South of the Suwannee

According to the Bush administration, we don't talk to terrorist or terrorist states -- that's appeasement.

It seems, however, that although President Bush and Secretary of State Rice have warned against speaking with Syria, the Israelis are doing exactly that. On the other hand, they do have more at stake and seem to have a better idea of how the world works than we do (and by "we" I mean the Bush administration).

Blogger Abu Muqawama provides perspective:

This has happened before, of course. The U.S. ended up being the last people to meet with the PLO, too, and was embarrassed to discover that Israel -- on whose behalf we weren't meeting with the PLO -- was secretly meeting with, ahem, the PLO. . . . And what must the president be thinking? It was just last week that he stood in the Knesset and made that bold speech about not dealing with radicals or some such. How many members of the audience were, at that very moment, engaged in talks with the Asad regime as they stood and applauded the president's words?

Kathleen Parker tries to justify using the term "full blooded American" in reference to John McCain, insisting that it should not be considered racist or narrow-minded. In her opinion, there are just too many questions about Obama characterize him in that way.

Make no mistake about it, in spite of her protests, this is racism and nativism pure and simple.

Parker states that "full-blooded Americans"

. . . know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.

Parker is only one of the most recent Americans to express this fear of the future. One hundred years ago, the same sentiments were expressed in the New York Times in regard to the recently-completed 1908 Olympics in London.

We are, as a community, naturally proud of the achievements of the "American" athletes in the Olympic games . . . But would it not be well for us to temper our celebration of their victories by consideration of the following . . .

. . . most of the victories won by our team in the track events were won for us by foreign-born athletes, or by men whose immediate ancestry is foreign . . .

The constant recruiting of our athletic life by Northern and Anglo-Saxon blood seems, in our climate, to be necessary to the maintenance of our supremacy. But . . . this fact should weigh far more than the conventional and purely adventitious fact that our flag was hoisted so many times, when we come to consider how many foreigners are included in the "American" wins at the Olympic games of 1908.

This racist rant is but the latest attempt to portray Obama as outside the American mainstream (whatever that is). Since some of the previous efforts (he's a Muslim; he doesn't wear a flag pin, etc.) didn't get much traction, I suspect that this sort of thing will be a continuing feature of the upcoming campaign.

How long before Parker begins to use the term "Aryan blood?"

While Jimmy Carter was in the Middle East, negotiating for some steps in the right direction, President Bush does a guest spot on Deal or No Deal.

ABC television's Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos have added their names to those dumbing down American politics. Their trivialization of the Obama-Clinton debate last night was incredibly disappointing.

Their questions were exactly of the sort that Stephanopooulos would have (and did) complain about during his tenure in the Clinton administration.

And you thought Andrew Sullivan and the other misogynists who's hatred of Hillary Clinton knows no bounds are bad?

You ain't seen nothing yet -- same sentiments, just more bluntly expressed.

James Wolcott wonders if the Obama phenomenon is a Republican plot:

I've never bought the pre-championship palaver that the Republicans were itching keen to face Hillary Clinton in the fall, that her mere presence in the race would energize their white-dumpling demoralized base into mobilizing into peasant mobs ready to storm Frankenstein's castle. The party's true savants had underestimated Hillary when she first ran for Senate and saw Rick Lazio's ears get pinned to the mat, and were unlikely to duplicate that error. I believe that they're far more wary of the Clinton machine than the Obama phenomenon because a phenomenon can be pricked or pop of its own accord, leaving behind a melting iridescence, whereas a machine like Clinton's feeds on the negativity thrown at it, a juggernaut nightmare designed to keep the opposition guessing over every move. . .

Say what you will, Wolcott is rarely far off in his estimation of the Republican's capacity for duplicity and dirty tricks.

"It may be that voters conclude that Spitzer’s indiscretions have nothing at all to do with whether Hillary Clinton can effectively serve as president."

This brilliant observation was made by Peter Baker in the Washington Post.

Really?

And it may be that voters conclude that the Miami Heat trading Shaquille O'Neal to the Phoenix Suns has nothing to do with her abilities, either.

(via The Daily Howler)