Iranian nuclear program—has metastasized into a flurry of malarkey about Syria. It’s been two years since he said, “Assad must step aside.” He announced the “red line” and “the world’s red line.” And now, “We can stop children from being gassed.” The Chinese believe that the strongest person in the room says the least.

Jennifer Rubin lists 10 reasons why it is now worse.

1. His Russia gambit lost whatever conservative support he had built up for a strike on Syria.

2. We are now at Vladimir Putin’s mercy, which he is already exploiting skillfully. The Russian despot took to the pages of the New York Times to deplore American exceptionalism and to denounce potential U.S. action. (He used the same “the rebels are all jihadists” claptrap that American isolationists use.) He accused the rebels of using the chemical weapons, an ominous sign for a chemical weapons exchange. Even worse was the pathetic U.S. response: “That’s all irrelevant. He put this proposal forward and he’s now invested in it. That’s good. That’s the best possible reaction. He’s fully invested in Syria’s CW disarmament and that’s potentially better than a military strike — which would deter and degrade but wouldn’t get rid of all the chemical weapons. He now owns this. He has fully asserted ownership of it and he needs to deliver.” This is delusional and frightening, to be blunt. Obama’s international humiliation will continue.

3. The media figured out quickly the Russia gambit is ridiculous and therefore is unlikely to treat the morass to follow as anything other than Obama’s fault. …

Roger Simon posts on Putin’s NY Times column.

… Down with American exceptionalism, but up with the Lord. What a righteous man. And good for the New York Times, known for its atheistic tendencies, to give him space to express these views and make the world safer for humanity.

But it shouldn’t end here. The Times should open up more space to President Putin. Perhaps he should be featured in the sports and travel sections. He is known to be a great hunter and fisherman. As recently as this year he apparently caught the biggest pike on record. Who knows? He may out swim Mao yet, or even Diana Nyad.

So he is just the man for the New York Times — an international liar who has just made a complete fool of the president of the United States and shamed our country in the process while putting into question the entire future of the Middle East.

For his next column, perhaps he can finally tell us what happened in Benghazi. Sadly, there’s a better chance he’ll do it than our own administration.

Max Boot says Putin is spiking the football.

More than 100,000 dead in Syria—a figure growing by 5,000 or so deaths every month. Millions more displaced. Chemical weapons used. Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah on the offensive. The United States humiliated and powerless on the sidelines. The situation in Syria is about as grim as you can imagine—and Vladimir Putin is loving every minute of it. That impression comes across very strongly in his New York Times op-ed today in which he takes a typically brazen victory lap after having wrestled global leadership, at least temporarily, away from a confused and hesitant American president.

As usual with Putin, he overdoes it—the man who parades around bare-chested to show off his pecs does not know the meaning of “subtlety.” Putin begins by claiming that only the UN Security Council can authorize the use of military force. Funny, I don’t remember the UN resolutions justifying Putin’s attack on Georgia in 2008 or his homicidal campaign in Chechnya which has killed tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands. …

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Here’s some of our favorites on Tuesday’s speech. Peter Wehner is first.

Max Boot does an excellent job explaining why the new Russian proposal on removing chemical weapons from Syria is almost certainly a mirage. Not surprisingly, however, President Obama is eager to embrace it. After all, doing so will avoid Congress rejecting his request to use military strikes against Syria–and the de facto collapse of his presidency.

But this will come at quite a high cost. Russia is now establishing itself as the preeminent power in the region, having displaced the United States. American prestige and credibility lie in ruins. President Obama has succeeded in undermining the moderate rebels he promised to assist. He has strengthened the murderous anti-American regime he declared he wanted gone. A despot who used chemical weapons and committed, in the words of Secretary of State John Kerry, a “moral obscenity” will now escape any punishment (which after all was the stated purpose of Obama’s threats to strike Syria). And Iran and Hezbollah, having (along with Russia) come to the aid of Assad, will emerge from this whole thing in a much stronger position.

It is hard to overstate how much of a debacle Syria has been for America. The damage we have sustained is deep and durable. The balance of power has shifted dramatically against America. It may take decades for us to undo the damage, if even that is possible.

This period may well turn out to be a hinge moment in the Middle East–and one of the worst diplomatic chapters in modern American history. Such is the cost to a nation when a community organizer is promoted to the job of commander in chief.

Peggy Noonan is next.

… A serious foreign-policy intellectual said recently that Putin’s problem is that he’s a Russian leader in search of a Nixon, a U.S. president he can really negotiate with, a stone player who can talk grand strategy and the needs of his nation, someone with whom he can thrash it through and work it out. Instead he has Obama, a self-besotted charismatic who can’t tell the difference between showbiz and strategy, and who enjoys unburdening himself of moral insights to his peers.

But Putin has no reason to want a Syrian conflagration. He is perhaps amused to have a stray comment by John Kerry be the basis for a resolution of the crisis. The hidden rebuke: It means that when Putin met with Obama at the G-20 last week Obama, due to his lack of competence, got nothing. But a stray comment by the Secretary of State? Sure, why not rub Obama’s face in it.

All this, if it is roughly correct, is going to make the president’s speech tonight quite remarkable. It will be a White House address in which a president argues for an endeavor he is abandoning. It will be a president appealing for public support for an action he intends not to take.

We’ve never had a presidential speech like that! …

Jennifer Rubin weighs in.

… The president is paralyzed because the first part of his argument, one which conservatives wholeheartedly agree with, does not match his call for inaction or, in the best case scenario, a Russian brokered deal.

Gone is the demand that Assad “must go.” Gone is any penalty for using chemical weapons. Gone is the demonstration of resolve meant to signal seriousness about chemical weapons. Gone is the notion that we care about the plight of Syrians or that 100,000 dead stir something beyond empty rhetoric. Gone is any deterrent effect to Iran. By throwing the ball to Congress and then to Russia, Obama has effectively taken the use of force off the table, letting the Russians and Assad set the ground rules. From a moral and geopolitical standpoint, this is a debacle that will extend throughout the Middle East and beyond.

A decade of war is not ending; it’s our willingness to move events in our direction and protect American interests and values that has. It will be a minor miracle if Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon in the next 3 years. Conservative hawks and liberal interventionists aren’t the only ones who should be concerned about Russian dominance in the Middle East. I hate to break it to those trying to wriggle out of doing anything about Assad, but even Obama admits we have vital national interests in the region. The president just isn’t willing to act to protect them.

Craig Pirrong from a few days ago.

Do we have the dumbest foreign policy team in history?

First, SecState Kerry advertises that any strikes on Syria will be “unbelievably small.”

