The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration asserts that relations between the US and China are at “at an all-time high.”

In 1998, when President Bill Clinton stood before television cameras in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, the United States owed more money to Spain than to China and did more than twice as much trade with Mexico. At a freewheeling news conference, Clinton criticized China’s military crackdown a decade earlier in Tiananmen Square and traded spirited jibes with President Jiang Zemin.

On Tuesday, Obama stood in the same building alongside another Chinese leader. This time, with the United States in hock to China for more than $1 trillion dollars and flooded with Chinese-made goods, it was a Chinese-style news conference. Each leader read a prepared statement and eyed the other in silence. There were no questions.

Since leaving Washington last Thursday for an eight-day tour of Asia, Obama has occasionally nudged China on issues such as Tibet and Internet censorship. But he has more often trumpeted China’s achievements and pleaded with Beijing for increased help on the world stage.

China returned the effusiveness in its music selection at a state dinner for Obama on Tuesday night. The People’s Liberation Army serenaded him and other U.S. officials with “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” “In the Mood” and “We Are the World,” as Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sat on either side of the Chinese president over a steak dinner. In many ways, the United States and China have never been closer

The Chinese officials really have a sense of humor. The music selections are hilarious and would no doubt flatter the narcissist-in-chief, who probably really believes that he wowed them in Beijing. (Of course we know what the Chinese really think of America’s economic policies, and it’s no laughing matter.)

Thomas Sowell comments on the KSM-NYC story and doesn’t pull punches:

In the string of amazing decisions made during the first year of the Obama administration, nothing seems more like sheer insanity than the decision to try foreign terrorists, who have committed acts of war against the United States, in federal court, as if they were American citizens accused of crimes…

The last time an attack on the World Trade Center was treated as a matter of domestic criminal justice was after a bomb was exploded there in 1993. Under the rules of American criminal law, the prosecution had to turn over all sorts of information to the defense — information that told the Al Qaeda international terrorist network what we knew about them and how we knew it. This was nothing more and nothing less than giving away military secrets to an enemy in wartime — something for which people have been executed, as they should have been…

In the wake of the obscenity of a trial of terrorists in federal court for an act of war — and the worldwide propaganda platform it will give them — it may seem to be a small thing that President Obama has been photographed yet again bowing deeply to a foreign ruler. But how large or small an act is depends on its actual consequences, not on whether the politically correct intelligentsia think it is no big deal.

As a private citizen, Barack Obama has a right to make as big a jackass of himself as he wants to. But, as President of the United States, his actions not only denigrate a nation that other nations rely on for survival, but raise questions about how reliable our judgment and resolve are

It does seem crazy to give our enemies military intelligence, all the more so since the announced rationale for bringing KSM to New York doesn’t explain the logic of the decision. What is the reason for this nutty decision? Andy McCarthy says it’s politics, but we’ve heard quite a number of people expressing far more troubling thoughts.

Just in case you missed it, the Obama administration apparently thinks that it doesn’t have enough on its plate already. NYT:

The Obama administration will insist on measures to give legal status to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants as it pushes early next year for legislation to overhaul the immigration system, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said…Ms. Napolitano dispelled any suggestion that the administration — with health care, energy and other major issues crowding its agenda — would postpone the most contentious piece of immigration legislation until after midterm elections next November…

Ms. Napolitano unveiled a double-barrel argument for a legalization program, saying it would enhance national security and, as the economy climbs out of recession, protect American workers from unfair competition from lower-paid, easily exploited illegal immigrants. “Let me emphasize this: we will never have fully effective law enforcement or national security as long as so many millions remain in the shadows,” she said, adding that the recovering economy would be strengthened “as these immigrants become full-paying taxpayers.”

And by the way, “illegal immigrants who hope to gain legal status would have to register, pay fines and all taxes they owe, pass a criminal background check and learn English.” We all know how well that would work.

The Politico reports on a statement by President Obama during his trip to Japan:

In a slap at President George W. Bush, Obama spoke of the importance of “multilateral organizations [that] can advance the security and prosperity of this region.” “I know that the United States has been disengaged from these organizations in recent years. So let me be clear: those days have passed…As an Asia Pacific nation, the United States expects to be involved in the discussions that shape the future of this region, and to participate fully in appropriate organizations as they are established and evolve…

As America’s first Pacific president, I promise you that this Pacific nation will strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world.”

