The Dish

Pete Wehner, formerly at the Bush White House and now writing for Commentary, among other things, draws a line:

It’s perfectly acceptable if people want to criticize Obama for his comments. One could, for example, dispute Obama’s assertion that the Israeli-Palestinian issue “infect[s] all of our foreign policy.” There is a widespread view among many foreign policy elites that all the problems of the Middle East can be traced to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I believe that proposition is false and belied by history (see the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and Syria’s subjugation of Lebanon for starters). In addition, jihadists don’t need the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an excuse to kill Americans. Osama bin Laden’s fatwas, issued in the late 1990’s, were at least as concerned with our presence in Mecca and Medina and our policies toward Iraq as our policies toward Israel.

Jihadists will certainly use our support for Israel as an excuse to attack us, but our mere existence will also do. That said, there are more than enough legitimate grounds on which to criticize Obama. It’s not necessary, and it’s wrong and dishonest, to tether him to claims he simply did not make. John Boehner should correct the record.

Amen.

Scott Horton recently interviewed Sidney Blumenthal on the subject. He’s not exactly the man any Republican would go to for advice, but he’s not wrong here:

John McCain’s emergence is testimony to the shattering of Bush’s presidency. Without the fracturing of conservatism, McCain would never have become the Republican nominee. It is not an accident, as the Marxists might say, that McCain was Bush’s rival in 2000, a bitterly fought contest that resulted in wounds that are still fresh to McCain. Regardless of McCain’s need to consolidate and conciliate the Republican base–and despite some Democrats’ insistence that McCain is little more than a party line reactionary–he remains an utterly singular figure in the individualistic tradition of Goldwater but lacking Goldwater’s early (at least) extremism. Ironically, at the end of the current Republican era, McCain is the last important Republican whose career stretches back to the Reagan period–and even to the Nixon years as an icon of the Vietnam War.

McCain represents continuity and a break with it. His reliance on neoconservatives for foreign policy advice is his most important connection to the Bush legacy. For McCain to win in the Electoral College, of course, he would have to reassemble the Republican coalition. But he might well have greater appeal and put into play states that dropped out of the G.O.P. alliance under George W. Bush, from New Jersey to California. If McCain did so the result would not be a restoration of Reaganism, but the basis of a post-Bush Republicanism.

I wonder if Sid would prefer a president McCain to a president Obama.

This, apparently, is the "core" of the blogosphere. More images here. Explanations here.
 

Pawlenty on the GOP’s structural problems:

The image of the white men’s club needs to go, too, says Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. "The country is changing. The Republican Party has to have a message that reflects faces and voices of America. We have to do a better job of recruiting women candidates, candidates of color and diversity."

The omens for Congress keep worsening:

Combined with the 30 seats that the GOP lost in 2006, that would leave the party facing a 70-vote deficit against Democrats in the House — a state of powerlessness reminiscent of Republicans’ long wilderness years in the 1960s and ’70s.

The new media evolve. I’m sure you wanted to know this:

Kelly is accused of, among other things, urinating on the allegedly underage girl who appears in the sex video. On Monday, a urine smell polluted the air of the jury room where juror interviews are taking place. On Tuesday, the theme whizzed by again.

Puns and porn. What more could you ask for?

Is it me or does this sound like panic from Rush Limbaugh:

It’s entirely possible, this newly constituted Republican Party which stands for nothing but liberalism lite might end up winning because a lot of the country might look at this socialist bunch the Democrats are offering and say pooey, and want no part of it, and then where are we?

You’ll have a Republican president with Bush-style immigration reform, and a cap-and-trade carbon emissions scheme.

Fordham is hosting a conference on the HBO classic. Among the highlights, these papers:

Laura Cook Kenna (George Washington U), “’I can’t turn the other cheek on this . . . My father was a Knight of Columbus’: ‘Christopher’ and the Contested Construction of Italian American Identity”

Matthew Leporati (Fordham U), “’Sometimes what happens in here is like taking a shit’: Confession and Identity in ‘The Test Dream’”

Cynthia Burkhead (U North Alabama), “Fishes and Football Coaches, Oh My! The Narrative Necessity of Dreams in The Sopranos”

Shama Rangwala (McGill U), “Creating a Little Dysentery in the Ranks: Epistemology and Class Relations in The Sopranos”

Sean O’Sullivan (Ohio State U), “Episode Five, or When Does a Narrative Become What It Is?”

The first one moves to Obama. More defections could neutralize any gains Clinton could make from Florida:

He has a mere 19 left over from the four primaries he participated in, but he has, at the lowest estimate, 13 delegates from currently-disqualified Florida. If Clinton succeeds in seating all of Florida’s delegates as elected in the state’s non-contested primary, she’ll net only 28 delegates more than Obama and Edwards combined. Joe Trippi’s fantasy about his ex-client as a kingmaker isn’t that far-fetched.

Joe Klein laments the decline of the Connecticut senator.

The opening scene is stunning:

(hat tip: Coudal)