This is going to deter who from doing what, exactly?  This is what I’ve been on about ever since the to-ing and fro-ing about how little we could get away with doing in Syria started.  It will have no deterrent effect, and if it sends a signal, it will be one of utter fecklessness.  They are rolling in the aisles in Damascus, Moscow, and Tehran.

Then Kerry suggests that Syria could avoid a US strike by putting its chemical weapons under international control.

That’s bad enough-how could we ever know he put them all under international control?  But it’s worse.  When Lavrov and Assad jumped at this, Kerry said that his proposal was merely “rhetorical.”

Again.  Not from The Onion.

I am tired after a long day, and tired of watching this display of incompetence.  I will just point out these things, and presume that the self-evident idiocy means that further comment is unnecessary.

Now some folks from the certified left/liberal media. Maureen Dowd is first.

Vladimir Putin, who keeps Edward Snowden on a leash and lets members of a riotous girl band rot in jail, has thrown President Obama a lifeline.

The Russian president had coldly brushed back Obama on Snowden and Syria, and only last week called John Kerry a liar.

Now, when it is clear Obama can’t convince Congress, the American public, his own wife, the world, Liz Cheney or even Donald “Shock and Awe” Rumsfeld to bomb Syria — just a teensy-weensy bit — Pooty-Poot (as W. called him) rides, shirtless, to the rescue, offering him a face-saving way out? If it were a movie, we’d know it was a trick. We can’t trust the soulless Putin — his Botox has given the former K.G.B. officer even more of a poker face — or the heartless Bashar al-Assad. By Tuesday, Putin the Peacemaker was already setting conditions.

Just as Obama and Kerry — with assists from Hillary and some senators — were huffing and puffing that it was their military threat that led to the breakthrough, Putin moved to neuter them, saying they’d have to drop their military threat before any deal could proceed. The administration’s saber-rattling felt more like knees rattling. Oh, for the good old days when Obama was leading from behind. Now these guys are leading by slip-of-the-tongue.

Amateur hour started when Obama dithered on Syria and failed to explain the stakes there. It escalated last August with a slip by the methodical wordsmith about “a red line for us” — which the president and Kerry later tried to blur as the world’s red line, except the world was averting its eyes.

Obama’s flip-flopping, ambivalent leadership led him to the exact place he never wanted to be: unilateral instead of unified. …

Now The New Republic.

 This, apparently, is how diplomacy happens these days: Someone makes an off-hand remark at a press conference and triggers an international chain reaction that turns an already chaotic and complex situation completely on its head, and gives everyone a sense that, perhaps, this is the light at the end of the indecision tunnel….

… What happened was Kerry went off message and, as has been his wont as Secretary of State, off the reservation, and violated the cardinal rule of official press conferences: He answered a hypothetical question in a hypothetical way. He blurted out a pie-in-the-sky, hyperbolic idea—getting rid of “every single bit” of the chemical weapons scattered across Syria “in the next week”—but everyone seized on it as a realistic proposal. It’s not.  …

… There are two clear winners in this slow-motion train wreck, and they are not Obama or Kerry. They are Assad and Putin. Both wanted, for their own reasons, to avert a military strike, and a military strike was averted. Putin insisted on a diplomatic solution while doing everything to make a diplomatic solution impossible, and now he gets his phony, unenforceable diplomatic solution. Assad wanted to go on killing his opposition, and he will continue to do so.

Obama, on the other hand, found himself constantly check-mated, either by his own hand, or, this time, by Kerry’s. First, he drew a red line on chemical weapons, seemingly by accident. Then, he all but ignored chemical weapons use by Assad until the evidence forced itself on the world. Then he agonized on whether to act, while Dempsey and the Pentagon rolled him, leaking their military plans to anyone who would listen, “probably,” said one insider, “because they didn’t want to act.” Then, he talked about how limited the strikes would be, all while Assad moved his men and his guns into residential areas and the Russians moved their ships in. Then, out of nowhere, he decided to take it to Congress. “The president says that he’s going to launch strikes and then, suddenly, he’s going to Congress. It’s probably one of the more incredible things I’ve ever seen,” McCain told me. “We were all dumbfounded,” said another Senate staffer.

Then came the persuasion of Congress, a legislative body that can’t even pass a farm bill, or a gun-control measure favored by a crushing majority of the American people. The president didn’t call Congress back, so instead, congressmen and senators got spend nearly two weeks marinating not in the intelligence, but in the vehement opposition of their constituents. Those that were in town—like the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—were rushed through the process of putting together a resolution before they even heard the classified briefing. Others, relative moderates like Republicans Saxby Chambliss and Kelly Ayotte who would normally support such a measure, complained that the briefings were vague and short on specifics. 

Obama, meanwhile, took off for Sweden, and, as the town halls roiled with anger, put off his address to the country for the following week. While abroad, he managed to further humiliate himself in the eyes of Putin, who already sees him as weak. Obama, having just called off his bilateral summit with Putin because Russia granted asylum to Edward Snowden, went ahead and met with Putin anyway. It was a pointless meeting—”We both stuck to our guns,” Putin said afterwards—but in Russia, the message was unmistakable: Putin is stronger, and Putin won. …

Andy Borowitz, another lib, can’t stop with his spoofs.

(The Borowitz Report)—Secretary of State John Kerry said today that he was “shocked and flabbergasted” that the Russians heeded his suggestion about Syria’s chemical weapons, telling reporters, “After four decades in public life, this is the first time someone has taken me seriously.”

“Whether as a senator, a Presidential candidate, or Secretary of State, I’ve devoted countless hours to thunderous and droning speeches that people have consistently tuned out,” he said. “So naturally, to be listened to all of a sudden came as something of a shock.”

But after the novelty of not being ignored wore off, Mr. Kerry said, the Russians’ assertion that he had said something worth paying attention to “seemed like a trick.”

“You mean to tell me that after decades of spewing mind-numbing rhetoric I all of a sudden blurted out an idea worth acting on?” he said. “It doesn’t pass the smell test.”

At the White House, spokesman Jay Carney welcomed the Russians’ engagement in the Syria crisis, but warned that “further actions based on John Kerry’s remarks will not be tolerated.”

“We ask the Russians to be constructive participants in this process,” he said. “And taking John Kerry seriously is a clear violation of international norms.”

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Today’s issue of Pickings is filled with humor. First off we have the Daily Mail, UK with a story about the growth of the ice cap in the Arctic. Looks like the earth has a new cooling period that makes Al Gore look like the fool he is.

A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent. …

… Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading. …

… Only six years ago, the BBC reported that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer by 2013, citing a scientist in the US who claimed this was a ‘conservative’ forecast. Perhaps it was their confidence that led more than 20 yachts to try to sail the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to  the Pacific this summer. As of last week, all these vessels were stuck in the ice, some at the eastern end of the passage in Prince Regent Inlet, others further west at Cape Bathurst.