First Pacific President? So that opera was about Obama, eh? And that must have been Obama parachuting from that TBM Avenger near the Bonin Islands. Good grief! HT: Powerline

David Broder notes the President’s dithering on Afghanistan:

The more President Obama examines our options in Afghanistan, the less he likes the choices he sees. But, as the old saying goes, to govern is to choose — and he has stretched the internal debate to the breaking point…Obama needs to remember what Clark Clifford, one of Harry Truman’s closest advisers, said: that the president “believed that even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all.”…In all this dithering, it’s easy to forget a few fundamentals…

I don’t see how Obama can refuse to back up the commander he picked and the strategy he is recommending. It may not work if the country truly is ungovernable. But I think we have to gamble that security will bring political progress — as it has done in Iraq.

Broder seems to disapprove of Obama, but then again he didn’t care for Hillary Clinton all that much. As for Broder’s comment on Harry Truman’s adviser Clark Clifford, it’s not all that relevant. After all, Obama is no Truman.

The WSJ reports that the declining costs of marrying computer technology to mechanical instruments has produced a wave of interest in tinkering for fun and profit:

Engineering schools across the country report students are showing an enthusiasm for hands-on work that hasn’t been seen in years. Workshops for people to share tools and ideas — called “hackerspaces” — are popping up all over the country; there are 124 hackerspaces in the U.S., according to a member-run group that keeps track, up from a handful at the start of last year. SparkFun Electronics Inc., which sells electronic parts to tinkerers, expects sales of about $10 million this year, up from $6 million in 2008. “Make” magazine, with articles on building items such as solar hot tubs and autopilots for robots, has grown from 22,000 subscribers in 2005 to more than 100,000 now. Its annual “Maker Faire” in San Mateo, Calif., attracted 75,000 people this year.

“We’ve had this merging of DIY [do it yourself] with technology,” says Bre Pettis, co-founder of NYC Resistor, one of the first hackerspaces, in Brooklyn. “I’m calling it Industrial Revolution 2.”…

Access to the tools to tinker is getting easier. “Computer numerical controlled,” or CNC, tools — which cut metal and other materials into whatever design is plugged into the computer attached to them — now cost as little as a tenth of what they did a decade ago. Mr. Sessions, the MIT student, says he first looked at such mills on a lark, assuming the price would be well out of his reach. But his mill cost about $7,000 to buy and set up…

Through much of the past century, however, developing new products required increasingly complex and expensive tools that were out of reach of most individuals — the Wright brothers built an airplane in their bicycle shop, but the first jet-powered aircraft were built at well-funded corporate and government labs. As a result, large firms came to dominate innovation.

That trend was disrupted in the 1990s when low-cost computers allowed Internet and software start-ups to compete with giants. But when it came to developing innovative physical products, high prices kept high-tech machine tools and materials out of most tinkerers’ reach.

“There have always been hobbyists, but it was really hard to go from being a hobbyist who built hot rods to becoming a car company,” says Erik Kauppi, a member of at A2 Mech Shop, an Ann Arbor, Mich., workshop where tinkerers pool tools they own. “But now, all of a sudden a guy or a couple of guys have a lot more leverage.” The electric scooter that Mr. Kauppi, who is 49, developed at the workshop is now in production…

There were 27% more undergraduates who earned mechanical-engineering degrees in 2008 than in 2003, according to the American Association of Engineering Societies. Over the same period, the number of computer-engineering graduates slipped by 31%…

Until the 1950s, economists thought how fast the economy grew was mostly a matter of how much money was spent and how much work was getting done. But in a 1957 paper that helped him later earn a Nobel Prize, MIT economist Robert Solow showed capital and labor only accounted for about half of growth. The remaining half he attributed to innovation — an area where the U.S. has long had an advantage.

So maybe we were wrong and your iPod didn’t ruin America after all. Still, some of the things from an earlier time have vanished for the moment. (HT: Ace)

This exchange comes from a joint press conference in Japan. President Obama was asked a question by a reporter from Fuji television:

Reporter: President Obama, you are a proponent of a nuclear free world, and you said, if possible, you would like to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki while in office. Do you have this desire? And what is your understanding of the historical meaning of the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do you think it was the right decision?…

Obama:…Now, obviously Japan has unique perspective on the issue of nuclear weapons as a consequence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that I’m sure helps to motivate the Prime Minister’s deep interest in this issue. I certainly would be honored, it would be meaningful for me to visit those two cities in the future. I don’t have immediate travel plans, but it’s something that would be meaningful to me. You had one more question, and I’m not sure I remember it. Was it North Korea?

