One wonders how Sen. Joe Biden can talk so much with his foot in his mouth. Obama's running-mate has said something foolish or indiscreet so often the Republican National Committee has started a "Biden Gaffe Clock" to chronicle them all.   Sen. Biden wasn't chosen to provide comic relief.  Sen. Obama thought his 35 years in the Senate, most of it on the Foreign Relations Committee, of which he is now chairman, would give the ticket foreign policy credentials Sen. Obama himself lacks. The most hypocritical of the legion of double standards employed by the news media in this campaign is that a paucity of experience in foreign policy is considered disqualifying in the Republican candidate for vice president, but inconsequential in the Democratic candidate for president. 

There are a lot of people to blame for the subprime mortgage crisis and this week's wall Street meltdown.  Above all are the crooks and mismanagers who ran the Federal National  Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) - and their political enablers. Fannie and Freddie were very good at greasing palms on Capitol Hill.  Fannie spent $170 million on lobbying since 1998, and $19.3 million on political contributions since 1990. The principal recipient of Fannie Mae's largesse was Sen. Chriss Dodd (D-CT), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.  Number two was Barack Hussein Obama. Fannie bought most of its bad mortgages from Countrywide Financial, whose CEO, Angelo Mozilo, gave sweetheart loans to senior executives of Fannie Mae. Sen. Dodd was also the second largest recipient in the Senate of contributions from Countrywide's PAC and its employees.  The number one senator on Countrywide's list?  Barack Hussein Obama.

A friend's sources in the Democrat Party are telling him Barack Obama is being pressured to dump Sen. Joseph Biden from the ticket and replace him with Hillary Clinton, the switch to come just after the vice presidential debate Oct. 2.  Speculation about such a switch has emerged on several left-wing blogs.  "It's time to dump Biden and replace him with Sen. Hillary Clinton," said Andy Ostroy on the Huffington Post today (9/15).  "I'm starting to think that if Team Obama doesn't do something dramatic fast, it's gonna lose this election." What might prompt such an act of desperation?  The polls -- which indicate the race is a statistical dead heat -- are cause for concern, but not for panic.  This might be the reason:

Immediately after Sen. Barack Hussein Obama committed his now-notorious "lipstick on a pig" gaffe, the McCain campaign demanded he apologize for the remark, and rushed out a Web ad (meaning it was meant for YouTube, not paid television) criticizing him for making it. CBS News yesterday (9/11) forced YouTube to pull McCain's "Lipstick" Ad because it contained an unauthorized clip of Katie Kouric.  No matter - it was already seen by its target audience. That ad shows the genius of what the McCain campaign is doing.   Whether its outrage was real or faux over the lipstick gaffe, the McCain campaign has Sen. Obama looking rattled, talking about the Republican candidate for vice president instead of talking about issues that might win him votes.   That's why the Lipstick Web Ad was designed for an audience of one - The One -  and it worked.  Sen. McCain is so far inside Sen. Obama's OODA loop that I almost feel sorry for him.  Very almost.

"We need to throw every last molecule of s**t we've got at McCain and Palin," said a poster at the Democratic Underground blog.  "Demonize them.  Dehumanize them." Panic brings out the ugliness in ugly people.  And ugliness of this sort is not restricted to moonbat bloggers. "In the press galleries at the convention, journalists wrinkled their noses in disgust when Piper, Ms. Palin's youngest daughter, was filmed kitty-licking her baby brother's hair in place," wrote David Carr in the New York Times Sunday. How dark must your soul be for you to be "disgusted" by a six-year-old girl who is behaving lovingly toward her baby brother? News organizations have flooded Alaska with investigative reporters, hoping to dig up something -- anything -- bad to say about Sarah Palin.  As mayor of Wasilla in 1996, did she try to ban from the public library books that weren't published until 1998?  The sewer that is the left-wing blogosphere is pumping its bilge directly into the "mainstream" media.