Shipping experts said the only way these vessels were likely to be freed was by the icebreakers of the Canadian coastguard. According to the official Canadian government website, the Northwest Passage has remained ice-bound and impassable  all summer.

The BBC’s 2007 report quoted scientist  Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, who based his views on super-computer models and the fact that ‘we use a high-resolution regional model for the Arctic Ocean and sea ice’.

He was confident his results were ‘much more realistic’ than other projections, which ‘underestimate the amount of heat delivered to the sea ice’. Also quoted was CambridgeUniversity expert

Professor Peter Wadhams. He backed Professor Maslowski, saying his model was ‘more efficient’ than others because it ‘takes account of processes that happen internally in the ice’.

He added: ‘This is not a cycle; not just a fluctuation. In the end, it will all just melt away quite suddenly.’ …

Dilbert’s Blog weighs in on Syria.

… As a citizen, I am forced to form an opinion using nothing but the questionable “facts” emerging in the news, plus my own guesses and suspicions. How does one form an opinion in that environment?

In a situation with so much at stake and so little reliable information, I default to the following rule: If you don’t know which choice is right, pick the one that costs the least to implement. So I don’t support bombing Syria; it sounds expensive.

I want to be clear that I’m not recommending a course of action for the United States. I don’t have access to the information that the decision-makers have. All I’m saying is that the government has a credibility problem where money is involved, and lots of money is riding on the Syria decision. The whole thing smells like bullshit to me.

P. J. O’Rourke provides decisive moments in the history of barack obama in “I Came, I Saw, I Skedaddled.”

Julius Barack Caesar Obama
Crosses the Rubicon

I am crossing the Rubicon. Brrr, the water’s chilly. Deep, too. I’m going for a walk along the riverbank to look for a bridge. And I will cross the Rubicon as soon as the weather warms up. The die has been cast. That is, the deck has been shuffled. Or the Wheel of Fortune has been spun. And I’ll buy a vowel.

Christopher Barack Columbus Obama

Many prominent experts, including Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, maintain that the earth is flat. This is a debate I would like to have. Meanwhile, I have discovered a new route to France. …

Andy Borowitz has another spoof.

Hopes for a positive G20 summit crumbled today as President Obama blurted to Russia’s Vladimir Putin at a joint press appearance, “Everyone here thinks you’re a jackass.”

The press corps appeared stunned by the uncharacteristic outburst from Mr. Obama, who then unleashed a ten-minute tirade at the stone-faced Russian President.

“Look, I’m not just talking about Snowden and Syria,” Mr. Obama said. “What about Pussy Riot? What about your anti-gay laws? Total jackass moves, my friend.”

As Mr. Putin narrowed his eyes in frosty silence, Mr. Obama seemed to warm to his topic. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Leno: President Obama has canceled a California political fundraiser over Syria. Wow! When Obama cancels a fundraiser, you know this is serious. We’re in Code Red!

Leno: If President Obama really wants to hurt Syria’s Assad, instead of missiles he should send over Obama’s economic advisers.

Conan: Diana Nyad set a new record swimming from Cuba to Florida. The 64-year-old swimmer also set a record as the “youngest person to ever set foot in Florida.”

Letterman: Have you taken down your Labor Day decorations yet? Labor Day honors working people by having them spend all day grilling burgers so they can return to work the next day grilling burgers.

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Roger Simon doesn’t want to go to war with a fool for a leader. 

Okay. I’m an idiot. What was I thinking? I apologize.

Any administration that could have the temerity to send the nauseating serial Benghazi prevaricator Susan Rice, on the anniversary of that event yet, to explain to Congress why our representatives should approve a strike on Syria not only should NOT get the aforesaid approval, they should be forbidden approval for anything more significant than the choice of wallpaper in the White House rest rooms — and even that I’m not so sure.

In earlier columns, I supported an attack on Syria because I abhor Bashar Assad and his (or his minions’) use of chemical weapons and because I have even less regard for his mentors, the Iranian mullahs. I wanted to discourage them both.

Well, naturally. Who wouldn’t?

But in my overweening contempt I overlooked — or more exactly chose to ignore — the obvious. We would be going to war with a blind man as our commander-in-chief. And I don’t mean a physically blind man like the Japanese samurai Zatoichi, whose heroic exploits were magnificent despite his infirmity, if you remember the film series. I mean a morally, psychologically and ideologically blind man incapable of coherent policy, action or even much logical thought on any matter of significance, let alone on such a crucial one with life and death at stake.

Maybe it took the the looming anniversary of the Benghazi tragedy — and the Theater of the Absurd mondo bizarro image of Susan Rice once again acting as a spokesperson — to remind me of that and knock sense into me, but I apologize to my readers. I should have known better. …

But, Norman Podhoretz things are working just the way president bystander wants.

It is entirely understandable that Barack Obama’s way of dealing with Syria in recent weeks should have elicited responses ranging from puzzlement to disgust. Even members of his own party are despairingly echoing in private the public denunciations of him as “incompetent,” “bungling,” “feckless,” “amateurish” and “in over his head” coming from his political opponents on the right.

For how else to characterize a president who declares war against what he calls a great evil demanding immediate extirpation and in the next breath announces that he will postpone taking action for at least 10 days—and then goes off to play golf before embarking on a trip to another part of the world? As if this were not enough, he also assures the perpetrator of that great evil that the military action he will eventually take will last a very short time and will do hardly any damage. Unless, that is, he fails to get the unnecessary permission he has sought from Congress, in which case (according to an indiscreet member of his own staff) he might not take any military action after all.

Summing up the net effect of all this, as astute a foreign observer as Conrad Black can flatly say that, “Not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and before that the fall of France in 1940, has there been so swift an erosion of the world influence of a Great Power as we are witnessing with the United States.”

Yet if this is indeed the pass to which Mr. Obama has led us—and I think it is—let me suggest that it signifies not how incompetent and amateurish the president is, but how skillful. His foreign policy, far from a dismal failure, is a brilliant success as measured by what he intended all along to accomplish. The accomplishment would not have been possible if the intention had been too obvious. The skill lies in how effectively he has used rhetorical tricks to disguise it. …

NY Post Editors point out the jobs report shows president bystander now has labor force participation rates worse than Jimmy’s malaise.

Jimmy Carter must be smiling: Another president has finally broken the record he had held for the worst rate of participation in the job market by American workers in modern times.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Friday job numbers show the nation’s “labor force participation rate” — i.e., the percentage of Americans over 16 who have jobs, or are looking for one — dipped to 63.2 percent.

That beats the sad record of 63.4 percent set in 1978, a harbinger of the Carter-era stagflation and malaise to come.