Reporter: Whether or not you believe that the U.S. dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — it was right?

Obama: No, there were three sets of questions, right? You asked about North Korea?

Operation Downfall was a massive plan for the American and Allied forces invasion of Japan in order to bring the war in the Pacific to a close not more than one year after the surrender of Germany in May 1945. If you would have been one of the tens or hundreds of thousands of American casualties from Operation Downfall, you can thank your lucky stars that the President was named Truman, not Obama. (And if your father or grandfather would have been one of those casualties, you might not even be here today, so you can that Truman for that too.) HT: Powerline

The President of tiny Kazakhstan and the President of Russia greeted the emperor of Japan as shown above. And there are plenty of other politicians who know how to stand up straight. There was, however, one notable exception among those meeting the emperor. Care to guess who? (HT: Ace)

Mark Steyn reviews the Hasan matter and the American ethos today:

who needs surveillance operations and intelligence budgets? Maj. Hasan was entirely upfront about who he was. He put it on his business card: “SOA.” As in “Soldier of Allah” – which seems a tad ungrateful to the American taxpayers who ponied up half a million bucks or thereabouts in elite medical school education to train him to be a Soldier of Uncle Sam.

In a series of meetings during 2008, officials from both Walter Reed and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences considered the question of whether then-Capt. Hasan was psychotic. But, according to at least one bigwig at Walter Reed, members of the policy committee wondered “how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents.” So he got promoted to major and shipped to Fort Hood, Texas. And 13 men and women and an unborn baby are dead.

Well, like they say, it’s easy to be wise after the event. I’m not so sure. These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event. “Apparently, he tried to contact al-Qaida,” mused MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “That’s not a crime to call up al-Qaida, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?” Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?

The truth is, we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said Gen. Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded?…

“Diversity” is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in “multiculturalism” doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing “Muslim” garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn’t until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He is an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress – that’s to say, a “Punjabi suit,” as they call it in Britain, or the “shalwar kameez,” to give it its South Asian name.

For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about “diversity” across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up –- with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaida.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along now.

For change of venue. HT: JOM

An article in the NYT from 1994:

“If I see another king, I think I shall bite him,” Teddy Roosevelt once growled. Offered that opportunity with the Japanese equivalent last week, Bill Clinton turned out to have had quite something else in mind.

It wasn’t a bow, exactly. But Mr. Clinton came close. He inclined his head and shoulders forward, he pressed his hands together. It lasted no longer than a snapshot, but the image on the South Lawn was indelible: an obsequent President, and the Emperor of Japan.

Canadians still bow to England’s Queen; so do Australians. Americans shake hands. If not to stand eye-to-eye with royalty, what else were 1776 and all that about?…the “thou need not bow” commandment from the State Department’s protocol office maintained a constancy of more than 200 years. Administration officials scurried to insist that the eager-to-please President had not really done the unthinkable.

Of course the NYT was far too busy this year to notice the obsequent behavior of the current President in his meeting with the Saudi king. And on the matter of the President’s visit to Japan — no comment on the bow, but the Times did mention Obama’s weird comment about Japan’s “prominent role in Afghanistan.”

The above is from 1945 or so, when senior American officials knew how to stand up on their hind legs. And now, from About.com, a company of the New York Times, we learn a little bit about etiquette in Japan, with which we have no quarrel — it’s good to be polite in social settings:

Let’s begin learning how to bow properly in Japan. Bowing seems simple, but there are different ways of bowing. It depends on the social status or age of the person you bow to. If the person is higher status or older than you are, you should bow deeper and longer. It is polite to bow, bending from your waist. Men usually keep their hands in their sides, and women usually put their hands together on their thighs with their fingers touching. If it is a casual situation, you can bow like nodding. The most frequent bow is a bow of about 15 degrees.