"You arrogant ass.  You've killed us!"  So said the executive officer of a Soviet submarine to his captain in Tom Clancy's novel "Red October" after the captain had recklessly fired a torpedo that homed in on his own sub. NBC's David Gregory must have had similar thoughts as he noted, ruefully, that the news media's assault on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin boosted substantially the television audience for her acceptance speech Wednesday night. No friend of Barack Hussein Obama -- and this last week has demonstrated he has no better, nor more unscrupulous, friends than those in the news media -- can be happy about that. Last night (8/03), her enemies learned firsthand why her nickname is "Sarah Barracuda."  With a smile on her face, Ms. Palin sliced and diced Obama with the skill she dresses a moose she just shot.

I wrote Fire and Nice for McCain's VP back in June in which I said Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would be the ideal running mate for Sen. McCain.  But I never thought he'd pick her. I underestimated him.  And Democrats will underestimate "Sarah Barracuda" at their peril. If I were Slow Joe Biden, I'd be worried.  A former journalist, Sarah Palin is careful about what she says and says it well, qualities for which Sen. Biden is not reknowned.   Sen. Obama picked Sen. Biden in part because of his reputed skill as a hatchet man.  But if Sen. Biden comes on too hard in the vice presidential debate, he'll look like a bully. Alaska is littered with the bodies of those who tried to bully Sarah Palin and failed.

The funniest of several mirthful moments in the Democrats' vice presidential candidate rollout was the assertion by aides for Sen. Barack Hussein Obama that though he's been in the U.S. Senate for more than 35 years, Joe Biden isn't a Washington insider because he takes the train home to Wilmington every night. Do they really believe this?  Or is it just that they think we're stupid enough to believe it? The only running mate who could have moved the needle much for Sen. Obama was Hillary Clinton, and he had powerful reasons other than electability for not selecting her. But Slow Joe?

Wonder why Barack Hussein Obama's been plunging in the polls?  Consider how he's elevated a policy dispute into a character issue. Sen. Obama thinks he can sell icicles to Eskimos.  That self confidence is likely what brought him to Pastor Rick Warren's mega-church last weekend to woo evangelicals. Mr. Obama thought he had an opening, because religious young people are as attracted to what's hip and cool as much as their less religious contemporaries, and young evangelicals tend to be very concerned about the environment and helping the poor. But far and away the most important issue for evangelicals, young and old, is abortion, and Sen. Obama has one of the most radically pro-abortion records of any politician in America.  The less evangelicals -- and most ordinary Americans -- know about it, the better for Sen. Obama.  So a politician with less ego and more judgment would have stayed as far away from the Saddleback Church as possible. As Arnold would say, big mistake.

Did you see the huge crowd outside the Russian Embassy in Washington DC protesting the war in Georgia? Neither did I. Now that we have a genuine war of aggression, the silence on the Left is deafening. "You might think, at a moment such as this, that the moral calculus would be pretty well understood," the Washington Post said in an editorial today (8/14).  "Russian troops are occupying large swaths of Georgia, a tiny neighboring country, and sacking its military bases.  Russian jets have roamed the Georgian skies, bombing civilian and military targets alike. Russian ships are said to be controlling Georgia's port of Poti, while militia under Russia's control reportedly massacre Georgian civilians.  Yet in Washington, the foreign policy sophisticates cluck and murmur that, after all, the Georgians should have known better than to chart an independent course." It is scandalous to liberals that terrorists at Gitmo don't have easy access to lawyers, but most don't care how many Georgians the Russians kill. Vladimir Putin is counting on this.

Barack Hussein Obama's efforts to explain his energy policy indicate why his campaign has emphasized celebrity over issues.  The liberal San Francisco Chronicle says he is offering "more flip-flops than a Lake Tahoe souvenir stand." In a speech in Lansing, Michigan Monday (8/04), Mr. Obama  called for release of 70 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  As the AP's Tom Raum noted in his lead, this was a reversal of a position he had taken less than a month before.  "The strategic oil reserve, I think, has to be reserved for a genuine emergency," Sen. Obama said in a press availability in St. Louis July 7:  "You have a situation, let's say, where there was a major oil facility in Saudi Arabia that was destroyed as a consequence of terrorist acts, and you suddenly had huge amounts of oil taken out of the world market, we wouldn't just be seeing $4 a gallon oil.  We could see a situation where entire sectors of the country had no oil to function at all.  And that's what the strategic oil reserve has to be for." Now, apparently, a drop in the opinion polls is reason enough to tap the strategic petroleum reserve.