Yes, the unemployment rate last month ticked down a tenth of a point, to 7.3 percent. But that’s only slightly better than the 7.8 percent rate that prevailed when Obama first took office in 2009. …

More on the report from Michael Strain.

Today’s employment report is very disappointing.  Nonfarm payroll gains came in below expectations – payrolls grew by 169,000 jobs in August.  Worse still, revisions for June and July lowered gains for those months by a combined 74,000 jobs.  The three-month moving average of employment gains now stands at 148,000 new jobs per month.  At that rate, the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution’s jobs gap calculator reports that the jobs gap won’t close until after 2025.  That’s over twelve years from now.

The labor force participation rate fell to its lowest level since the late 1970s.  The rate of employment also fell.  While a drop in the unemployment rate – as happened this month; it’s down to a still-awful 7.3% – is usually good news, a labor force that shrinks in size along with a drop in the number of employed workers is nothing to celebrate.

The three-month moving average of payroll gains – a good measure because it smooths out noise from any one report – has been trending down since the start of the year. … 

… It’s important not to get lost in the statistics and politics, and to remember why all this matters.  Our badly damaged labor market is an economic crisis, yes, but it is first and foremast a moral, spiritual, human crisis. …

Digital Journal answers why dementia occurs more often in wealthier countries.

People living in ‘wealthy’ countries appear more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease due to greatly reduced contact with bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms. This leads to them having weaker immune systems.

This argument comes from researcher who state that they’ve found a significant relationship between a nation’s wealth and hygiene and the rate of Alzheimer’s in a population. …

We need to be wealthy since a saline drip (sea water) can cost $700. The NY Times reports.

… A Chinese-American toddler from Brooklyn and her 56-year-old grandmother, treated and released within hours from the emergency room at St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital, ran up charges of more than $4,000 and were billed for $1,400 — the hospital’s rate for the uninsured, even though the family is covered by a health maintenance organization under Medicaid, the federal-state program for poor people.

The charges included “IV therapy,” billed at $787 for the adult and $393 for the child, which suggests that the difference in the amount of saline infused, typically less than a liter, could alone account for several hundred dollars.

Tricia O’Malley, a spokeswoman for the hospital, would not disclose the price it pays per IV bag or break down the therapy charge, which she called the hospital’s “private pay rate,” or the sticker price charged to people without insurance. She said she could not explain why patients covered by Medicaid were billed at all.

Eventually the head of the family, an electrician’s helper who speaks little English, complained to HealthFirst, the Medicaid H.M.O. It paid $119 to settle the grandmother’s $2,168 bill, without specifying how much of the payment was for the IV. It paid $66.50 to the doctor, who had billed $606.

At White PlainsHospital, a patient with private insurance from Aetna was charged $91 for one unit of Hospira IV that cost the hospital 86 cents, according to a hospital spokeswoman, Eliza O’Neill.

Ms. O’Neill defended the markup as “consistent with industry standards.” She said it reflected “not only the cost of the solution but a variety of related services and processes,” like procurement, biomedical handling and storage, apparently not included in a charge of $127 for administering the IV and $893 for emergency-room services.

The patient, a financial services professional in her 50s, ended up paying $100 for her visit. “Honestly, I don’t understand the system at all,” said the woman, who shared the information on the condition that she not be named.

Dr. Frost, the anesthesiologist, spent three days in the same hospital and owed only $8, thanks to insurance coverage by United HealthCare. Still, she was baffled by the charges: $6,844, including $546 for six liters of saline that cost the hospital $5.16.

“It’s just absolutely absurd.” she said. “That’s saltwater.”  …

Tree Hugger reports on a pear tree still bearing fruit at age 383.

When the first European settlers stepped foot on Plymouth Rock in 1620, the landscape they encountered must have felt like the epitome of wildness. In time, of course, cottages and farmhouses, roads and footpaths would sprout up even there as ‘civilization’ took root. But little could they have guessed, from those fragile early shoots, that the whole wild continent would be tamed in just a few short centuries.

It may be hard to believe, however, but one of America’s earliest settlers is still alive today — and still bearing fruit after 383 years.

Among the first wave of immigrants to the New World was an English Puritan named John Endicott, who in 1629, arrived to serve as the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Charged with the task of establishing a welcoming setting for new arrivals upon the untamed land, the Pilgrim leader set about making the area around modern-day Salem as homey as possible.

In approximately 1630, as his children watched on, Endicott planted one of the first fruit trees to be cultivated in America: a pear sapling imported from across the Atlantic. He is said to have declared at the time: “I hope the tree will love the soil of the old world and no doubt when we have gone the tree will still be alive.” …

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We missed an article on the 50th of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, American race relations scholars, try to understand why leaders of the African American community are so negative on the prospects for racial harmony in our country. Their classic volume, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, can be purchased here.

Black voices of gloom are a staple in reporting on race. “Dreams unfulfilled” is how the Washington Post describes the racial landscape as the nation approaches the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s electrifying address delivered from the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. The reporter found blacks who had witnessed the speech half a century ago. “I had hoped when I was a young man that we’d see a lot of progress by now,” said Donald Cash, a D.C. resident who is now 68. “But I think we’re going backwards,” he declared.

There will be commemorative weeklong events, as there should be. A march on Saturday, August 31, is billed as “National Action to Reclaim the Dream.” In retrospect, was Dr. King’s dream just wishful thinking, bound to disappoint? “We cannot walk alone,” he said. The destiny of blacks and whites is inextricably intertwined. But how to walk together? Sobering numbers from a recent PewResearchCenter survey suggest an enduring racial chasm. Seventy percent of blacks believe they are treated less fairly than whites in dealings with the police. Almost as many (68 percent) distrust courts. Fifty-four percent perceive inequality in places of work, and 51 percent in the public schools. Forty-eight percent doubt the fairness of the electoral system, and 44 percent think the stores and restaurants they patronize are unfair to them because of their race.

Racial optimists that we have long been, we find these numbers staggering. Evidently, blacks believe they don’t get a fair break anywhere — a conviction hard to understand for those of us old enough to remember the days of brutal subjugation of blacks in the South and of a North where de facto segregation was everywhere apparent. …

One amusing anecdote in the Thernstroms’ book was the story of a rural Georgia county who at the advent of the auto, considered having two road systems – one for whites and one for blacks. A good illustration of the actual hardships visited on blacks was the Negro Motorist Green Book published by a Harlem letter carrier on what establishments would accommodate blacks. WaPo had the story.

African Americans traveling to the nation’s capital on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington will need little more than a GPS device to find their way. But 50 years ago, they might have needed a book to navigate through the racial prejudice of the times.

During the Jim Crow era, laws restricted black Americans from patronizing gas stations, restaurants and hotels.

