The Enlightened Despot

Words fail:

Regular readers know full well that I have a special place in my heart for Governor Sarah Palin, despite her many, many failings. But this, in refernece to Obama’s Special Olympics comments on Jay Leno’s show,  is really too much:

I was shocked to learn of the comment made by President Obama about Special Olympics,” Governor Palin said. “This was a degrading remark about our world’s most precious and unique people, coming from the most powerful position in the world.

I am willing to accept that Sarah Palin lies compulsively, stoops to gross acts of corruption, trades her daughter’s privacy and emotionaly well being for political advantage, turns on friends and allies whenever it is politically expedient, and is prepared to put our nation in grave peril by pretending she is qualified to lead it. That is just America’s favorite hockey mom being who she is. What I cannot accept, however, is a person who would hope to lead our country, and yet thinks that ‘most unique’ is a meaningful phrase that should be inflicted on the American people.

I hope I can find it in my heart to forgive my favorite leader of a bannana republic, but I’m afraid I can’t make any promises.

First Fox News brought us ‘The Terrorist Fist-Jab’, a phrase near and dear to my heart. Now, describing the same practice, a local Fox affiliate really blows it:

(h/t Little Man)

What the hell was Olmert thinking?

In an unusually public rebuke, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been forced to abstain from a United Nations resolution on Gaza that she helped draft, after Mr. Olmert placed a phone call to President Bush.

“I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’ ” Mr. Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to The Associated Press. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now,’ ” Mr. Olmert continued. “He got off the podium and spoke to me.”

Israel opposed the resolution, which called for a halt to the fighting in Gaza, because the government said it did not provide for Israel’s security. It passed 14 to 0, with the United States abstaining.

Mr. Olmert claimed that once he made his case to Mr. Bush, the president called Ms. Rice and told her to abstain. “She was left pretty embarrassed,” Mr. Olmert said, according to The A.P.

I don’t see how this can fail to make taking a 100% pro-Israel stand a little harder for American politicians, or how that can fail to be a very bad thing for Israel. Is there an angle I’m missing, or was he just having a Biden moment?

Yglesias makes an important point about Palin’s response to the Bush Doctrine (once she was told what it was): she said that preemptive strikes would be justified if we had reason to believe an attack is imminent. That isn’t the McCain/Bush position; they don’t think the attack has to be imminent. No one ever argued that Iraq posed an imminent threat, just that it posed a threat. But, pace Yglesias, she didn’t commit herself to that being the only situation under which a strike would be justified, so I don’t seem them having any trouble recovering on the off chance that someone notices or cares.