But of course the American President greeting a foreign emperor is not a social setting that the Times commented on above. It is a formal affair of state — indeed, the State Department has had rules on bowing for over 200 years. Let’s review some guidelines on the matter from a site that concerns itself with forms of address:

Does the President Bow to a Foreign King or Queen?…I would follow the advice of Chris Young, President of the Protocol Diplomacy International / Protocol officers Association (he’s also Chief of Protocol of the State of Georgia, and Director of International Affairs) when he says “Look no further than the U.S. Constitution, which states in Article I, Section 9, that ‘No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.’

Those weren’t just words that prohibited Congress from naming someone a prince or princess, duke or duchess, lord or lady. Those words were clear signals that in the U.S. all persons are on equal footing: that no nobility would exist here and thus no one had to bow to anyone. Certainly people here have titles such as president, chief executive officer, mayor, chancellor, and the like, but none of those titles was encoded on someone’s DNA. Titles were to be ascending, earned through one’s own sweat equity and remarkable character, rather than descending, simply a generational bequeath to one’s progeny.”

So a US citizen when meeting a king or queen –- in the United States or in the monarch’s country — should simply offer nod of the head as a sign of respect and shake the hand of the monarch if it was offered. This contrasts with either a deep bow or curtsy which would be an appropriate sign of fealty from a subject.

Regarding the President. again I would quote of Chris Young, when he says both are “equals on the world stage. Both are heads of state ….the only order of precedence that exists between the two is usually an alphabetical one rather than one of rank.”

Well, that’s certainly not the way the current President sees things, as we noted in his deep bow before the Saudi Arabian king (which the White House insipidly denied he did, by the way). The curious thing about Obama’s behavior is that he is perfectly willing to perform gestures that abase the United States before the world, but he personally regards himself as the biggest big-shot of all, a man who tells every other country what it ought to do. This fellow Obama seems almost precisely 180 degrees out of phase with the America we grew up in.

TIME notes some potential problems with the prosecution of KSM:

“The challenge for prosecutors is to try and present a case that is not tainted by evidence that is inadmissible,” says Joshua Dratel, a criminal lawyer in New York who has appealed cases against terrorists on the basis of torture allegations. Holder testified at his Senate-confirmation hearings earlier this year that he believes waterboarding is torture, and any evidence obtained after Mohammed’s waterboarding will likely be inadmissible.

That means the government will likely have to rely on evidence that predates the 2003 waterboarding, as well as Mohammed’s 2002 statement to al-Jazeera in which he took credit for the attack. Holder said at his press conference announcing the trials Friday that he has seen evidence previously unavailable that made him confident the prosecution will be successful…

But even if the government can make a strong case without the tainted evidence, Mohammed’s treatment could cause problems. It’s possible — though not likely — that a court could rule that the government doesn’t have the right to prosecute someone who has been severely abused in custody. (Previously, suspects have been released even when their abuse didn’t prejudice evidence against them, but there’s no clear precedent for terrorism cases.)

Other issues likely to be raised by the defense, says Dratel, are finding a jury that can be considered impartial, especially blocks from the World Trade Center site, and whether Mohammed’s rights to a speedy trial have been violated.

We agree with those who say bringing KSM to trial in NYC is a dangerous and deeply weird decision. Surely it is an invitation for every Hasan wannabe to try his luck. In so many ways, this looks like a decision that will likely be bad for Democrats. As the man said, it really is impossible to caricature this administration. HT: JOM

According to the AP, the self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court. (Why you’d want to have a trial of the “self-proclaimed” 9/11 mastermind is odd in itself.) Here was the President’s reaction:

President Barack Obama said it was a legal and national security matter. “I am absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subjected to the most exacting demands of justice,” Obama said

What the heck does that mean? The only thing one can be absolutely certain of in a trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is that it will be a three ring circus, 24/7 on TV, with each inanity covered intensely by a bunch of well coiffed C students on camera.

This Obama is one strange bird. The things that he has “absolute” certainty about are things where the word “absolute” makes no sense. They are of indeterminate outcome and off in the future.

Contrast that with Obama’s very public dithering about Afghanistan (see the AP’s treatment of this for a chuckle), where the effects of any decision could be measured relatively quickly and where any decision is a choice among lousy options. The man dithers where choices are hard, and speaks authoritatively when outcomes are gauzy and in the distance. What else do you expect from a college professor?

Sean Trende in RCP has an interesting analysis of the state of the Democratic Party today:

The historical base of the Democratic Party for two centuries has long been what Jay Cost and I call Jacksonians: Culturally conservative, hawkish, and populist whites located throughout the South and Border states. They began breaking away from Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s – their reaction to the Party’s embrace of unions, blacks and liberals is a story is so well known there’s no need to rehash it here.