So Harlem-based letter carrier Victor Green published the “Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide” in 1936, when travel was not only inconvenient but embarrassing and potentially deadly.

“The Green Book,” as it came to be called, was a game changer, with its listings of black-friendly establishments.

“It was like the African American AAA Travel Guide,” said writer Calvin Ramsey, who wrote a play and a children’s book about the publication.

“To most people, Washington, D.C., is technically a Southern city,” Ramsey said. “But for people in the South, going to the march was ‘going north.’ People going by car or bus relied on the Green Book.” …

Forbes OpEd on the California opportunities in fracking.

… In the 1960s, when our oil production was at its height, the California economy was the envy of the nation. While production now is half what it once was, the state’s well-being still benefits greatly from oil, whether in Bakersfield, Long Beach, or even Beverly Hills, where oil pumps hidden inside large buildings create prosperity by the barrel.

Why has oil production halved? The same reason that our economy has become a nightmare—political policies that make it practically impossible to do business in California. When I asked Dr. Andrew Kleit, professor of Energy and Environmental Economics at Penn State University, about California’s woes on a recent podcast, he responded, “California has very challenging environmental regulations . . . you simply can’t build new things.”

Thus, we find ourselves in desperate but well-deserved straits. If it weren’t for our weather, who knows how many more productive businesses would have fled?

California urgently needs what it has lost all right to ask for: some breakthrough industry to set up shop here and somehow create trillions in wealth and millions of jobs.

And yet the oil industry is proposing to do exactly that—through revolutionary shale oil technology. …

Mark Steyn on the failure of Muslim culture and the neverland where we cannot speak of that failure.

In 2010, the bestselling atheist Richard Dawkins, in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post, called the pope “a leering old villain in a frock” perfectly suited to “the evil corrupt organization” and “child-raping institution” that is the Catholic Church. Nobody seemed to mind very much.

Three years later, in a throwaway Tweet, Professor Dawkins observed that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than TrinityCollege, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” This time round, the old provocateur managed to get a rise out of folks. Almost every London paper ran at least one story on the “controversy.” The Independent‘s Owen Jones fumed, “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.” The best-selling author Caitlin Moran sneered, “It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again. Something’s gone weird.” The Daily Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers beseeched him, “Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging.”

None of the above is Muslim. Indeed, they are, to one degree or another, members of the same secular liberal media elite as Professor Dawkins. Yet all felt that, unlike Dawkins’s routine jeers at Christians, his Tweet had gone too far. It’s factually unarguable: Trinity graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10. If you remove Yasser Arafat, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the other winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Islam can claim just four laureates against Trinity’s 31 (the college’s only peace-prize recipient was Austen Chamberlain, brother of Neville). Yet simply to make the observation was enough to have the Guardian compare him to the loonier imams and conclude that “we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.” …

Along comes Breitbart with an illustration of Muslim backwardness.

A stork once detained by Egyptian authorities on suspicion of being a winged spy has been found dead.

Mahmoud Hassib, the head of Egypt’s southern protected areas, said Saturday that local residents found the dead bird on an island in the Nile, south of the ancient city of Aswan.

In August, a local resident found the stork in Egypt’s Qena governorate, some 450 kilometers (280 miles) southeast of Cairo. Both he and police were suspicious of the European wildlife tracker found on it. Authorities later let the bird go.

However, controversy trails the bird into death. An Egyptian wildlife organization claimed on its Facebook page the bird was “eaten by local villagers.” Hassib denied that the bird had been eaten, though he didn’t know an exact cause of death.

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Steve Hayward at Power Line with a prescient Mencken quote.

Way back in 1920, the great H.L. Mencken offered the following forecast for the future of the presidency:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Behold the proof: Barack Obama.

Jonah Goldberg is first up trying to explain US Syria policy.

… So from the vantage point of foreign brutes, bullies, and buffoons, it’s understandable that America’s methods could be confused for stupidity. This is why I love the old expression, “America can choke on a gnat, but swallow a tiger whole.”

So I am trying very hard to hold onto this perspective as I watch the president of the United States behave in a way you don’t have to be a pan-Arab autocrat to think is incredibly stupid.

Where to begin? Perhaps with Obama’s initial refusal to support the moderate rebels seeking to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, a puppet of Iran and bagman for Hezbollah. Or we might start with Obama’s refusal to support the Green Movement in Iran, which sought to overthrow the Iranian regime, which would have been a triumph for both our principles and our national interests.

These were odd choices, particularly given his decision to help depose Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, an indisputably evil man, but also a dictator who posed no threat, who abided by our demands to relinquish WMDs, and whose domestic death toll was a tiny fraction of Assad’s. …

 

… I understand the attraction the buddy system has for a man who, as a state legislator, perfected the art of voting “present” on hard questions. But it’s hard to see this as anything other than rank political cowardice.

The buck stopped with Truman. For Obama, the buck is kryptonite.

In Stockholm on Wednesday, the president said that the credibility of the world, America, Congress, and the international community is on the line. Everybody is on the hook for his red line, except for the one person who actually drew it.

I’d love to see the genius in that argument, but it looks like clear-cut stupidity to me. 

Charles Krauthammer says the president is not serious.

…Problem is, Obama promised U.S. weaponry three months ago and not a rifle has arrived. This time around, what seems in the making is a mere pinprick, designed to be, one U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times, “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”

That’s why Dempsey is so glum. That’s why U.S. allies are so stunned. There’s no strategy, no purpose here other than helping Obama escape self-inflicted humiliation.

This is deeply unserious. Unless Obama can show the country that his don’t-mock-me airstrike is, in fact, part of a serious strategic plan, Congress should vote no.

John McCain changed the administration’s authorization resolution to include, mirabile dictu, a U.S. strategy in Syria: to alter the military equation (against Assad). Unfortunately, Obama is not known for being bound by what Congress passes (see, for example: health care, employer mandate).

When Obama tells the nation what he told McCain and Lindsey Graham in private — that he plans to degrade Assad’s forces, upgrade the resistance and alter the balance of forces — Congress might well consider authorizing the use of force. But until then, it’s no.

Andrew Malcolm shares his thoughts.

You probably could have anticipated this. When President Obama gets in trouble, he either has no idea about the wrongdoing (think IRS, FBI). Or it was someone else’s fault. (You-know-who from Texas.)

Now, we know that the red line statement Obama made as president 381 days ago about how any Syrian use of chemical weapons “would change my calculus” wasn’t really Obama’s fault.

According to Obama, although it looked just like the American president standing at the little podium with no teleprompter in the White House Briefing Room, that modest man was actually speaking on behalf of the entire world.

“I didn’t set a red line; the world set a red line,” Obama claims.

