Well, Roger Ailes isn't that powerful. The meme that a speech that said almost nothing new is a "stunning" attack on Israel is countered on the right with an embrace of the speech by neoconservatives. Yeah: you couldn't make this conservative cognitive dissonance up. Max Boot:
[T]oday’s speech at the State Department marks Barack Obama’s emergence as a full-fledged, born-again neocon firmly in the George W. Bush mold.
President Obama’s speech on the Middle East represents a watershed in his shift from a destructive and delusional approach to the Middle East, marked by indifference to democracy promotion and solicitude toward tyrants, toward embracing a policy that looks a lot like George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda.
The entire speech could easily have been delivered by George W. Bush in its commendable but hardly inspirational cheering of democratization, which foundered on Obama’s decision to task Bashar Assad with leading democratic reform in Syria.
My view of the speech as I heard it is below. My bottom line on Israel/Palestine is that this contained little that is new on the subject. Moreover, the content about democratization was almost exactly the same as the final section of the prescient Cairo speech. The distinction between Bush and Obama on democratization is now and always has been that Bush wanted to impose it by force and Obama wants to coax its indigenous evolution. Is that so hard to grapple with?
(Links via Robert Stacy McCain.)
The Dish 