An unnamed State Dept. individual tells PowerLine Blog how bad things are in Georgia and how badly we are reacting, Asking if we had noticed that “Secretary Rice and President Bush’s responses have virtually mirrored Senator Obama’s recommendations,” he says, “It is heaps of shame on the current administration for letting a close ally dangle like this, and is instructive of just how bad an Obama foreign policy would be.”

He concludes:

In a way, this attack is very similar to the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. Iran terrorized a helpless group of people to humiliate the US. I believe that is what is going on here.

The US is typically slow to respond to shocks like this. We still have time to redeem ourselves. However, it appears that our foreign policy has taken a decisively Carter-esque turn. Iran has witnessed US acquiescence to their proxy Hezbollah taking over Lebanon. We’ve done little about their militias killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our enemies are learning that there is virtually nothing that will evoke an American response.

Let’s hope that this brings back some of some of that first-term President Bush. Otherwise, surely bad things will follow. President Bush sees himself as a bold, Trumanesque President. It’s time for a bold response like the Berlin Airlift.

Oh my.

“I’ve never seen the media as much entranced by a candidate as they were in my very first campaign, in 1960, when they were for JFK,” Robert Novak told Bill O’Reilly in June, weeks before his retirement after being diagnosed with brain tumor.

“But I’m telling you right now, the enchantment with Obama beats the JFK syndrome,” he said. “It is just such a feel-good atmosphere of my colleagues, my senior colleagues, people I’ve known for years. And I get it from some of the young people, too. They just feel this is such a wonderful thing, in the first place to have an African-American candidate, nominee, but also one that makes them feel so wonderful.”

John Fund, Novak’s first hire as a young reporter, comments:

Bob Novak rarely felt “wonderful” about any candidate, acknowledging to me at a dinner just last month that the only president he ever covered who proved to be a success was Ronald Reagan. “Put not your faith in princes,” he told me, paraphrasing the Bible. “Principles and ideas do matter a lot in the world, but politicians usually just use them on the way to disappointing you.”

It’s in WSJ.com’s Political Diary for last Tuesday, 8/5.

The Big O. is finally getting with it:

John of PowerLine Blog has an idea:

I doubt that it will catch on. If we do get to the point, though, that Obamamaniacs are walking down the street flashing the “O,” we non-cultists should think of a responsive gesture. Maybe something that only requires one hand.

Something to do with one of the fingers, I think.

This news release from Camp Obama caught my eye in the Sun-Times, page 3:

WASHINGTON — Intensified attacks by Republican John McCain on the character of his Democratic opponent have coincided with Barack Obama losing a 9 percentage point advantage in a national poll, which showed the candidates running dead even over the weekend.

Republicans at it again, eh?

McCain, who had vowed to avoid the kind of negative tactics that were used against him in the 2000 Republican primary contest with George W. Bush, began attacking Obama during the Illinois senator’s trip to Iraq and Afghanistan late last month.

The rat!

In the course of the McCain offensive, Obama’s lead in a Gallup Poll tracking survey slid from 9 percentage points July 26, when he returned from overseas, to nothing by Saturday, when the poll showed the candidates tied at 44 percent.

What about the politics of civility?

The four-term Arizona senator, who backed the war and claims experience with security and foreign-policy issues, charged that Obama’s promise to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office amounted to his having chosen to lose a war to promote his run for the presidency.

That’s what he claims?  Experience?  From 26 years in House and Senate, debating and voting on national issues?  And so on and so forth?  Please.

Read the rest of this beautiful making of silk purse from sow’s ear, proof positive of David Axelrod’s ability to get around any problem, in this case a measly nine-point drop in polls.

Wait!  Reader’s mistake!  I get to the end of this marvelous story by Steven R. Hurst and see that hes not writing from Camp Obama but from the offices of the Associated Press, our venerable and venerated news service of long standing as a paragon of fairness and balance,

the essential global news network, providing distinctive news services of the highest quality, reliability and objectivity with reports that are accurate, balanced and informed. 

Soreeeeeeee!!!!!!  My fault!

Answer to conundrum even some smart people are annoying themselves with:

Ordinary Americans are smart enough to perceive that the elites are demanding that they vote for Obama to prove they’re not racists. But the voters don’t feel they have to prove any such thing, and they resent like hell the suggestion that they do have to prove it.

Explanation here for what Maureen Dowd takes as a sign of racism:

[O]nly 31 percent of white voters [tell] The New York Times in a survey that they had a favorable opinion of Obama, compared with 83 percent of blacks.

D., mainly concerned with diehard Hillary fan-feminists in her quite clever riff on Jane Austen, does get this one in about the color issue.  But she has no time for wondering about those 83% of blacks.  Could they be prejudiced?

Hey, if he knows what’s best, we’d be fools to ignore him:

In the video above Mary Katharine Ham humorously elaborates on the hectoring and devotional elements of the Obama campaign. Ms. Ham omits any reference to the warning Mrs. Obama provided in her admoniton to the Los Angeles disciples of Barack:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your division. That you come out of your isolation. That you move out of your comfort zones. . . . .

More evidence that O’s Euro trip gave more evidence of his not knowing much:

In Paris, he said that “terrorism cannot be solved by any one country alone,” and that we should establish partnerships. In Berlin, he expressed hope that Europeans and Americans “can join in a new and global partnership to dismantle the networks” of terrorists worldwide.

But there’s one problem. We already have a counterterrorism partnership with the European Union. And it works. Indeed, despite news media caricatures of aggressive Americans feuding with pacifist Europeans, both groups are quite serious about protecting citizens by working together.

But he has a great smile and is young and fresh and will save us hopeless people from ourselves.