Also, you should know that just because the president of the United States threatened some vague response on Syria’s President Bashar Assad should he use chemical weapons does not now put Obama’s credibility on the line should nothing adverse, in fact, happen to Assad’s regime.

This, henceforth, shall be known as Chicago Logic. Through Obama’s hindsight, what’s on the line now is the credibility of the world, which has thrice decided through the United Nations to do nothing about Assad’s chemical use. Like the Arab League. And Britain’s Parliament, which voted to join the “No’s” last week.

Also what’s also on the line, Obama declared at a Wednesday Stockholm news conference, is the credibility of the United States Congress, which until a couple of days ago had no clue it had any role in Obama’s red line drawing almost 13 months ago. …

Ann Coulter has a point of view.

Oh, how I long for the days when liberals wailed that “the rest of the world” hated America, rather than now, when the rest of the world laughs at us.

With the vast majority of Americans opposing a strike against Syria, President Obama has requested that Congress vote on his powers as commander in chief under the Constitution. The president doesn’t need congressional approval to shoot a few missiles into Syria, nor — amazingly — has he said he’ll abide by such a vote, anyway.

Why is Congress even having a vote? This is nothing but a fig leaf to cover Obama’s own idiotic “red line” ultimatum to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria on chemical weapons. The Nobel Peace Prize winner needs to get Congress on the record so that whatever happens, the media can blame Republicans.

No Republican who thinks seriously about America’s national security interests — by which I mean to exclude John McCain and Lindsey Graham — can support Obama’s “plan” to shoot blindly into this hornet’s nest. …

Peter Wehner tries to square the “I didn’t draw the red line.” comments.

… In this particular case, the president seems to have dissociative amnesia, apparently having forgotten that a year ago last month he did, in fact, draw a red line. (Note the use of the first-person pronouns by the president — “That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”) The president may have forgotten, too, that he promised that crossing this red line would be a “game changer” (it was not). That Assad had to go (Assad is still in power, stronger than before). That he promised to arm Syrian rebels (he hasn’t). That his “coalition of the willing” may include, if we’re lucky, one other country besides America. And that on the matter of the Use of Force Resolution he was against going to Congress before he was for going to Congress. 

The cause of Mr. Obama’s dissociation appears to be the psychological trauma induced by his multi-year fiasco in Syria. And in order to cope, we are seeing signs of anger, petulance, and hero syndrome and, as is always the case with this president, blame shifting. 

On a slightly more serious note, Mr. Obama’s presidency is being wrecked by reality. He’s being exposed at every turn, and in every crisis, as inept. He can’t handle that truth so he’s trying to distort it. …

More from Nile Gardiner in the Brit Telegraph.

… As Obama’s words made clear, he is himself 100 percent responsible for the ‘red line’ that has been laid down on Syria, a red line that he drew without much thought behind what it would entail. He made these remarks at the height of his presidential election campaign, after a year and a half of doing absolutely nothing about the crisis in Syria, no doubt in an effort to look tough and to demonstrate that he wasn’t ‘leading from behind.’

It is not America’s credibility that is on the line at the moment, or that of the United States Congress. It is the credibility of Barack Obama himself, who unwisely drew a line in the sand, and is now pushing for a military intervention in the Middle East without a clear strategy, while aggressively cutting defence spending and failing to demonstrate that a Syrian war is in the US national interest. And as I noted in an earlier piece, Mr. Obama is trying to drag America into war without the military support of key US allies, including Great Britain. The president has a grand coalition of two at present: himself and deeply unpopular French Socialist Francois Hollande. That is hardly an alliance that instills confidence at home, or fear into the hearts of America’s enemies abroad.

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We have a short history lesson today about Walter Duranty, a NY Times reporter who refused to report the early 30′s famine in Ukraine. He was the dean of the West’s reporters in the Soviet Union and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work, which was in many respects, outright lies. To this day, the Times includes his award in their brag. Last year the first Walter Duranty Prize for Mendacity in Journalism was awarded to Vogue Magazine for their adoring puff piece on the wife of Bashar Assad.  Power Line’s John Hinderaker posts on that award’s prescience. Pickerhead has two Duranty biographies in his library. One is titled Stalin’s Apologist. The other, his autobiography is titled I Write As I Please. True enough.

Last fall, PJ Media and the New Criterion teamed up to award the first-ever Walter Duranty Prize for mendacity in journalism. My wife and I attended the event, and I wrote about it here. You can read the principal speeches, in which the grand prize and two runner-up awards were given out, here. So, who won the Duranty Prize last October?

Vogue Magazine, and reporter Joan Juliet Buck and editor Anna Wintour, for their stunningly stupid cover story on the glamorous wife of Syria’s dictator: “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert.” Seriously. Claudia Rosett’s speech awarding the grand prize was hilarious; here are a few excerpts:

‘Styled as a profile of the first lady of Syria, Asma al-Assad, this article was a paragon of propaganda — a makeover of the Assad dictatorship, presenting Asma as the human face of President Bashar al-Assad’s rule: “glamorous, young and very chic.” ‘ …

 

…How could these people be so dumb? PJ Media ridiculed Anna Wintour for falling for the murderous Assad dictatorship, but after all: Wintour may be a political figure by virtue of her massive fundraising for Democratic Party candidates, but she isn’t the Secretary of State. Or the President. What we see here is a characteristic failing of liberals. They are easily seduced by glamour, and–always in the background of glamour–money. Why else do they keep voting for Kennedys with IQs in the 80s? Or wear Che Guevara t-shirts, because they think he’s cute? These people are suckers.

So congratulations to PJ Media and the New Criterion. Their first-ever Duranty Award was prophetic. With hindsight, it honored not just mendacity in journalism, but stupidity in foreign policy.

When Assad opposed W Bush the DC Dems were in Bashar/Love. Rowan Scarborough makes sure their statements don’t get flushed down the media memory hole.

The Obama national security team that wants to go to war with Syria and demonizes President Bashar Assad is the same group that, as senators, urged reaching out to the dictator.

As a bloc on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, President Obama, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Vice President Joseph R. Biden all opposed the George W. Bush administration’s playing tough with Mr. Assad.

None grew closer to Mr. Assad and promoted him in Washington more than Mr. Kerry.

“President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had,” Mr. Kerry, as a senator from Massachusetts, told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2011. He predicted that Mr. Assad would change for the better.

But that same month, pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in Syria that would lead to a civil war, unmasking Mr. Assad’s brutal tactics, including the Aug. 21 unleashing of nerve gas that killed more than 1,400 civilians.

Today, Mr. Kerry is a leading advocate for attacking Mr. Assad’s regime. On Friday, he called the man he once befriended a “thug and murderer.” …

John Fund on “president present.”

