The Dish

Oh, this is getting good.

What's that I hear in the background? Meep, meep.

Matt and Trey up the ante on reality:

People seem to think I have been imagining a contemptuous attitude toward the US by the Israeli government, or that my concerns about its "Go Cheney Yourself" policy on the peace process are somehow a function of obsessiveness or something that isn't anti-Semitism but is somehow even "darker". But I am not imagining these things. They are real and they are dangerous:

Hours after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed unyielding American support for Israel’s security here on Tuesday, Israel’s Interior Ministry announced 1,600 new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem. Mr. Biden condemned the move as “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.” …

[Biden] began the day on a note of support, asserting the Obama administration’s “absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israel’s security.” But by the end of the day, Mr. Biden’s tone had a very different quality. He issued a statement condemning “the substance and timing of the announcement” of the housing, and added, “Unilateral action taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations on permanent status issues.”

It appears Netanyahu was blindsided by this as well. As I have pointed out, Netanyahu is now the Israeli center, but Netanyahu still openly backs new settlements in East Jerusalem for Israeli Jews and Israeli Jews alone. And he would not be prime minister without the support of his religious right. And they believe that the West Bank is God's land – for them alone. And in that, they have the full backing of the Christianist right in the US:

PALIN: I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.

WALTERS: Even if it’s [in] Palestinian areas?

PALIN: I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expand.

Eric Massa implodes on Glenn Beck:

“Not only did I grope him, I tickled him until he couldn’t breathe,” he said. “I should have never allowed myself to be as familiar with my staff as I was… I own this misbehavior.”

Glenn Beck says they’re both “standing with hoses.” But one gets the feeling that the fire has broken out in both of their houses – and not the White House.

Yglesias shares some wisdom:

I’ve never found speaking to important political figures either on or off the record to be incredibly valuable in terms of actual information. People are generally more willing to make jokes when it’s off the record, so it’s more entertaining to participate in those kind of briefings. On the other hand, it’s much easier to build an item around a direct quote so it’s more professionally valuable to be on the record. But it seems to me that the people who do the real value-adding reporting are mostly talking to lower-level people—nobody ever gets the real scoop from anyone remotely senior.

Ryan Avent reads a report (pdf) on small businesses, which are a major driver of new jobs:

[Small business] owners continued to report that their single-most important problem, by far, is low sales levels (rather than taxes, interest rates, or labour quality). That's worth keeping in mind as conservatives increase the volume at which they argue that high unemployment is due to extensions of government unemployment benefits. The problem is clearly not labour supply. Rather, the economy's principal job creators are seeing too little demand to justify increases in hiring.

Stanley Fish uses one billboard and a Newsweek article to claim Bush is being rehabilitated:

Bush’s policies came to seem less obviously reprehensible as the Obama administration drifted into embracing watered-down versions of many of them. Guantanamo hasn’t been closed. No Child Left Behind is being revised and perhaps improved, but not repealed. The banks are still engaging in their bad practices. Partisanship is worse than ever. Obama seems about to back away from the decision to try 9/11 defendants in civilian courts, a prospect that led the ACLU to run an ad in Sunday’s Times with the subheading “Change or more of the same?” Above that question is a series of photographs that shows Obama morphing into guess who — yes, that’s right, George W. Bush.

Oy. James Joyner's two cents:

This all strikes me as reasonable up to a point. Frankly, given how low the opinion of Bush was when he left office — with many proclaiming him The Worst President Ever — he has nowhere to go but up.

Will Bush ever be regarded as a great president in the tradition of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, TR, FDR, and Reagan?  Nope.  But he wasn’t an awful president, either.   And, depending on how Iraq shakes out, he might even be thought of as a pretty good one.

My three cents: no president in the twentieth century did as much damage to this country as Bush: in terms of unfathomable debt, unwinnable wars, political cynicism, the dangerous fusion of politics and religion, the integration of torture into the DNA of America, the squandering of American soft and hard power, the lost years on non-carbon energy, the trashing of constitutional balance, and the immiseration of most ordinary Americans, he was a disaster. The only way in which Fish is correct is that the damage was so deep and so intractable that Obama, perforce, cannot undo it overnight and so cannot help but be tarred with its consequences, including a brutal recession.

But for Fish, there is no actual reality, remember, just post-modern illusions. Which is why the pomo-left and the shameless-right were made for each other.

If we only create reality, what is, after all, wrong with Fox News? They do it rather well, don't they?

Brendan Nyhan dismisses "an array of silly narratives blaming the tactics of Obama and his staff for the President's current political standing":

[T]his entire genre of political coverage is useless. If/when the economy picks up, Obama's speeches will start "connecting" and everyone will marvel at how effective the White House political team has become.

And Halperin will be right there for the spin then.