If you watch cable tv, chances are you've seen an ad promoting T. Boone Pickens' plan for reducing the vast sums we're spending on imported oil. Hearts quickened in the Democrat party because Mr. Pickens says in the ad: "This is one emergency we can't drill our way out of."  That's what Democrats say when they block drilling off our coasts and in Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.  But the budding romance cooled when Mr. Pickens made it clear he supports lifting those drilling bans. Mr. Pickens' plan has two key elements.  The first is to build a massive series of wind farms on the Great Plains.  The second is to convert most motor vehicles in the U.S. to run on compressed natural gas. He's ridiculously wrong on wind, but bulls-eye right on natural gas.  Then again, Jack Wheeler explained the argument for natural gas over two years ago in What Bush Can Do To Get Cheaper Gas (April 2006) and The Natural Gas Solution (May 2006).  Both are worth re-reading carefully now.   

In a news conference Wednesday (7/23) in Sderot, an Israeli city subject to frequent rocket attacks by Palestinian terrorists, Sen. Barack Hussein Obama addressed the doubts many Israelis have about his commitment to their security. "In terms of knowing my commitments, you don't have to just look at my words, you can look at my deeds," Mr. Obama said.  "Just this past week, we passed out of the Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don't obtain a nuclear weapon." Sen. Obama is not a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. He had nothing to do with the advancement of the bill he referred to. Barack Hussien Obama has the thinnest resumé of any major party candidate for president in history, and this isn't the first time he's tried to pad it.  But his false claim in Sderot goes beyond puffery.

On July 15, President Bush announced he was lifting the executive branch moratorium on offshore drilling.  In the 24 hours that followed, crude oil futures plunged $9.26 (6.3 percent), the biggest oil price decline in 17 years.  Oil prices fell again yesterday (7/16) when the Bureau of Land Management overrode the objections of environmentalists and opened  4.9 million acres of land in Alaska to oil exploration. Now reflect on these words.  "Coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick, it's global warming, it's ruining our country, it's ruining our world, we've got to stop using fossil fuel," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) said last month. No, Harry, it's Democrats who are ruining our country.  What we've got to do is throw you and your ilk out of office.

During his eight years in the Illinois state senate, Barack Hussein Obama voted "present" 130 times.  That's an astounding 12-13 times a year in which he said, in effect, "I'm here, but I'm not going to take a stand on this issue." Given that record of bold leadership, I'm surprised Sen. Obama acted as he did on the legislation Congress passed July 9 to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.  Sen. Obama had pledged to filibuster FISA if it contained a provision to provide retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies which cooperated with the government, and then reneged on that promise.  The FISA flip flop is the latest of er, ah, "pivots" Sen. Obama has made recently on campaign finance, NAFTA, gun control, the death penalty, and abortion.  Now get ready for the Mother-of-All-Pivots he is about to make on the Iraq war. 

A Rasmussen poll released Tuesday (7/08) indicated the approval rating for the Democrat-led Congress has declined by 36 percentage points from last year's "high." Just 9 percent of respondents said Congress was doing a "good" or "excellent" job, while 52 percent of us think it's doing a "poor" one. That's the lowest rating ever. Much of the dissatisfaction with Congress is due to its unwillingness to do anything about the soaring price of gasoline. "Right now, our strategy on gas prices is 'Drive small cars and wait for the wind'," a Democrat congressional aide tells The Hill newspaper. "So why are the Republicans running scared, and why aren't they going after the 'new Democrat Congress' hammer and tongs?" wonders Web logger Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. "Beats me. Because they're idiots, I guess." I disagree. Some Republicans in Congress are crooks, and many are cowards. But few are idiots. For idiocy, you have to look to the campaign of Sen. John McCain.

The New York Times mentioned in a story June 21 that Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, was "in the midst of a major security operation."  So what happened? Marie Colvin of the Times of London had an answer Sunday: "American and Iraqi forces are driving al Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror." Al Qaeda was making its "last stand" in Mosul, and now is done, finished, kaput, said Ms. Colvin, who was embedded with the 2nd Iraqi Division for Operation Lion's Roar.  The victory is so complete that Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said Saturday (7/05) his government has defeated the terrorists in Iraq.  Defeated.  Past tense. Not a word about this "spectacular victory" appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times Sunday, or on the evening network newscasts of ABC, NBC, CBS, or CNN.   Well, the New York Times did run a story on the front page Monday about an "epic battle," but it was about a tennis match at Wimbledon.