Washington is abuzz with talk about how much President Obama has damaged America’s credibility with his indecisiveness on Syria. It’s become accepted fact that Obama’s decision-making style resembles that of an academic convening an unruly seminar whose participants he largely disdains. What he is not is a decisive leader with the ability to bring disparate players together behind a common purpose.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. We had inklings of it a long time ago. Back when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton accused him of “taking a pass” on tough issues when he was in the Illinois state senate, a theme later picked up by Republicans. Its basis is the 129 times he voted “present.” On 36 of those occasions, he was the only one to vote present of the 60 senators. One of those occasions was in 1999, when he twice chose not to vote on a bill protecting sexual-assault victims from having the explicit details of their cases made public without “good cause.” Bonnie Grabenhofer, the president of the Illinois National Organization of Women at the time, said she endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2007 in part because “when we needed someone to take a stand, Senator Obama took a pass.”

Today President Obama’s chaotic indecisiveness is a big part of his challenge in getting both houses of Congress to approve military action in Syria. Republicans are strongly leaning against intervention at this point, but Obama’s real problem may be with Democrats. ABC News reports that several congressional Democrats pushed back against military action against Syria in a conference call with administration officials Monday. ..

And Ed Morrissey says the world has figured it out too.

One of the major arguments for intervention in Syria is that it will be a rescue mission for the credibility of the American presidency, if not for any other reason. John McCain has been making that point repeatedly over the last two weeks, insisting that a show of weakness now would be fatal to American interests in the region and to our alliances with the Arab world. Jake Tapper interviewed the newsman who got Barack Obama’s first televised interview in 2009 for Al-Arabiya, Hisham Melhem, who says that Obama’s credibility in the region has been on the wane for four years:

‘Arab allies now view Obama as “wobbly, indecisive, not strong enough,” said Washington bureau chief of al Arabiya television Hisham Melhem, who also conducted that interview with Obama back in 2009.

Obama’s style of leadership does not engage Arab leaders, and does not address regional issues, like Egypt, said Melhem.

But “everybody’s crying out for American leadership, the Turks, the Arabs, and the Europeans. And given the weaknesses of the Europeans, given the vote in the British Parliament, given the fact that NATO ally Turkey is unable to lead – everyone is looking for the United States to lead, and there is no leadership,” said Melhem.

“The United States is AWOL.” ‘

Of all the arguments for intervention in Syria, this is actually the only one with any merit at all. …

Here’s something different. Business Insider publishes the American impressions of a student from Mumbai, India who has studied computer science the last two years at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh.

Aniruddh Chaturvedi came from Mumbai to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn., where he is majoring in computer science. This past summer he interned at a tech company in Silicon Valley. During two years in the U.S., Chaturvedi has been surprised by various aspects of society, as he explained last year in a post on Quora. Chaturvedi offered his latest thoughts on America in an email to Business Insider.

The most surprising things about America:

Nobody talks about grades here. 

Everyone is highly private about their accomplishments and failures. Someone’s performance in any field is their performance alone. This is different compared to India where people flaunt their riches and share their accomplishments with everybody else.

The retail experience is nowhere near as fun/nice as it is in India. Because labor is cheap in India, there is always someone who will act as a “personal shopper” to assist you with holding your clothes, giving suggestions, etc. In America, on the other hand, even if you go to a Nordstrom or Bloomingdales, there is almost nobody to help you out while you’re shopping. Shopping in America is more of a commodity / chore than it is a pleasurable activity 

This may be biased/wrong because I was an intern, but at least in the tech world, nobody wants to put you under the bus for something that you didn’t do correctly or didn’t understand how to do. People will sit with you patiently till you get it. If you aren’t able to finish something within the stipulated deadline, a person on your team would graciously offer to take it off your plate.

The same applies to school. Before I came to the United States, I heard stories about how students at Johns Hopkins were so competitive with each other that they used to tear important pages from books in the library just so other students didn’t have access to it. In reality, I experienced the complete opposite. …

… Chaturvedi ended his post with a link to a video of “America F— Yeah” from the movie “Team America.” 

Weekly Standard review tears away some of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage” BS.

Fantasies of the “noble savage” are nothing new, of course. There were Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s state-of-nature imaginings in the 18th century, and something similar appears even in the ancient epic Gilgamesh. In 1580, Montaigne compared holy-warring Europeans (unfavorably) with Brazilian cannibals, and the phrase itself first turns up in English in John Dryden’s 1672 play The Conquest of Granada.

Typically, the idea is that the natural man is the virtuous man, living in small, happy, family groups, treading lightly upon Mother Earth, taking only what he needs, and returning himself gratefully to her enfolding bosom after, one supposes, a decently short interval. It’s become one of the left’s foundation myths, as well as a congenial foil to the modern free-market industrial culture it blames for many of the world’s woes.

Marlene Zuk now lends weight to some much-needed pushback. Although she doesn’t tackle the doubtful politics behind this striving for a primitive past, she does provide a welcome corrective to the “newspaper articles, morning TV, dozens of books, and self-help advocates promoting slow-food or no-cook diets, barefoot running, sleeping with our infants, and other measures large and small claim[ing] that it would be more natural, and healthier, to live more like our ancestors.” …

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Since the administration is owned by unions, we suppose it makes sense they would be hostile to school voucher programs. But, it is very sad because those programs primarily benefit black children. The Washington Post Editors opine on the perversity.

NINE OF 10 Louisiana children who receive vouchers to attend private schools are black. All are poor and, if not for the state assistance, would be consigned to low-performing or failing schools with little chance of learning the skills they will need to succeed as adults. So it’s bewildering, if not downright perverse, for the Obama administration to use the banner of civil rights to bring a misguided suit that would block these disadvantaged students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due. …

… Unfortunately, though, it is not a surprise from an administration that, despite its generally progressive views on school reform, has proven to be hostile — as witnessed by its petty machinations against D.C.’s voucher program — to the school choice afforded by private-school vouchers. Mr. White told us that from Day One, the five-year-old voucher program has been subject to unrelenting scrutiny and questions from federal officials. Louisiana parents are clamoring for the choice afforded by this program; the state is insisting on accountability; poor students are benefiting. The federal government should get out of the way.

The reasons for the administration’s about face in Syria are explained by Peter Wehner.

… This latest volte-face by the president is evidence of a man who is completely overmatched by events, weak and confused, and deeply ambivalent about using force. Yet he’s also desperate to get out of the corner he painted himself into by declaring that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would constitute a “red line.” As a result he’s gone all Hamlet on us. Not surprisingly, Obama’s actions are being mocked by America’s enemies and sowing doubt among our allies. (Read this New York Times story for more.)

What explains this debacle? It’s impossible for us to know all the reasons, but one explanation appears to be a CYA operation.