But this group remained at least in play for the Democrats. Clinton inherited a coalition consisting of minorities, liberals, urban voters, and a decent remnant of Jacksonian voters in the Ohio River Valley and the South, who still preferred a moderate-to-conservative Democrat to a Republican. This coalition became a majority coalition when Clinton used a combination of fiscal conservatism and social moderation to bring suburban voters on board. This was a huge innovation for Democrats; suburbs like Nassau County, NY, Orange County, CA and Fairfax County, VA had fueled the rise of the Republican parties in those states. Clinton moved them substantially toward his side. This coalition allowed him to win by eight points in 1996; absent Perot and a last-minute fundraising scandal, he probably would have won by more.

Clinton intuited that suburban voters are, generally speaking, culturally cosmopolitan – they don’t like it when you call someone “macaca,” and aren’t crazy about the religious right. But they’re generally not particularly socially liberal either, and are fans of “law and order.” They like taxes low and appreciate economic growth, but like good schools and a clean environment. Having to balance a bunch of spending priorities with somewhat limited income in their daily lives, balanced budgets are the ultimate “good government” indicator for these voters.

Clinton delivered on all of these issues, keeping tax increases fairly small, and balancing the budget for much of his term. In so doing – and this is very important – he re-branded the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility, economic growth, moderate taxes, and smart government. In other words, he finally shed the “Carter” label for the Democrats. This, in turn, made it plausible for his much more liberal heirs to benefit from this presumption of competence for Democrats – one that they probably would not have enjoyed without him.

George W. Bush’s presidency, in turn, was an upper-middle class suburbanite’s nightmare. An aggressive social agenda, a fiscal trainwreck, two poorly-managed wars and a financial collapse later, these suburban voters trended even more heavily Democratic then they were in the Clinton era. By 2008, Democrats held most of the suburban districts around major metropolitan areas, and were threatening in the exurbs. The right Democratic candidate probably could have put together a massive 2008 Presidential majority, combining minorities, liberals, Jacksonians, Catholics, and suburbanites. The mood of the country was certainly right for a 1920/1932/1952/1980 result.

But the Democrats nominated Barack Obama. The party’s grip among Jacksonians had weakened since Clinton left the stage, but they abandoned Obama completely. Jay Cost and I have detailed this here. This movement is why Obama received 53% of the vote, instead of the 60% or so we might expect given the voters’ attitude toward Bush’s Presidency.

Obama was able to win even without this branch of the Democratic party because he generated such intensity among the remaining portions of his base. In other words, while his base wasn’t as broad as Clinton’s, it was deeper. Faced with vanishing 401ks and home values, and disgust with Bush’s presidency, suburbanites flocked to him. Liberals were enthralled to finally elect one of their own. And minorities turned out heavily for the opportunity to elect the first black President.

But this presents a problem. You only get to elect the first black President once, and governing a coalition of suburbanites, poor blacks, and upper class liberals isn’t easy. It is hard to keep that enthusiasm up. And with the Jacksonian wing of the party gone, if that enthusiasm dissipates, or if one of the coalition groups becomes disgruntled and starts to shuffle out the door, the party isn’t left with much.

Michael Barone and Pat Cadell have also noted the trending away from the Democratic Party among suburbanites. This is a key battleground for 2010 and one which could give the Democratic Party important advantages if it could capture those votes as we have previously noted. However, as of this moment it appears that the US media have erected a Potemkin village of support for the Obama administration’s strange priorities and inept execution, and that many average Americans have come to see through the charade. Time will tell.

Some comments from a fan of Hillary Clinton:

If you have been reading us for any length of time, you know that we used to make fun of “Dubya” nearly every day…parroting the same comedic bits we heard in our Democrat circles, where Bush is still, to this day, lampooned as a chimp, a bumbling idiot, and a poor, clumsy public speaker.

Oh, how we RAILED against Bush in 2000…and how we RAILED against the surge in support Bush received post-9/11 when he went to Ground Zero and stood there with his bullhorn in the ruins on that hideous day.

We were convinced that ANYONE who was president would have done what Bush did, and would have set that right tone of leadership in the wake of that disaster. President Gore, President Perot, President Nader, you name it. ANYONE, we assumed, would have filled that role perfectly.