There hasn't been a terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.  The number of experts who, on Sept. 12, 2001, would have predicted this happy state of affairs is precisely zero.  The principal reason why we've been safe at home these last seven years has been the war in Iraq. Sen. Obama describes the war in Iraq as a "distraction" from the war on terror.  But that's not how al Qaeda saw it. In a 2005 letter to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al Qaeda's number two, Ayman al Zawahiri, described Iraq as "the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era." A few months earlier (December, 2004), Osama bin Laden himself said in an audiotape: "The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries; the Islamic nation on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. It is either victory and glory or misery and humiliation." For al Qaeda, Iraq has turned out to be misery and humiliation.  To the great disappointment of Democrats.

It's a good thing many of Barack Hussein Obama's supporters don't care much about issues, because their candidate has been changing his position on them with dizzying speed. "Barack Obama aligned himself with welfare reform on Monday, launching a television ad which touts the way the overhaul 'slashed rolls by 80 percent'," ABC News reported July 1.  "Obama leaves out, however, that he was against the 1996 federal legislation which precipitated the caseload reduction." When the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia's ban on handgun ownership June 26, Sen. Obama said he supported the decision of the 5-4 majority.  But last November he told the Chicago Tribune he thought the DC handgun ban was constitutional.  While in the state legislature, he proposed legislation that would, in effect, have banned handguns in Illinois. There are a lot more examples.  As a flip-flopper, Obama leaves John Kerry in the dust.  He's such a "master of the U-turn" that an Obama political U-turn should be called an O-turn.

You've probably heard the permanent ice cap in the Arctic has receded considerably, because the people who are worried about global warming talk about it all the time.  You may not know ice in Antarctica is growing. This is an awkward topic for global warming alarmists, because if global warming were, ah, global, this shouldn't be happening. So how could ice be melting at the north pole while it's building up at the south?  There's a good reason, but as it's natural and not man-made, glowarming alarmists and their journalistic cheerleaders are paying no attention to it.

A lie can get half way around the world before the truth can lace up its combat boots. This is especially true when the lie is propagated by a major news magazine and a senior member of Congress. On March 19, 2006, Time Magazine published an article written by Time reporter Tim McGirk which in effect accused a squad of Marines of having murdered civilians in Haditha, Iraq, and their superiors of covering it up. "It's much worse than reported in Time Magazine," said Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa, at a press conference May 17, 2006.  "There was no fire fight.  There was no IED that killed these innocent people.  Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood." On December 21, 2006, four enlisted Marines were charged with multiple counts of murder.  Later, four officers in their chain of command were charged with having covered up the murders.  The news coverage of the indictments was enormous. This Tuesday (6/17), a military judge dismissed charges against LtCol. Jeffrey Chessani. He was the seventh of the eight Marines either to have the charges against him dismissed, or be found not guilty.    Yet Tim McGirk and Jack Murtha are not the only shameful scum responsible for the scandalous treatment of the Haditha Marines - we must include the Navy prosecutors as well.

Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. has the lead for the time being.  But three sign posts point the way to a McCain landslide in November -- in the unlikely event the Arizona senator has the wit to heed them. What figures to be by far the most important issue this fall is the skyrocketing price of energy and its deleterious effect on the broader economy and national security. National security is the one issue Sen. McCain knows something about, and Sen. Obama knows nothing.  However, the fact that we're winning the war on terror makes most Americans less interested in it, and more focused on economic concerns.   Voter anxiety about Sen. Obama's fitness to be commander in chief is a strong subsidiary issue.  But this election will be won or lost at the gas pump.