According to Politico, “At the very least, Obama clearly wants lawmakers to co-own a decision that he can’t back away from after having declared last year that Assad would cross a ‘red line’ if he used chemical weapons against his own people.” And the Washington Post reports:

Obama’s proposal to invite Congress dominated the Friday discussion in the Oval Office. He had consulted almost no one about his idea. In the end, the president made clear he wanted Congress to share in the responsibility for what happens in Syria. As one aide put it, “We don’t want them to have their cake and eat it, too.”

Get it? The president of the United States is preparing in advance to shift the blame if his strike on Syria proves to be unpopular and ineffective. He’s furious about the box he’s placed himself in, he hates the ridicule he’s (rightly) incurring, but he doesn’t see any way out.

What he does see is a political (and geopolitical) disaster in the making. And so what is emerging is what comes most naturally to Mr. Obama: Blame shifting and blame sharing. Remember: the president doesn’t believe he needs congressional authorization to act. He’s ignored it before. He wants it now. For reasons of political survival. To put it another way: He wants the fingerprints of others on the failure in Syria.

Rarely has an American president joined so much cynicism with so much ineptitude.

Last weekend, The NY Times had a major piece on ESPN and college football.

The nation’s annual rite of mayhem and pageantry known as the college football season begins this week, and Saturday will feature back-to-back-to-back marquee matchups.

At the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, last year’s national champions, the Alabama Crimson Tide, will battle the Virginia Tech Hokies in the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Classic.

Earlier in the day in Houston, Oklahoma State will play MississippiState in the Texas Kickoff Classic. And that night in Arlington, Tex., LouisianaState and Texas Christian will face off in the Cowboys Classic.

The games will not just be televised by ESPN. They are creations of ESPN — demonstrations of the sports network’s power over college football.

The teams were not even on each other’s schedules until ESPN, looking to orchestrate early-season excitement and ratings, went to work. The 2013 Chick-fil-A Kickoff Classic came together more than two years ago when one of the network’s programming czars noticed that Alabama was not scheduled to play this Labor Day weekend, brought the Tide on board and found a worthy opponent.

Far beyond televising games, ESPN has become the chief impresario of college football. By infusing the sport with billions of dollars it pays for television rights — more than $10 billion on college football in the last five years alone — ESPN has become both puppet-master and kingmaker, arranging games, setting schedules and bestowing the gift of nationwide exposure on its chosen universities, players and coaches.

The money and programming focused on college football by ESPN, as well as its competitors, have transformed the game, creating professionalized sports empires in the midst of academic institutions. …

 

… The power of television contracts has driven the recent fever of conference switching, as colleges forsake geographic loyalties in pursuit of more lucrative deals. In the last year, three universities jumped to the Atlantic Coast Conference for all sports: Pittsburgh, Syracuse and Louisville, none of them located within 200 miles of the Atlantic coast. Each stands to receive more than $16 million a year from the A.C.C.’s $3.6 billion contract with ESPN.

In the world of big-time college sports, universities like these are the winners. But there are colleges on the losing end, too — those stuck in conferences whose value is diminished by realignment, those that simply lack the resources to build teams good enough to break into the exposure game.

David Schmidly has watched what he calls the “massive increase in commercialization” of college sports as the president of several universities, most recently New Mexico, a public college with a respected men’s basketball program but a mere trickle of television dollars. As he sees it, the escalating television deals, especially at a time when states are slashing subsidies to public universities, have only widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots — between a “group of super-wealthy institutions and those that are trying to gnaw at the wood of the doors to get in.” …

 

… on many campuses today, it is impossible to ignore the anxiety about the trade-offs inherent in big-time sports. These concerns turned up repeatedly in a Times review of minutes from faculty senate meetings in recent years.

In March, the East Carolina chancellor, Steve Ballard, spoke in support of a faculty senate resolution urging Conference USA universities to review their travel policies to minimize disruption to classes and tests. According to a paraphrase in the minutes, Mr. Ballard “stated that it is absolutely against the interests of public education to let commercial entities like ESPN dictate the football schedules and therefore dictate the travel schedules and the class time available to our student athletes.”

Several years ago, Alan DeSantis, a communications professor who was then the faculty athletic representative at Kentucky, where basketball is king, decried the profusion of Tuesday and Wednesday night games.

“When did that ever become acceptable?” Mr. DeSantis asked. “It’s because there’s television revenue, and ESPN wants a night game.”

“And so for our amusement, for America’s amusement,” he added, “my students and your students are being yanked out of class to make us happy. And then they’re getting on the plane and we’re getting back at 3 in the morning exhausted and drained, and then we’re wondering why our kids aren’t performing better.”

In a recent interview, Mr. DeSantis said he had tried to persuade SEC presidents to agree on a rule barring athletes from missing more than 20 percent of classes because of games. He failed.

“It is like this insane arms race where no one wants to take their foot off the accelerator because everyone around them is upping the ante,” he said. …

 

… To Mr. Schmidly, the former president at New Mexico, “what’s emerging is a select set of 50 to 60 schools” and everyone else.

The winners, Mr. Schmidly said, “will all have stadiums that seat more than 50,000. They’ll all have TV contracts that bring in $20 million to $30 million a year. And because they have all that money, they will be good in all sports.”

Meanwhile, he added, “The rest of the institutions will be struggling because they don’t have the same set of opportunities.”

Over the years, the WAC (Western Athletic Conference) has been front and center in realignment. There are more than 20 former WAC programs. After BoiseState’s departure, the conference became much less desirable to ESPN, and its annual television fee plummeted to $1 million, tax statements show. That caused more teams to leave.

The WAC had a long and strong football tradition, but it could not weather the financial hit that followed BoiseState’s exit. In August 2012, its membership down to seven universities, the WAC announced that it would abandon football at year’s end.

This season, two former WAC universities, New MexicoState and Idaho, are stranded without a football conference, forced to cobble together schedules as independents, though they will be joining the Sun Belt Conference in 2014 for football.

Eight years ago, after ESPN televised a New MexicoState game, the university’s president, Michael V. Martin, explained the event’s significance to the faculty senate. “I will tell you, last Saturday we hit a home run,” he said, “not because we had the biggest crowd in the history of N.M.S.U. football, not because we had the first sellout before game day, but because we were on ESPN nationally.”

But Mr. Martin, who last year became the chancellor at ColoradoState, recently said: “ESPN treated the WAC as marginal cannon fodder. The contract was ridiculously small, and they made you play Thursday night at 8 if you wanted any exposure at all.”

Jeff Hurd, the WAC commissioner, said, “There is certainly a reality to the collegiate athletic world; the business side is very much there.” He added, “For lack of a better way to say it, it does become survival of the fittest.”