AP, I’ve long hoped you’d pull out of this trend of policing anti-Obama or anti-Glacier or anti-Dem political rhetoric with an almost obsessive fastidiousness. I’ve been seeing a younger me, when I was doing much the same thing inside the Beltway, obsessed that my side prevailed for the right reasons, with the absolutely unimpeachably correct rhetoric and themes.

But the act’s worn thin.

Obama couldn’t staff ME on foreign policy – or, frankly, anything else, aside perhaps from Chicago machine politics -yes, he’s even more innocent and ignorant and unsophisticated than Bill Clinton was.

Listen, AP, to this jaw-droppingly sophomoric line from Obama about giving an adversary “an excuse”. Obama says it all the time – it reflects his level of understanding of world affairs, and that of his fans and much of the Beltway establishment: it’s about 7th or 8th grade, in my personal growth timeline. Sovereign governments of thugs and dictators and zealots and others with adverse agendas need “excuses” to do what they do. Unbelievable that an adult could actually say or believe this.

But in their millions, they do. They think of the WaPo and the NYT as giving them a solid link to the world they live in. They can hear a line like the one about “excuses” and not do a double-take. They can read Friedman without laughing or shaking their heads. They can read Zakaria or Cohen or Dowd at all.

And I fear, dear AP, that you show quite a bit of this pattern yourself. Your analysis of foreign policy and especially Iraq doesn’t show anything outside the Beltway mindset. Your instincts and integrity and sympathies are impeccable. But some of the lightweight kool-aid is leaking into your cocktail, and it’s been showing for some time. Even when my experience was limited to the Beltway variety, I had a strong feeling I was subsisting on partial information and extremely limited wisdom.

Almost every word Obama speaks on foreign policy is cringe-worthy – he’s an embarrassment to any knowledgeable and sane person. So the possible distortion of a phrase or two is, to borrow one of his stupefyingly transparent dodges, a “distraction”. His general cluelessness and substantive emptiness are the issue.

Many’s the time I wish I could go to the old AP site to find fresh, hilarious, incredibly witty and intelligent satire of the first order. I was poised to buy some friends the “Six Days, B*tch” coffee mugs when your old site went into amber.

But you’ll want to think twice here about playing the punctilious pedant when it comes to defending the opposition from even the most glancing kidney-punch. We’ve got a rough patch to get through, and the odds are better with the unbearable McCain than the unthinkable Obama. The opposition has forever blackened their names by dumping poison into the system, injecting a level of bad faith not seen since the Civil Wsr (Bush lied, etc.), all while the nation confronts as vile an enemy as it’s ever seen. Even a cheap shot, if it helps further tarnish the twink from Chicago, will in the end have been for the best. And those who launch that cheap shot haven’t come within a light year, substantively or ethically speaking, of opposition folks up to and including the most senior public office-holders.

IceCold on May 13, 2008 at 2:51 AM