Sen. John McCain plans to visit Colombia and Canada this summer, presumably to contrast his views on free trade with those of Sen. Barack Hussein Obama.  He may also visit Iraq, in part to remind people Sen. Obama hasn't been there in more than two years. Sen. McCain should add one more stop on his summer travel itinerary.  He should visit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an area about the size of South Carolina in Alaska's far north. Oil companies want to drill in a portion of ANWR roughly the size of Dulles airport, where the U.S. Geological Survey thinks there may be 10.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, an amount equivalent to 37 percent of the current U.S. proved reserves of 21.7 billion barrels.   But Sen. McCain says he'd no sooner drill in ANWR than in the Grand Canyon.  And Sen. Obama is even dumber than that.

Sen. Barack Hussein Obama celebrated clinching the Democratic nomination with a speech from the convention center in St. Paul.  Future generations, he told his adoring audience, will look back upon that night and say: "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal..." Canute the Great (995-1035), the Viking king of England, Denmark and Norway, is reputed to have waded into the ocean and ordered the waves to recede.  Canute, who was actually a pretty modest guy for a king, didn't really expect the water to obey.  He staged the scene to teach a lesson about the limits of a king's powers to sycophantic courtiers.  But Sen. Obama apparently wasn't kidding. It'd be hard enough for a President Obama to bring peace to the Middle East and carbon free energy independence to the United States without regulating sea levels too.

The half life of a Barack Hussein Obama campaign pledge is getting shorter.  Last Wednesday (6/04), Sen. Obama spoke before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.  Though the group is predominantly Democrat, Sen. Obama wanted to reassure it, because many AIPAC members know he has chosen as his foreign policy advisers and spiritual mentors people who have said unkind things about Israel. Reassure them he did.  "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," Sen. Obama told AIPAC. The next day, however, after receiving criticism from, among others, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Sen. Obama's campaign issued a "clarification."  And that is just the start of his hypocrisy regarding Israel.

Who? When?  Republicans, including Sen. McCain himself I would imagine, are asking these questions about his selection of a vice presidential candidate. Ideally, a presidential candidate wants a running mate who will help him win the election, and (maybe) to govern afterwards.  But most will settle for a veep who isn't a drag on the ticket, as Dan Quayle was for the first President Bush. Traditionally, a presidential nominee has chosen a running mate to balance the ticket geographically, or to appease a faction of the party.  The most successful example of this was when John F. Kennedy picked Lyndon Johnson, though neither liked the other, and LBJ joined the ticket only because he thought Kennedy would lose. Bill Clinton broke with this tradition when he chose another young (purported) moderate from a neighboring southern state.  By picking Al Gore, he hoped to reinforce his campaign theme of generational change. Which way will Sen. McCain go? The potential running mates most often discussed have downsides nearly as great as their upsides.  There's an exception, however, who has virtually no downside.  Those conservatives who've heard of her - yes, her - were delighted to learn that McCain advance man Arthur Culvahouse was in Alaska recently, because they surmised he could only be there to discuss the vice presidential nomination with Gov. Sarah Palin.

"We have not exhausted our non-military options in confronting the Iranian threat; in many ways, we have yet to try them," Sen. Barack Hussein Obama says on his Web site. "If Iran abandons its nuclear program and support for terrorism, we will offer incentives like membership in the World Trade Organization." It was Albert Einstein who first defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." "Perhaps Mr. Obama is unaware that one of (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad's first acts was to freeze Tehran's efforts for securing WTO membership because he regards the outfit as 'a nest of conspiracies by Zionists and Americans'," wrote Amir Taheri in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday (5/28). Sen. Obama can escape Einstein's charge of insanity by pleading ignorance. He didn't know about U.S. overtures to Iran, or Mr. Ahmadinejad's rejection of them.  But shouldn't a candidate for president know these things? It's gotten so absurd that, after Sen. Obama took opposite sides on successive days last week on whether Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez should be engaged or isolated, ABC's Jake Tapper described him as "a one-man gaffe machine." And that was before The Amazing Gaffe-Man's Memorial Day twofer.