Well, we told you before how much the current president, Dr. Utopia, made us realize just how wrong we were about Bush. We shudder to think what Dr. Utopia would have done post-9/11. He would have not gone there with a bullhorn and struck that right tone. More likely than not, he would have been his usual fey, apologetic self and waxed professorially about how evil America is and how justified Muslims are for attacking us…

As we will always be grateful for what George and Laura Bush did this week, with no media attention, when they very quietly went to Ft. Hood and met personally with the families of the victims of this terrorist attack. The Bushes went and met privately with these families for HOURS, hugging them, holding them, comforting them…

The Obamas should have done that. But didn’t. Wouldn’t. Thank goodness George W. is still on his watch, with wonderful Laura at his side. We are blessed as a nation to have these two out there…just as we are blessed to have the Clintons on the job, traveling the world doing the good they do.

BTW, the author of the comments above thinks that Democrats will rue the day that they elected the man the website refers to as Dr. Utopia.

Five years ago, Jonathan Chait said this in TNR:

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I’m tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism — “I inherited half my father’s friends and all his enemies” — conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage.

He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school — the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks — shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks — blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing — a way to establish one’s social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess…

I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. Nor is this phenomenon limited to my personal experience: Pollster Geoff Garin, speaking to The New York Times, called Bush hatred “as strong as anything I’ve experienced in 25 years now of polling”…

Bush is a far more radical president than Clinton was…Bush crusaded for an enormous supply-side tax cut that was anathema to liberals. But, where Reagan followed his cuts with subsequent measures to reduce revenue loss and restore some progressivity to the tax code, Bush proceeded to execute two additional regressive tax cuts. Combined with his stated desire to eliminate virtually all taxes on capital income and to privatize Medicare and Social Security, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Bush would like to roll back the federal government to something resembling its pre-New Deal state…

Bush’s foreign policy…the way Bush sold it — by playing upon the public’s erroneous belief that Saddam had some role in the September 11 attacks — hearkened back to the deceit that preceded the Spanish-American War. Bush’s doctrine of preemption, which reserved the right to invade just about any nation we desired, was far broader than anything he needed to validate invading a country that had flouted its truce agreements for more than a decade…

Bush has governed as the most partisan president in modern U.S. history. The pillars of his compassionate-conservative agenda — the faith-based initiative, charitable tax credits, additional spending on education — have been abandoned or absurdly underfunded. Instead, Bush’s legislative strategy has revolved around wringing out narrow, party-line votes for conservative priorities by applying relentless pressure to GOP moderates…

The other day, Mark Hyman said this in the American Spectator:

Barack Obama despises America. When people who voted for Obama in 2008 — including registered Democrats — start speaking in normal conversational voices at dinner parties, neighborhood gatherings and PTA meetings that the over-inflated ego from Chicago has it “in for America,” then it’s clear most reasonable people have reached the same conclusion…Consider these facts.

The 30-years of Obama’s post-adolescent life are radical by any measure. First, he grew up listening to the ramblings of committed Communist Frank Marshall Davis. It had such a profound effect on him that he wrote fondly of Davis in his first book. In fact, that book is replete with statement after statement about how the U.S. is deeply flawed. Most Americans believe in American exceptionalism. Not so with Obama.

Patriotic Americans would not have listened to the bigoted, anti-Semitic, hate-America rants of a fringe religious leader for 20 seconds let alone for 20 years. Yet, Obama who admitted he attended services at Trinity United Church at least twice a month for two decades called Jeremiah Wright his mentor and his moral sounding board. Nor would most Americans cultivate a close friendship with an admitted domestic terrorist…

In his speech before the Muslim world, Obama made the patently absurd claim of equivalency between the status of displaced Palestinians and the slaughter of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. His claim that 7 million Muslims live in the U.S. is a figure inflated by as much as 700%…Obama claimed that the U.S. is not a Christian nation, which is at odds with the fact that 79% of Americans self-identify as Christians…

the door to greater individual freedoms in Iran was firmly closed shut when Obama announced the U.S would not meddle in Iran’s election and he offered no encouragement to democracy activists who protested the obviously stolen elections. His silence was deafening when regime security agents savagely attacked and killed countless Iranians who took to the streets…