Imagine the election this fall as a gigantic Democratic primary in which independents and Republicans can cross over.  I suspect this is how John McCain is looking at it. Sen. McCain is running for president de facto as an independent.  This gives conservatives heartburn, but considering the parlous state of the Republican brand these days, it's probably wise. The more swing voters view Sen. McCain as independent, the more likely they are to choose between him and Sen. Obama on the basis of the major differences between them on issues, or on their characters, or on their  experience, all of which work to Sen. McCain's advantage. And by stressing his independence, Sen. McCain undermines one of Sen. Obama's  campaign themes.  Sen. Obama has presented himself as a reformer who would reach across party lines.  But he's never actually done it.  Sen. McCain has.  In a "where's the beef?" contest, Sen. Obama is tofu.

Few foreign leaders have received as favorable news coverage in the United States as has the Moqtada al Sadr, with less factual basis for it. Mookie, as our troops call him, is the nominal head of the Mahdi Army, a radical Shia militia, and of the Sadrist political movement, which holds 30 seats (of 275) in the Iraqi parliament.   His patron is Iran, which provides him with money, arms and military training. The last couple of months have been dreadful for Mookie everywhere except on the pages of American newspapers and magazines.

A message from Mississippi has interrupted the leisurely cruise Republicans in Congress have been taking up the river De Nile.  Democrat Travis Childers soundly defeated Republican Greg Davis in a special election in a House district that President Bush carried by 25 percentage points in 2004.   Mr. Childers' victory completes a trifecta for Democrats in once heavily Republican districts. You don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing.  The Republican brand today is as popular as Tylenol's was during the cyanide poison scare. The bitter wind from Mississippi has replaced complacency with panic, but many Republicans don't know what to do about it.  Many blame President Bush, with good reason.  But the larger reason for the troubles of congressional Republicans is that they are viewed (alas, correctly) as being motivated by little else than self enrichment.

In his victory speech after the North Carolina primary, Sen. Barack Hussein Obama said something that is all the more remarkable for how little it has been remarked upon.  In defending his stated intent to meet with America's enemies without preconditions, Sen. Obama said: "I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did." That he made this statement, and that it passed without comment by the journalists covering his speech, indicates either breathtaking ignorance of history on the part of both, or deceit on the part of both.

The average retail price of a gallon of gas in the U.S. this week is $3.61, according to the Energy Information Administration.  That's up 55 cents a gallon from this time last year.  Many analysts expect the price to approach $4 a gallon this summer. Anticipating this, last month Sen. John McCain proposed suspending the 18.4 cent a gallon federal gasoline tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day.  Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has endorsed the idea.  Sen. Barack Hussein Obama has denounced it. Sen. Obama wasn't always hostile to such "gimmicks."  As an Illinois state senator, he voted three times temporarily to suspend that state's gasoline tax.  Gasoline prices then were about $2 a gallon. The 5% Illinois state sales tax on gasoline was suspended, despite Mr. Obama's objection, in June of 2000 for the remainder of the year.  The suspension led to a price decline of three percent compared to neighboring states.

If James Glanz wins a prize for his reporting from Iraq, it will be for fiction. Mr. Glanz is the bureau chief of the New York Times in Baghdad.  When Iraqi troops began an offensive March 25 to take Basra from the Mahdi Army, an Iranian-backed militia nominally headed by the Moqtada al Sadr, he and his colleagues described the fighting (which spread to other cities in southern Iraq and to the Sadr City section of Baghdad) as a military defeat and a political catastrophe for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki. After three weeks of reporting nothing but alleged Iraqi government setbacks, it must have come as a shock to subscribers of the New York Times to read, in a dispatch April 20 from Mr. Glanz and Alissa Rubin, that "Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's militia in Basra on Saturday." Ignorance and stupidity alone cannot explain how the New York Times reported this story so wrong for so long.

Rarely in the history of American politics has a bigot had as much power as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright enjoys today. Support for Sen. Barack Obama has plunged nationally and (more importantly) in North Carolina since Rev. Wright confirmed at his National Press Club appearance Monday (4/28) that he does indeed hold racist, lunatic, anti-American views, and implied that Sen. Obama has been insincere in separating himself from them.  "He had to distance himself, because he's a politician," Rev. Wright said. If you're running as the candidate of hope and change who will "bring us together," it is hard to imagine how things could get worse.  But they can. Jeremiah Wright could destroy his former protégé in a single interview.  Obama is at the mercy of a man who hates the country of which he wants to be president.

Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is hiding from a girl.  That's the Clinton spin on his decision to back out of a debate before the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina.  As a matter of political tactics, his decision is sound.  Sen. Obama is the front runner.  He's got nothing to gain from another debate.  And potentially much to lose -- though it's unlikely he'll ever again be as awful as he was in Philadelphia April 16.  He doesn't want to answer any more questions about his relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, or with former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayres (and most in journalism don't want to ask them).  But his refusal to debate supports Sen. Clinton's insinuation he doesn't have what it takes to be president. It's something his hagiographers in the liberal media refuse to see.  Like the Wizard of Oz, they don't want you to peer behind the curtain, lest you be unimpressed by what you see.  The longer the contest goes on, the higher the curtain is raised.

If Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. read Karl Marx less and Arthur Brooks more, he might not be in such hot water. Barack's now-infamous comments in San Francisco reek of the watered down Marxism that passes for thought on college campuses these days.  "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition.  It is the opium of the people," Marx wrote in 1843. Barack and his apologists in the news media focused on his description of rural Pennsylvanians as "bitter" because that was the least offensive element of what he had said.  Most of those who were upset by his remarks were upset by his notion they "cling to" religion out of economic frustration.  Arthur Brooks could have told Barack the people he described as "bitter" likely are a good deal happier than most of his supporters are, or his wife seems to be.  Dr. Brooks, a professor of business & government policy at Syracuse University, demonstrates, through the wealth of statistics in his new book, Gross National Happiness, that conservatives are much happier than liberals.  It's urban liberals who are bitter, not small town folks.

As the Obama rocket flames out and plummets back to earth, it is useful to recall how extraordinary it has been. Before the Iowa caucuses,  almost everyone thought Hillary Clinton would win the nomination easily.  She had the support of blue collar workers and most party insiders, and an enormous war chest.  If ever there were a prohibitive favorite, it was she. But until "Bittergate" erupted last weekend, she was  losing the nomination to a tyro senator whose most important resumé tic was that back in school he'd been president of the Harvard Law Review.  It took many missteps by the Clinton campaign to make this possible.  But for Barack to have been on the verge of besting Hillary is nothing short of phenomenal. What fueled the Obama rocket was that he was able to bring together two rarely united factions within the Democratic party: blacks and latte liberals.

When Democrats in the 43rd state legislative district in suburban Seattle met April 5 to select delegates to the state convention, they refused to begin their deliberations by saying the Pledge of Allegiance: "At the mere mention of doing the pledge there were groans and boos," wrote Web logger Eli Sanders, who attended the caucus.  "Then, when the district chair put the idea of doing the pledge up to a vote, it was overwhelmingly voted down.  One might more accurately say the idea of pledging allegiance to the flag...was shouted down." The 43rd is part of the congressional district represented by Rep. James McDermott (D-Wash), who just before the start of the Iraq war made a trip to Iraq to criticize U.S. foreign policy...

"Disregard what we told you last week."  "Mainstream" journalists in Iraq haven't said that in so many words.  But the stories they're writing this week say it implicitly. On March 31, six days of fighting between Iraqi government forces and the Iranian-backed militia nominally headed by the Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr subsided when al Sadr asked for a cease fire and his forces abandoned the battlefield.  We were told at the time the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had suffered a humiliating defeat. But this week's stories make clear that Mr. Maliki is not acting like someone who has suffered a humiliating defeat, and Mr. al Sadr is not behaving like someone who has won a big victory. That's because Moqtada's "Mahdi Army" has been getting its clock cleaned - to the dismay of our journalists.

Most of such racists as remain in America are black.  This is because black racism is tolerated, even -- in certain quarters -- encouraged, while white racists receive the scorn and contempt they deserve.  As Jack Kemp said in another connection, "you get more of what you subsidize, less of what you tax." Black racism will fester and grow as long as racists like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright are treated more gently than racists like David Duke. Mr. Duke, a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, has been excoriated by every major political figure, liberal and conservative. But Jeremiah Wright has many defenders -- both among white liberals and his fellow black clergy -- for his views, which he has expressed in more inflammatory language than Mr. Duke employs. Why the double standard?  The reason, liberals say, is the guilt white Americans are supposed to feel for slavery and segregation.