Obama’s disagreement with American values and institutions is evident in domestic issues. He has stocked his administration with wild-eyed radicals who believe foreign law trumps the U.S. Constitution (Harold Koh); include an avowed Marxist and “truther” who believes George Bush was complicit in the 9/11 attack and is also an ardent supporter of cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal (Van Jones); and include a devoted admirer of Mao Tse-tung who slaughtered as many as 75 million people (Anita Dunn). (In contrast, George W. Bush’s Attorney-General nominee John Ashcroft was savaged by the news media for being an Evangelical Christian.) Three weeks after America’s first black president was sworn in, the nation’s first black Attorney-General who was hand-picked by Obama, called America “a nation of cowards”…

In May, Obama immediately issued a statement that he was “shocked and outraged by the murder” of a Kansas doctor specializing in partial-birth abortions. He called it a “heinous act of violence.” Attorney-General Holder mobilized U.S. Marshals nationwide to provide protection to abortion clinics. But Obama remained silent the very next day when two U.S. soldiers were gunned down by a Muslim extremist outside a Little Rock recruiting station…

Five months later, another Muslim fanatic gunned down nearly four dozen Americans, killing 13, at the Ft. Hood army base. It was an act that demanded the most serious demeanor of the military’s Commander-in-Chief. Yet, Obama referenced the massacre in the most insincere fashion just seconds after a jocular shout-out to an audience member during a public speaking engagement.

We live in a profoundly divided country today. It seems to us unlikely that the republic can long endure this state. What would it take, if anything, to unite the country again? If the country does come together, will it be under the Left, the Right, or something else?

The AP reported that the sniper John Allen Muhammad took “to the grave answers about why and how he plotted the killings of 10 people”, which apparently continues to be a puzzle:

Muhammad was executed for killing Dean Harold Meyers, who was shot in the head at a Manassas gas station during the spree across Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. He never testified or explained why he masterminded the shootings with the help of a teenage accomplice. That left questions unanswered

Hmm. Perhaps the AP should look at some of the drawings associated with the snipers. Or perhaps pay a little attention to the gentleman’s eerie confrontation at the New Jersey DMV at 8:52 a.m. on the day before the anniversary of 9-11. (On the other hand, maybe it was America’s love of guns that was the root cause.)

The WSJ has a report from outer space:

Timothy Geithner said Wednesday that maintaining a strong dollar is “very important” for the country’s economy, sticking to his mantra on foreign-exchange policy as the U.S. currency continues its broad downtrend. “I believe deeply that it’s very important for the U.S. and the economic health of the U.S. that we maintain a strong dollar,” he said at a roundtable discussion with Japanese reporters. “We bear special responsibility for trying to make sure that we are implementing policy in the U.S. that will sustain confidence not just among American investors and .. savers but investors around the world”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported from planet earth: “Gold rallied to as high as $1,118.60 an ounce as the Dollar Index dropped to a 15-month low.” Geithner seems to get more amusing with each trip to Asia. (Of course the Indonesians might not see things that way.)

Marty Peretz in TNR:

Can you imagine the fall of the ayatollahs? I can, and so can learned Abbas Milani, professor of Iranian studies at Stanford, whose writings you can read here, with an additional important article in both the print and on-line New Republic next week.

But can President Obama imagine an Iran freed from the iron grip of the mullahs’ madness? There is nothing in his behavior to suggest that he can or, for that matter, that he would be pleased if he could. His first visit to a Muslim country was for two days in Turkey in April. He and his aides, reported Tom Raum in the Huffington Post, were ecstatic about the results. As far as I can tell, there were none, at least none that were good. Turkey has continued its drift towards an Islamic foreign and domestic policy. The Organization of the Islamic Conference is already meeting in Istanbul, and Dr. A’jad will arrive there on Sunday. Believe me, he will be royally welcomed … and raise tremors among the declining moderate populace.

As with the meanings he conveyed to the Turks, Obama is to be judged with reference to the Iranians on what messages he has sent them. To the people in the streets, to the middle class and to the students–the only hope for Iran–he has shown them, frankly, his behind. Not a statement of solidarity. Certainly not material support. He is still apologizing for the overthrow by the C.I.A. of Iran’s prime minister, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953. That was 56 years ago, for God’s sake.

Peretz also talked about Russia and Obama a little while ago. He seems quite worried about the performance and mental make-up of this President of ours.